Maybe I am, maybe I’m not. I don’t care to check, because it doesn’t matter. If you don’t want to donate your organs, just opt out.
Then decide. Opt out.
Why not? If you don’t like this default, opt out.
That’s a very realistic concern which is not at all crazy or paranoid. Luckily, there’s a solution: Opt out. There’s no point letting you die if you opt out. So opt out.
When supply doesn’t meet demand (or vice versa), there are usually price controls causing it. And sure enough, you’ll find that it’s illegal to buy and sell organs across most of the world. In other words, a price ceiling of $0. Repeal that law, and you’ll have organs coming out your ears. Opt-out/opt-in doesn’t solve the real problem, that it is illegal to buy or sell organs.
Try making it illegal to buy or sell food and see if that has any impact on how many people get fed. It’s just as absurd to think that policy will work with organs, too.
People are murdered for their organs so criminals can sell them on the black market. The law against buying and selling organs is literally killing people. It’s one of the worst, most immoral laws I can think of.
I’m an organ donor and I agree, in part, with Smapti. The state shouldn’t just expect to get my organs by default. It can ask for my permission, and ideally pay me or my estate for the privilege if I grant it. I don’t think an opt-out policy by itself is the apocalypse that he does, but it’s a step down a dark and scary road. Best not to tread there.
I dislike opt-out systems since I don’t like the implication that the state has default rights to my corpse.
I wonder if meeting half-way would be effective, though: instead of an easily ignorable single checkbox, there are two checkboxes–one for yes and the other no. If you fail to check exactly one of them, you don’t get your license or ID card. You must make your wishes known whether positive or negative.
Most people, like me for instance, think that this risk is so miniscule as to be not worth the harm of people dying from lack of organs. Anyone who cares can opt-out. Plus, if the doctors are so evil as to kill you for your organs, would a no-donate directive stop them? So I’d argue that you are not being paranoid enough. And the 99.999% of potential donors where this is not a problem could benefit someone else.
In any case with opt-out there would likely be enough willing donors to make killing unwilling ones unnecessary. Unless you possess special organs that is.
I’m with John Prine - give my knees to the needy.
Yes, I would. When there is a limited supply, I would put convicts lower on the priority list.
Fix the supply, and we don’t need to worry about the priority list. If I were allowed to put restrictions on who gets my organs, they would only go to those who are on the donor list themselves.
But you are willing to take the organ of someone killed to harvest it, right?
In the 401K example I mentioned it is as easy to take it as not take it - the decision is made in the middle of doing the paperwork for coming on board. So the difficulty of signing up or not signing up does not seem to be the issue. Some work on defaults says that what is happening is that the power structure is giving cues about what you should do. If the default is to not donate, then there is some sense that this is the “right” choice to make - even if there is no such intention.
In the 401K example when they made signing up the default they also made the amount deducted low so as to not stress anyone by taking too much money for the program. The average amounts people took from pay for the program actually went down as people who would have signed up at say 6% took cues from the default being 4% and went with that.
So whether the German system is easier than the California system is immaterial - it is the default that matters.
Consider that different societies have different circumstances and you’re regarding this through the lens of your own experience.
In the US there is a real fear among certain groups that doctors will declare them dead before they are actually dead in order to benefit some other group of people. While I think that is extremely unlikely these days, given the historical, factual abuses of minorities in the name of medicine that occurred in the past in the US that fear is not entirely without some basis.
If you’re curious about what I mean by historical abuses, two examples are the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment and the lesser known but even more repulsive work done by J. Marion Sims where he obtained female slaves and used them as experimental surgical subjects without anesthesia even though it was available at the time. At least one of his slaves endured 30 surgeries on her body while fully awake. Nor are those of African descent in the US the only group that have been abused and/or exploited in the past.
So, as I said, while I’d like to, and do, believe outright abuses of the organ donation system in the US today are extremely rare to nonexistent I find it completely understandable that certain groups in the US are deeply suspicious of the medical establishment and fearful of their bodies being exploited for the benefit of others.
If you believed that there was a risk that, as an organ donor, you’d be “harvested” prior to actual death, killed for someone else’s benefit when you might otherwise be saved, perhaps you would hesitate to be listed as a donor even if you think organ donation is a great thing for the recipient.
Data from countries with opt-out systems shows that there are plenty of potential donors, and so demand for illegal organs is less. Since I’m willing to donate my organs for free I’ll undercut the paying market. And got a cite for the gigantic killing for organs problem? Waking up in the bathtub without your kidneys is a UL I believe.
Really. You’re going to send a renew by mail form back for this? And risk that the person will be unlicensed for a while as this cycles?
I’ll have to look up the research on this. I suspect it doesn’t work. But this idea comes up so often I bet someone has done an experiment.
As far as I understand the idea behind laws that forbid the sale of organs is to prevent a situation in which the poor become spare parts for the rich. Those moral deliberations aside, would it work? I suppose it might. And we would not even have to donate ourselves. You could probably get a mint condition kidney from Bangladesh for a couple hundred Dollars (shipping not included). The third world is a big place. Lots of organs for those who can pay. Plus the good feeling of having abolished one of the worst, most immoral laws. Or … maybe not.
Nah, just do it for in-person renewals and first-time licensees. Mail renewals would just keep the previous default.
Surveys and the like are very sensitive to subtle changes in wording and ordering. I’d be surprised if a forced question didn’t make a difference, but I’ll admit that I haven’t seen any research on this.
Personally, I think the arguments against organ donation are stupid and/or paranoid. However, even allowing the possibility of an opt-out (as compared to compulsory donation) means that we think people’s wishes on this should be adhered to, no matter how inane or flimsy their basis is. And if we allow that this as a consideration, we should take our role in obtaining proper consent seriously.
From here.
Now why is it more morally suspect to register the 5% against by default than to not register the 95% for?
Enforced donation is certainly wrong. Making opting out difficult is certainly wrong. But I’d say 55% of donors who would be willing to save a life not doing so because of the way the defaults are set up is even more wrong.
You assume that “strongly support” means the same thing as “wants to be a donor”.
Generally speaking we consider it worse to violate someone’s negative wishes than to ignore someone’s positive wishes. If you allow someone to borrow your car, but that information is lost somehow, that person may be harmed (perhaps greatly, depending on the circumstances), but it’s not considered a big deal. On the other hand, if you very much don’t want that person to borrow your car, and they do anyway, we consider it a crime.
You may reply that there’s a difference in that unlike with a car, an unwilling donor is in no way harmed by a violation. And I absolutely agree in principle, which is why I’m a donor. But that argument is off the table once we allow opt-out at all. If no possible harm could come to donors, there is no reason to not have compulsory donation. Because no one suggests compulsory donation, then we have allowed for the chance, at least in principle, that a donor could be harmed (whether physically, spiritually, philosophically, or otherwise).
At any rate, I believe it would be nice to not have to weigh our moral choices at all, which is why made my suggestion. It is consistent with the link you posted, because it forces people to form a specific opinion on whether or not they want to donate. It also makes the yes/no choices “symmetrical”, whereas in the linked study, participants had to take positive action to click a link to fill out some forms. I’d like to see a study where participants had to fill out equal forms for either registration or opting out.
I suspect this view is based on the idea that needing a transplant is essentially the same lottery as getting randomly killed and consequently being a donor is.
It is not. I am a transplant recipient and am not and never have been on the donor list. This is because the reason for my need for a transplant was chronic illness, the consequences of which (both inherent in the disease and derivative of the treatment) made my organs unusable for donation. I couldn’t even donate blood.
From what I saw of the process, most recipients of organs are in the same position.
Thus, I did not want to proclaim that I was an organ donor just to subjectively pat myself on the back for doing my bit, when the reality is that if I should be in a car accident or the like, it would potentially waste everyone’s time as the trauma doctors investigated my potential to donate at considerable expense, only to discover that it was hopeless.
I have not worked the empirical data beyond what I learned from my cohort waiting on the transplant list and the doctors, but it seems to me that “normal” for people who get transplants is having undonatable organs. After all, you have to be very sick indeed to need a transplant (yet still be bobbling along for sufficient time for the need to be recognised, and not die from the wait.)
The transplant surgery is dictated by the availablity of a compatible donor, and you have to live long enough to have one turn up. Losing a liver in a car accident, is not typically what puts you on the list to receive a transplant, because there are not on-the-shelf donors available for acute trauma cases like this.
It is for this reason that analogies with insurance do not apply, and also that your plan would necessarily have more exceptions that cases to which it applied - more holes than cheese, so to speak.
My mother has expressed similar concerns, and instead of signing an organ donor card has told all her relatives that she would like her organs donated if she is, in our opinion, brain dead. They ask the relatives if there is no card.
That doesn’t work if the person is rapidly dying and the family can’t be found, but the more common organ donation scenario is that a person has lethal brain damage from an auto accident, and it takes a little while to determine that, during which time the relatives can be notified. Or so she believes. And my dad was the medical doctor supervising patients getting liver transplants, so she had some source of evidence to lean on.
(He didn’t take a lot of personal interest in the question as he believes both he and she were to old, with too many preexisting conditions, to have usable donations.)
Organs, not “donations”. But i guess my meaning was clear.
And my mother, despite being married to a doctor, has reason to distrust the medical establishment.
If we have opt-in, then there probably won’t be any organ shortages and the ethical issues move from “Is he dead yet? Can we harvest his organs now?” to “should we really be giving this diabetic overweight 80 year old a new kidney?”
Frankly, if we just had opt out for ONE kidney and opt in for anything else, it would relieve much of the pressure. I mean seriously, if you can live on earth with one kidney, I’m sure you can muddle through with one kidney in heaven.