ArticleTheoretical medicine and bioethics2019
Death, unity, and the brain.
Article in Theoretical medicine and bioethics, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- A structured analysis of the concept of brain death.Theoretical medicine and bioethics · 2026Article
- When does life end? Consensus and controversy in defining death.Monash bioethics review · 2026Article
- The Brain as a Whole? Neuroendocrine Functions and Death by Neurological Criteria.The Linacre quarterly · 2025Article
- Diagnosing death: the "fuzzy area" between life and decomposition.Theoretical medicine and bioethics · 2021Article
- Correction to: Whole-brain death and integration: realigning the ontological concept with clinical diagnostic tests.Theoretical medicine and bioethics · 2020Article
- Confirmation of Brain Death with Positron Emission Tomography.Journal of pediatric intensive care · 2020Article
- Brain death: new questions and fresh perspectives.Theoretical medicine and bioethics · 2019Article
- When is somebody just some body? Ethics as first philosophy and the brain death debate.Theoretical medicine and bioethics · 2019Article
- Whole-brain death and integration: realigning the ontological concept with clinical diagnostic tests.Theoretical medicine and bioethics · 2019Article
- When are you dead enough to be a donor? Can any feasible protocol for the determination of death on circulatory criteria respect the dead donor rule?Theoretical medicine and bioethics · 2019Article
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1 author.
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Abstract
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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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.