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Death, unity, and the brain

The dead donor rule holds that removing organs from living human beings without their consent is wrongful killing. The rule still prevails in most countries, and I assume it without argument in order to pose the question: is it possible to have a metaphysically correct, clinically relevant analysis...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor principal: Oderberg, David S.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Springer Netherlands 2019
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6881420/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30945062
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11017-019-09479-8
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author Oderberg, David S.
author_facet Oderberg, David S.
author_sort Oderberg, David S.
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description The dead donor rule holds that removing organs from living human beings without their consent is wrongful killing. The rule still prevails in most countries, and I assume it without argument in order to pose the question: is it possible to have a metaphysically correct, clinically relevant analysis of human death that makes organ donation ethically permissible? I argue that the two dominant criteria of death—brain death and circulatory death—are both empirically and metaphysically inadequate as definitions of human death and therefore hold no epistemic value in themselves. I first set out a neo-Aristotelian theory of death as separation of soul (understood as organising principle) and body, which is then fleshed out as loss of organismic integrity. The brain and circulatory criteria are shown to have severe weaknesses as physiological manifestations of loss of integrity. Given the mismatch between what death is, metaphysically speaking, and the dominant criteria accepted by clinicians and philosophers, it turns out that only actual bodily decomposition is a sure sign of death. In this I differ from Alan Shewmon, whose important work I discuss in detail.
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spelling pubmed-68814202019-12-12 Death, unity, and the brain Oderberg, David S. Theor Med Bioeth Article The dead donor rule holds that removing organs from living human beings without their consent is wrongful killing. The rule still prevails in most countries, and I assume it without argument in order to pose the question: is it possible to have a metaphysically correct, clinically relevant analysis of human death that makes organ donation ethically permissible? I argue that the two dominant criteria of death—brain death and circulatory death—are both empirically and metaphysically inadequate as definitions of human death and therefore hold no epistemic value in themselves. I first set out a neo-Aristotelian theory of death as separation of soul (understood as organising principle) and body, which is then fleshed out as loss of organismic integrity. The brain and circulatory criteria are shown to have severe weaknesses as physiological manifestations of loss of integrity. Given the mismatch between what death is, metaphysically speaking, and the dominant criteria accepted by clinicians and philosophers, it turns out that only actual bodily decomposition is a sure sign of death. In this I differ from Alan Shewmon, whose important work I discuss in detail. Springer Netherlands 2019-04-03 2019 /pmc/articles/PMC6881420/ /pubmed/30945062 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11017-019-09479-8 Text en © The Author(s) 2019 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
spellingShingle Article
Oderberg, David S.
Death, unity, and the brain
title Death, unity, and the brain
title_full Death, unity, and the brain
title_fullStr Death, unity, and the brain
title_full_unstemmed Death, unity, and the brain
title_short Death, unity, and the brain
title_sort death, unity, and the brain
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6881420/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30945062
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11017-019-09479-8
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