How would you feel about encountering a person whose face wasn't really "theirs" because it was transplanted from a donor? The technical hurdles are massive - but assuming that they could be met, how would people react? You don't see kidney donated by someone you knew, but what if you saw the face of a dead friend or relative walking down the street?
Arlene Judith Klotzko writes for Prospect:
A living person with the face of someone who is dead certainly sounds macabre. It reminds us of Frankenstein's monster, who was assembled from bits of the dead bodies his creator found in charnel houses. It is not surprising, then, that the reaction to the prospect of face transplantation is almost uniformly negative. ... With respect to face transplants the most prevalent moral intuition is the "yuck factor" or "the wisdom of repugnance" as Leon Kass, President Bush's chief bioethics adviser, put in rather more elegant language. But consider the public reaction to the first heart transplant or to the first so-called test tube baby, Louise Brown, who was born 25 years ago in Britain as a result of in vitro fertilisation (IVF). There was utter horror. Now both procedures have very few critics - even Leon Kass has changed his mind about IVF - and they have become a part of mainstream medicine.
So what are the real moral questions surrounding face transplants? Is it right to risk the deadly effects of long-term immunosuppression for anything short of saving a life? Could the public disquiet surrounding the procedure widen the already severe gap between the supply and demand for donated vital organs (hearts, livers and kidneys)? Will people tear up their donor cards out of fear that someone else will wear their face after their death? Will families refuse to consent to any transplant because of the same fear or because of the disfigurement of the corpse that only face and hand transplantation necessitates? And, finally, how can we ensure that a desperate person - so disfigured that he dreads even going out of his home - can give truly informed consent to an experimental and risky operation?
Our identities - who we are as individuals are not determined by our faces, but our faces are our most outwardly visible sign that we are us rather than someone else. What would it be like to look in the mirror and see a face that belongs to someone else - would you be able to cope? Would you be able to cope with the idea of someone living on with your face after you die - and should your family have any input on this? All very interesting questions...
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