Feelings about organ donation
Oct. 21st, 2017 08:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtbcOrgan donation has been in the UK news lately: default opt-in or opt-out, overrides by next of kin, consent in general. The question of encouraging people to donate fits nicely with the concurrent news of Richard Thaler's Nobel Prize. One thing that puzzles me is my instinct not to donate: when I have strong a priori wishes about my own body that seem irrational then typically I find that they are easily explained by a naive consideration of evolutionary psychology.
While I can believe that medical staff may indeed be more willing to give up on saving me if they know somebody else would benefit from my organs, I expect that to be a negligibly small effect and if my prognosis is so very poor then perhaps it probably would be better for both me and the healthcare budget to give up on me. Helping people is good and organ donation is both very helpful and requires very little sacrifice given that it occurs only at the very end of one's life.
I am thus surprised to find how much I want my cadaver to remain unmolested, that choosing to donate is an effort of will. It is not as if I seek to go as far as embalming or cryopreservation. In reflecting upon this, I can imagine that if we had a family mausoleum then it would similarly make a difference to me in visiting my parents' tombs that they too were intact. It is as if removing internal organs and corneas and whatnot change for me the category from dead person to being simply parts of that person, differently from rotting or dessicating. Yet, I am not greatly bothered if a few percent of somebody's cremains are missing from the urn and instead traces of somebody else's are among them.
I do not have reservations about my next of kin donating my organs: after I will no longer regain consciousness then I do not expect to retain an opinion on the matter. So, that may weakly suggest an evolutionary psychology story: organ donation is likely to be effected by strangers in order to benefit strangers and my next of kin are of course in my own family group. Even while alive I would have not such reservations about donating a kidney to one of my children. Though, with less precious and personal items, like food, it feels fine to donate to needy strangers.
I suspect that there would not be much interest in an organ donation system that provides loans rather than grants: have my spouse's organs now but mail them back to us for the mausoleum when your relative is no longer using them. Also it might be unpleasant to put them approximately back into place.
While I can believe that medical staff may indeed be more willing to give up on saving me if they know somebody else would benefit from my organs, I expect that to be a negligibly small effect and if my prognosis is so very poor then perhaps it probably would be better for both me and the healthcare budget to give up on me. Helping people is good and organ donation is both very helpful and requires very little sacrifice given that it occurs only at the very end of one's life.
I am thus surprised to find how much I want my cadaver to remain unmolested, that choosing to donate is an effort of will. It is not as if I seek to go as far as embalming or cryopreservation. In reflecting upon this, I can imagine that if we had a family mausoleum then it would similarly make a difference to me in visiting my parents' tombs that they too were intact. It is as if removing internal organs and corneas and whatnot change for me the category from dead person to being simply parts of that person, differently from rotting or dessicating. Yet, I am not greatly bothered if a few percent of somebody's cremains are missing from the urn and instead traces of somebody else's are among them.
I do not have reservations about my next of kin donating my organs: after I will no longer regain consciousness then I do not expect to retain an opinion on the matter. So, that may weakly suggest an evolutionary psychology story: organ donation is likely to be effected by strangers in order to benefit strangers and my next of kin are of course in my own family group. Even while alive I would have not such reservations about donating a kidney to one of my children. Though, with less precious and personal items, like food, it feels fine to donate to needy strangers.
I suspect that there would not be much interest in an organ donation system that provides loans rather than grants: have my spouse's organs now but mail them back to us for the mausoleum when your relative is no longer using them. Also it might be unpleasant to put them approximately back into place.
