ABSTRACT
The legal and medical definition of death has recently changed in many states from cessation of heart and lung function to so-called brain death. Patients who have suffered irreversible loss of brain function but continue to breathe would have been accounted alive under previous medical practice and legal statute. They are now pronounced dead. Though the changes are sanctioned by leading medical and legal authorities, they have proceeded in a climate of some confusion, a symptom of which was a recent ruling by a Florida judge: "This lady is dead and has been dead and she is being kept alive artificially." 1 In part this confusion is merely the result of misunderstanding on the part of judges and the public of what those authorities proposing redefinition have in mind, but it also mirrors the conceptual disarray in the brain-death literature. 2 Though a large number of physicians, jurists, and philosophers now hold that brain death is death, there is little agreement about the justification for the redefinition or about the nature of the task of "redefinition" itself.
