ABSTRACT
In his paper ‘The Survival Lottery’1 John Harris makes a proposal intended to remedy the chronic shortfall in the number of vital organs that presently become available to physicians for use in transplant surgery. He writes as follows:
…everyone [shall] be given a sort of lottery number. Whenever doctors have two or more dying patients who could be saved by transplants, and no suitable organs have come to hand through ‘natural deaths’, they can ask a central computer to supply a suitable donor. The computer will then pick the number of a suitable donor at random and he will be killed so that the lives of two or more others may be saved.2
