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Comment by Noumenon72 | Hacker News Reader

If you're going to potentially violate human rights and set up incentives to murder people for profit, saving lives like this is the best reason to do it. The long waiting lists for organs in the US show that our choice is a tradeoff, not a best practice. Insofar as our system is caused by squeamishness and the desire to feel morally pure, it is harming people unnecessarily too.

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This is possibly the most psychopathic thing I've ever read. It belongs on https://www.reddit.com/r/ShitHNSays/

The article as I understood it said:

1. China executes a lot of Falun Gong and Uyghurs. We consider this genocide.

2. China takes their organs after they're dead without asking.

If you are reading me as "it's good to do (1) to get (2)", that would be very psychopathic of me. I didn't mean to say that.

What I had done while reading was entirely discard everything in the article about (1) because it was breathless and wasn't performed in order to get the organs. Then I attempted to make a comment on (2). Even (2) by itself is questionable, and I know I could be judged just for my opinion on that. But I didn't mean to get everyone riled up. Sorry.

Not that it makes a moral difference, but the victims aren't all hardened criminals. They are political dissidents, people who follow the wrong religion, and racial minorities.

Most of the greatest mass atrocities in world history have been framed as a "tradeoff". Destroying some lives to save others isn't a functioning society, it's a living nightmare.

Honestly, if we were even going to begin to entertain any notions even slightly related to this, I'd want to suggest that if we insist on having the death penalty as a punishment, then those who are put to death should, if suitable, become automatic organ donors.

Nah that's totally ridiculous. Death is as serious a punishment as possible and can never be appealed once delivered, there should never be any incentives to deliver the death sentence besides seeing that justice is done.

Let me be clear that I'm not advocating for capital punishment at all, I'm staunchly against it. But honestly, if we're going to decide that we're allowed to kill people in the name of justice, it's arguable that the deceased's bodies should be used to help save lives.

Well, lots of things are arguable to some extent, but really the idea that the state should materially benefit from murdering its own citizens is pretty difficult to defend in my opinion. The moment a judge starts to think "well, what about all the lives this prisoner's healthy organs will save?" when deciding whether or not to give a death sentence, your society is 100% fucked. If anything your hypothetical society should deliberately not take the organs of any one sentenced to death.

Absolutely not. If anything their bodies should be protected from any kind of harvesting as to not incentivize the state from handing out death penalties.

I believe the death penalty should be abolished anyway. But, disregarding the complexity of the implementation of such a policy, if the government is in the business of ending people's lives, I'd rather it be done to directly help people, instead of in a punitive fashion. If you think about it, the death penalty isn't really a punishment - some people commit heinous crimes specifically so they can be killed.

"Suicide by Justice" doesn't seem like it would be or is a popular enough form of suicide to warrant what you're suggesting. Your logic doesn't make much sense.

> it. The long waiting lists for organs in the US show that our choice is a tradeoff, not a best practice. Insofar as our system is caused by squeamishness and the desire to feel morally pure, it is harming people unnecessarily too.

Apologies if I am misunderstanding, but are you insinuating that forced harvesting of organs is “best practice”?

I didn't get that reading at all. The US medical system shows very well that we don't always have "best practice" in mind when it comes to health care.

Nope, neither is an unambiguous, strictly better practice. From the Chinese side I would be writing "The scandals where officials have given the death penalty just so they can get the organs show that our choice is a tradeoff, not a best practice. Insofar as our system gives incentives to harvest organs instead of keeping people alive, it is harming people unnecessarily too."

Or should even be considered "a practice" at all for that matter.

Not sure why this is being downvoted. It may be a macabre way of looking at it, but it is a valid viewpoint. Poster didn't specify whether they actually felt that way. I agree, in the following sense. A different way to put it - if human rights are to be violated, there better be a damn noble reason for it.

It's a point of view that makes no sense. Murdering one person to save another is not "noble". It negates the entire point of "human rights" in the first place.

You might as well suggest that people who need organs should be able to kill a random person on the street to get them.

I think the OP was merely opining that they'd rather see this, than people dying for pure profit motive. I know that, were I provided a choice between killing someone for forced organ donation that could potentially save lives, versus killing someone for greed, profit, or punishment, with no way to say "no", I'd choose the former. Making it clear, however, that I'd rather never have to make that choice in the first place.

I see where you're coming from.

I guess to me, it makes no moral difference. The means corrupt the end. The Nazis managed to get some useful science out of the Jews during the Holocaust, but it's hard to see that as a silver lining.

I think that if you're at the level of making those kinds of choices, you're already living in hell.

I'd agree there. I don't think humans are at a point (nor will they ever be at a point) where they're capable of making such decisions without corruption clouding things.

A life saved is not sufficient to counter a murder.

Some countries implement an opt-out system. If you do not want your body to be reused after you die, you have to declare it in advance.

This is hugely beneficial for patients.

Now, even this hugely emotional article does not talk about murder.

It’s one thing to harvest organs if the patient dies of accidents/natural causes, and personally I am in favour of the opt-out system.

It’s a whole other thing of killing the patient on purpose to harvest their organs.

At least several thousand people are executed in China annually. Can their bodies be used?

Wouldn’t it be worth investigating why they are executed? Given this organ trade is going on I wouldn’t be surprised if their “justice” system is being literally trigger-happy because they benefit from the resulting organs being made available.

Executed in a systen where law is not supposed to be impartial but only a tool among many to upkeep the states power. I don't think humans where worth much after death before modern organ transplantation. State arbiter gets more reasons to less leniency when there is a profit to be had from the execution.

In an already 'unfair' system adding profit motive to executions can only worsen the humanitarian result.

I agree, even if it's five lives saved per murder there's probably a better way. (Voluntary suicides come to mind.) In my view the article did not make the case that "people are being killed _for_ their organs," but "people are being killed _and_ they're taking their organs." The first policy is unambiguously bad while the second is efficient in some ways and dangerous in others.

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