In this chapter we make no attempt to summarise the many issues of social, economic, medical and political interest raised in this book ranging from the definition of ‘the gift’ in an Apartheid society to the redistributive role of the seller of blood in the United States, the Soviet Union and Japan. Much that we have written is fundamentally about a conflict of ideas; of different political concepts of society and the role of the private market in the area of social policy; of, in Isaiah Berlin's words, ‘the central question of politics – the question of obedience and coercion: “Why should I (or anyone) obey anyone else?” “Why should I not live as I like?”’ Why should I not ‘contract out’ of ‘giving relationships’? Such themes are clearly not amenable to condensation.

Instead, we aim to provide some interpretative comment on the responses of the voluntary donors recorded in the preceding chapter, and to relate certain issues of principle and practice raised in this study to the potential role that governmental social policies can play in preserving and extending the freedom of the individual.

Practically all the voluntary donors whose answers we set down in their own words employed a moral vocabulary to explain their reasons for giving blood. Their view of the external world and their conception of man's biological need for social relations could not be expressed in morally neutral terms. They acknowledged that they could not and should not live entirely as they may have liked if they had paid regard solely to their own immediate gratifications. To the philosopher's question ‘What kind of actions ought we to perform?’ they replied, in effect, ‘Those which will cause more good to exist in the universe than there would otherwise be if we did not so act’.

For most of them, the universe was not limited and confined to the family, the kinship, or to a defined social, ethnic or occupational group or class; it was the universal stranger.