Definitions of death: brain death and what matters in a person.

35 Robert Veatch helpfully summarizes this as the view that ‘Death is the irreversible loss of that which is essentially significant to the nature of man’. 36 Veatch argues for the higher brain standard in part through a comparison between human death and the death of plants or non-human animals. 37 As he argues: When we say that an amoeba has died, we mean that cellular respiration has ceased, or mobility of the cellular protoplasm has ceased, and nothing more.

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