Do you have a citation that displaying preserved human remains is illegal? You aren’t the first to mention it, but so far it’s been stated as a kind of common knowledge, and I have no idea if it’s true or not.
Obviously you can’t simply pile corpses in your front yard, but that’s for health and safety reasons, and presumably the laws are not specific to humans.
Just as obviously, it is not completely illegal to display human remains–if there is a law, it must have exceptions for medical and (possibly?) artistic displays.
So, again–got a cite? Would it make a difference if Grandma specifically allowed it in her will (exhibitions such as Body Worlds operate this way)?
I don’t accept that the state should be able to tell you what you can or cannot do with the body, unless there is some public health or safety issue involved.
I do pair well with a good Chianti…
As someone mentioned, “practical use” is a fuzzy concept. The state could use the money from the proceeds of the sale of your house for all kinds of “practical” uses. Why should your kids get it?
For those siding with the OP, what is the limit? Can the state take the entire body? If not, why not? We can re-use the skin (which actually is an organ, you know), the bones, muscles, the face, and we can now even re-use your arms. It won’t be long before we see foot transplants (if that hasn’t happened already).
So, we are not talking about just harvesting internal organs here.
As far as I’m concerned, if it’s usable it should be used.
But just as opt-out is a compromise position, I suppose you can list a number of allowed organs that you find palatable.
I suppose one could make the arguement that if you are NOT allowed to sell your organs (either while alive or dead) that you also can’t “will” your body to friends or relatives either.
I can’t agree. I look at it in an information sense. Our brains are computers, and when we are dead our brains cannot process or store information. The precise reason why our brain didn’t store the datum “my neighbor borrowed my chainsaw without asking” seems irrelevant.
The exemption has to make sense. If we are staring from the premise that the dead have no rights, why should there be any exemptions at all?
To be more concrete: suppose a young motorcyclist has signed up to donate his body for scientific research. He’s killed in a horrific piano-wire accident. As it turns out, medically speaking he is dead-average: O- blood, and his organs (which are all pristine) have no particularly negative qualities.
He’s actually nearly useless for medical research because his body is so boring (he would be much more interesting if he were a chronic smoker, or had some uncommon cancer, or what not). But he could save a half-dozen lives with his organs, and improve a half-dozen more with his corneas/face/etc. Why shouldn’t the state override his wishes, assuming we accept the original premise?
Ok, suppose his body landed gently in an ice-cold pond right next to the hospital. Or use whatever means of death that works best.
Out of curiosity, what specifically about a decapitation scenario makes it difficult to recover the major organs, assuming emergency response is reasonably prompt?
We can’t keep a decapitated body alive, basically.
What you need for organ donation (ideally) is an intact body with most of the brain destroyed/dead but the brainstem intact enough that a respirator can keep it going long enough to get a surgical team in to harvest the organs. Oh, and no interruption in heart beats/circulation longer than a minute or two, at most, and preferably not even that.
Of course it’s not irrelevant if we’re talking about a person’s property that’s being used without their use, and something that isn’t anybody’s property being used. If you insist on computer metaphors, it’s the difference between someone using your without your knowledge or permission, and someone not using your computer at all, but instead picking through a dumpster for computer scraps.
You’re free to believe the increasing the state of medical knowledge and/or helping to train new doctors doesn’t make sense, but that’s not only an unsupportable position, it’s quite silly. And as for your objections, can you find any cites at all for any medical schools who reject cadavers for use in their gross anatomy programs if they aren’t chronic smokers or have uncommon cancer, or some such?
I strongly object to the government using people’s (dead) bodies without their consent. I’d rather see stem cell research advance than rely on dead people (where the chance of rejection is high enough).
Would the surviving family be exempted from some end of life costs? How would this work? Do they slice you open to see if you’re viable?
I’m happy to donate my body to science. Since I have epilepsy, I may (or may) not be useful. At the very least, medical students can practice on my cadaver.
Okay. Well, suppose that our hypothetical piano wire sliced through just above the brainstem, or otherwise left just enough brain to maintain the heart and lung function. Or heck; just say that the guy was shot in the head several times, causing brain death.
Prompt emergency response isn’t the same as having a staff prepared to harvest, properly store and to transport the organs to where they need to go on a moments notice. You pretty much have to harvest internal organs at the time of death. In the case of our motorcycle rider, investigators might need to figure out some facts before the body is carted off, they will likely have to run toxicology tests and doctors are unlikely to know whether or not his organs are even viable (his he HIV + or have some other disease that disqualifies his organs).
I’m not using metaphors at all. The brain is a computer. And I’m certainly not talking about someone borrowing the computer; that would be analogous to brain donation, which obviously doesn’t happen.
My point was simply about whether–from the brain/computer’s perspective–there is any difference between an event that was unobserved because the computer was shut down, or because it was outside the computer’s range of sensing. I claim there is no difference, outside of auxiliary data.
It is quite silly, so it is fortunate that I never made such a claim.
My “nearly useless” was too strong, I’ll admit. So I will withdraw that claim until I can find a cite. I will point out that “nearly useless” does not equal medical schools outright rejecting cadavers.
That said, I think the overall point still stands: can you really claim that the definite saving of a half-dozen lives (and improvement of a half-dozen more) is a lesser end than hypothetical research results?
The state doesn’t have a right to dictate where his organs go after death, period. The state may dictate certain ways in which the body is disposed of in order to preserve the health of society at large but I don’t see where that translates into the state having the right to mandate organ donation. I’m not even sure how you would go about passing laws mandating organ donation or whether they would stand up to Constitutional review. Would it be a state law or a Federal law? Are there any ethical discussions about mandated organ donation in the medical community?
I agree, but that’s not where I’m trying to go with my line of argument. FinnAgain, along with the OP, believes that the dead have no rights. I don’t agree with this premise, but I will entertain it for the moment. But given that premise, I cannot understand why he thinks a request for a body to go to medical research should override the interests of the state, even in a case artificially constructed such that the benefits to ignoring the request are obvious.
I think therefore that FinnAgain is being inconsistent, and that this damages the credibility of the original premise. I think that despite claims to the contrary, and despite the fact that it is perfectly rational, neither FinnAgain nor YogSosoth really fully believe in the premise.
The dead do not exist. Things that exist cannot have rights. Things that do not exist cannot have anything, as a matter of fact.“The Dead” is a linguistic fiction that does not correspond to anything in reality that exists, only something in reality that used to exist.
As you haven’t demonstrated a single logical inconsistency, you certainly haven’t proven that. All you’ve offered is your subjective view that medical research shouldn’t be a valid exemption. That certainly doesn’t damage the credibility of anything. It’s also fallacious to assume that if an argument about possible exemptions for mandatory donation doesn’t hold water, that the argument for mandatory donation itself has had its “credibility” reduced. We do not judge arguments by credibility, in any case, that only applies to people.
If that’s your argument, instead of using metaphors you are simply wrong. The brain is not a computer, the brain is a brain. That it shares some similarities with a computer no more means that it is a computer than that it is an apple. And your metaphor would have been someone borrowing the use of a computer, since your earlier metaphor was borrowing the use of a tool. But ah well.
At the point where you refer to a person who doesn’t exist as if it’s a computer that’s “shut down”, and claiming that there’s no difference between being dead and therefore not existing, and simply being unaware of something, it’s clear that either you really are using metaphors, or your argument is simply fatally flawed.
Yes, you did. I pointed out that using bodies for medical experimentation would be a valid exception to mandatory organ donation. You claimed that that exemption “made no sense.” I pointed out, in turn, that claiming that “increasing the state of medical knowledge and/or helping to train new doctors doesn’t make sense” was an absurd and unsupportable position.
Keep it in the Pit if you’re going to post bullshit like this.
Argument by assertion. However, I will grant that “the dead do/do not have rights” is a bit of linguistic fiction. Most seem to understand it as “the right of a living person to exert control over his/her future body”.
I never said anything about the credibility of the argument; I spoke of the credibility of the premise. And since this particular premise is not something that can have a single, factual answer, I think it’s fair to judge its credibility.
Since we are both merely arguing by assertion here, I doubt we can come to any sort of consensus. Many books have been written on the subject, again with no consensus, so I doubt we’ll solve that on a message board.
I did not change the object merely to emphasize the same point–I was making a different point there.
Dead people exist; they’re just dead, and their brains and other parts aren’t operating correctly. If you freeze a person, at least with current technology, you kill them. But the pattern is still there; it’s just been disrupted such that it can’t operate in the normal way. It is like a hard drive with the heads crashed (and that was a metaphor, or rather, a simile).
I said the exception made no sense, not the research. Research is indeed valuable. But using a body with many viable organs for transplants is a much better use than for research, since the former virtually guarantees lives saved. Use the unviable bodies for the research, since it matters less there, and there are many more of them.
I do apologize, but my intent was not to put words in your mouth, but rather made clear my position.
