Sylvine said:
As for the "buying for nothing and selling for $200,000"-problem: You said it Yourself, it barely covers costs, so it's not exactly "buying for nothing".
They're buying it for nothing--they're not compensating the OWNER in any way, shape, or form. Why should the people who procure the organ, transport it, manufacture all the medical equipment necessary for the above, and who prep it for transplant be compensated but the person who actually grew the organ inside of their body should NOT and, in fact, should be legally required to provide said organ free-of-charge? If you're going to make this argument, be consistent and require that doctors, medical device manufacturers, transportation services, and nurses all be legally required to work for free. Or be REALLY consistent and require EVERYONE to work for free, because that's what it'd eventually amount to.
Opting out instead of opting in does not mean Your body will be picked apart regardless of whether someone actually needs a kidney or not. That wouldn't be, as You say it, very cost-effective.
Opting-out is not the same thing as legally mandatory. I don't really care either way whether consent is presumed unless you register non-consent or whether non-consent is presumed unless you register consent. You have to pick one as the default. However, I have strong doubts as to whether presumption of consent would increase supply. In Ohio, for instance, the little check box on your driver's license where you say you want to be an organ donor is presumed as first-person consent, meaning that it legally overrides the wishes of your next-of-kin should you die. That means that, technically, the tissue bank could go ahead and harvest anything and everything useful from your corpse even if your family protests.
Does this ever happen? HELL NO. It'd be a PR nightmare and taking bits from dead people is a PR-deprived enough practice as it is. If you presume consent, there will be an enormous PR backlash the first time some poor Jew or Muslim (both sects adamantly against messing with the dead IIRC) gets harvested because they didn't know that they had to register that they refuse to donate. There'd be a huge rush on the part of large numbers of people to register their non-consent "just in case" because they can always change their minds later. And then they'd forget about it and you'd be stuck with a potentially enormous segment of the population on the do-not-harvest list.
And no, it's not. If it's estabilished as part of a (in this case) democratic, legal procedure, it becomes part of the social contract. Just the same as stealing a twenty from Your wallet is theft, but taxing Your salary is not.
Taxing my salary IS theft, and democracy can go screw itself. As Benjamin Franklin once so aptly noted: democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. Just because 51% of the population can be convinced to go along with an idea doesn't make it right, and the fact that there's a huge procedure involved doesn't make that right either.
What makes it right or wrong is the reference to ethical principle--and that ethical principle must *itself* be based on facts in order to be valid. The facts are these: in order to live, people need certain things. In order to get those things, they must work. In order to work, they must think. The better your thinking, the more productive your work, the more and better things you can get. This is what some call "natural justice" (although this is a misnomer): it is the automatic, functioning state of nature. Thought and effort produce rewards. Injustice is a human invention--an attempt to interfere with this process. It is not *unjust* that some people can't or won't think or work as well as some other people, it's nature, neither just nor unjust.
It is interesting to me that it is injustice that is often some kind of positive action (not positive in the sense of good, but in the other sense of "definite"), whereas justice usually describes a negative action--in essence a *lack* of interference. That is the only kind of "social contract" anyone has the right to expect from me or from anyone--that I leave them free to face nature as they leave me free to do so.
Taxation consists of taking rewards I have earned and giving them to people who have not earned them. Their purposes are immaterial to me, all that matters to me is that this reward did not exist without me--my thought, my judgment, my effort--yet others presume to cut me out of the equation as if all that matters is the reward and now how it came to be. This is contra-fact, contra-nature, contra-justice.
THIS is my ethical principle, and by this principle it doesn't matter how many people say something is okay (or how few).
