INTRODUCTION

Debates about the definitions of life and death have played important roles in the history of biomedical ethics (see Chapter 38). After exploring some of those meanings, this chapter examines the positions taken prior to the time of the transplantation of human organs (see Chapter 62). This is followed by a more extensive discussion of the definition of death in the transplant era and controversies that can be expected over that definition in the coming century.

CONCEPTUAL ISSUES

The terms, “life” and “death,” each have a number of different meanings. They are terms playing important roles in biology, sociocultural communication, and in moral, legal, and public policy debates.

The Meaning of Life

To know what it means for a human to be dead, one must first reflect on what it means to be alive. The Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged (Gove 1971, 3333) contains no fewer than twenty-one definitions of the term, “life,” many of which include multiple subcategories. The first group of definitions view life as a biological phenomenon; the second group view it more metaphorically as the existence of anything such as a culture. A third group of definitions use the term to assign moral or legal or public policy status to an entity.

Biological Uses

The first definition is that life means “an animate being; the quality that distinguishes a vital and functional being from a dead body or purely chemical matter.”