The Diagnosis of Death and the Irreducibility of the Human Person 1

Abstract

If, as Karol Wojtyla had insisted, the human person is fundamentally irreducible to any natural, biological, social, or even cosmological function, then the diagnosis of death on any of the purely functionalistic grounds available to medical science presents a serious ethical problem. Perhaps we can no longer treat the question of death merely as a medical “diagnosis,” regarding, on that basis, the appropriateness of organ transplantation as a purely medical judgment, ethically accountable only to professional standards of care. We will explore this problem from within a personalistic philosophical, and theological framework, according to which the irreducibility of the human person provides the central referent for an analysis of the reductionistic tendencies of contemporary thinking concerning the “diagnosis of death.”