Prisoners Receiving Transplants

As the prison population in America grows in numbers and increases in age, questions and debates about the allocation of medical resources to prisoners will grow in urgency. One issue which arises every so often is whether convicted felons, especially those who are awaiting capital punishment, should receive the same level of medical care as others in society - including scarce donor organs for the purpose of transplantation. As is often the case, the debate over whether a death row inmate should receive an organ transplant is not a single controversy, but rather several rolled into one. Being able to address the larger question requires disentangling the smaller questions and examining each in turn. What role, if any, should a person 's social and moral worth play in the allocation of medical resources? Are prisoners still members of society, deserving of the same medical considerations as others?
An important consideration which must be explained before any such questions can be answered is the distinction between medical justice and social justice. The sphere of medical justice involves the decisions doctors must make about providing medical care to those in need, while the sphere of social justice involves the allocation of resources by society those those in need. For doctors, medical justice makes answering the above questions relatively straightforward: they are obligated to provide medical care to those in need regardless of moral worth, dollar costs, or social status. Thus, doctors are ideally obligated by medical justice to provide the same level of medical care to other human beings regardless of any non-medical considerations. Social justice, however, requires different conclusions because society is required to make decisions that do include non-medical considerations. This means that while medical justice may require a question be answered one way, the larger sphere of social justice could lead to a different answer entirely.
Should a person 's