The Social Construction of Death, Biological Plausibility, and the Brain Death Criterion

摘要

It would be a serious mistake to abandon the use of the brain death criterion for determining death. While it may seem biologically implausible to some to say a brain-dead patient is dead because the human as an integrated organism continues, it all depends on what one understands about the brain and believes about human death. If it helps, compare a patient who is brain dead with a patient without a head, sustained by machines. It seems right to call the patient dead, biological plausibility to the contrary. It is therefore entirely reasonable to consider the biological situation of brain death to be human death and to use a brain death criterion/tests to confirm that a patient is in irreversible apneic coma.