L’ULTIMO CONFINE. I CRITERI DI ACCERTAMENTO DELLA MORTE FRA SCIENZA E FILOSOFIA

Recently a growing number of scholars have raised serious doubts about the validity of the well-established criteria for determination of death. Based on these criteria, a person whose heart continues to beat with the aid of an artificial respirator, but who is in a state of “brain death”, is considered a corpse from which it is permissible to remove organs. Since the publication of the Harvard Report – which in 1968 proposed for the first time to replace the traditional cardio-pulmonary criterion with the cerebral one –, philosophers and scientists expressed severe reservations about the new organ harvesting procedures, comparing them to vivisection and insinuating that its validity was fictitious, because it was motivated solely by the desire to justify the removal of organs. This paper analyzes some of these objections, trying to show that not all of them are relevant. The truth or falsehood of a diagnostic criterion, in particular, does not depend on the reasons that push one to adopt it or on the consequences that derive from it. That the brain death criterion is useful for solving some practical problems, such as the availability of organs, does not mean that it is false. Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s true either. Pointing out that brain death was introduced to legitimize organ harvesting, therefore, says nothing about its scientific validity, which should be verified with independent scientific arguments.