Hacker News Reader

Comment by oroul | Hacker News Reader

> If a spouse wanted to sell their organs to improve the life of the remainder of their family, and made the choice with sound mind, then absolutely.

The thing is, nobody of sound mind who has a choice (and I mean a real choice, not "give us your organs or your family starves") would choose to do this.

Nobody wants to sell their organs. People that want to purchase organs would love your suggestion however, as it allows them to justify exploitation of the desperate under the guise of "it was their decision".

Freedom of destiny indeed.

View on HN

> Nobody wants to sell their organs. People that want to purchase organs would love your suggestion however, as it allows them to justify exploitation of the desperate under the guise of "it was their decision".

The problem is that almost any labor is unethical under certain systems. We just notice it more when it's in the extremes, like sex-work or selling an organ.

If we didn't have a situation where people could be taken such advantage of, this wouldn't be a problem. The cost of buying an organ might be very high, because no one would be forced into it.

But yes, if suddenly selling organs were legal in the US, that would be a very unfortunate thing because it would immediately be abused.

Freedom must include the freedom to make mistakes, as well as the freedom to make choises you don't understand.

Otherwise some entity will "keep you safe from yourself".

Genuinely asking. Do you then think we should drop age restrictions on tobacco and alcohol sales?

Children aren't biologically capable of making sound decisions about their destiny[1]. If anything, the age could be raised.

[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3621648/

I'm not sure how many children you've known. There is a huge disparity in how wise they are just as is the case with adults. I'm not sure I see the philosophical consistency of telling a sharp youth who wants to smoke that they can't while letting an unsavy adult get talked into giving up their left lung.

I don't know. Societies globally agree that human babies are born prematurely and take some 16..18+ years to mature enough to take care of themselves. As an anecdote I've had both tobacco and alcohol before the legal age. Never really liked either.

My context was adults. Of course babies mustn't have the right to operate heavy machinery unsupervised, among many other things. But once society declares a person fully grown, they should have all the rights.

I'm a bit of an individualist. I understand why society, like an ant hive, would like to control some/many aspects of its constituents. But I also think that freedom isn't a mere cost, but is actually a portal to a better world overall.

There are multiple documented instances of life insurance fraud for exactly this purpose.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com