Conclusions

Given the advances made in the biomedical sciences across the twentieth century and that continue today one could assume that we are in possession of a proper definition of certain fundamental concepts, such as life and death. However, if anything, these same advances have contributed to a great deal of uncertainty surrounding death and how we ought to understand it. Can a person in a chronic vegetative state be the object of therapeutic obstinacy, when the chances for recovery are extremely poor? Are those born with severe anencephaly sufficiently alive to be declared dead? Are those we assess as brain dead already dead or do they die once we cease providing life support or perhaps a short time afterwards? The law requires that medical doctors record a time of death not least because, as Lamb puts it ‘[i]t is as wrong to treat the living as dead as it is to treat the dead as alive.’