Department of Bioethics, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20892-1156, USA.
J Med Ethics. 2010 Oct;36(10):632-4. doi: 10.1136/jme.2009.035196. Epub 2010 Jul 21.
Although established in the law and current practice, the determination of death according to neurological criteria continues to be controversial. Some scholars have advocated return to the traditional circulatory and respiratory criteria for determining death because individuals diagnosed as 'brain dead' display an extensive range of integrated biological functioning with the aid of mechanical ventilation. Others have attempted to refute this stance by appealing to the analogy between decapitation and brain death. Since a decapitated animal is obviously dead, and 'brain death' represents physiological decapitation, brain dead individuals must be dead. In this article we refute this 'decapitation gambit.' We argue that decapitated animals are not necessarily dead, and that, moreover, the analogy between decapitation and the clinical syndrome of brain death is flawed.
尽管根据神经标准来确定死亡在法律和现行实践中已经确立，但这一做法仍然存在争议。一些学者主张回归传统的循环和呼吸标准来确定死亡，因为被诊断为“脑死亡”的个体在机械通气的帮助下表现出广泛的综合生物功能。其他人则试图通过诉诸断头术和脑死亡之间的类比来反驳这一立场。由于被斩首的动物显然已经死亡，而“脑死亡”代表生理上的斩首，因此脑死亡的个体必须已经死亡。在本文中，我们反驳了这种“斩首策略”。我们认为，被斩首的动物不一定死亡，而且，断头术和脑死亡临床综合征之间的类比是有缺陷的。
