While your primary question is whether you should donate your kidney or liver lobe, I actually reject your premise that you have to choose.
While hospitals don’t let you donate both at the same time for good reason, it’s now fairly common (insofar as living organ donation is common) for hospitals to allow folks to donate both assuming full recovery from the first operation.
I believe I was told when donating my kidney that I wouldn’t be eligible to donate part of my liver, though my memory is fuzzy because it was some years ago.
However, I looked into it after a few years, and sure enough, was cleared to donate part of my liver. Perhaps the medical community is slowly coming around to this, but the transplant clinic you are working with isn’t quite there yet.
I ended up going under the knife for the second time in July 2023. I was cleared to donate at two top-flight hospitals in the US despite my prior kidney donation, as a point of reference.
If you are truly interested in doing both, I’d suggest donating the kidney first. The recovery is not as strenuous, so it’s a good “trial run” to see if you would be interested in doing the liver donation, too. One point that might move you marginally more towards liver donation is that there is a group (NOTA) trying to legalize compensation for kidney donors which might increase the supply of donated kidneys, thus marginally making donated livers more valuable.
Today marks the 6-year anniversary of my kidney donation. Aside from the raw QALY’s of it all, I found it to be a rather rewarding experience.
There are many more arguments both for and against that I’m not going to enumerate here, but are definitely available elsewhere in the forum. I’ll also plug that I agree with Henry’s comment—there are grassroots effects that are hard to measure, but my intuition is they have sneakily high EV.
But the main argument for me, and many other vegans (and vegetarians, but I’ll just say vegans for brevity) I know, is that at some point, they stop wanting to eat meat. If one truly views it as a chore, it will always be seen as a sacrifice. However, if the notion of eating animal products truly grosses you out, then it’s basically easier to be vegan than to eat meat.
I am not trying to deny that animal products can smell or taste great! But at this point, if I were to have a bite of chicken, the first thought for me would be “I am eating this factory farmed chicken that lived a horrible life of abject suffering” and not “hey, this tastes good.” It just grosses me out. Perhaps this would be a corollary to your point 5, but at some point, the dedication to the diet becomes more internalized. At that point, points 2 and 3 somewhat fall off, because it’s just a baseline lifestyle rather than part of my EA-aligned activities.
(To be clear, I acknowledge that this isn’t a universal vegan experience. I don’t mean to invalidate longtime committed vegetarians/vegans who don’t view meat the same way I do. I just mean to point out that there is potentially some light at the end of the tunnel that makes committing to this diet/lifestyle significantly easier. For me, that was about one year after transitioning from vegetarianism to veganism. Watching Dominion helped lock in any remaining doubts I may have had at the 1.5-2 year mark.)