THE METAPHYSICS OF BRAIN-DEATH

The dominant conception of brain death as the death of the whole brain constitutes an unstable compromise between the view that a person cea ses to exist when she irreversibly loses the capacity for consciousnes s and the view that a human organism dies only when it ceases to funct ion in an integrated way. I argue that no single criterion of death ca ptures the importance we attribute both to the loss of the capacity fo r consciousness and to the loss of functioning of the organism as a wh ole. This is because the person or self is one thing and the human org anism is another. We require a separate account of death for each. Onl y if we systematically distinguish between persons and human organisms will we be able to provide plausible accounts both of the conditions of our ceasing to exist and of when it is that we begin to exist. This paper, in short, argues for a form of mind-body dualism and draws out some of its implications for various practical moral problems.