I, along with others, have been critical of the social construction of brain death and the various social factors that led to redefining death from cardiopulmonary failure to irreversible loss of brain functioning, or brain death. Yet this does not mean that brain death is not the best threshold to permit organ harvesting—or, as people today prefer to call it, organ procurement. Here I defend whole-brain death as a morally legitimate line that, once crossed, is grounds for families to give permission for organ donation. I do so in five moves. First, I make the case that whole-brain death is a social construction that transformed one thing, coma dépassé, into another thing, brain death, as a result of social pressures. Second, I explore the way that the 1981 President’s Commission tried to establish the epistemological certainty of brain death, hoping to avoid making arcane metaphysical claims and yet still utilizing metaphysical claims about human beings. Third, I explore the moral meaning of the social construction of a definition that cannot offer metaphysical certainty about the point at which somebody becomes just some body. Fourth, I describe how two moral communities—Jewish and Catholic—actually ground their metaphysical positions with regard to brain death in the normativity of prior social relations. Finally, I conclude with a reflection on the aesthetic-moral enterprise of the metaphysical-epistemological apparatus of brain death, concluding that only such an aesthetic-moral approach is sufficiently strong to stave off the utility-maximizing tendencies of late-modern Western cultures.

中文翻译：

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什么时候某人只是某个身体？作为第一哲学的伦理学和脑死亡的争论。

我和其他人一样，对脑死亡的社会结构以及导致重新定义从心肺功能衰竭到脑功能不可逆性丧失或脑死亡的各种社会因素提出了批评。但是，这并不意味着脑死亡并不是允许器官采集的最佳门槛-或正如人们今天所称的器官采集。在这里，我捍卫全脑死亡，这是一条道德上合理的界限，一旦跨越，便成为家庭允许器官捐赠的理由。我这样做有五个动作。首先，我认为全脑死亡是一种社会结构，它改变了一件事情，昏迷感社交压力导致大脑死亡。其次，我探讨了1981年总统委员会试图建立脑死亡的认识论确定性的方式，希望避免做出神秘的形而上学主张，而仍然利用关于人类的形而上学主张。第三，我探索了一个定义的社会建构的道德含义，该定义不能就某人成为某物的这一点提供形而上的确定性。第四，我描述了两个道德共同体（犹太人和天主教徒）实际上是如何根据先前的社会关系的规范将他们的形而上学立场与脑死亡相关的。最后，我以对脑死亡的形而上学，病态学装置的审美道德观进行了总结，