Stollery Children's Hospital, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
Bioethics. 2010 Feb;24(2):47-53. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8519.2008.00709.x. Epub 2009 Feb 6.
Brain death is accepted in most countries as death. The rationales to explain why brain death is death are surprisingly problematic. The standard rationale that in brain death there has been loss of integrative unity of the organism has been shown to be false, and a better rationale has not been clearly articulated. Recent expert defences of the brain death concept are examined in this paper, and are suggested to be inadequate. I argue that, ironically, these defences demonstrate the lack of a defensible rationale for why brain death should be accepted as death itself. If brain death is death, a conceptual rationale for brain death being equivalent to death should be clarified, and this should be done urgently.
脑死亡在大多数国家被接受为死亡。解释为什么脑死亡就是死亡的理由却令人惊讶地存在问题。标准的理由是，在脑死亡中，生物体的整合统一性已经丧失，但这已被证明是错误的，而且也没有明确阐明更好的理由。本文检查了最近专家对脑死亡概念的辩护，并认为它们是不充分的。我认为，具有讽刺意味的是，这些辩护恰恰表明，缺乏一个可以接受的理由来解释为什么脑死亡应该被视为死亡本身。如果脑死亡就是死亡，那么就应该阐明脑死亡等同于死亡的概念性理由，而且应该紧急进行。
