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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>Putting grandkids through college or paying for the mortgage etc. could make it easier for people to talk about death.

It will also make it easy for rich leeches to force poor people into "voluntary" deaths, to improve the fortune of their remaining family members.

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In the end, is it truly that much different than the prevailing economic structure disproportionately forcing the poor into high-risk or hard-labor occupations that result in significantly degraded lifespan and/or quality of life?

Putting organs on the market might make certain ethical dilemmas about economic inequality more obvious to the casual bystander, but the same sort of ethical quandaries are already structurally woven into the global economic system.

>In the end, is it truly that much different than the prevailing economic structure disproportionately forcing the poor into high-risk or hard-labor occupations that result in significantly degraded lifespan and/or quality of life?

It's not different at all. We're not different from the Aztecs: our economy has become an elaborate system of human sacrifice to false gods.

Especially Moloch.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

Especially Yahweh

Putting organs on the market will make those existing structural ethical dilemmas (which I fulminate about here pretty regularly, going back a long time) more obvious because it makes them worse. Making things worse is not, in my experience, the first step in making things better. How many innocent people do you propose to sacrifice on the altar of your intellect in order to persuade the 'casual bystanders' to adopt your position?

This sounds little different than the failed Marxist strategy of 'sharpening the contradictions of capitalism' in hopes of awakening class consciousness among the proletariat. Your eschatology seems to suffer from some glaring ethical flaws from where I'm sitting.

You're reading my commentary as a defense of the practice, which it isn't.

You're normalizing it, a;beit unintentionally, by equating a chronic loss of economic agency with an acute loss in the form of a single transaction.

There's only one place I'm aware of on earth where organs can be sold: Iran. Here's an interview with an economist who helped set up that market, which does seem to function fairly efficiently and has some safeguards in place to prevent coersion.

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/09/tina_rosenberg.html

Edit: specifically, this is about kidney donation from living donors, not after-death donation.

> In the end, is it truly that much different than the prevailing economic structure disproportionately forcing the poor into high-risk or hard-labor occupations that result in significantly degraded lifespan and/or quality of life?

You are right but I am unable to see why might think it is bad. Poor people taking more risks to come out of poverty is very natural and should be encouraged. Why do you think I left my homeland, left my parents, friends and Gods to come to Silicon Valley ?

If you are not going to allow poor people to take risks and make hard choices you are keeping them in perpetual poverty.

You're taking risks to advance your own economic power by serving the interests of a system that is an aspect of the very thing that keeps you poor int he first place. Liberation is something that begins in the mind, not the pocketbook; economics is a useful theory but it's far from being a totalizing philosophy.

> interests of a system that is an aspect of the very thing that keeps you poor int he first place.

Seems other way round to me. It is the restrictions on organ trade that is keeping poor.

>If you are not going to allow poor people to take risks and make hard choices you are keeping them in perpetual poverty.

Only in a world where getting rich is about "taking risks" and not about being ruthless, luck, connections, and inheritance.

> being ruthless, luck, connections, and inheritance.

All those are important but then risk is also one way to get rich faster.

> Poor people taking more risks to come out of poverty is very natural

Poor people don't take more risks to come out of poverty... Poor people take risks because they have no choice and they remain in poverty.

> Why do you think I left my homeland, left my parents, friends and Gods to come to Silicon Valley ?

That's not the type of risk we are talking about. We are talking about things like coal miners.

> rich leeches to force poor people into "voluntary" deaths

What is wrong in rich people parting their wealth to help poor people while benefiting their family members ?

The voluntary part however is very important and in a country like USA that part can generally be achieved much better than say India or China. Give instant green-cards to the family members of organ donors from India and China instantly and USA will not have a problem of organ donation queue while helping millions of Chinese and Indian people live a better life.

I'm sure Indian and Chinese people must be delighted by the prospect of being 'voluntary' livestock to produce meat to replace the failing body parts of wealthy Americans, and that no financial or emotional pressure will be brought to bear on anyone to participate.

While it might sound bad to you for millions of Indians and Chinese it is totally worth a Kidney. As long as they are making that choice themselves I do not see the problem.

>What is wrong in rich people parting their wealth to help poor people while benefiting their family members ?

What's wrong is that life and health should be a right to everybody, not just to those who can buy it out.

> What's wrong is that life and health should be a right to everybody, not just to those who can buy it out.

I am unable to see how life and health can be right without justifying force and violence. If someone needs a Kidney and if it is a right then it must be forcibly taken from someone else without that you can not call it a right.

>I am unable to see how life and health can be right without justifying force and violence. If someone needs a Kidney and if it is a right then it must be forcibly taken from someone else without that you can not call it a right.

Or you know, it can be either taken from a donations pool where everybody has access to, or the person may just not have it.

Prioritizing the rich to live is not really ethical in my book.

> from a donations pool where everybody has access to

If the donation pool is limited and a sick person is not allowed to use his wealth to save himself, it is violence on the sick person.

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