Sooner or later, we have to ask more particularly what death is and, in so doing, to face up to some of the associated bioethical issues. End-of-life decisions can be very difficult, not least when it is difficult to determine when the end of life is. Some of those issues are of biomedical fact, and some go well beyond that. How are we to determine the criteria appropriately applicable to death? Previously we noted that instead of asking what life is, we do better to ask what it is to be alive. Being alive is a process, a going onward of a nexus of life processes. A converse truth is that instead of asking what it is to be dead, we do better to ask what death is. Being dead is not a process, nor is it anything at all in particular. The occurrence of death, to a broad approximation, is the termination of the life process. At most, we can say that dying is a process, the ending, rapidly or otherwise, of the processes of life. When all of the life processes have ceased, then death has occurred to the formerly living being. So far so good, but major problems arise when some of the life processes have stopped and some continue.

Issues become complex here. For one thing, the criteria by which we define conceptually when death occurs need not be the same as those by means of which we determine in practice when it occurs. Those lines that are the most easily drawn are not always the most accurate. We must also bear in mind the possibility that it might not always be appropriate to try to establish precise lines, as death might not occur at any precise point. Furthermore, in the midst of our difficulties in trying to pin things down as well as possible, we must keep a firm grip on the fact that issues about what occurs and when it occurs – and why that rather than something else should count as death – can be resolved soundly and sensibly only on the basis of some sound and sensible resolution of the issues about what death occurs to.