ArticleTheoretical medicine and bioethics2019
The human organism is not a conductorless orchestra: a defense of brain death as true biological death.
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 12 papers.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- When does life end? Consensus and controversy in defining death.Monash bioethics review · 2026Article
- A structured analysis of the concept of brain death.Theoretical medicine and bioethics · 2026Article
- Death as the extinction of the source of value: the constructivist theory of death as an irreversible loss of moral status.Theoretical medicine and bioethics · 2024Article
- Inconsistency between the Circulatory and the Brain Criteria of Death in the Uniform Determination of Death Act.The Journal of medicine and philosophy · 2023Article
- How many ways can you die? Multiple biological deaths as a consequence of the multiple concepts of an organism.Theoretical medicine and bioethics · 2022Article
- (Re)-Emerging Challenges in Christian Bioethics: Leading Voices in Christian Bioethics.Christian bioethics · 2022Article
- Brain death debates: from bioethics to philosophy of science.F1000Research · 2022Article
- Diagnosing death: the "fuzzy area" between life and decomposition.Theoretical medicine and bioethics · 2021Article
- Whole-brain death and integration: realigning the ontological concept with clinical diagnostic tests.Theoretical medicine and bioethics · 2019Article
- Why psychological accounts of personal identity can accept a brain death criterion and biological definition of death.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
- Brain death: new questions and fresh perspectives.Theoretical medicine and bioethics · 2019Article
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Abstract
In this paper, I argue that brain death is death because, despite the appearance of genuine integration, the brain-dead body does not in fact possess the unity that is proper to a human organism. A brain-dead body is not a single entity, but a multitude of organs and tissues functioning in a coordinated manner with the help of artificial life support. In order to support this claim, I first lay out Hoffmann and Rosenkrantz's ontological account of the requirements for organismal unity and summarize an earlier paper in which I apply this account to the brain death debate. I then further support this ontological argument by developing an analogy between the requirements for the unity of an organism and the requirements for the unity of an orchestra. To do so, I begin by examining the role that a conductor plays in unifying a traditional orchestra, and then go on to show that the human organism (at least in postnatal stages) functions like a traditional orchestra that relies upon a conductor (the brain) for its unity. Next, I consider the conditions required to achieve orchestral unity in conductorless orchestras and show that, in contrast to simpler organisms like plants, the postnatal human organism lacks those conditions. I argue, in other words, that although conductorless orchestras do exist, the human organism is not one of them. Like a traditional orchestra without a conductor, the brain-dead body is not a unified whole.
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