Constructing the Death Elephant: A Synthetic Paradigm Shift for the Definition, Criteria, and Tests for Death.
In debates about criteria for human death, several camps have emerged, the main two focusing on either loss of the “organism as a whole” (the mainstream view) or loss of consciousness or “personhood.” Controversies also rage over the proper definition of “irreversible” in criteria for death. The sit...
| Publicado en: | Journal of Medicine & Philosophy Vol. 35; no. 3; pp. 256 - 299 |
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| Formato: | Artículo |
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Oxford University Press / USA
Jun2010
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=50985766&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: hlh uiTerm: 50985766 longDbName: Humanities International Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 03605310 MPS jtl: Journal of Medicine & Philosophy issn: 03605310 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Jun2010 vid: 35 iid: 3 pid: 622 pub: Oxford University Press / USA artinfo: ui: 50985766 10.1093/jmp/jhq022 ppf: 256 ppct: 43 formats: fmt: @attributes: type: P size: 339KB tig: atl: Constructing the Death Elephant: A Synthetic Paradigm Shift for the Definition, Criteria, and Tests for Death. aug: au: SHEWMON, D. ALAN affil: David Geffen School of Medicine, UCLA, Los Angeles, California, USA su: Death (Biology) Loss of consciousness Brain death Blind people Brain sug: subj: Death (Biology) Loss of consciousness Brain death Blind people Brain keyword: brain death dead donor rule death donation after cardiac death non–heart-beating donor non--heart-beating donor ab: In debates about criteria for human death, several camps have emerged, the main two focusing on either loss of the “organism as a whole” (the mainstream view) or loss of consciousness or “personhood.” Controversies also rage over the proper definition of “irreversible” in criteria for death. The situation is reminiscent of the proverbial blind men palpating an elephant; each describes the creature according to the part he can touch. Similarly, each camp grasps some aspect of the complex reality of death. The personhood camp, in contrast to the mainstream “organism” camp, recognizes that a human organism can still be a biological living whole even without brain function. The mainstream camp, in contrast to the personhood camp, recognizes that a person can be permanently, even irreversibly unconscious, and still be a living person so long as his/her body is alive. The author proposes that hylomorphic dualism incorporates both these key insights. But to complete the picture of the entire “death elephant,” a fundamental paradigm shift is needed to make sense of other seemingly conflicting insights. The author proposes a “semantic bisection” of the concept of death, analogous to the traditional distinction at the beginning of life between “conception” and “birth.” To avoid the semantic baggage associated with the term “death,” the two new death-related concepts are referred to as “passing away” (or “deceased”) and “deanimation,” corresponding, respectively, to sociolegal ceasing-to-be (mirror image of birth) and ontological/theological ceasing-to-be of the bodily organism (mirror image of conception). Regarding criteria, the distinguishing feature is whether the cessation of function is permanent (passing away) or irreversible (deanimation). If the “dead donor rule” were renamed the “deceased donor rule” (both acronyms felicitously being “DDR”), the ethics of organ transplantation from non–heart-beating donors could, in principle, be validly governed by the DDR, even though the donors are not yet ontologically “deanimated.” Thus, the paradigm shift satisfies both those who insist on maintaining the DDR and those who claim that it has all along been receiving only lip service and should be explicitly loosened to include those who are “as good as dead.” Even so, a number of practical caveats remain to be worked out for non–heart-beating protocols. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: Y custom: © 2019 Journal of Medicine and Philosophy Inc.. item: Journal of Medicine & Philosophy holder: Oxford University Press / USA dt: @attributes: year: 2010 holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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