From National Public Radio:
Most college students write papers and read academic journals as class assignments. But how often does 5 percent of a final grade depend on deciding the fate of the professor’s internal organs?
Professor Michael Taber of St. Mary’s College of Maryland asked the students in his Altruism and Egoism class to decide whether he should donate a kidney.
“I was trying to come up with an exercise that would allow them to apply some of the concepts and some of the discussions that we were having in the seminar to a real issue,” Taber tells NPR’s Jacki Lyden.
After all, if only one kidney is required for survival, couldn’t it be considered selfish to hang on to a complete pair? Is it immoral not to donate?
The otherwise theoretical discussion gets complicated when it’s about a real person. “The decision to do something as intimate and personal as literally giving a part of oneself is not simply like whether or not to donate, say, even a sizable amount of money to a good cause,” Taber says.