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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   25900 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

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There's also concern around organ donation. I've seen some reports online about adopting new guidelines around brain death so that (to put it crudely) they can start getting the organs as fresh as possible.

I think that, too, causes unease: some eager-beaver surgeon pushing for declaration of death while the patient is literally still breathing in order to get the organs as fast as possible.

There's a lot of ways this could go wrong, and I'm too cynical to accept "but that would never happen! slippery slope is a fallacy!" arguments since the slopes have been greased with butter in every other instance of big social changes. Right now the fears around euthanasia may not have manifested, but I think that is largely due to the brakes from social lack of acceptance being put on. Remove the brakes, and what will happen?

EDIT: To clarify that last, I don't mean simply making it legal. Where it's legal, but there is high social opposition to it, that keeps the brakes on. But push for mainstreaming it, run publicity campaigns with the hardest cases (the way activists fighting abortion bans always pick the "pregnant by incestuous rape ten year old" victim when the vast majority of abortions are for economic reasons), and weaken that opposition, and then what happens?

Canadian style MAID where disabled veterans are told "we can't afford to pay for the supports for you to live in your own home, but if you want to kill yourself we can sign you right up"? If a twelve year old wants assisted suicide, then providing a psychiatrist rubber-stamps that they are mature enough to make the decision, it can go ahead? Once again like the bad old days before antibiotics, the danger is not from the illness but from going into hospital, because you're less likely to come out alive?

When you take the brakes off, there's only so long the inertia holds. Then the new normal sets in, and then all the edge cases and "that will never happen" start happening.

I've seen some reports online about adopting new guidelines around brain death so that (to put it crudely) they can start getting the organs as fresh as possible.

Probably prompted by the op-ed a week or two ago, Donor Organs Are Too Rare. We Need a New Definition of Death?

The author made a very good case that some utilitarians aren't nearly wise enough to try their hand at maximizing expected utility and should just be deontologists instead.

Not intentionally, of course.

I think that, too, causes unease: some eager-beaver surgeon pushing for declaration of death while the patient is literally still breathing in order to get the organs as fast as possible.

I understand this is a common fear and I'm supposed to identify the doctor as some kind of monster for being insufficiently respectful of the likely dead. But, like, they're not chomping at the bit for those organs because they want to turn a profit, they need them to save other people's lives. I definitely do want safeguards put in place and to ensure the false positive rate is very very low and am in no way saying we should take healthy people's organs in some kind of utilitarian maximizing nightmare world. But sometimes the cynicism in this type of post rubs me the wrong way. We should all want the same thing here.

they need them to save other people's lives

Mmmm. That's a bit too much like the thought experiment about the surgeon kidnapping people and killing them for their organs - is he wrong or is he in the right? And there does seem to be some financial inducements involved, or at least alleged.

I think people are uncomfortable with revising definitions of death to be "this person isn't dying fast enough so we can break them down for parts, let's say that if they're not up and about dancing flamenco, they're toast and we can start cutting".

There's also concern around organ donation. I've seen some reports online about adopting new guidelines around brain death so that (to put it crudely) they can start getting the organs as fresh as possible.

If you want to read more about this some discussion is here: https://old.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/1mf2rv4/donor_organs_are_too_rare_we_need_a_new/

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