Then again the octogenarian already lived all those years and the child obviously had no such opportunity.
How is giving to somebody who had something and used it and not giving it to somebody who hadn't had the same opportunity fair?
How is giving to somebody who had something and used it and not giving it to somebody who hadn't had the same opportunity fair?
It is not fair to count the octogenarian's past good fortune against them in what should be a fair contest. But we do it, because when handing out organs we don't care about fairness, we care about viable lifetime remaining.
When searching for fairness a lot of people seem to believe that good luck in the past means it should be harder for you to have good luck in the future. Ironically, this is very unfair.
It matters whose costs we're measuring here and it matters how we measure that. See what responses you get when, e.g., you change the problem to be deciding who gets the liver among two twins who are identical except that one is, say, a Republican and the other a Democrat, or some other situation where the only difference in utility is which of two opposed groups would be aided by their survival.
Then compare the responses you get to how much that person approves or disapproves of the respective beliefs.