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Defining Life through Death

June 23, 2018

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As we approach the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the neurologic criteria for determination of death, it is appropriate to reflect on death in the 21st century. Since 1968, there have been countless advances in medicine and basic biology, yet we still wrestle with the same phenomena discussed by the Ad Hoc Committee of Harvard Medical School. In the 50 years since this monumental pronouncement, there has been considerable debate within Roman Catholicism about the status of the neurologic criteria. In a recent issue of JMP, several Catholic thinkers defended the neurologic criteria from within a Thomistic metaphysical framework, while others rejected the criteria due to the alarming variability in determination of death policies. A forthcoming article by David Oderberg challenges proponents of the neurologic criteria who claim that this notion of death is consistent with hylemorphism. What are we to make of this? This paper will take the recent work of Moschella and Oderberg to illustrate the current debate on death within a hylemorphic framework. It will argue that Oderberg’s arguments are devastating to Moschella’s defense, but perhaps there is a way to avoid Oderberg’s conclusion that putrefaction is the only sure sign of human death. Importantly, this debate on death sheds much light on human life and provides additional ways to defend the lives of all human beings—the unborn and the disabled in particular. While death has received much attention in the literature lately, the implications of this debate cannot be overstated. With the significant number of Catholic physicians, nurses, hospitals, organ donors, and patients, we can only hope that consensus and clarity are achieved sooner rather than later.

Keywords:
Death and dying; Definition of death; Determining death