There’s a meme going around of an X post noting that 33% of US organ donations come from auto accidents and warning that we’d better get ready for a big drop once we have advanced self-driving cars.
It wasn’t a joke. Gave me pause.
In theory, auto crashes may be net utility positive. Probably not. But in principle.
What are we supposed to do with that knowledge as a society? As a person making choices about how to “change the world”?
Does that mean reducing auto deaths isn’t a good social policy?
Reducing smoking sure has screwed Social Security.
It’s a real world trolley problem. Most of us aren’t unalloyed utilitarian's, and don’t see it as a happy thing that people die in crashes so others, maybe more then one, can live.
At the same time, we do count up lives saved and lost when making policy decisions. I mean, how could we not?
If you were a researcher working on a cure for a rare disease that 100 people died of per year, and you felt good doing it, and then you learned that — through some weird chain of unintended consequences — 1000 more people would die every year if you cured those 100, how would you feel? Defeated? Or: Not my problem, not my patients, not my fault, not my responsibility?
No one who isn’t a strict utilitarian — and who is? — thinks a sensible way to save extra lives by organ donation is to randomly kill people in a lottery. Even if it were voluntary, where you became eligible to receive an organ if you ever need it only if you sign up for the lottery.
Conducting that lottery by random (or not so random) auto accident hardly seems any better. It seems a no-brainer that the world is a better place if we put a stop to it, right?
But if I tell you the odds of you dying in a car crash are 50% of the odds your life will be saved one day by a car-crash organ (not a real number, but imagine), in your Rawls veil of ignorance type stance, would you vote to reduce car crash deaths? How about as you, for real, now?
If you were President of the United States, and the car safety folks quite reasonably lobby you for a research program grant of $500m to save 500 more lives per year, and you get all enthusiastic, and then the organ transplant folks lobby you for the same $500m, that you can only spend once, to save 1000 more lives, which would you pick?