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Yes­ter­day, I went and gave some blood. This got me think­ing about the moral sta­tus of donat­ing blood. It’s got to be either oblig­a­tory or supereroga­tory. You might recall these def­i­n­i­tions from my pre­vi­ous post on boy­cotting mar­riage:

1. Oblig­a­tory: If an action is morally oblig­a­tory, that means that you must do it, from the moral point of view. Syn­onyms include “required” and “duty” (as in, “feed­ing your chil­dren is your duty”). Notice that “right” can be a syn­onym for both “per­mis­si­ble” and “oblig­a­tory.” When peo­ple say that some­thing is “right,” their state­ments are ambigu­ous, and we have to fig­ure out from the con­text whether they mean “per­mis­si­ble” or “oblig­a­tory.” For instance, if some­one says “gay mar­riage is right,” they prob­a­bly mean that, for any given cou­ple, gay mar­riage is morally per­mis­si­ble, not that it is morally obligatory.
2. Supereroga­tory: This word describes actions that go above and beyond what is morally required in a praise­wor­thy way. For instance, you prob­a­bly think the  acts of char­ity per­formed by Mother Theresa were supereroga­tory. But not all morally per­mis­si­ble actions are also supereroga­tory. For instance, eat­ing Lucky Charms instead of Golden Gra­hams for break­fast is per­mis­si­ble, but there’s noth­ing supereroga­tory about it.

You might be tempted to say that donat­ing blood is a moral oblig­a­tion — that you’re doing some­thing wrong if you don’t do it. It would have to be a much weaker oblig­a­tion than, say, that not to kill inno­cent peo­ple, but donat­ing blood could be among your moral oblig­a­tions nonetheless.

But, tak­ing a closer look, I think that can’t be the case. Moral oblig­a­tions and moral duties are closely related to rights.  If you have an oblig­a­tion to do some­thing for some­one, that gives the per­son a right to that good or ser­vice (and/or vice versa — it’s per­haps a chicken and the egg prob­lem to deter­mine whether rights or oblig­a­tions come log­i­cally first, but we can set that aside for now). For instance, when we say that par­ents have a moral oblig­a­tion to feed their chil­dren, that can also be expressed by say­ing that chil­dren have a right to food which is enforce­able against their parents.

To take the case at hand, imag­ine that you agree that donat­ing blood is indeed a moral oblig­a­tion. That amounts to say­ing that the recip­i­ents of donated blood have a right to that blood, even before you give it. But this is clearly wrong, because one per­son can­not have a right to a part of another person’s body. Even though healthy peo­ple are not harmed by giv­ing blood and quickly replen­ish their own sup­ply, it is risky to say that blood recip­i­ents have a right to it. How about peo­ple who need mar­row trans­plants? Do they have a right to the mar­row of all peo­ple on the Earth whose mar­row is a match? How about peo­ple who need a liver trans­plant? Healthy peo­ple can often give a por­tion of their liv­ers and, like in the blood case, their own liver regen­er­ates. How about peo­ple who need a kid­ney? Do they have a right to one of yours? Healthy peo­ple need only one.

As you can see, it is both strange on its face and a slip­pery slope to main­tain that there is a moral oblig­a­tion for healthy peo­ple to give parts of their bod­ies to the sick. If it were a moral oblig­a­tion, then the sick would lit­er­ally have a right to parts of healthy people’s bod­ies, and could do what was nec­es­sary to enforce that right. Donat­ing bio­log­i­cal mate­ri­als is supereroga­tory — going above and beyond the moral call of duty. The thing that’s inter­est­ing about blood dona­tion, how­ever, is that it’s a pretty quick and easy process for most healthy peo­ple, but it is lit­er­ally and fre­quently life-saving. So, while I don’t think it’s a moral oblig­a­tion, I do think you should still go do it ASAP :-)

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