I mostly mean the organs you donate while still alive.
In the case of the organs you can’t live without, it’s pretty much the whole free market thing. It will create incentive for people who want to be able to keep their organs when they die. There’s no more reason to take their organs when they die than there is to take their money and spend it on saving lives.
I’m not entirely convinced that this is the best either. I don’t know how much incentive people really get from stuff that happens after they die. Perhaps it should at least be encouraged with fees to keep your organs, or subsidies to sell them.
You know, it would probably be possible to benefit from your organs’ value while you’re alive. Sign a contract to agree to be organ-harvested after your death, and get a stipend for the average estimated value of your cadaver, today! Free money, from your perspective. You could get more if you contractually agreed not to smoke or take certain dangerous jobs.
You know, it would probably be possible to benefit from your organs’ value while you’re alive. Sign a contract to agree to be organ-harvested after your death, and get a stipend for the average estimated value of your cadaver, today! Free money, from your perspective. You could get more if you contractually agreed not to smoke or take certain dangerous jobs.
That’s a brilliant idea and it is a travesty that it isn’t in place now. (The whole “moral hazard” thing would need to be solved but there are ways to solve it.)
Certainly, but loss-of-autonomy has a cost associated with it, in my utility ordering, at any rate. I think it’s best to allow people to do what they want with their bodies. Creating incentives is far less intrusive, in terms of personal freedom, than forcing a single course of action on everyone. Besides which, leaving aside the provisional issue at hand, I don’t like to think too hard about the legal implications of deciding that people don’t own their bodies and brains.
There’s no more reason to take their organs when they die than there is to take their money and spend it on saving lives.
If people were routinely burning all their assets when they died, preventing anyone from getting any use out of them, I think I would be in favor of a policy that mandated the donation of the property for life-saving purposes. In the property case, one could at least make the argument that mandating redistribution after death would disincentivize people from working hard during their lifetimes. I don’t see a similar disincentive associated with mandatory redistribution of organs after death.
I’m pretty convinced that mandatory organ donation upon brain-death is an unmitigated good thing. Are there any sound arguments against it, besides the pragmatic difficulty of selling the policy to people? So the important question for me is: Should we institute an organ market for living donors in addition to requiring donation upon death? There are costs to the organ market, as has been pointed out in the comments. Also, an organ sold by a living donor is one less organ harvested from a cadaver, so an organ market wouldn’t increase the number of organs available for transplant in the long term. It would skew the allocation of available organs towards the wealthy, which raises equity concerns.
The big advantage to the organ market that I see is that it allows for better matching of donors and patients. My understanding is that harvested organs can’t be stored for more than a few days, so if an organ is harvested from a cadaver it might go to waste because of the lack of suitable patients in the (spatial or temporal) vicinity of the donor. If there were an organ market, some organs which would otherwise be wasted in this way would in fact get transplanted. I guess my view on the organ market would hinge on the extent of to which it would mitigate this kind of waste, and that’s an empirical question. If anyone knows of data pertinent to this question, I’d be interested in hearing about it.
Thanks! I was not in fact aware of that. I actually thought about the cryonics objection when I was writing that comment, but I figured neuropreservation would not be a problem. Looks like I was wrong. I probably should have tried harder to follow up on my initial suspicion rather than dismissing it.
If people were routinely burning all their assets when they died, preventing anyone from getting any use out of them, I think I would be in favor of a policy that mandated the donation of the property for life-saving purposes.
But they are making use of their organs. I don’t know why they consider burying them important, but it’s not my place to judge. It might not make them nearly as happy as it would the recipient, but the same can be said of them spending money on luxury when there are people who have trouble meeting their basic needs.
Also, an organ sold by a living donor is one less organ harvested from a cadaver, so an organ market wouldn’t increase the number of organs available for transplant in the long term.
Yes it would. To my knowledge, it’s pretty rare for people to die in a condition where their organs can still be used.
If there were an organ market, some organs which would otherwise be wasted in this way would in fact get transplanted.
I wonder how that would work. Would they move people who need organs to hospitals where people who match them are dying? Why couldn’t they do that now? Perhaps they can, and just don’t because there’s no money in it and it seems really tasteless.
But they are making use of their organs. I don’t know why they consider burying them important, but it’s not my place to judge. It might not make them nearly as happy as it would the recipient, but the same can be said of them spending money on luxury when there are people who have trouble meeting their basic needs.
You are probably much more libertarian than I am. I don’t buy the strong self-ownership assumption that undergirds many libertarian arguments. I think it is within a government’s legitimate sphere of power to legislate against sufficiently widespread wastage of important resources, even if those resources are legally acquired by their owner. If a crazed billionaire began buying up all the silicon in the world in order to bury it on the moon, I think the government should step in to prevent this from happening. When the relevant resource is literally a part of the owner the government should err on the side of liberty, but there can still be cases of waste egregious enough to warrant intervention, and the widespread burial of transplantable organs is sufficiently egregious.
Yes it would. To my knowledge, it’s pretty rare for people to die in a condition where their organs can still be used.
Ah, I didn’t know this. If this is the case, then there is good reason to encourage living people to give up their organs.
I wonder how that would work. Would they move people who need organs to hospitals where people who match them are dying?
I was thinking more about living donors. An organ market would encourage some people to sell their organs while they were alive. Unless something goes really wrong, these organs are presumably going to end up transplanted. If all of those people waited until they were dead, some fraction of those organs would be wasted, either because their former owners died in a way that renders the organ usable, or simply because the organ could not be transported to a suitable recipient in time.
I think it is within a government’s legitimate sphere of power to legislate against sufficiently widespread wastage of important resources, even if those resources are legally acquired by their owner.
The problem is, once you get past the poverty line, additional money doesn’t make you all that much happier. If you’re well past it, anything you do with your money is wasting it. If you stop them from wasting it, you’re just stopping them from earning much money. You’ll destroy incentives. There’s no reason to stop them from wasting resources in one way if it just means that they’ll waste them in another.
We don’t have to choose between the extremes of allowing people to do whatever they want with their resources (as long as they don’t use them to directly harm people) or legislating against any socially suboptimal usage of resources. I think people should have quite a bit of freedom to use their resources the way they want, precisely because we don’t want to disincentivize people from working, and also because a government that is constantly monitoring its citizens to ensure socially optimal resource usage would be unbearably intrusive. But I also think there are cases where the benefits of government intervention outweigh these costs.
Where exactly to draw the line is a difficult question, and there are a number of cases where I’m unsure whether a government mandate is advisable. However, there are also cases that are clearly on one side or another of the line. Banning all luxury consumption, for instance, is definitely a bad idea. I also think its pretty clear that mandating organ donation (perhaps with a religious exemption clause) is a good idea. In this case, the costs aren’t that great. I can’t see any disincentivization of productive behavior, and the additional intrusiveness required to adequately enforce the policy does not seem all that burdensome. And by all accounts the social benefits would be quite significant.
Since the government is hardly going to do the best possible thing with our money, my last comment was vastly exaggerated.
Even so, I don’t think people are generally expected to help others with their money. If they manage to do something particularly wasteful, you can tax them for it to make up for it.
I generally prefer the idea of subsidizing the stuff that does help people, but it works out the same if you add a tiny change in how you do income taxes.
Consider someone who is deciding whether to donate their money to Seeing Eye or use it to dig ditches and then fill them. Seeing Eye is less than 0.05% as effective as the Fred Hollows Foundation, so the difference in social optimality is less than 0.05% of what it could do.
This means that if they dig ditches and then fill them, they are less than 0.05% more wasteful than if they donate to Seeing Eye. Why not just move the line by 0.05%, and let them do whatever they want? You can just tax them an additional 0.05% to make up for it, and they’ll still end up with more incentive. For that matter, you’d probably save enough money on not bothering with regulation to make up for it.
It seems like digging ditches and then filling them is infinitely more wasteful than donating to Seeing Eye, since it makes an infinitely smaller difference, but that’s not really how it works. The difference is so small it’s lost in rounding.
i disagree with the kind of analysis you’re doing here. Just because a difference is a small percentage of the maximal possible difference does not mean it is a small difference. Suppose you have three mutually exclusive actions available to you: A—play video games all day, B—put in a small amount of effort that will ensure that malaria is eliminated, C—put in a moderate amount of effort that will ensure that everyone in the world lives forever without sickness or deprivation. As a percentage of what you could accomplish by doing C, the difference between doing A and doing B is negligible. But it seems absurd to say that the difference between doing A and doing B is so small that it doesn’t really matter. Sure, it’s small as a percentage, but it’s still a massive difference.
Of course, it still might be the case (in fact, it probably is the case) that in your particular example, the cost of intervention outweighs its benefits. But I have already granted that this is often the case. If your example was meant to provide a general argument against any government regulation of resource usage, I don’t see how it works.
Instead of discussing hypotheticals, why not talk about the actual policy under consideration: Do you think that the cost of a mandatory organ donation policy plausibly outweighs its benefits? If you don’t, do you have other non-consequentialist grounds for opposing the policy?
It doesn’t matter because you could add a rediculously tiny tax to make up the difference.
Also, I think it’s generally a good idea to give taxes and subsidies to get rid of externalities. If this is done correctly, it makes no difference at all how you spend your money.
I mostly mean the organs you donate while still alive.
In the case of the organs you can’t live without, it’s pretty much the whole free market thing. It will create incentive for people who want to be able to keep their organs when they die. There’s no more reason to take their organs when they die than there is to take their money and spend it on saving lives.
I’m not entirely convinced that this is the best either. I don’t know how much incentive people really get from stuff that happens after they die. Perhaps it should at least be encouraged with fees to keep your organs, or subsidies to sell them.
You know, it would probably be possible to benefit from your organs’ value while you’re alive. Sign a contract to agree to be organ-harvested after your death, and get a stipend for the average estimated value of your cadaver, today! Free money, from your perspective. You could get more if you contractually agreed not to smoke or take certain dangerous jobs.
That’s a brilliant idea and it is a travesty that it isn’t in place now. (The whole “moral hazard” thing would need to be solved but there are ways to solve it.)
That has a pretty similar result as the government forcing you to donate and slight change in the tax system.
That part would be useful.
Certainly, but loss-of-autonomy has a cost associated with it, in my utility ordering, at any rate. I think it’s best to allow people to do what they want with their bodies. Creating incentives is far less intrusive, in terms of personal freedom, than forcing a single course of action on everyone. Besides which, leaving aside the provisional issue at hand, I don’t like to think too hard about the legal implications of deciding that people don’t own their bodies and brains.
If people were routinely burning all their assets when they died, preventing anyone from getting any use out of them, I think I would be in favor of a policy that mandated the donation of the property for life-saving purposes. In the property case, one could at least make the argument that mandating redistribution after death would disincentivize people from working hard during their lifetimes. I don’t see a similar disincentive associated with mandatory redistribution of organs after death.
I’m pretty convinced that mandatory organ donation upon brain-death is an unmitigated good thing. Are there any sound arguments against it, besides the pragmatic difficulty of selling the policy to people? So the important question for me is: Should we institute an organ market for living donors in addition to requiring donation upon death? There are costs to the organ market, as has been pointed out in the comments. Also, an organ sold by a living donor is one less organ harvested from a cadaver, so an organ market wouldn’t increase the number of organs available for transplant in the long term. It would skew the allocation of available organs towards the wealthy, which raises equity concerns.
The big advantage to the organ market that I see is that it allows for better matching of donors and patients. My understanding is that harvested organs can’t be stored for more than a few days, so if an organ is harvested from a cadaver it might go to waste because of the lack of suitable patients in the (spatial or temporal) vicinity of the donor. If there were an organ market, some organs which would otherwise be wasted in this way would in fact get transplanted. I guess my view on the organ market would hinge on the extent of to which it would mitigate this kind of waste, and that’s an empirical question. If anyone knows of data pertinent to this question, I’d be interested in hearing about it.
Are you aware that it would mean no more cryonics?
(Even if you want to preserve the head only, the injection of anti-ice fluids makes the rest of body unusable for transplantation.)
Thanks! I was not in fact aware of that. I actually thought about the cryonics objection when I was writing that comment, but I figured neuropreservation would not be a problem. Looks like I was wrong. I probably should have tried harder to follow up on my initial suspicion rather than dismissing it.
But they are making use of their organs. I don’t know why they consider burying them important, but it’s not my place to judge. It might not make them nearly as happy as it would the recipient, but the same can be said of them spending money on luxury when there are people who have trouble meeting their basic needs.
Yes it would. To my knowledge, it’s pretty rare for people to die in a condition where their organs can still be used.
I wonder how that would work. Would they move people who need organs to hospitals where people who match them are dying? Why couldn’t they do that now? Perhaps they can, and just don’t because there’s no money in it and it seems really tasteless.
You are probably much more libertarian than I am. I don’t buy the strong self-ownership assumption that undergirds many libertarian arguments. I think it is within a government’s legitimate sphere of power to legislate against sufficiently widespread wastage of important resources, even if those resources are legally acquired by their owner. If a crazed billionaire began buying up all the silicon in the world in order to bury it on the moon, I think the government should step in to prevent this from happening. When the relevant resource is literally a part of the owner the government should err on the side of liberty, but there can still be cases of waste egregious enough to warrant intervention, and the widespread burial of transplantable organs is sufficiently egregious.
Ah, I didn’t know this. If this is the case, then there is good reason to encourage living people to give up their organs.
I was thinking more about living donors. An organ market would encourage some people to sell their organs while they were alive. Unless something goes really wrong, these organs are presumably going to end up transplanted. If all of those people waited until they were dead, some fraction of those organs would be wasted, either because their former owners died in a way that renders the organ usable, or simply because the organ could not be transported to a suitable recipient in time.
The problem is, once you get past the poverty line, additional money doesn’t make you all that much happier. If you’re well past it, anything you do with your money is wasting it. If you stop them from wasting it, you’re just stopping them from earning much money. You’ll destroy incentives. There’s no reason to stop them from wasting resources in one way if it just means that they’ll waste them in another.
We don’t have to choose between the extremes of allowing people to do whatever they want with their resources (as long as they don’t use them to directly harm people) or legislating against any socially suboptimal usage of resources. I think people should have quite a bit of freedom to use their resources the way they want, precisely because we don’t want to disincentivize people from working, and also because a government that is constantly monitoring its citizens to ensure socially optimal resource usage would be unbearably intrusive. But I also think there are cases where the benefits of government intervention outweigh these costs.
Where exactly to draw the line is a difficult question, and there are a number of cases where I’m unsure whether a government mandate is advisable. However, there are also cases that are clearly on one side or another of the line. Banning all luxury consumption, for instance, is definitely a bad idea. I also think its pretty clear that mandating organ donation (perhaps with a religious exemption clause) is a good idea. In this case, the costs aren’t that great. I can’t see any disincentivization of productive behavior, and the additional intrusiveness required to adequately enforce the policy does not seem all that burdensome. And by all accounts the social benefits would be quite significant.
Since the government is hardly going to do the best possible thing with our money, my last comment was vastly exaggerated.
Even so, I don’t think people are generally expected to help others with their money. If they manage to do something particularly wasteful, you can tax them for it to make up for it.
I generally prefer the idea of subsidizing the stuff that does help people, but it works out the same if you add a tiny change in how you do income taxes.
Consider someone who is deciding whether to donate their money to Seeing Eye or use it to dig ditches and then fill them. Seeing Eye is less than 0.05% as effective as the Fred Hollows Foundation, so the difference in social optimality is less than 0.05% of what it could do.
This means that if they dig ditches and then fill them, they are less than 0.05% more wasteful than if they donate to Seeing Eye. Why not just move the line by 0.05%, and let them do whatever they want? You can just tax them an additional 0.05% to make up for it, and they’ll still end up with more incentive. For that matter, you’d probably save enough money on not bothering with regulation to make up for it.
It seems like digging ditches and then filling them is infinitely more wasteful than donating to Seeing Eye, since it makes an infinitely smaller difference, but that’s not really how it works. The difference is so small it’s lost in rounding.
i disagree with the kind of analysis you’re doing here. Just because a difference is a small percentage of the maximal possible difference does not mean it is a small difference. Suppose you have three mutually exclusive actions available to you: A—play video games all day, B—put in a small amount of effort that will ensure that malaria is eliminated, C—put in a moderate amount of effort that will ensure that everyone in the world lives forever without sickness or deprivation. As a percentage of what you could accomplish by doing C, the difference between doing A and doing B is negligible. But it seems absurd to say that the difference between doing A and doing B is so small that it doesn’t really matter. Sure, it’s small as a percentage, but it’s still a massive difference.
Of course, it still might be the case (in fact, it probably is the case) that in your particular example, the cost of intervention outweighs its benefits. But I have already granted that this is often the case. If your example was meant to provide a general argument against any government regulation of resource usage, I don’t see how it works.
Instead of discussing hypotheticals, why not talk about the actual policy under consideration: Do you think that the cost of a mandatory organ donation policy plausibly outweighs its benefits? If you don’t, do you have other non-consequentialist grounds for opposing the policy?
It doesn’t matter because you could add a rediculously tiny tax to make up the difference.
Also, I think it’s generally a good idea to give taxes and subsidies to get rid of externalities. If this is done correctly, it makes no difference at all how you spend your money.
One argument per comment, please. I disagree with your first response and agree/appreciate your second.