You can’t usefully donate organs if you commit suicide. Suicide leads to autopsy leads to unusable organs.
This covers donating brains too, so to a first approximation, cryonics won’t work for you if you suicide.
With that said, I agree that if we assume for the purposes of argument he could have donated his organs, and he cared enough about others to donate his life insurance to charity, he would probably want to donate his organs too.
I wonder how long before an insurance company decides to test cryonics as an excuse. “We respect his belief that he is not dead, but rather in suspended animation.”
That would probably be a good thing. I think that the company says they pay out in the event of legal death, so this would mean that they’d have to try to get the person declared “not dead”. By extension, all cryonics patients (or at least all future cryonics patients with similar-quality preservations) would be not dead. If I were in charge of the cryonics organization this argument was used against, I would float the costs of the preservation and try to get my lawyers working on the same side as those of the insurance company. If they succeed, cryonics patients aren’t legally dead and have more rights, which is well worth the cost of one guy’s preservation + legal fees. If they fail, I get the insurance money anyway, so I’m only out the legal fees.
At least most cryonics patients have negligible income, so the IRS isn’t likely to get very interested.
You can’t usefully donate organs if you commit suicide. Suicide leads to autopsy leads to unusable organs.
This covers donating brains too, so to a first approximation, cryonics won’t work for you if you suicide.
With that said, I agree that if we assume for the purposes of argument he could have donated his organs, and he cared enough about others to donate his life insurance to charity, he would probably want to donate his organs too.
I wonder how long before an insurance company decides to test cryonics as an excuse. “We respect his belief that he is not dead, but rather in suspended animation.”
That would probably be a good thing. I think that the company says they pay out in the event of legal death, so this would mean that they’d have to try to get the person declared “not dead”. By extension, all cryonics patients (or at least all future cryonics patients with similar-quality preservations) would be not dead. If I were in charge of the cryonics organization this argument was used against, I would float the costs of the preservation and try to get my lawyers working on the same side as those of the insurance company. If they succeed, cryonics patients aren’t legally dead and have more rights, which is well worth the cost of one guy’s preservation + legal fees. If they fail, I get the insurance money anyway, so I’m only out the legal fees.
At least most cryonics patients have negligible income, so the IRS isn’t likely to get very interested.