Reviving Death
Elyssa Ilana Kanet, Ph.D Student in Bioethics, Bar Ilan University
We have been socialized to believe that the death of a human being is a medically definable event, one that in the modern medical community is generally defined as whole brain death. Once blood flow ceases to the brain stem and the brain stops functioning as an integrated (and integrating) unit, the human body is considered dead. However, this criterion is defined largely by technical understandings of the death of an organism – relating to the irreversibility of brain death and its critical role in supporting the integrated functioning of the body. Largely ignored are the moral and spiritual questions underlying the creation of this definition. In my paper and in this presentation, I intend to demonstrate two things: 1. That the incident of death in hospitals and medical practice is often reduced to little more than physiological indicators of a seemingly irreversible biological state. And, 2. That in medical practice, practitioners often disenchant the significance death, overlooking the serious moral and spiritual quandaries that underlie this definition.
In order to demonstrate the second part of this argument, I discuss the many value based assumptions that determine which bodily functions we declare significant. These assumptions express both moral and religious understandings of what it means to be human, and what constitutes a meaningful human life.
For example, why is it that circulatory and respiratory functions used to be the critical processes defining human life, yet modern physicians now consider the brain to be the singular morally relevant organ? Why is it that some physicians and religious systems of ethics reject defining a human life according to the brain, rather stating that life should be defined by a functioning somatic system (that is, one’s body)? Why do some scholars believe death should be defined in reference only to higher-brain death (that is, loss of consciousness) and not loss of all brain functions? What is it we are really saying about the moral worth and religious significance of the human being via these divergent understandings of the end of human life? And how can we “re-enchant” the experience of bodily death in medical practice?
I review a number of scholars who maintain different understandings of human death. In addition, my particular concentration is on Jewish ethics, and thus I will also be bringing comparisons to Jewish law and medical ethics on the topic of defining death. Through these venues I hope to present the inherently religious, or perhaps metaphysical, nature of what has since become an essentially medical, and hyper technical, definition.
We have been socialized to believe that the death of a human being is a medically definable event, one that in the modern medical community is generally defined as whole brain death. Once blood flow ceases to the brain stem and the brain stops functioning as an integrated (and integrating) unit, the human body is considered dead. However, this criterion is defined largely by technical understandings of the death of an organism – relating to the irreversibility of brain death and its critical role in supporting the integrated functioning of the body. Largely ignored are the moral and spiritual questions underlying the creation of this definition. In my paper and in this presentation, I intend to demonstrate two things: 1. That the incident of death in hospitals and medical practice is often reduced to little more than physiological indicators of a seemingly irreversible biological state. And, 2. That in medical practice, practitioners often disenchant the significance death, overlooking the serious moral and spiritual quandaries that underlie this definition.
In order to demonstrate the second part of this argument, I discuss the many value based assumptions that determine which bodily functions we declare significant. These assumptions express both moral and religious understandings of what it means to be human, and what constitutes a meaningful human life.
For example, why is it that circulatory and respiratory functions used to be the critical processes defining human life, yet modern physicians now consider the brain to be the singular morally relevant organ? Why is it that some physicians and religious systems of ethics reject defining a human life according to the brain, rather stating that life should be defined by a functioning somatic system (that is, one’s body)? Why do some scholars believe death should be defined in reference only to higher-brain death (that is, loss of consciousness) and not loss of all brain functions? What is it we are really saying about the moral worth and religious significance of the human being via these divergent understandings of the end of human life? And how can we “re-enchant” the experience of bodily death in medical practice?
I review a number of scholars who maintain different understandings of human death. In addition, my particular concentration is on Jewish ethics, and thus I will also be bringing comparisons to Jewish law and medical ethics on the topic of defining death. Through these venues I hope to present the inherently religious, or perhaps metaphysical, nature of what has since become an essentially medical, and hyper technical, definition.