The Gaming Den

Chamomile wrote:Grant some hefty tax breaks to the people who you harvest a kidney from, because they paid in a kidney instead of cash, and there's decent odds you'll have your pick of volunteers.

Volunteering for financial incentives is just called "being paid," and it's definitely not called being forced. I'm not disagreeing, I'm just pointing out that you started trying to defend the utility of forced kidney donations and ended up outlining a system that offers large enough rewards that people willingly exchange their kidneys for them. And yeah, from a utilitarian perspective convincing people to participate in a voluntary exchange through rewards will be many times superior to expending some fraction of the state's legitimacy forcing people to give up their organs.

DSMatticus wrote:

Chamomile wrote:Grant some hefty tax breaks to the people who you harvest a kidney from, because they paid in a kidney instead of cash, and there's decent odds you'll have your pick of volunteers.

Volunteering for financial incentives is just called "being paid," and it's definitely not called being forced. I'm not disagreeing, I'm just pointing out that you started trying to defend the utility of forced kidney donations and ended up outlining a system that offers large enough rewards that people willingly exchange their kidneys for them.

It's true. When I started thinking about how being taxed in kidneys is fundamentally the same as being taxed in cash, it occurred to me that being taxed in kidneys should cause you to be taxed less in cash, since the two are in fact comparable. And then I realized that you probably wouldn't have to force a whole lot of people at all. Though in the event that you didn't have enough volunteers, I'd still think it's justified to just pick some people and get the kidneys out of them whether they like it or not, for the same reasons that taxes are superior to charity.

Chamomile wrote:Though in the event that you didn't have enough volunteers, I'd still think it's justified to just pick some people and get the kidneys out of them whether they like it or not, for the same reasons that taxes are superior to charity.

Morally, sure. Economically, no. Cash is inherently fungible. Kidneys are inherently not. You have to make sure they match the donors, so right off the bat, you have to convince a lot of people who don't want to give kidneys to take a bunch of tests so you can even figure out who's kidneys to take. Then, on top of that you have to have some sort of fair method of picking who gets the kidneys. And you don't want the worst kidneys, so you want to prioritize good ones. And then people will drink even more than they would just to have two bad kidneys instead of one good one.

Much better to just use the money you would have to spend on all that instead on dialysis machines and waiting for more kidneys to show up.

Wouldn't it just be easier to take the kidneys, then test them and match them to whoever needs them?

Maj wrote:Wouldn't it just be easier to take the kidneys, then test them and match them to whoever needs them?

Because if you just take the kidneys there is no reason to believe you will get the optimal kidneys for the people who actually need kidneys. If kidneys could be stored forever, that would be fine, but in practice they can't. So much so that you don't even want to remove them and then ship them, you want to move the person, then take out the kidney near the person who needs it.

About the only thing you can really do to make the kidney donation system substantially superior is to switch organ donation on death from an opt-in program to an opt-out program. If the general rule is that you confiscate all the viable organs of dead people unless they have signed up on the registry of people who refuse to have their organs donated, then a lot more organs would go into circulation but no one would have their rights being assaulted.

The choice would remain structurally identical - people could choose to have their viable organs donated after their death or not. But by putting the burden of declaration on the people who don't want their organs taken instead of putting the burden on people who do, the amount of lives saved would increase substantially. The reality is that most people don't put five minutes of real effort into making formal declarations about what happens after they die - especially when they are young enough to have organs that are good for transplanting.

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Anyway, the forced birther argument based on the rights of the fetus is actually really bad. Because that argument requires a chain of assumptions to all be true. If you cut the chain at any point, it all collapses.


So first off, to have human rights, you need to be a living entity. I think that's pretty clear. A fetus is living tissue, but the argument that it's a living entity is fairly weak. A vascularized collection of tissue might describe a hand or a tumor, and none of those things are entities in their own right and cannot have human rights.

Secondly, to have human rights, you need to be a person. Fetuses have hearts, brains, and kidneys... but so do chickens and salmon. Merely being alive doesn't entitle a being to human rights, otherwise KFC would be an atrocity. The argument that a fetus, which has no concept of "personhood" deserves to be treated as a person and not as buffalo wings on the run is pretty weak.

Thirdly, even if a person has human rights, it's a pretty tough sell that those rights supersede another person's right to their own internal organs. You have to subscribe to a particularly brutal form of communist thought to seriously suggest that one person's right to life might trump another person's ownership of their own body. If you can't stomach carving people up for their organs by lottery, this entire argument is dead on arrival.

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The Forced Birther movement is on much better ground arguing simple divine mandates and shit. I may not buy their premises, but at least that argument is strong with their premises granted. The "rights of the unborn" argument is a chain of weak assumptions even with its premises intact.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:Thirdly, even if a person has human rights, it's a pretty tough sell that those rights supersede another person's right to their own internal organs. You have to subscribe to a particularly brutal form of communist thought to seriously suggest that one person's right to life might trump another person's ownership of their own body. If you can't stomach carving people up for their organs by lottery, this entire argument is dead on arrival.

Even if you do buy into the idea that the state can requisition and redistribute your organs as they see fit, how does this not directly lead to Gattaca-style eugenics? And I don't mean in a slippery slope sense, I mean in a 'the state has a vested interest in making healthy and intelligent newborns with a wide amount of genetic diversity, therefore people with beneficial genetic mutations or sequences/people of rare-but-stable genotypes are required to surrender their genetic material and their labor for teh babbies' sense? The slippery slope would come into play when state direction of peoples' organs extended to stopping undesirables from breeding altogether, but I still don't see how making a hardcore communist argument for kidney and liver redistribution lottery wouldn't extend to Handmaiden's Tale-style rape camps.

Well, yes. If you concede that people don't have a right to their own bodies and that the state has an interest in forcing people to bear children, then obviously the next step is rape camps. The forced birther movement argument pretty much goes to rape camps immediately.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:About the only thing you can really do to make the kidney donation system substantially superior is to switch organ donation on death from an opt-in program to an opt-out program. If the general rule is that you confiscate all the viable organs of dead people unless they have signed up on the registry of people who refuse to have their organs donated, then a lot more organs would go into circulation but no one would have their rights being assaulted.

-Username17

Whatever you do, never go with NZ's system where the family can opt out after death no matter the dead persons' wishes. It pleases members of some cultures but it totally screws the organ donation system.

Orca wrote:Whatever you do, never go with NZ's system where the family can opt out after death no matter the dead persons' wishes. It pleases members of some cultures but it totally screws the organ donation system.

"But having my loved ones' bodies left anything but fully intact goes against my religion! How else will they come back whole when Jesus (finally) starts the zombie apocalypse?"

RadiantPhoenix wrote:"But having my loved ones' bodies left anything but fully intact goes against my religion! How else will they come back whole when Jesus (finally) starts the zombie apocalypse?"

I'm actually worried my folks will bury my body. Not because I'm super concerned what happens to it, it's just burials cost a lot where I live (and cremation is a sign of disrespect for the dead, as in, "you didn't shell out for the burial, you're probably happy your relative is dead, you greedy selfish ass") and I'd really hate for the final primary effect of my existence be some fuck making mad bux off my death.

Demand in your will that your body be harvested for organs and the remains used as garden fertiliser or something. If one part of it is just a little bit weird, people generally accept that as honouring the wishes of the eccentric deceased. As opposed to just writing "burn my body".

Personally, I want (what's left after the doctors have taken anything that happens to be usable) to be cremated before my funeral, and have the ashes mixed into dough that will be used to make cookies to serve at the funeral. Attendees may or may not be informed afterwards.

It's an awesome prank that only has one downside: the bit where I won't get to see the results.

Getting back to abortion, one argument I've heard is blaming the woman for not using adequate preventative measures. ("You only used a condom, and you probably screwed it up too")

RadiantPhoenix wrote:Getting back to abortion, one argument I've heard is blaming the woman for not using adequate preventative measures. ("You only used a condom, and you probably screwed it up too")

It does in fact take at least two people to make a baby, and the woman is the one most likely to have participated against their will. But it honestly doesn't matter. Even if you simply grant that a woman being pregnant is her own damn fault, that still doesn't imply that she has to spend the next forty weeks working for someone else for free.

If you find yourself in a shitty job that it turns out you don't like, you can quit. Unlike all the other crap that people compare to slavery these days, telling someone that they aren't allowed to quit a shitty job that doesn't pay any money actually is slavery. The freedom to quit a job you don't like is the very essence of a free market. Whether it's "your fault" that you have the shitty job or not, you still have the fundamental human right to quit.

It is absolutely incompatible with belief in capitalism or free labor to hold that people aren't allowed to quit a job they don't like.

-Username17

Koumei wrote:Demand in your will that your body be harvested for organs and the remains used as garden fertiliser or something. If one part of it is just a little bit weird, people generally accept that as honouring the wishes of the eccentric deceased. As opposed to just writing "burn my body".

Personally, I want (what's left after the doctors have taken anything that happens to be usable) to be cremated before my funeral, and have the ashes mixed into dough that will be used to make cookies to serve at the funeral. Attendees may or may not be informed afterwards.

It's an awesome prank that only has one downside: the bit where I won't get to see the results.

I want my body to be blasted into space and into the sun. Or catapulted into the house of someone I don't like. Either's cool.

i was planning on being cremated and my ashes being put into the water cooling for a really swag high end computer . . sadly, there are laws against that kind of stuff <.<

FrankTrollman wrote:

RadiantPhoenix wrote:Getting back to abortion, one argument I've heard is blaming the woman for not using adequate preventative measures. ("You only used a condom, and you probably screwed it up too")

It does in fact take at least two people to make a baby, and the woman is the one most likely to have participated against their will. But it honestly doesn't matter. Even if you simply grant that a woman being pregnant is her own damn fault, that still doesn't imply that she has to spend the next forty weeks working for someone else for free.

If you find yourself in a shitty job that it turns out you don't like, you can quit. Unlike all the other crap that people compare to slavery these days, telling someone that they aren't allowed to quit a shitty job that doesn't pay any money actually is slavery. The freedom to quit a job you don't like is the very essence of a free market. Whether it's "your fault" that you have the shitty job or not, you still have the fundamental human right to quit.

It is absolutely incompatible with belief in capitalism or free labor to hold that people aren't allowed to quit a job they don't like.

-Username17

Their analogy actually seemed more like drunk driving to me.

People who support the whole free market capitalism thing actually do want slavery though. Not for them personally, but they dream of a system where other people are literally kept as slaves.

RadiantPhoenix wrote: Their analogy actually seemed more like drunk driving to me.

You could in fact make a consistent moral argument that sex is essentially criminal behavior and that it is therefore acceptable to force women to work without pay as punishment. And as soon as someone suggests that we start sentencing men to 40 weeks hard labor for the crime of getting their dick wet, I'll seriously entertain the possibility that they are actually making such a consistent moral argument.

I mean, it's still insane. The idea of equating sex with crime is batshit madness. But as long as they aren't suggesting that men who have sex need to be punished by having their freedom confiscated they obviously aren't even arguing in good faith.

And don't let them weasel around with discussions of adultery or pre-marital sex or any of that shit. The labor requirements and physical pain of pregnancy are exactly the same whether you're married to the sperm donor or not. And the long term pregnancy difficulties of sodomy are of course nonexistent.

-Username17