I have value in life, why can't I have value in death? While I'm living, I am free to give the results of my value to anyone I choose. Why not in death?
The problem with this is that today, individually, it may seem like a worthwile thing to do with your dying body. Fast-forward 20+ years, and it'll become expected part of life, and college funding will become conditioned on grandparents dying early enough.
You generally don't want to start going that road.
That is a very valid concern. But your concern also has an answer.
> Fast-forward 20+ years, and it'll become expected part of life,
Yes. I think people will probably have a reverse mortgage like thing where they will be able to borrow (but lot less) money today with a promise that they will have to donate their kidney when the time comes. People with certain ethnicity, blood group, genetic makeup etc. will become more valuable and hence will be able to derive more value and hence "rare type" will stop being rare type. This is a great outcome.
At the moment rich people from developed countries hunt for organ donors in Mexico, China, India and Africa bringing a lot of misery to those countries and money for the politicians and smugglers. Do you really like little Indian kids kept in a basement forever only to be killed like chickens later for their organs ? Or would you like to see the American justice system being applied to maximise individual freedom with full protection of law ?
Your argument is fallacious. You allude to indian children being held in awful conditions for organ harvesting so as to hold people emotionally hostage to your proposal, but the outcome you refer to to is not an inevitability but the result of a moral and political failure on the parts of the actors involved. You are in effect absolving them of ethical responsibility by saying they can't help it because they are powerless to resist the temptation to make all that money so we should just accept that it's going to happen unless we create a market for it.
They are not powerless to resist the ethical incentives. They are ethically corrupt and your implicitly endorsing their corrupt behavior by treating it as an inevitability that is better commercialized than eliminated.
There's an argument about what they should do vs. what we can actually make them do. If we can make those people behave ethically, great. But if we can't? Sometimes it's easier to make bad things unprofitable and let their own lack of ethics steer them away from doing bad things.
That's fine for things like victimless crimes, but less so where the activity we're considering commercializing involves inflicting an injury on one party by removing one or more of their organs. I'll cut to the chase by saying I'm a deontologist rather than a utilitarian.
In any case, it seems far more likely that some combination of medical technologies is likely to lead to lab-grown organs before the establishment of a fleshy stock exchange.
Didn't think of that this way. You make an interesting observation; I need to think more about it because I still feel like there might be big market failures in such a system. I'm worried about ways people could be coerced into dying "before their time".
Personally, I hope genetics will soon advance to the point the organs can be grown, thus rendering the whole issue moot.
It was the sell organs to pay for college that I was referring to. What a terrible society to live in where people think this reasonable. Perhaps society should just properly fund college education so that the harvesting of organs from people isn't considered reasonable.
How about harvesting organs so the kids could use that money to create their next Javascript based startup ? Should the society then also fund their Startup ?
College education is an example. People will spend resources on whatever they think is useful. Who are we to judge ?
People are free to spend on what they want, within the bounds of the law. I think you fail to see how badly society is doing when selling organs to pay for education seems reasonable. Education is a public good. A startup is not. Education is something that reasonable societies provide for its citizens.
We've gone so far away from proper notions of the purpose and meaning of a society that people are talking about selling organs to pay for public goods. I'm not talking about your proposal to sell organs. It's your proposal to do something so drastic to pay for something so basic.
You generally don't want to start going that road.