Abstract
Very often, but particularly in France, the free giving of blood is derived from the notion of person. Persons who need blood as a treatment would be respected by the free gift of other persons which take it for a duty. As honorable as this deduction may be, it seems too be false and it would be possible to derive from the notion of person a right to retribute the giver for his/her « donated » blood. But this argument supporting the payment of the collected blood, if it denounces a mistake, does not necessarily means that it becomes a maxim for action. I can give my blood, be convinced of the right to be paid for a blood collect and refuse to be paid for my gift. This is a proof that it would be other sources, more obscure and less rational, of the notion of gift. We attempt, in this chapter, to detect a few of them while searching how they are compatible with a rational approach of ethics.
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Notes
- 1.
The symposium organized by the Académie Éthique Médecine et Politiques Publiques on 8th February 2018 (www.IAMEPH.org) is a fortunate exception [32].
- 2.
The end of the quotation from Poe is, as Bachelard translates it in L’Eau et les rêves: ‘Comme cette syllabe vague – blood – détachée de la série des mots précédents (…) tombait, pesante et glacée, (…) dans les régions les plus intimes de mon âme!’ ([1], p. 84). One can read that excerpt in Aventures de Gordon Pym published in the Pléiade volume which contains Poe’s Oeuvres en prose [29]. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Chap. III, in Poe Edgar Allan, Poetry and Tales, The Library of America , Literary Classics of the United States, New York,1984, p. 1035.
- 3.
One could say the same of blood in French, of ‘dam’ in Hebrew.
- 4.
As Bachelard says, when he sketches the poetics of blood after Poe, he does not challenge the existence of that poetics, the happiness of which he nonetheless denies: ‘C’est une poétique du drame et de la douleur, car le sang n’est jamais heureux’ ([1], p. 84).
- 5.
‘Quelle différence y a-t-il, pour un aveugle, entre un homme qui urine et un homme qui, sans se plaindre, verse son sang ?’ <What difference is there to a blind man between a man making water and a man bleeding in silence?> [15].
- 6.
One could similarly show that imaginary feature of behaviours towards blood, as ‘one needs all of Moses’ ingenuity to imagine that blood could be completely evacuated from the flesh where it was circulating, as Bentham underlines in relation to kosher meat’ ([2], p. 169).
- 7.
Is it not expressed in Nietzsche? ‘Reading and Writing’ in Thus Spoke Zarathustra begins thus: ‘Of all what is written, I love only what a person hath written with his blood. Write with blood, and thou wilt find that blood is spirit’ [25].
- 8.
It will be difficult to say that a mathematician writes his demonstrations with his blood, even though he must die in a duel, like Évariste Galois, on the morning following one of his most beautiful discoveries, or like J. Cavaillès, who was shot for his resistance activities against the Nazis, after writing On Logic and the Theory of Science [4] while in prison.
- 9.
Pascal says it perfectly in fragment 663 of Lafuma’s classification: ‘I only believe histories whose witnesses are ready to be put to death’ [26]. Paradoxically, one would not risk being killed for what one cannot demonstrate or prove.
- 10.
‘The life of the flesh is in the blood’, as is written in Leviticus, XVII, 11.
- 11.
‘And when he had opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held; and they cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?’ [3]
- 12.
‘But now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ’ [3].
- 13.
‘Then, being now justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him’. [It is of course God’s wrath].
- 14.
‘The blood of Jesus Christ his Son [the Son of God] cleanest us from all sin’.
- 15.
‘53. Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you. 54. Whoso eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him at the last day. 55. For my flesh kismet indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. 56. He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him’ ([3] John, VI, 53–56).
- 16.
As in the well-known episode in B. IV of The Republic in which Socrates pictures Leontius, Aglaion’s son, who, ‘coming up from Piraeus along the foot of the northern wall on the outside and [noticing] some corpses lying beside the executioner, felt the desire to look at them at one moment and turned away in disgust at the next. For a time he struggled and covered his face; then, overcome by his desire he opened his eyes wide and run toward the corpses. « Look for yourself, you wretches, » he shouted, « and fill yourselves with an image of the beautiful. »’ (439e-440a). (Plato , [28], p. 421).
- 17.
The place and moment of the giving blood and of transfusion have been separated for a long time.
- 18.
J-L. Gardies, in L’erreur de Hume , legitimately insisted in this regard that modern laws differ from archaic ones in making minimal use of the imperative mood, and in the relative absence of the idea of prohibition [18].
- 19.
Which is the first part of B. II of La philosophie de la volonté [30].
- 20.
Admittedly, blood is entirely absent from Kant’s morals. However, blood can still reappear, for example in his endorsement of a justice that kills, that spills blood, through the use of the death penalty. The logic of capital punishment does not arise, however, from the idea of person, since the death penalty might be prohibited in the name of that notion at least as easily as it is admitted by the strange Kantian argument that the person of the man sentenced to death is respected by that punishment. The notion of person is, as usual, equivocal, and accommodates directly opposing attitudes. This means that, in reality, it is always other considerations, some of which lack any obviously rational ground, that determine what one believes to be entailed by the notion of the person.
- 21.
We have already demonstrated this in relation to several texts. Personne et anonymat. Du mauvais usage de la notion de personne, [7]; ‘Réflexions critiques sur l’usage de la notion de personne en éthique médicale’ [8]; ‘La solidarité peut-elle se substituer à la valeur d’autonomie ?’ [9]; ‘Personne et altérité dans l’utilitarisme’ [10]; ‘Qu’est-ce que soigner ?’; ‘Le soin est-il une aide ?’; ‘Qu’est-ce que l’autonomie ?’ [13]; ‘Has the Care in Psychiatry Other Characteristics than those it has in the Other Fields of Medicine? [11]; ‘Y a-t-il, chez Stuart Mill, une spécificité de l’éthique entre les morales et le droit ?’ [12]; ‘Une pensée de l’existence à l’épreuve de l’éthique des soins. Les contradictions de l’éthique médicale’ [14].
- 22.
This is what Descartes meant when he called them ‘passions of the soul.’
- 23.
- 24.
‘Tous [les organes] ont leur vie particulière. […] Si l’organe vit, il a donc une vie propre et séparée du reste du système’ <Each organ has its own life. […] If the organ is alive, then it possesses its own life separate from the rest of the system (https://books.google.fr>books) [16].
- 25.
‘En tant que valeurs, toutes les marchandises ne sont que des mesures déterminées de temps de travail coagulé’ <all commodities are merely definite quantities of congealed labour-time> [24]. Here Marx re-used a sentence he had already used in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.
- 26.
With a little more space, we could have developed a curious analogy between the circulation of blood and that of language, to the advantage of the word plasma which, in Greek, means fiction .
- 27.
The text of ‘The Mystery of Jésus’ also includes the following fragment: ‘Veux-tu qu’il me coûte toujours du sang de mon humanité, sans que tu donnes des larmes?’ <« Do you want it always to cost me the blood of my humanity while you do not even shed a tear?»> [26].
- 28.
‘In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace’.
- 29.
‘You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, because you were slain, and with your blood you purchased for God persons from every tribe and language and people and nation […]’.
- 30.
Saint Paul who shows very well that Christ’s sacrifice is a surpassing of animal and human sacrifices ([3] Heb. IX, 12-14; X, 4) – since for a long time the first born in some families were sacrificed, and a bargain with God was needed to substitute animals to the first born that God seemed to be asking from human beings. Reason revolts at this idea and recoils from the sort of analogy that Saint Paul dares write, which at the same time rationalizes and offends reason. When blood is spilled to pay for the fault of the one whose blood is spilled, it is the logic of retribution and punishment: hurting somebody who has inflicted hurt seems to belong to a certain order, but when blood is spilled and the one whose blood is spilled is innocent, it must be something utterly different, and that blood must be worth something completely different, e.g. that it redeems the sins of the other men. But what seems to be rational is not at all so. Saint Paul is rationalizing something which is actually absurd and aberrant.
- 31.
As is seen in Acts, XV, 20, 29; XXI, 25 [3].
- 32.
Jurists sometimes talk of the non-patrimonial and non-commercial dimension of the human body, when, in other times, one would have talked of its inalienable nature .
- 33.
Admittedly, the trader who sells at the same price to the shrewd buyer and to the naive child does not necessarily do so out of duty, even if their action is compatible with their duty, but it is a basic duty to respect contracts.
- 34.
This sort of paradox is often found in morals when it moves apart from common opinion. Schiller could criticize Kant in his parody of the strange scruples of the conscience of morals. Here, we have a great ‘scruple of the conscience’. ‘Scruples of Conscience: Gladly I serve my friends, but alas, I do it with inclination and thus I am frequently nagged by my lack of virtue. Decision. There is no other advice, thou must seek to despise them, and do with disgust what thy duty commands’ ([31], vol. I, pp. 299-300); trans. J. Timmermann, in Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, ([23], 2007, p. 152).
- 35.
Several examples of which we have already noted in the previous chapters 2 and 3: see p. 28, p. 50, above.
- 36.
Lacan wrote in the Book Two of the Seminar, precisely in the Chapter XVI of La Lettre volée <The purloined letter> : « Chacun sait que l’argent ne sert pas simplement à acheter des objets, mais que les prix qui, dans notre civilisation, sont calculés au plus juste, ont pour fonction d’amortir quelque chose d'infiniment plus dangereux que de payer de la monnaie, qui est de devoir quelque chose à quelqu’un ».
- 37.
As is the case for Kant: ‘So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means’. (Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals , sect. II, in ([23], 1996, p. 80).
- 38.
Note though that anonymity does not offer only advantages: there are circumstances in which one might wish one knew the name of the woman or man who has donated her or his blood, especially in the case of a contamination by a virus which was not known at the time when the transfusion was made.
- 39.
François Pilet, an economic journalist in Switzerland, a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, who was awarded the 2013 Jean Dumur prize for his book ‘Krach Machine’, explained a little time ago – on the 8th February – at the symposium of Paris-Descartes University on La Vente des Produits Sanguins, Précarité et Vulnérabilité, how drug addicts, for example, use their dealer’s donor card to continue to give their own blood and get the money they need to buy drugs.
- 40.
Michel Monsellier, the President of the Fédération Française du don du sang bénévole, said this during the debate we were mentioning previously: see the previous note.
- 41.
«Now the God of peace, that brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant» ([3], Heb. XIII, 20). Just before, Paul inflamed Christians with these words: « XII. 3. For consider him that endured such contradiction of sinners against himself, lest ye be wearied and faint in your minds, 4. Ye have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin. » The just must be ready to die for sins to be redeemed. The image of Christ as a lamb is also in [3] 1 Pet., 1, 19: « Forasmuch as ye know that ye were not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold, from your vain conversation received by tradition from your fathers; But with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot ».
- 42.
[3] Revelations, I, 5.
- 43.
Even though Hare had the merit of launching the movement, he could hardly have avoided treating it in too simple a way, by missing its complexity.
- 44.
To solve his problems linked to the cycloid, Pascal had to compose spaces that did not correspond to the intuition he had of them. Even though his heart felt that space had three dimensions, the needs for the demonstration made him built four-dimensional spaces, for which he apologized, but which were nonetheless necessary to build the centres of gravity of volumes generated from cycloids. Hilbert, for his part, surpassed Desargues’ theorem by showing that his solution was valid only in very particular spaces and not universally, as its creator could only have imagined in the seventeenth century [21].
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Cléro, JP. (2021). Blood – One of the Most Overlooked Issues in the Ethics of Care. In: Reflections on Medical Ethics. Philosophy and Medicine, vol 138. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65233-3_4
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