뇌사자 장기기증의 윤리적 조건과 문화적 과제

Abstract

Organ donation would be a practice of agape for saving patient's life. It has noble and moral meaning for Christians and others also. It is an ethical alternative to dealing in human organs for organ transplants. But, in Korea, shortage of organ for transplants resulted to be cases of purchasing foreigner's organ, e. g. Chinese. Now, Korean churchs eagerly try to promote promise of organ donation from volunteers. In this context, this paper studied the moral justification and ethical conditions for organ donation.There are two ways to procure human organs for transplants: from living donor and from brain death people. This paper focused on the latter, ‘organ donation from brain death people. Now, there are some principles for donation of human organ including autonomy and informed consent. And the key concept is autonomous agree on ment. But it is difficult to certify for brain death people who agree on organ donation in form of ‘living will’. In this case, the only way to decide of organ donation is, what so called, the ‘presumed consent’ of family. Now, presumed consent has some ethical difficulties for rights of decision maker of those cases. Who can decide properly? And what's the grounds of organ donation of brain death people.Now, this paper recommends shift from presumed consent to living will. In other words, organ donation must be justified by autonomous consent and voluntary devotion for agape. Organ transplants have to do with technology and medical issues. But organ donation is an ethical issue which is morally justifiable under the condition of ethical autonomy. And this study propose a task of transformation of traditional bio-culture to biblical view of life and death for Christian of Korea.