Rethinking the Ethics of Vital Organ Donations: Accepted Medical Practice Already Violates the Dead Donor Rule. Explicitly Jettisoning the Rule--Allowing Vital Organs to Be Extracted, Under Certain Conditions, From Living Patients--Is a Radical Change Only at the Conceptual Level. But It Would Expand the Pools of Eligible Organ Donors‪.‬

Mr. Jones, aged thirty, is lying in a bed in an intensive care unit, breathing with the help of a respirator. His face looks ruddy, and he is warm to the touch. Indeed, he looks healthier than other patients in the unit. He has also just been diagnosed as "brain dead." Two ethically important questions arise with respect to Mr. Jones: (1) Is he really dead, or is he a living patient with traumatic brain injury? (2) Is it acceptable to retrieve his organs--including vital organs such as the heart, lungs, liver, and both kidneys--for donation to patients in need of transplantation? According to the moral status quo, the answers to these two questions are linked. It is thought permissible to retrieve vital organs only from dead patients--the "dead donor rule." What makes it permissible to retrieve organs from Mr. Jones (with his prior consent or the consent of his family) is that Mr. Jones is dead, despite appearances to the contrary. The constellation of neurological findings that since 1968 has been called "brain death" is death, pure and simple.