Redefining Death to Save Organ Donations

In regards to the ethics of organ donations: I have known quite a few people who purposefully deny the organ donor stamp on their drivers licenses out of worry that because someone else may benefit (moneywise) their life may not be saved and their organs would be harvested.

This is a very sad state regarding saving lives when people worry about corruption in health services such as emergency medical care.

Even more so redefining death in philosophical terms brings to my mind some weird workings behind this as in a science based field such things should not weigh so highly.

I'm sorry, but this article can't hide the hard reality that medical ethicists are "moving the goalposts" in order to harvest more organs. This is a deadly game.

I remember reading a few years ago that China had a lot of difficulty obtaining organ donations because they still used the outdated notion of heart-death, rather than brain-death, to determine legal death. As a result of that (and other factors), around 90% of the organ donations in the PRC came from executed criminals. Organ transplants are cheaper in the PRC, so they were one of the larger destinations for so-called "organ transplant tourism." I don't know if they've updated their definition of death or not (hard to find recent info), but the issue with executed criminals is still apparently an outstanding international concern.

This article, and this issue, is another example of how science continues to challenge our deep-held assumptions and viewpoints, by making edge cases increasingly relevant. In this case, life-or-death important, not just for the organ donor, but for the recipient as well. It's a hard decision to have to throw a loved one (or their ventilated but oh-so-lively-looking cadaver, depending on your point of view) under the bus based on statistical likelyhoods of greater good.