Ethics of Death and Dying

Catalog description

Death is supposed to be the only certain thing besides taxation. And yet, advances in medicine have caused us to reconsider what death means more than once, and we may be at the stage of having to do so again. The ability to restart the heart made us alter the definition of death from meaning “the heart has stopped beating” to “the heart has stopped beating irreversibly.” The ability to keep a body functioning even without any brain function led us to create brain death as a category of being dead, and the potential for organ transplants has changed dramatically what it is appropriate to do to a dead person. Using sources from philosophy, literature, medicine, and law, this course will examine the concept of death to try to determine what, if it can be determined at all, we actually mean by the term “death,” and how it is appropriate to use the term. Do we actually know what death is, or are we constantly redefining it as society changes – and if so, what does that mean for our concepts of living and dying in a world of frozen embryos, organ transplants, and electrically resuscitated hearts? We will also ask the question raised at least as long ago as Epicurus, why is death bad? The answer to this may or may not change depending upon what death is. Finally, we may continue to ask what sorts of deaths are acceptable to cause, and why or why not.