The heart of death. Re-animating the debate on brain death and transplantation

作者：Erk Christian^*

来源：Ethik in der Medizin, 2014, 26(2): 121-135.

DOI：10.1007/s00481-013-0245-9

• Death
• Dying
• Life
• Organ donation
• Transplantation
• Soul

Contemporary debates on the moral permissibility of the donation and transplantation of vital organic material often focus on the definition of and criteria for the determination of death. However, death cannot be experienced in the same fashion as life as it is its contradictory negation; death is not-life. Any attempt to define death must, therefore, proceed from and be based on a definition of life.
This article argues that life cannot be reduced to a set of empirically observable properties or functions but can only be explained comprehensively from a philosophical perspective. Taking this perspective allows us to establish that life is the "actus primus" (soul) of all animate beings.
Applying this "soul criterion of death" necessitates the conclusion that the explantation of vital organic material from a person whose brain has stopped functioning is always a violation of the dead-donor rule as the person is dying but not dead.

• 出版日期2014-6