Last minor update: 17 Sep, 2020
Introduction.
I started thinking about donating a kidney a lot, I attempt to explain and formalize some of my thinking on this, and I think it would be valuable to someone who is also considering donating.
Some simplistic calculations
Donating a kidney adds about 14 additional QALY's(Quality Adjusted Life Years).AMF saves a life (35 QALY) for approx 3,500 USD. This is equal to 100$ per QALY.
Donating a kidney is the same as donating 1,400$ to AMF.
Well, what are the costs?
The risk of dying from donating a kidney is approx 1/3000.
You should expect to stay in the hospital for 2 nights and be able to work after 2-4 weeks.
I will assume that you can take paid time off work. Which isn't realistic to many people.
I will also ignore any benefits accrued by relieving the government from paying for Dialysis.
For the kidney donation to make sense, your overall altruistic contribution must be less than the loss to your future impact.
1400/(1/3000) = 4,200,000$ in a lifetime or 105,000 per working year (40 working years).
So if you give (time or money) less than of 105,000$ a year. Donating a kidney may be a good idea.
But if you give more, say 120,000$. Donating a kidney has a negative expected value.
Veg diet
On average a vegetarian spares between 370 - 580 animals per year, I will take 100 because it seems more realistic and because counting wild fish might not be fair, mostly because their lives have unclear signs.
For the 14 QALY, you add by donating a kidney, you indirectly cause 1,400 animals to suffer.*
Let us account for the animals by counting them as an externality and adding them to the price.
An ACE charity can spare 1,400 animals for 350$.
1,400$ - 350$ = 1,050$. This is the benefit of donating a kidney after accounting for animals.
If a veg*n spares 400 animals per year, rather than the 100 I assumed earlier, the benefit of donating a kidney goes to zero.
And if they spare even more, donating a kidney becomes net negative.
Having clearer estimates of how many animals a veg diet spares will make this much easier.
Offsetting
You wouldn't think that donating enough so that someone's life is saved would justify you in killing a person you really dislike.
https://nothingismere.com/2014/11/12/inhuman-altruism-inferential-gap-or-motivational-gap/
https://freefromharm.org/eating-animals-addressing-our-most-common-justifications/
https://nothingismere.com/2014/11/12/inhuman-altruism-inferential-gap-or-motivational-gap/
https://freefromharm.org/eating-animals-addressing-our-most-common-justifications/
how does offsetting eating animals compare to offsetting infantile-cannibalism?
Should murderers offset their murders?
Is asking this so annoying it results in fewer animal advocates?
Is asking this so annoying it results in fewer animal advocates?
Moral circle expansion.
it could be the case that donating a kidney will expand people's moral circles, but being aware of the underlying indirect costs may result in even more speciesism. Because cognitive dissonance wouldn't let people care about animals and also indirectly harm them. I will be thinking about MCE more in the coming weeks.
Publicity
I can already see the newspaper headlines:
But even on a personal level, being a live kidney donor will make your ethical lifestyle known to more people, some who may start thinking about giving more themselves.
Quotes from the web
One way I look at it is that I wouldn't donate a kidney in order to get $2,000 (whether that was to be spent on myself or donated to effective charities), or equivalently, that I am prepared to pay $2,000 to keep my second kidney. This means that, for me at least, donating is dominated by extra donations.
The problem with these comparisons is that they're totally made up. There's a potential one-off activity (donating a kidney) which, Thomas argued above, has large benefits to recipients relative to costs to the giver. There's also a question about how much you donate to charity. Based on the rationales you're giving here, someone who is happy with the cost/benefit tradeoff of donating a kidney as a one off, but is convinced that it's not as good cost/benefit as further donations, should actually increase their donations. However, my impression is that that has not been the reaction to these arguments; instead they justify current behavior/levels of altruism. (Toby, Ryan, correct me if I'm wrong here.) But donating a kidney would, according to most parties to the discussion, be net beneficial on its own terms. So the net impact of these arguments is to prevent people from taking positive sum altruistic actions, thereby reducing value.
There are kinds of costs that do mix between these two activities - genuinely foregone wages. And if your foregone wages were large and you decided that you would offset donations rather that consumption or savings with them, it would be perfectly appropriate to conduct this comparison. (Similarly, if the financial risk to future donations were higher, that would also make sense to offset.) But idly speculating about how much you'd have to be paid to do something, while taking the current level of donation as fixed, results in net negative impacts.
Every time you make the tradeoff between giving up a kidney or donating amount "X" to an effective charity, you are left with a kidney
I think the right framework for thinking about this sort of thing is to decide that there's a certain amount of happiness you're willing to forgo for the sake of others, and then do the most good you can within that bound.
https://www.jefftk.com/p/altruistic-kidney-donation
Extra
The meat-eaters problem is less pronounced when the QALY is in a developing country.
*This may suggest that killing people may be an effective way to reduce animal suffering. While this is the logical conclusion of my argument. I, arbitrarily, stop at not donating my kidney. Mostly because I think not violating rights to be a good morally uncertain bet.
