Abstract
Medicine has not only saved the life of ethics, as Stephen Toulmin stated 30 years ago, but has also rejuvenated an old field of philosophy. As Toulmin claimed, it was clinical medicine with its growing ethical problems and new types of conflict situations that obliged philosophers to once again address “substantive ethical questions” by applying “principles to particular situations” instead of just practicing metaethics. The topic of organ transplantation is a very good example of what the reanimation of ethics by medicine could resemble. It is not only a current and controversial subject of applied ethics, namely medical ethics, but is also concerned with a subject from the heart of philosophy, which has been rejuvenated by the possibilities of modern medicine. This field of philosophical thinking refers to one of the presumably most existential topics overall in that its core lies in the question of the end of life and therefore, the question of death, that is: When is a human being dead? When does a human life end? What do such findings mean with regards to handling dying and dead bodies?
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Notes
- 1.
For a modest but clear critique of Jonas’ vocabulary cf. Miller (2009).
- 2.
- 3.
See references in Müller (2010).
- 4.
- 5.
Müller (2013).
- 6.
Bos (2005).
- 7.
Cf. Veatch (2008).
- 8.
Robertson (1999).
- 9.
As Truog and Miller put it: “In sum, as an ethical requirement for organ donation, the dead donor rule has required unnecessary and unsupportable revisions of the definition of death” Troug and Miller (2008, p. 675).
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Acknowledgment
I am grateful to Dr. Sohaila Bastami for her numerous helpful remarks and inspiring comments.
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Eichinger, T. (2016). Brain Death, Justified Killing and the Zombification of Humans – Does the Transplantation Dilemma Require New Ways of Conceptualizing Life and Death?. In: Jox, R., Assadi, G., Marckmann, G. (eds) Organ Transplantation in Times of Donor Shortage. International Library of Ethics, Law, and the New Medicine, vol 59. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16441-0_2
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