Is life living? Defining death in a technological age.

Abstract

Historically, humanity has assigned death to evil spirits, malevolent gods, and other supernatural agents; but by the eighteenth century, the scientific spirit began to manifest itself through more precise biologic definitions of death. Thanks to modern medical technology, these early scientific views, with their considerable margin for error, gave way in the twentieth century to criteria based on such diverse factors as total lack of response to external stimuli, absence of spontaneous muscular movements, absence of all reflexes, total collapse of the arterial blood pressure, flat electrocardiogram, and flat electroencephalograph tracings. Undoubtedly such difficult matters as organ transplants, wills, homicide, euthanasia, and abortion demand precise definitions of death; but modern medical advances have engendered visions of physical immortality with doctors as the arbiters who often define and determine death. Even so, such one-dimensional, scientific views fail to capture those nebulous social, religious, or spiritual definitions that pervade humanity's definition of death. Humanistic views of death resist the movement of death from the moral realm to a technological order that places people in a system, theory, or chart, where they are thus absolved from fear of freedom. Rather, humanistic definitions demand that humanity step beyond mechanistic definitions of death into a transcendent world of moral choices that guarantee human dignity and worth by ascribing meaning to life and death. These meanings counter the desiccating fear that something like biologic human might, through something called medical technology, defeat something called fate.