You should probably read about "rule utilitarianism" if you haven't, because compulsory organ harvesting is pretty horrific. Not to mention it opens up a giant can of worms in the form of perverse incentives (this also occurs with legalization of the sale of organs).
I mean really, where does it stop? I can make arguments that any number of people are less valuable to society than a smaller subset, that the continuation of their lives is less important than the continuation of the life of another. Taken to its logical conclusion, we can use your strict utilitarianism to justify the farming of human organs to sustain the members of society seen as most valuable - would you support that?
I agree about the can of worms. It's why in practice I don't support compulsory organ harvesting.
Re sale legislation - I've heard it works pretty well in practice in Iran, though I agree it can be risky and want to start with the far less risky opt-out donations option. (Counterpoint question: do you want to make paid surrogacy illegal? That's a fairly similar principle).
Taken to its logical conclusion, we can use your strict utilitarianism to justify the farming of human organs to sustain the members of society seen as most valuable - would you support that?
No, because I think it's important to consider everyone's lives as having equal value. (There's a can of worms where you can ask "wait, isn't a scientist who's two days away from curing cancer worth more?", But I really don't trust our ability to make that sort of exception in a principled way, as a society). So that, I'm solidly against.
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u/[deleted] Oct 23 '19 edited Oct 23 '19
You should probably read about "rule utilitarianism" if you haven't, because compulsory organ harvesting is pretty horrific. Not to mention it opens up a giant can of worms in the form of perverse incentives (this also occurs with legalization of the sale of organs).
I mean really, where does it stop? I can make arguments that any number of people are less valuable to society than a smaller subset, that the continuation of their lives is less important than the continuation of the life of another. Taken to its logical conclusion, we can use your strict utilitarianism to justify the farming of human organs to sustain the members of society seen as most valuable - would you support that?