ABSTRACT
This chapter opens with presenting organ shortage as a unique feature of transplantation medicine. Indeed, the shortage is perhaps the rule in the political economy of health resources, but the shortage in human organs places it in a different register. In this chapter, I analyze how the shortage problem framed the ethics of transplantation from its early successes in the 1960s and the 1970s to the present days. I argue that basic ethical concepts such as informed or presumed consent, altruism and donation, and the dead donor rule were designed to suggest an ethical code for the supply of organs for the burgeoning transplant medicine. I discuss how the ethical discourse ultimately fails in its mission to obtain enough legitimacy and social acceptance to the point that shortage is curtailed.
