No, it’s because you’re incapable of seeing how important they are to other people that makes you incapable of understanding other human beings. It’s all about how you feel without any consideration the millions who don’t view a corpse as simply a piece of meat to be discarded casually. If you wish to pit me go ahead and pit me. At the very least avoid spineless threats.
Lightnin’, I think you missed the point.
And how would you feel if those things were taken from you? Or all your pictures? Just because you vest your feelings in other things than gravesites and headstones doesn’t mean that the feelings of others which attach to those things are cheap. And they’re certainly less abstract, for those people, than potentially saving a stranger’s life.
Quite a few posts have excorciated “religions” as being a major stumbling block in this plan.
Can someone refresh my recollection as to which religious demoninations object to organ donation? My unresearched opinion was that most major religions were at least neutral to the concept, not hostile to it in any meaningful way. Certainly my faith, Roman Catholicism, supports and enocurages the practice. When I was Grand Knight of my K of C council some fifteen years ago, I ran a blood drive that also encouraged participants to register as organ donors.
In the balance stands at least one human life, versus annelid nourishment. It’s a very, very good argument. How many human lives, exactly, would you put in the balance against our responsibility to feed the worms? What’s your threshold?
Again, because there is quite a significant difference between not knowing something and not existing. You are trying to compare the property rights of someone who doesn’t know something with the property rights of someone who does not actually exist.
Just like the state can tax you but there are exceptions, if a corpse is being used for beneficial research that should be an exemption.
At the point where you’re claiming that the human rights of a person who does not exist are being violated, or human rights are being violated backwards in time at a point where that person did exist, it’s clear that you’re rationalizing.
Are you accounting for the suffering of the survivors?
Granted, the dead don’t suffer, but the people they leave behind do. Now, you may not agree with a cultural meme that says (pull WAG out of rear orifice) that removing body parts interferes with some eternal afterlife, but those who do may suffer greatly to think a loved one has been barred from heaven, or consigned to eternal limbo, or whatever, due to organ donation. They may view that as a fate worse than death… hence why some argue there should be allowances to opt-out for belief systems. It’s not for the benefit of the deceased, but for the benefit of survivors.
So you, right now, should have no say in what happens to your possessions after your death?
Ideally, no, ultra-orthodox Jews wouldn’t be able to get in the way of saving live via organ donation any more than other folks would be allowed to refuse taxation because giving away money conflicts with their religious beliefs. I recognize that societal we’re not at that point yet, however, so opt-out is preferable.
And, Spark, this is a thread about organ donation. If you’d like to how the government should deal with estates and property, that’s quite a different discussion.
Skimmed the thread, but didn’t see if this was brought up yet.
One might make the argument that you don’t own your body after you die, but don’t your heirs own the body? I certainly own my body while I’m alive, and I would say that my ownership of said body is stronger than my ownership of my house. I can leave my house to my kids, but not by body? And think of the “social good” that could be accomplished if the government owned my house after I died.
What am I missing?
I think it is exactly the same.
As John Mace says, other people can no doubt suggest lots of useful things to do with your other property upon your expiration, that you might take issue with now, while you live.
Why should your body, of all things, be subject to less protection?
That the state has a practical use for your dead body that no one else does? Unless your heirs are demanding your organs for their home transplant business or they’re really, really hungry and would like to make a tasty John Mace liver and onions dish, I can’t see anything practical they could do with your organs. Remember they can probably still bury some of you, it’s not like your whole body is necessarily lost. Indeed most of the tasty muscle meat should remain if they wanted delicious John Mace fajitas.
An objective definition of “practical” might not be easy to come up with here.
I can easily imagine a child feeling deeply troubled that, without her ever expressing any desire for it, the body of his dead mother was chopped up to be parceled out, and finding the resulting anguish highly impractical. He’d presumably be told that better people than he had been given the authority to decide what was practical.
You’re right. A body can be reused in a lot of ways. For instance, it can be ground up for compost, or sold as a fucktoy on Craigslist. The evil state, however, forbids the recycling of human remains in this way. No matter how much a living person may desperately want to make some lucky necrophiliac’s Saturday night, the state will step in and say “No. You’re not allowed”. So the state already has plenty of rights over your dead body. Currently, the state only allows you to dispose of your internal organs in two ways. You can either burn them, or bury them in certain designated places for the nourishment of worms and beetles. A lot of people think this is something of a waste, particularly since every hospital in the country will, today, lose at least one patient waiting for an organ transplant.
Your stuff is different. Sure, the state could sell it to buy antibiotics for sick kids or whatever, but then where is your incentive to hang on to this stuff while you’re still alive? The only reason people don’t blow their life savings in a mad dash to tick every box on the bucket list is because they want to leave it to their kids. If the state did step in and take your belongings, pretty soon people would stop leaving any belongings behind to take. It’s a self-defeating strategy, in other words.
I’d be happy if the state instructed doctors to take organs whenever viable, because they can’t possibly be put to any other decent use. I would not be happy to let the state take my stuff because, even though I won’t care about it, I would want my children to be as well off as possible. If the state took people’s stuff, people would just dispose of it themselves before they died.
I really like this idea. Seems to solve the core problem to me. People/families that don’t want to help out for whatever reason also likely won’t get any help when they need it.
How, pray tell, did you make the leap to assuming I was referring to “ultra-orthodox Jews”? I did not specify any religion, and “ultra-Orthodox Jews” are hardly alone wanting the body to be intact to one to degree or another. MANY groups have done that, from Ancient Egyptians (the whole purpose of mummification was to preserve the corpse, after all, including quite a few of the internal organs which were given special attention and their own containers) to modern-day Hmong. There’s more than one group potentially involved.
Because they believe that all the bits of a body are required for its time in the afterlife. You’re free to get annoyed that I provided a valid example though, I guess. Feel free to substitute any other group(s) that also share a religious belief about organ donation, and the argument remains the same.
The link also mentioned the idea of allowing organs to be sold after death. That would dovetail neatly with the idea that, if there’s no longer a “you” to hold ownership of your body then it naturally devolves onto your heirs just like your more mundane property, and would also increase donation rates – your heirs would have to have some strongly rooted objection, not just a vague squickiness, to turn down serious cash.
She gave me those things… well, the plastic cow, anyway. And we planted the tree in her memory. And you know what? If that tree burned down, or the cow was stolen… I’d be bummed, but not devastated. Certainly not devastated enough to let someone else die.
Well, if Grandma’s body belongs to you after she dies, shouldn’t you be able to have it stuffed and mounted? The state is already telling you what you can and can’t do with a body- why draw the line at organ donation?
I want my flaming corpse to be launched into the sea via catapult at my funeral party (on a boat). As long as everything will stay together during flight properly without them, you may have whatever organs you like.
I advise everyone to go to bethematch.org and sign up to be a bone marrow donor. I did. I mean, you could save a life. Go. Save a life.