Organ Donation

What argument can be made for allowing non-donors to recieve organs? I'll wait for your answer to this before I go further, but the only argument I can think of also serves as an argument for compulsary organ donation.

Well, let's pretend the President needs a kidney and he's not a donor. Not a likely scenario, but then again we are playing hypotheticals.

Just to clarify to prevent unnecessary debate, I'm not saying that people who are ineligible to donate should be ineligible to receive donated organs.

Right, but like above argument was swayed towards.

I think what you need to do with this argument, is just what you're doing, but break it down into the reasonings behind why peolpe aren't donating. I would assume that a very large majority won't or aren't because of religion. In one form or another, they feel it violates their 'Bible law' or whatever you'd like to call it, but i'd say that assumption has got to be very close, while the other small majority fall into the 'don't give a shit/can't donate' columun.

No matter how you look at it, people who aren't helping fix the problem are being saved by the system while people who ARE helping fix the problem are dying on the waiting list. That is fundamentally wrong, in my opinion.

Right, but how long is this system going to continue to be necessary? 50 years? 100 years? They've already begun printing organs from essentially scratch, and have begun to harvesting process. What i'm saying is that given our advances in medical technology, this discussion will not be an issue; However, until that point something should be done to persuade more people into doing so. Making people opt-in to the system will never work, for the very reasoning you use choose not to (doctors more likely to pull the plug).

maybe younger people should be a higher priority? maybe minors / early adulthood citizens should have first dibs? Not saying that elderly people aren't deserving, but that's just life.

What you've also got to factor in is that transplants don't always work, sometimes the next person in line isn't the best suited for said organ. Given they do go through lots of testing before it's approved, some of the times they're already on dialysis or go weekly/bi-weekly whatever the case may be for said organ. Also, said person needing a donation could need a liver, and they could be an alcoholic. Maybe if you've ruined yourself you shouldn't be able to get them if you aren't a willing donor. I could live with something like that, variables that is. Remember that after you get an organ they don't just stitch you up and you go about your day, our technology allows us to just take those anti-rejection medicines basically for the rest of your life so your organ doesn't fail.

There are also several groups of peolpe that cannot donate, such as HIV positive patients. There are different amounts of people out there with HIV/AIDS but guestimations are anywhere from 1m to 5million people.