It’s the most ethical use of them because it doesn’t put anyone in the position of deciding who deserves to live.
- Make “disassembly for organ donation” the mandatory form of judicial execution. And make more crimes capital:
[Quote=A Gift from Earth by Larry Niven]
Any citizen, with the help of the organ banks, can live as long as it takes his central nervous system to wear out. This can be a very long time if his circulatory system is kept functioning. … But the citizen, cannot take more out of the organ banks than goes into them. He must do his utmost to see that they are supplied. … The only feasible method of supplying the organ banks is through execution of criminals. … A criminal’s pirated body can save a dozen lives. There is now no valid argument against capital punishment for any given crime; for all such argument seeks to prove that killing a man does society no good.
Hence the citizen, who wants to live as long and as healthily as possible, will vote any crime into a capital crime if the organ banks are short of material. … Cite Earth’s capital punishment for false advertising, income tax evasion, air pollution, having children without a license.
The wonder was that it had taken so long to pass these laws.
[/quote]
Or reinstitute the organ draft.
You’ll have to go back to firing squads, beheading, or some other form of execution that doesn’t render most of the organs unsuitable for transplant.
I remember taking in college when I took an Ethics course. Once we had a discussion where we were given a list of people who needed an organ transplant, their bios, medical issues, etc. Our professor broke us up into groups, and we had to decide who was the best candidate for the organ. Fuck, that was a hypothetical – I don’t even want to think what it would be like having to do something like that for a living.
First, you also have to take into account who’s most likely to live. You have Person A who’s younger, but there’s a pretty good chance he won’t survive the transplant operation. Then you have Person B who’s a good candidate, but he also has a habit of forgetting to take his meds. Person C doesn’t have either of those problems, but she’s a lot older and probably will only live another five years. And so on.
Who will benefit the most from this organ, is basically the criteria.
Too bad the public doesn’t always have all the facts straight. This decision wasn’t about “morality”. It was about reality and the getting the best possible use of a very scarce resource.
Is it cold? Yeah. Does it have to be be? Well, sadly, yes. Until you can find a way to ensure that there’s a heart/liver/lungs/kidney/whatever for every single person, this is what we’re stuck with. I wouldn’t want to have to do it, but it’s one of those things that has to be done.
I’m not OK with sentencing a person to death because they might in the future forget to take their medicine.
That’s not a decision anyone has the right to make.
Again, this is a zero-sum situation. One person’s reception of an organ means someone else’s non-reception of an organ.
But it has to be made anyway.
Nor does anyone have a “right” to an organ. At any rate, that’s the best procedure we’ve got right now. Which is why more people need to sign up to be organ donors. It’s sickening, and it’s heartbreaking, but it’s reality.
(Maybe someday, in the distant future, they’ll be able to clone organs, or something like that. Until then, we have to work with the system we have)
Which is why it’s fundamentally wrong to tell someone that they have to die because they decided that some other person is more deserving of a transplant.
No. It doesn’t.
We should have been cloning organs decades ago. You can thank the “pro-life” lobby for effectively making cloning research illegal in most of the country.
Someone correct me if I’m wrong (and I’ll take **Qadgop **without a cite as an expert), but with hearts, it’s pretty likely that his getting a donor heart meant someone else on the list died - before the ‘next’ decent match heart came up, they kicked it.
So whether we want to consider a person’s morals (and more importantly, their likelihood of following their medical regimen) or not, it will have an effect on how many years of quality life get saved.
This is all pretty heartless. A man died.
Yes, the decision must be made. You can delegate that decision to a person, a committee, or a mechanical device (lottery machine), but it’s still a decision.
Yes, a man died. But he did it after shooting at an old lady, striking a pedestrian with a stolen car, and then wrapping said car around a tree. Is it heartless to say it was his own fault?
You’re not still going to be a front line combatant after the surgery. This guy joined the Army Reserves two years after his heart transplant, and even that’s unusual.
Guess not. He’d have been heartless if he hadn’t gotten the transplant.
Maybe it was a self-defense shooting, the pedestrian was jaywalking, he made an honest mistake about whose car it was, the car had a sudden mechanical failure, and the tree failed to yield the right-of-way?
I think it was actually a SunTrust bank sign and not a tree, but the end result would be much the same.
Yeah, yeah. It was just an example.
Maybe the heart came from an evil ax murderer and it turned him evil? I think a saw a documentary about that once.