From Al Roth‘s blog, the pope’s recent comments on organ donation.
Either the pope didn’t read our column on organ donation, or we failed to change his mind on the issue.
The Pope Doesn't Agree With Us on Organ Donation
TAGS: Organ Donation, religion
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Would there be any religious, moral, or economic objection to this plan:
1)organ donation is opt-in, and once the decision is made to donate, this decision is binding no matter what your heirs say
2)people who have made this binding decision to donate have absolute priority over all other people when it comes to receiving organs, no matter what
3)a minor correction to (2): to prevent someone making this decision to donate the day that they suddenly realize that they need an organ, you have to have made this binding decision a certain amount of time before you need an organ. This time being the minimum of: 5 years, the time since the above policy enters effect, and the time since you reached an age at which you could sign a binding contract.
Seems like it gives people an incentive to donate, and people who think it’s wrong to donate organs should also think it’s wrong to receive them.
He seems to believe the unintended consequences are a cost to high to accept. I’m not religious but do find the religious bashing folks the epitome of what they seem to hate – simple mindedness.
Knowing humans and their tendencies, without religion we’ll get something like nationalism, which has killed way more people.
If Freakonomics doesn’t mind a little offending of its religious readers, I think a great issue to pursue would be the economics of religion.
We know that many religious leaders do not actually believe what they preach, but they preach what’s going to be well received by their audience. In this sense, religions are a bit like mainstream media. We don’t hear about “Oprah’s Mystery Man” because Murdoch thinks that everyone should know, we hear about it because they think it drives ratings.
In a similar parallel, it would be interesting to investigate how much religious policies are ratings-driven. How well would a Pope be received if he told everyone “I reconsidered, it is okay to use condoms”? Or if he said that “a regulated market in human organs would be okay”?
Already, the Catholic Church is more tolerant and more science-friendly in its views than many Christians in the U.S. If the purpose of a religion is to maximize its number of followers, what happens if a religious leader endorses views with which its followers do not agree? Is the purpose of religion really leadership, or is it just to make people feel good about their existing views?
In other words – is it the dog (the Pope) that wags the tail (the believers); or is it the tail that wags the dog?
Charles (#10): Believing that the unintended consequences of a market in organs are too great to accept is unreasonable, unless you also believe that the people who will die without a kidney are going to die according to God’s will. But if that is what you believe, then, why of course – deviating from God’s will is an abomination.
RE: Bobby G
By utilitarian he is referring to the practicing of harvesting organs from those without social utility for the sake of those with lots of it, e.g. there is little provided to society by a prisoner having two functioning kidneys, but much is taken from society when a policeman (or whoever) dies from kidney failure.
RE: matt
Terrible idea. We’ll have all the world’s alcoholics, drug users, etc sign up to be donors, then in five years they’ll all cash in and the suuply of healthy organs will be gone. Your idea is somewhat similar to health insurance, where healthy people subsidize the care of unhealthy people. There’s a way to make preferential care a good option, but not as you present it.
I’m not sure I agree with the proposition that the Pope is not a “clear thinker,” or even that he could not have read your paper on the subject.
Whatever the Pope’s faults may be — and I don’t deny he has some! — Benedict XVI is NOT an intellectual lightweight. Anyone who can quote Manuel II Palaiologos in a tangential manner (and inadvertently ignite a furor in the process) is no idiot.
He has merely arrived at a different conclusion on the matter based on his own value judgements, as determined by his chosen philosophy. He operates by a package of axioms and assumptions — in his case mainly determined by Roman Catholicism — and evaluates whatever he reads accordingly. Most people live by packages of axioms and assumptions — some the same as his, others a bit different, some VERY different — so this is not unusual.
To convince the Pope to reach a different conclusion, one would first have to pierce the wall of axioms that surround him. That’s a tall order, especially given that he makes his living asserting the veracity of those axioms! For the opposite to happen, i.e. for the Pope to convince you of HIS conclusions, he likewise would have to pierce the axioms that a professor of economics lives by — some of which support YOUR own livelihood.
I doubt either of you would be able to change the other’s mind. In the language of economics, neither of you has any “incentive” to concede the possibility of fault in any of your axioms. Quite the opposite, actually.
RE: denis bider
I agree than in man smaller denominations, it’s about selling the product, and this occurs even in communities of Catholic or some other large religion. But as far as what the Pope and/or the Church teaches, it’s rather obvious that they give little credence to how they think the masses will receive it. Moreover, (nearly) every teaching (of faith and morals) of the Church is consistent with (nearly) every other teaching over the past 2000 years, meaning all that has changed is the manner in which it is delivered, perhaps to make it more precise or more pertinent.
@11,
Check out Larry Iannaccone’s articles “Introduction to the Economics of Religion” or “A Formal Model of Church and State.”
Essentially, churches can not maximize their number of followers (assume that’s the goal, even unconstrained) by telling people what they want to hear. Religion is a public good, and participants’ utility from religion is increasing in the participation of the others around you. That is, church services are more enjoyable when surrounded by people who are really into it, and you wouldn’t enjoy it as much if you were surrounded by apathetic people. The church’s membership can drop, then, if its leadership announces a loosening of the rules because it draws in more free-riders. By keeping prohibitions (e.g. dance, sex, etc.) the church raises the cost of participating so that only people that are really into participate – which creates a more sustainable church.
Iannaccone shows that strict churches grow, and when they liberalize they tend to lose membership.