In this way, my argument undermines one of the key motivations for adopting the Psychological Account. On the other hand, these features seem to drive our intuitions about survival in these cases. ) Account is re-interpreted in such a way as to overcome the problems posed by cases of transient retrograde amnesia, it turns out that standard brain transplantation cases involve details which are strictly irrelevant according to the theory. I consider various means of responding to this problem, arguing that the best available response will undercut our ability to rely on intuitions about brain transplantation to support the Psychological Account. In such cases, the transitivity of psychological continuity may break down. I show that the Psychological Account has trouble accommodating cases of transient retrograde amnesia. ( shrink)Īccording to the Psychological Account of personal identity, personal identity across time is maintained by some form of psychological overlap or continuance. At the same time, it would do a better job of ensuring that. Such an approach would incentivize corporations to structure reorganizations in ways that improve compliance and minimize the likelihood of future offenses. In the terms developed by this Article, these successors share a “criminal identity” with their predecessors. - This Article offers a more sophisticated approach to successor liability: successors should be liable for the crimes of their predecessors only when they inherit their predecessors’ compliance vulnerabilities. As a result, it skews corporate incentives against reorganizing in more socially beneficial ways. Such a coarse-grained, onetrack approach fails to recognize that not all reorganizations are cut from the same cloth. Any corporation that results from any merger, consolidation, spin-off, etc., is on the hook for all the crimes of all the corporations that went into the process. The law of successor criminal liability is simple-corporate successors are liable for the crimes of their predecessors. We will conclude that brain death is indeed our death – but for reasons entirely different from those cited in the original justification of this criterion. We shall analyse various pathological conditions and their respective effects on the bodily and mental characteristics of our existence. May brain death be the ceasing to exist of a different entity? -/- Substituting clinical case reports and considerations about human physiology for the use of thought experiments, the thesis takes a novel and philosophically unconventional approach to the problem of what we essentially are. While we will find that the destruction of its brain does in fact not correspond to an organism’s death, we shall also ask whether the assumption that we are essentially organisms is correct.

To this end, we shall connect the medical debate about the definition of death to the philosophical debate about personal identity. Is brain death really our death? -/- This is the question that this thesis seeks to answer.

In recent years, however, doubts about this neurological criterion have been growing. Soon the so-called brain death became the new worldwide standard.

) the death of the organism in the presence of external life support. It was suggested that the destruction of the brain could indicate (. What had previously been deemed a permanent cessation of vital functions suddenly became reversible. Only comparatively recently, in the 1950s, rapid developments in intensive-care medicine called into question this widely accepted criterion. When does a human being cease to exist? For millennia, the answer to this question had remained largely unchanged: death had been diagnosed when heartbeat and breathing were permanently absent.

Forced spirit fission