Ethical Aspects of Non-Life-Saving Allografts with Special Regard to the Hand

Ethical discussion is preferable to ethical judgment given prior to taking action. The issue is not to submit in advance medical or surgical protocols based on an arbitrary moral determination, acting as if the problem was already resolved by transcendental references (and what references?). This is even truer given that medical science is never satisfactorily based on the past and incurs as many hopes as fears, which are more or less justified. With respect to composite tissue allograft (CTA), four issues can be raised: 1. If at first, we had to fight against opposition to organ — kidney and, moreover, heart — grafts, these oppositions are now overcome. But is it possible to ethically think that the now ordinariness of these organ grafts will be, with time, considered as such for CTAs? 2. Shall there be conservative or liberal reasoning? 3. May therapeutic performance take over the well-being principle? 4. Is it possible to assimilate the CTA into usual clinical research?