From today, you won't be able to get a driving licence unless you answer yes or no to the question of whether you wish to be included on the Organ Donor Registry. You might not think this is such a big deal: if you're joining a section of the population that does much to create both organ donors and the need for them, it's an elementary civic duty to make your mind up on the subject. 

Yet the Conservative MP Peter Bone has described the move as "a back-door way of forcing people to decide whether they want to go into organ donation" and "Big State gone mad".

How have we got to a situation where - Gordon Brown's sensible proposals to move to an opt-out rather than an opt-in system having been shot down three years ago - people are now describing as "mad" the idea you might be asked even to bother making a decision?

The preservation of human life is universally accepted as among the highest duties of authority. We not only forbid euthanasia: strong objections are raised to doctors in palliative care who want to withdraw artificial life support to let nature take its course. Saving lives is the prime basis on which governments restrict the freedoms of the living: in everything from the enforcement of seatbelt laws to the internment and torture of suspected terrorists.

We even kill to save lives. Saving lives is pretty much the only grounds on which we now feel able to go to war. It was Saddam's imagined capacity to take life that was the given pretext for the invasion of Iraq, and Nato's intervention in Libya - wherever mission creep may now have taken it - was also sold to us on the basis that it was to "prevent civilian casualties".

Yet when organ donation comes up, we apply an entirely different standard. Here, on the waiting lists for organ transplants, are desperately ill people for whom a new liver, a new heart or a new kidney will mean the difference between life and death. These aren't hypothetical casualties in terrorist spectaculars that may or may not happen: these are real, actual, named people whose lives are in the balance. 1,000 of them die every year.
Yet while we drop bombs on foreigners in the interests of saving hypothetical lives, we baulk at compromising the "rights" of dead people to save real ones. Principle tells us, apparently, that if you don't like the idea of being buried without your kidneys the life of a teenager on dialysis is a small price to pay for respecting your squeamishness.

If that's so, to hell with principle. Presumed consent should be the very least of it. Harvest them, I say. Strip-mine the morgues. Choose life.