Blood donation can make you question whether some social norms are truly humane. And right now, I’m going to prove it.
Blood donation has a few problems.
First: there’s always a shortage, because there aren’t enough donors.
Second: donors cannot be forced.
Third: it’s considered unethical to give donors overly large incentives, because then the majority of donors would be poor — and that would look like exploitation of the human body.
But if we say that the poor must not be motivated with money, and we want to distribute the burden of donation evenly, then why not simply introduce a donor conscription?
Let’s do the math. In the US, about 7 million people donate blood each year. Each gives blood roughly twice, half a liter at a time. That makes about 7 million liters of blood annually.
The US population is over 330 million. Which means only one in 45 people regularly donates blood. If we divided the load fairly, and everyone contributed, it wouldn’t be one liter per year — it would be just 40 milliliters. A single shot glass of blood.
Rich or poor, everyone could give the same. You could even have a rule: if you don’t donate blood without a valid medical reason, you lose the right to receive donations yourself.
Would that be ethical? In my view — no less ethical than taxes. Society already sees it as normal to force people to give up what they earned with their own bodies. Nobody objects when a mover tears muscles, wrecks joints, and then has to hand part of his wages over to the state. Why is blood fundamentally different? Unlike taxes, of course, there’s no way to make it progressive or regressive — even Elon Musk has about five liters of blood in his veins, not five million.
One might say that in the case of taxes, the state interferes not with the body itself but with the product of its work. But then what about compulsory military service, where the state directly interferes with the body and life?