When Do We Die?
This first section covers one of the most deceptively complicated questions in the philosophy of death literature. When do we die? The answer may seem obvious. If Victor is vaporized by a nuclear bomb at noon, then he died at noon. That is straightforward enough. But what if someoneâs body is biologically dead, but their consciousness continues in some form? Is the person dead now? Or what if theyâre brain dead, but the human organism that is their body is still alive? Is the person dead now? Or, what if someone is permanently cryogenically frozen, or if each of the living cells that comprise them are separated from one another, permanently ending their consciousness, but not killing any of the living cells that made them up? Or, what if they die, but are seemingly resurrected at a later date? These cases, and others, reveal that itâs far from obvious what makes it the case that a person is dead. In this section, you will get to read one landmark legal document that sets out to define death and three contemporary philosophersâ take on the question of when someone dies.
You will first get to read a very important historical document, Defining Death: Medical, Legal and Ethical Issues in the Determination of Death. It was written by the Presidentâs Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research, appointed by Jimmy Carter, and published in 1981. After considering various criteria for death, and their philosophical and legal merits, the commission ultimately argued that an individual has died when they have âsustained either (1) irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions, or (2) irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain.â
This definition is controversial, to say the least. In the next chapter, John Lizza first provides a brief history of how public definitions of death changed from just being (1) to include (2) as well. That is, he reviews how âbrain deathâ came to be introduced into law and then he reviews the considerations in its favor. After that, Lizza acknowledges that this competing view is a good account of death from a purely biological point of view. However, he argues that insofar as we are looking to understand death in a social and cultural context, we also have to account for metaphysical, moral, and social considerations in addition the biological factors. Taking all of these considerations into account, Lizza defends the idea that we should accept âbrain deathâ as being sufficient for death.
This chapter is followed by Michael Nair-Collinsâ, in which he argues for the contrary conclusion that âbrain deathâ is not death in any sense of the term. The âbrain deathâ view of death, he argues, is a product of a certain theory about personal identity that is based on the false assumption that humans are fundamentally different from non-human animals. But weâre not, he argues, so the criterion of death that applies to humans should apply to non-human animals as well. That criterion, in a nutshell, is that death occurs when entropy overwhelms homeostasis. In other words, death occurs when the amount of âunavailableâ energy in a system overwhelms the steady internal, physical, and chemical conditions maintained by living systems. Nair-Collins then reviews a bit of history, arguing that the abovementioned Presidential Commission defining death adopted âbrain deathâ as a sufficient criterion for death for practical purposes, as it allowed them to declare brain dead comatose patients on ventilators as dead. Such patients who were organ donors could then have their organs harvested for donation. Nair-Collins ends by reviewing competing accounts of the metaphysical and moral status of âliving unconscious patients.â He argues that since these accounts of life and death reflect fundamental and personally meaningful commitments, a pluralism of views should be accepted in society for moral reasons (even though only one such view is actually true).
In the final chapter of this section, Cody Gilmore raises, and attempts to solve, the Paradox of Cryptobiosis. Cryptobiosis refers to the âstate of an organism when it shows no visible signs of life, and when its metabolic activity becomes hardly measurable, or reversibly to a standstill.â Gilmore asks us to imagine a tardigrade (a tiny insect-like creature) who is alive, enters a state of cryptobiosis where their metabolisms have ceased, and then comes out of that state, returning to function as they did before. Now consider the tardigrade while itâs in cryptobiosis. It seems plausibly true that itâs not alive or dead while in that state, and it seems plausibly true that everything is either alive or dead. The paradox arises because these seemingly true propositions are mutually inconsistent, so one of them must be false. Gilmore goes on to defend a positive view of what it is to be alive, viz. activism and dead, viz. neutral incapacitation. These views collectively entail that itâs not true that everything is either alive or dead. Gilmore thus concludes that the paradox can be solved by rejecting the claim that everything is either alive or dead. The tardigrade in cryptobiosis is an example of something that is neither.
If youâre interested in reading more about when death occurs, check out the following:
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Michael Nair-Collins, Sydney R. Green, and Angelina R. Sutinâs âAbandoning the Dead Donor Rule? A National Survey of Public Views on Death and Organ Donationâ (2015) Journal of Medical Ethics 41 (4):297â302.
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Cody Gilmoreâs âWhen Do Things Die?â in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death (2013) edited by Ben Bradley, Fred Feldman, and Jens Johansson, New York: Oxford University Press.
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Fred Feldmanâs book Confrontations with the Reaper: A Philosophical Study of the Nature and Value of Death (1992) New York: Oxford University Press.
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Peter Singerâs book Rethinking Li...
