Applied Ethics Commons^™

An Alternative Policy For Obtaining Cadaver Organs For Transplantation, James L. Muyskens

Publications and Research

Two moral principles have been basic to the legal decisions concerning the rights and duties toward the newly dead. They are the duty to give decent burial and the denial to anyone of a right to ownership of the dead body for commercial profit. The next-of-kin-rather than the church or the state­ have come to bear the primary responsibility for providing decent burial.

The familial duty to give decent burial has come to be understood as a legal right to determine what is to be done to the body in the interval between death and burial.

Armed with this right, …