A year or so ago I wrote a paper in Biomedical Ethics regarding which criteria should be used for death. One problem with my criteria, if trying to apply it to the abortion debate, is that it argues that death means 'the cessation of x,' rather than 'lack of x.' I think the latter can be substituted for the former, though, with minimal repercussions. Here's my paper (short) for those interested.
By what standard should a human be considered dead?
In the past, the way to tell whether a person was dead was to check if their heart was beating and to see if their lungs were breathing. Due to the advent of modern technology this standard for determination falls short of our common sense notion of whether a person is dead or not. A human nowadays can be kept breathing with an iron lung, have normal heart functioning, yet have absolute brain damage to their cerebrum, i.e. they are in a vegetative state and will never be conscious again. Is this human alive by the sense that we commonly use the word, and should they have the same right to life as every other living human?
I agree very much with Martin Benjamin on this issue. When we talk about death, we are referring to cessation of a certain kind, e.g. death of disco music, death of tree, death of a dog, etc. In all of these situations, some kind ceases to be that kind and hence it is dead. Now there are two kinds that have been put forward to account for what we mean when we say, someone has died. The first is the organism, and the second is the person. Note that death can be applied to both these kinds, and neither of the applications are inherently wrong; it is just that one of these doesn’t correspond to our common sense notion of death. The organismic view of death describes death as ‘the ceasing to exist of a functioning organism, i.e. when the cardiopulminaryneurological (CPN) processes stop functioning. The person view describes death as ‘the ceasing to exist of person--the conscious, thinking being.
Now the problem with the organismic view of death is that a human can lose all ability to think and be conscious yet be considered alive and to have rights of any other human. The absurdity of this can be summed up in two thought scenarios:
1.) If someone hurts one of your family members or friends to the extent that they will never be conscious again, would you feel relieved that they still have CPN functioning?
2.) If a doctor tells you that you are either going to lose all CPN functioning if you do not treat a disease, or you are going to lose all conscious ability and be a vegetable for the rest of your life if you do get treated, would you feel comforted by being treated since you will still have CPN functioning?
It seems that the large majority of people would neither feel relieved or comforted by any of the scenarios. When someone thinks about the tragedy of death, they are not merely thinking about CPN functioning. They are referring to the loss of consciousness, the loss of the ability to plan for the future, to communicate, to laugh, to think, etc. This is what we ultimately mean when we speak of the death of a human—i.e. we refer to the death of a person.
I think it must be recognized that just because we have always checked for a heart beat or for respiration to see if a human was dead, what we were ultimately checking was to see if the person was dead, not just the organism. Before modern medicine, loss of CPN always referred to the death of a person. So even though nowadays we may be able to keep CPN functioning without the human being conscious, that does not mean they are ‘alive’ by any common sense standard for which we use the word. Their personhood is dead, and that is the ‘kind’ which really matters to humans.
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