Research
Current Project
Defending the Whole Brain Definition of Death: Some Lessons from Process Ontology
The whole brain definition of death is the legal standard for death. However, problems abound. Alan Shewmon recounts an extraordinary example of a patient who had lost brain function yet was able to carry her fetus to term. It's hard to think that such a patient is dead even though she satisfied the whole brain definition of death. I attempt to defend the whole brain definition of death by drawing on process ontology in the philosophy of biology. Process ontology sees organisms, like human beings, as a system of hierarchical processes. Certain lower processes, like cell mitosis, support higher processes, like digestion, which support higher processes, like the organism. The organ that is in charge of integrating these functions is the whole brain. So, death starts with the loss of functioning of the whole brain, even if some processes can continue for a while independently.
Publications
Abandoning the Dead Donor Rule
Journal of Medical Ethics
(2023)
The Dead Donor Rule tells physicians that they may not kill their patients to procure vital organs. The Dead Donor Rule, despite its widespread acceptance, remains contentious. A number of bioethicists challenge the Dead Donor Rule based on a conception of harm. Yet, this conception of harm is limited in certain important ways. Using Joel Feinberg's conception of harms as setbacks to interests, I show that procuring vital transplant organs from permanently unconscious patients does not harm them, especially if their family consents and they had given their prior consent. Given that they're not harmed, then, I argue that there is nothing wrong with killing permanent unconscious patients to procure their vital organs. I conclude that we can give up the Dead Donor Rule. I then show how this argument can avoid some of the deeper problems about definitions of death.
Putting Oneself at Risk for the Fun of It
The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Psychoactive Drug Use edited by Rob Lovering
(2024)
Using recreational drugs can lead to physical ailments, psychosis, addiction, and even death. But drugs are not the only risky activity that human beings engage in. Horseback riding, cave spelunking, and base jumping are all risky if not riskier than drug use. Yet, we as a society tolerate them. Here, I argue that what makes other risky activities permissible, like base jumping, also makes drug use acceptable. What seems to be the deep difference between these different activities is that drug use is perceived to impose risks not just on the user but also on the public. Here, I dig in and look at the threats drug use poses to the public. I argue that these threats are not nearly as deep as people think once properly understood, but even if they were, we'd still agree to accept the risks that drug use poses given the costs of not.
A Few Future Projects
Rights, Risk, and Priority
Rights are an odd fit for risk. Rights crave certainty or drive us towards certainty, but such certainty is either impossible or unwanted. Even if we could get it, the costs of doing so would be rather great. Robert Nozick notes this in his Anarchy, State, and Utopia. We cannot rule out certain threats, so the potential for rights violations lingers. Rather than conceiving of rights as trumps or side-constraints as they typically are, we need a different way to think about them. I argue that rights tell us to prioritize certain basic interests over other kinds of interests, like mere economic concerns. Our rights are secure, then, when threats to these interests are minimized properly. If they are, then, we can balance other economic concerns with these basic interests. Seeing risks as prioritizing interests gives us a way of protecting those interests with the need for certainty.
Risk, Death, and Organ Transplantation
Determinations of death are beset with uncertainty. We can avoid this uncertainty by guaranteeing that a patient is dead prior to transplantation. Such a guarantee takes time to ensure that vital organs will not spontaneously resuscitate, but the longer we wait, the less likely it is the organs will be viable. Given these uncertainties, it will be useful to understand the structure of the risks involved—the way shifting the risks away from one party, donors, moves it to others, recipients, and vice versa. To optimize the harms and benefits here, we could use standard expected utility theory. However, these approaches are hotly contested. Here, I hope to highlight the insights as well as the potential limitations of expected utility approaches while developing other viable tools and resources for dealing with the uncertainty surrounding organ donation and transplantation.