A human is made of two parts: the personality (the bit comprising your music tastes, general outlook on life, and fear of test tubes) and the body, which isn’t nearly as interesting on its own and would probably never get invited to parties. Death is the moment at which the two separate, usually following a row over whose turn it is to buy toilet paper.
Death’s a real inconvenience and people tend to spend a lot of their time trying to avoid it, particularly if they have dinner reservations. It’s not known what happens afterwards but, as Woody Allen advises, it’s best to bring a change of underwear.
As far as I can see there are two possibilities for the personality: 1) it ceases to exist or 2) it goes to a special place, either Heaven, in which everyone is happy, except journalists who are bored, or Hell, which is a place of eternal suffering and damnation, and where they don’t serve breakfast after 9:30.
You may notice that in neither scenario does the ‘soul’ have much use for the body and rarely returns its phone-calls. Nor do the family make much use of it, usually incinerating or burying it as one might do with incriminating evidence.
The hiding or flambéing of corpses is universal and in many cases it has become a religious ritual. The reason we initially did it though was not to please a god but to prevent the corpse spreading disease. This is now a bit of an anachronism, as doctors can do this more effectively: as a bonus they make better use of the flesh-lump than the earthworms would.
In the 08-09 financial year the NHS saved 977 lives by transplanting organs (half of which were from the dead), while about 400 people died waiting for a donor. 25% of the population are on the organ donor register and it’s not unreasonable to suggest that far fewer people would die waiting if this figure were 100%.
I don’t see any logical reason somebody would care about what happens to their body after they die, any more than they’d worry about the future of air they've breathed out, or a swimming pool they've finished urinating in. However, it would be a little harsh to force people to donate their organs, particularly if they’re alive at the time: thankfully, compulsory donation is unnecessary as a simple policy change could significantly raise the rate.
In the UK, to donate organs you need to tell the NHS you want to do so. Under an alternative system people are automatically donors unless they specifically ask not to be. This is known as ‘opt-out’, and provides much higher rates of donation.
This doesn’t rely on some Kafkaesque bureaucracy in which anyone can opt out but no-one knows how, or a Stalinist system in which you’re free to opt out provided you don’t mind being taken on an extended holiday by the KGB. Instead it simply takes advantage of human irrationality.
Psychologists have discovered that enrolment in pension plans depends heavily on whether they are opt-out or opt-in; in general people stick with the default option, apparently through trust in the experts in charge of the situation or simple laziness.
The same applies to organ donation: Johnson and Goldstein’s 2003 survey found that 42% of people would opt-in to being an organ donor, while only 18% of people would drop out after having been automatically enrolled. Their survey of European countries (see graph) found that those with an opt-in system (coloured white) had a significantly lower consent rate than those with an opt-out system (coloured grey). Changing the UK’s policy would be simple and cheap, save lives and, most importantly, irritate the Daily Mail which opposes the change for no apparent reason other than that they enjoy objecting to things.
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