Deceased donor organ donation ought to be opt-out

First of all, I think my post might not have been clear enough on the deceased vs next-of-kin consent. I did not say that the deceased person will should be ignored. It is perfectly reasonable to let the deceased persons will override that of the next of kin. The reason to include next of kin in the rigt to objection is that they might with great probability be aware of the preferences of the deceased if he/she did not report nonconsent. In the case where the deceased had no preference whatsoever then it would be good for the emotional wellbeing of the next of kin to be allowed to decide in place of the deceased. Also, as for overriding the next of kin in the case the deceased wants to donate, assumed consent does not necessarily mean that explicit consent cannot be registered for the purpose of overriding the wishes of the next of kin. Actually, not only those who have a disagreement in the family have reason to do this, anyone can have reason to make sure that his/her will is made explicit to spare the family any uncertainty in the matter."The 'dead body is not a person' argument revolved around the theory that a dead body has no legal rights whatsoever. [...]"It might have legal rights, but not moral rights. Moral rights are either approximations to utilitarianism, or derived from the nature of the moral agent. But the corpse is not a moral agent. I think the stronger case for respecting the dead is actually given by utilitarianism, namely that we do it for the sake of the well being of the living.Anyhow, the legal rights must be motivated by the well-being or rights of the living. The living can most likely gain or lose wellbeing simply by knowing that their death will be handled in a disrespectful way. Thus we prohibit disrespectful handling of bodies even when there are no relatives or close friends to take offense. The case for giving legal rights to a corpse is however weaker than that for giving rights to a person, so any rights given to a corpse must be significantly less extensive.I cannot agree that the dignity of a corpse implies equally strong rights as the living have. As i have said, the corpse is neither a moral agent nor capable of pleasure, pain, preference satisfaction or anything similar. The emotions of the living grant some form of right to dignity to the deceased, that is in human and mammalian nature. But this is not the same case as for the moral worth of actual moral agents, it is just derived from the moral agents having a connection to the corpse (to some extent including the previously existing person). The moral status of a corpse must therefore be weaker than that of a living person."The 'benefits' argument indicates that if there are more organs, more people will be able to survive when needing a transplant. Now, I do not mean to be heartless or rude but instead of seeing it as a benefit to a society to enable more people to overcome organ damage by transplant, shouldn't we be seeing it as a blindfold to the real problem? [...]"Now I do not know the proportion of transplants directed at self-inflicted behaviour, but I doubt it is so great that organ shortage would be eliminated by excluding them. There is a multitude of inherited or communicable deceases causing organ failure as well as more or less random diseases such as cancer. It varies greatly with the type of cancer what possibiliy there is to avoid it. Also physical trauma from accidents can lead to a lot of different conditions that might damage internal organs. But more importantly it is not possible to draw a line between self-inflicted and externally inflicted conditions. Even if it were, the fact that it was self-inflicted does not in itself decrease the moral value of prolonged or improved life, and that value must obviously be greater than the moral value of the dignity of a corpse. The worst violations of corpse dignity are avoided by providing an option to not donate. Giving a liver to an alcoholic has the problem that its effectiveness is decreased if the behaviour continues after treatment, but that is quite a different issue. It is relevant in prioritizing of course."Why, then, should their family and friends be forced to see and empty case of what was once an intact body of their late father just so a binge drinker can get up off their hospital bed and drink some whisky to celebrate? The real problem to be dealt with is not having so many bodies on hospital beds in the first place, prevention is better than cure."This is not really relevant since the possibility exists to opt-out if one is opposed to helping others even when there is none at all cost to oneself."My opponent's third argument was just a statement that many people are too lazy to sign a consent form, this is irrelevant to the debate because I can easily argue that those people would still be too lazy to say they didn't want to in the reverse situation (we can't always assume that 80% of a nation will want to donate their organs upon death)."Actually, this IS probably the most relevant argument from a rights perspective. If the majority wants to donate, then the natural assumption is to assume consent. I see no compelling reason to consider the assumption of objection more "natural" than the assumption of consent. To assume nonconsent even when the majority do not oppose the extraction of their organs could only be justified by arguing that nonconsent in some sense is more "natural". I actually think there is reason to regard consent as the natural state in this issue, since the most natural thing is not to care very much what happens after death, except for possibly gross violations of dignity. It is also more natural to help others than not to help if there is no cost to oneself of doing so. "Why is it that one should feel it is their duty to donate an organ and have to sign off a document just to say "hey there, I own my body and don't want your filthy hands on my organs when I die because my next of kin would reject it anyway." I mean, what if the person had no family left but had friends who wanted to see their beautiful body in a coffin to make peace with their departure from this world. A friend doesn't count as a next of kin and so couldn't object it, according to you."It is quite hard to know who qualifies as friend, unless the dceased left some explicit instructions regarding that. But then it would probably be clear what the deceased wanted and no other opinions needed."The final issue to address is that if a person just turned eighteen and die don their birthday"We could let kids fill out the forms in school if this is such an important issue, or send the form by mail to everyone before the age of consent. Including both YES and NO as explicit options. I can't however agree that incidental violations of dignity are enough to justify a system that causes grave harm to more persons. The benefit of the system would be very much greater than the "harm" of occasional violations of the will of donors. This is an extremely unlikely situation. People are wrongfully killed by law enforcement, and would oasionaly be even with perfect regulation. But that does not lead us to totally reject law enforcement, only to minimize the risks."to qualify as an organ donor already includes the declaration of being healthy enough to do so, it's far more efficient than a system where most dead body's organs end up being tested and rejected anyway since not everyone being considered a valid organ donor by consent is a valid organ donor by health standards. "The cost of the testing is negligible compared to the medical benefits. This applies to the current system also, everyone who signs up is not tested repeatedly over their lifespan. The price of quality adjusted lifeyears is generally quite high, WHO suggests 3xGDP/c to be the limit[1]. [1] Murray CJ, Evans DB, Acharya A, Baltussen RM. Development of WHO guidelines on generalized cost-effectiveness analysis. Health Econ 2000; 9:235–51.