this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2025
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In some cases there are religious reasons, but I can see this as being a useful policy even in a purely secular world. Even with the fairly stringent organ donation consent laws we have, there have been instances where it appears that there have been instances where it appears that a person was exploited in order to harvest their organs. I'm talking stuff like conflicts of interest where transplant physicians are involved with determining the death of a donor, which could be a conflict of interest, or relaxing of standards of care of a future organ donor (i.e. letting their condition decline so their organs can be harvested sooner). There are rules about this stuff, but nonetheless, there are instances where the rules appear to have been violated.
Requiring consent of the donor (or their family) may seem silly, but removing that safeguard would inevitably lead to both abuse of the organ donation system, and also a distrust of the system by prospective donors and their families (the perception of tomfoolery would be a greater risk than the actual negligence, because cases of abuse are exceptionally rare today and I expect they'd remain quite rare even if we relaxed the consent requirement).
Philosophically, it's also important to note that the organs aren't actually harvested from corpses per se, but a heavily sedated person (who may or may not still be showing brain activity). They rule the death before they've harvested the organs, I think, but the person still being alive at the time of harvest is a big deal for organ viability. I don't actually know if they ever actually harvest organs from corpses, but I do know that doing it while the donor is still alive is the standard. The point here is that it's inherently an ethically dicey proposition, similar to how deciding to switch off someone's life support of a non-donor can be a big decision for families and/or doctors. In a way, the consent requirement can be seen as a way of sidestepping the messy philosophical questions like "what even counts as being alive". Ethically, it's by far the safest approach.
I believe that the increase in legal and ethical supply would reduce the amount abuse.
That's the real problem, but an opt out system would be a good compromise.
The question is how you define personhood, but if you ask me, the body is alive, but the person is dead.
No, in that case the person could be alive, maybe even conscious, but unable to interact with the world ever again.
It doesn't, because the consent is given when the person is still alive and only applies once they are considered dead.
It doesn't solve any of the questions around the definition of death, only concerns about the treatment of dead bodies. The same effect could be achieved with an opt out system, instead of the current opt in one.