death Archives - Prindle Institute

October 23, 2023October 31, 2023

“Grief Tech”: A Blessing or a Curse?

photograph of patrons holding hands at seance

Generative AI certainly has many intriguing uses. Everything from music, to text, to video, can now be generated – a new power riddled with ethical concerns. Perhaps one of the more sensitive topics concerns the use of generative AI to recreate people who are deceased. The music and film industries are already grappling with the possibility of reviving artists to perform again. But the issue can also hit much closer to home. There’s a good buck to be made in helping folks reconnect with dead family members in ways that weren’t previously possible. My Heritage’s Deep Nostalgia can colorize and animate old family photographs, while other vendors offer the opportunity to chat with a dead relative or hold a funeral where the deceased can address the room. Such technology offers a priceless chance at closure and healing, but might it also be exploiting the dead as well as the living?

The rising industry of “grief tech” takes many different forms. At a recent funeral, a woman who passed away at 87 was able to speak with mourners. A similar process was used at the funeral of former SAG president Ed Asner. Those attending his funeral were able to converse with him as generative AI formed responses on the fly from a bank of answers regarding his work, politics, and family life he had previously recorded. This was all thanks to the company StoryFile, whose technology was originally conceived with the intention of recording the memories of Holocaust survivors.

Many appreciate the opportunity this kind of technology affords. As the 87-year woman’s son noted, “Nothing could prepare me for what I was going to witness when I saw it.” It isn’t hard to see the benefit this provides loved ones.

In addition to these more elaborate reproductions of the deceased, chatbots are another way generative AI can resurrect people who have passed away. In 2016 James Vlahos used recordings of his father’s life story to create a “Dadbot” that he could create an interactive experience that emulated his father. Vlahos found comfort in this and has since launched a company that allows people to upload their memories in order to create an AI version of themselves that can live on.

Supporters of the technology claim that it provides comfort to loved ones as it offers a way of preserving memories. One man, for instance, was able to recreate his grandfather so that he could have a final chance to say goodbye.

Despite their promise, however, these services appear exploitative – not only of the dead but of the living families who may be willing to pay vast sums of money to see their loved ones again. Some companies require living consent in order to be part of the program, but there’s no guarantee this will be the universal standard moving forward. There is, for example, already interest in recreating historical figures who have no opportunity to offer consent.

It may also be the case that grief tech services are not healthy for us. While creating an AI avatar can be a nice way to memorialize someone, it can also be a crutch that prevents us from completing the grieving process. Not only can this enable our desire to avoid reality, but it can prevent us from making new, meaningful relationships.

Many of the services promise greater honesty and transparency. It’s assumed that the person filling out the questions can do so more truthfully – they have the opportunity to say things in death that they might not wish to have revealed in life. Thus, the process can get closer to the truth and offer real closure.

But it can be misleading who we are actually talking to. While some anticipate getting a “freer, truer version of their lost loved ones,” it may be that what they receive is a useful, polished fiction. While people can be more honest when preparing their words for posterity, that does not mean that we can trust people to accurately relay their life’s details.

Further, the fact that a profile is created from old memories and thoughts doesn’t mean that it will be a literal copy. The model might sound like a loved one, it might say similar things, but when an AI model is generating that content, it is still the model that is producing statements. While this might give the impression to a loved one that they are finally going to have the long-awaited conversation they’ve sought, in reality, a computer model may simply be making things up based on the echoes of distant memories. We should be incredibly skeptical about the new information that gets revealed; it is a well-documented phenomenon that AI can “hallucinate” facts.

This could have the potential to create further problems. What if the AI makes some kind of controversial claim after the fact? “Bill killed me!” “Leave all my money to Sally.” Not only is there potential to generate unnecessary postmortem controversies, but even the potential for manipulation depending on how the model was constructed and by whom. We’ve already proven quite susceptible to mistaking machines for sentient beings. It’s not hard to imagine forming an unhealthy attachment to a model of a reincarnated loved one.

The potential for abuse appears rife. As one article notes, there are marketing opportunities created by effectively creating a digital clone of a person that can mimic the choices that you would make. This would be a significant benefit for marketing and advertising – a company could sell services to the bereaved, while also harvesting that customer data for advertising purposes.

Resurrecting the dead in AI form promises great benefit, but the attending risks are great. While this has the potential to revolutionize the way we approach death, that promise alone doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.

August 19, 2022December 14, 2022

The Animal Ethics of OrganEx

photograph of pig head poking around barn door

As Benjamin Franklin famously wrote in his 1789 letter to physicist Jean-Baptiste Le Roy, “in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” While it seems nothing can be done about the latter, science has been progressively fighting the former for centuries. Or, at least, challenging when death’s inevitability befalls us.

In a recent paper published in Nature, a team from Yale University claim to have developed a system – dubbed OrganEx – capable of reversing some of death’s effects over an hour after cardiac arrest. If we’re to believe the findings (and there seems to be a good reason to do so), then this team has pushed the boundary separating life from death. Before going further, however, it should be pointed out that the experiment was carried out on pigs and the restored features of life were nothing as grand as consciousness and the capacity for independent living; they were cellular.

Nevertheless, the study’s results may have profound implications for medical practice, especially in end-of-life matters like organ transplantation and donation, palliative care, and assisted dying.

In short, OrganEx was developed from an already existing experimental system called BrainEx. Developed in 2019, BrainEx showed the capacity to preserve the structure and function of cells within a pig’s brain hours after decapitation. OrganEx takes the same principles and applies them to the entire body. It consists of two essential parts. The first is an infusion device attached to the body via the femoral artery and vein. The second part is a complex chemical cocktail that the infusion device circulates through the body, mixed with the recipient’s blood. This concoction consists of amino acids, vitamins, an artificial oxygen carrier, and neurological inhibiting compounds, among other things. An hour after researchers stopped the pig’s heart and withheld medical assistance, the OrganEx system started pumping the perfusate around the pig’s body. After six hours of circulation, tests showed that oxygen had begun reaching multiple bodily tissues and that the pig’s heart had demonstrated limited electricity activity. Additionally, some expected cellular degradation appeared absent. In fact, some cells were metabolizing glucose and building proteins.

In other words, compared to the experiment’s control groups, OrganEx began repairing damaged organs hours after death.

The study’s results are remarkable, and the paper has received significant media attention (many making references to the idea of Zombie Pigs). However, an unease sits at this study’s core and, unfortunately, at the core of many biomedical studies – the use of animals in experiments.

Unlike the BrainEx study, in which researchers acquired the pig’s head from a slaughterhouse, the pigs used in the OrganEx study were slaughtered deliberately for the study’s purposes. Is this ethical? Can we justify the use of these pigs in the OrganEx experiment? I believe a perfectly suitable alternative was overlooked, an alternative that would have meant that the pigs used in the experiment could have continued their lives without being slaughtered – human cadavers.

Within research ethics, there is a widely employed framework known as the 3Rs. Proposed by Russel and Burch in their 1959 book, The Principles of Humane Experimental Technique, these Rs stand for Replacement, Reduction, and Refinement, and researchers should consider each of these principles in order. Replacement refers to substituting animals in research with technological alternatives or simply nothing at all. If it isn’t possible to replace animals, researchers move on to the reduction principle, using as few animals as possible to minimize potential suffering. Finally, if replacement and reduction aren’t possible, researchers should seek to refine their husbandry and experimental methods to reduce suffering and improve welfare. The OrganEx’s study designers seemed to consider such principles, and Yale’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee gave comparable advice: “we sought to minimize the animal number and any potential discomfort and suffering.”

I believe, however, that the use of pigs in this experiment breached the first of these principles. The appropriate number of pigs would have been zero, as freshly deceased people would have provided equally effective test subjects.

This might strike some as an odd claim to make. After all, researchers use non-human animals in the preclinical research phase as a buffer before human testing. Bypassing such a precaution and going straight to human research goes against the typical wisdom of research ethics and protocol. However, it is essential to remember that the subject needs to be dead for the OrganEx experiment’s purposes (or at least “dead” according to our current conception of death). That is the experiment’s point, to explore the technology’s posthumous application. As such, research participants cannot be harmed as we typically envision (i.e., allergic reactions, unforeseen side effects, etc.) because they’re already dead.

Death is not an unusual event. It happens to countless people every day. My proposal is that the researchers could have taken advantage of this naturally occurring, potentially suitable research populace but chose to use pigs instead; pigs that they slaughtered deliberately.

So, the question becomes which potential subject is more ethically justifiable: live pigs needing slaughtering to satisfy the experiment’s participation requirements or the bodies of humans who had recently died from natural causes?

All other things being equal, this seems to be a fairly straightforward choice. Living beings deserve more moral consideration than dead ones because the living can experience harm, have a greater claim to dignity, and possess complex internal worlds (pigs especially). The dead lack these things, and while we may attach morally valuable attributes to the deceased, such qualities pale compared to the living. This is true for comparing intra-species (dead human vs. live human) and inter-species (dead human vs. live pig). In short, living pigs deserve more moral consideration than dead humans, and in a research context, if you can use an already dead human instead of slaughtering a live pig, and you subscribe to the principle of reduction, then you should use the human cadaver.

That said, there might be good reasons why the researchers chose to use pigs instead of humans. They do indicate that the BrainEx study focused on a pig brain, and some consistency with that existing work would make sense. I’m unconvinced, however, that this is a compelling enough reason to decide to use pigs in this subsequent study. This is certainly true given that, presumably, the OrganEx’s anticipated application isn’t on pigs but on humans. It would seemingly make sense to align the experiment closely to the anticipated application as early as possible and skip unnecessary research steps.

Ultimately, there are good arguments to use animals for research if doing so helps prevent downstream harmful outcomes (although I don’t necessarily buy them). Nevertheless, if those outcomes can be avoided without using animals, then there is an ethical duty to do so. Preventable harm, including death, should be avoided where possible, which applies to animals as much as it does to humans.

April 1, 2022December 14, 2022

Reflections on Communal Annihilation or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

photograph of overgrown buildings in Chernobyl exclusion zone

It appears that we are at the moment living under the greatest threat of nuclear war the world has seen in decades.

If you live in a city, or if you (like me) live next to a military base of strategic importance, there is a non-zero chance that you and your community will be annihilated by nuclear weapons in the near future.

I, at least, find this to be unsettling. For me, there’s also something strangely fascinating about the prospect of death by the Bomb. The countless books, movies, and video games that depict nuclear apocalypse – often in vaguely glamorous terms – suggest that I’m not alone.

If ever there was one, this is surely an appropriate time to reflect on the specter that haunts us. That’s what I’d like to do here. In particular, I’d like to ask: How should we think about the prospect of death by the Bomb? And why do we find it fascinating?

***

Let’s start with fascination.

Our fascination with the Bomb is no doubt partly rooted in the technology itself. It wasn’t too long ago that human beings warred with clubs and pointy bits of metal. The Bomb is an awful symbol of humanity’s precipitous technological advancement; to be threatened by it is an awful symbol of our folly.

Even more important, in my view, is that the Bomb has the power to transmute one’s own personal ending into a small part of a thoroughly communal event, the calamitous ending of a community’s life. In this way, the Bomb threatens us with a fascinating death.

To appreciate this point, consider that one of the peculiar things about the prospect of a quotidian death is that the world – my world – should carry on without me. I (you, we) spend my whole life carving out a unique place in a broad network of relations and enterprises. My place in my world is part of what makes me who I am, and I naturally view my world from the perspective of my place in it. Contemplating the prospect of my world going on without me produces an uncanny parallax. I see that I am but a small, inessential part of my world, a world which will not be permanently dimmer after the spotlight of my consciousness is extinguished.

This peculiarity sometimes strikes us as absurd, an indignity even. Wittgenstein, for example, expressed this when he said that “at death the world does not alter, but comes to an end.” It can also be a source of consolation and meaning. Many people are comforted by the belief that their loved ones will live on after they die, or, optimistically, that they have made a positive impact on others that will extend beyond the confines of their life. We are told that death can even be noble and good when one lays down one’s life for one’s friends.

The Bomb is different from run-of-the-mill existential threats in that it brings the prospect of a death that isn’t characterized by this peculiarity. If the Bomb were to strike my (your) city, my world would not carry on without me. Humanity and the Earth might survive. But my world – my family, friends, colleagues, students, acquaintances, the whole stage on which I strut and fret – would for the most part disappear along with me in one totalizing conflagration. At death, my world really would come to an end.

From an impartial point of view, this is clearly worse than my suffering a fatal heart attack or dying in some other quotidian way. But this is not the point of view that usually dominates when we think about the prospect of our own deaths. What sort of difference does it make from a self-interested point of view if our world dies with us?

A tempting thought is that the extent to which this would make a difference to a person is directly proportional to how much they care about others. If I don’t care about anyone besides myself, then I will be indifferent to whether my world dies with me. The more I care about others, the more I will care about who dies with me.

While I think there’s truth in this, it strikes me as an oversimplification. A thought experiment may help us along.

Imagine a people much like us except that they are naturally organized into more or less socially discrete cohorts with highly synchronized life cycles, like periodical cicadas. Every twenty years or so, a new cohort spontaneously springs up from the dust. The people in any given cohort mostly socialize with one another, befriending, talking, trading, fighting, and loving among themselves. They live out their lives together for some not entirely predictable period, somewhere between ten and one hundred years. Then they all die simultaneously.

It seems to me that death would have a recognizable but nevertheless rather distinct significance for periodical people. On the one hand, as it is for us, death would be bad for periodical people when it thwarts their desires, curtails their projects, and deprives them of good things. On the other hand, there would be no cause to worry about leaving dependents or grieving intimates behind. There would be little reason to fear missing out. Death might seem less absurd to them, but at the unfortunate expense of the powerful sources of consolation and meaning available to us.

Perhaps most importantly, that most decisive of personal misfortunes, individual annihilation, would invariably be associated with a much greater shared misfortune. In this way, death would be a profoundly communal event for periodical people. And this would reasonably make a difference in how a periodical person thinks about their own death. It’s not that the communality would necessarily make an individual’s death less bad. It’s more that assessments of the personal significance of events are generally affected by the broader contexts in which those events occur. When a personal misfortune is overshadowed by more terrible things, when it is shared – especially when it is shared universally among one’s fellows – that personal misfortune does not dominate one’s field of vision as it normally would. Perversely, this can make it seem more bearable.

When we contemplate the Bomb, we are in something like the position of periodical people. The usual other-related cares, the usual absurdity, the usual sources of consolation and meaning do not apply. The prospect of collective annihilation includes my death, of course. But weirdly that detail almost fades into the background as it is almost insignificant in relation to the destruction of my world. This is a strange way of viewing the prospect of my own annihilation, one that produces a different sort of uncanny parallax. I think this is key to our fascination.

There may be something else, too. We live in a highly individualistic and competitive society where the bonds of community and fellow feeling have grown perilously thin. The philosopher Rick Roderick has suggested that in a situation like ours, there’s something attractive, even “utopian,” about the possibility that in its final hour our fragmented community might congeal into one absolutely communal cry. Of course, if this suggestion is even remotely plausible, it is doubly bleak, as it points not only to the prospect of our communal death but also to the decadence of our fragmented life.

***

I’ve tried to gesture at an explanation as to why the Bomb can be a source of fascination as well as trepidation. Along the way, some tentative insights have emerged, which relate to how we ought to think about this unique existential threat.

Then again, I recently had a conversation with my much wiser and more experienced nonagenarian grandparents, which makes me question whether I didn’t start this circuitous path on the wrong foot. To my surprise, when I asked them of these things my grandparents told me that during the Cold War they didn’t really think about the Bomb at all. My grandfather, Don, gave me a pointed piece of advice:

“There’s not a darn thing we can do about it. You know, if it’s going to happen, you better go ahead and live your life.”

Perhaps, then, I (and you, reader, since you made it this far) have made a mistake. Perhaps the best thing to do is simply not to think about the Bomb at all.

January 19, 2022December 14, 2022

Defining Death: One Size Fits All?

In 1844, Edgar Allen Poe published a short story titled The Premature Burial. The main trope at play in the story was the common Victorian fear of being buried alive. The main character suffers from a condition which causes him to fall into catatonic states in which it is difficult to detect breath. The body exhibits little to no motion. In response to his all-consuming fear, he designs a coffin that will allow him to alert the outside world through the ringing of a bell if he is confused for dead and accidentally buried alive.

Determining when death has occurred is not an easy matter, either historically or in the modern age. In some cultures, family members would wait until putrefaction began in order to bury or otherwise perform death ceremonies with the bodies of their loved ones, just to make sure that no one was being disposed of who was, in fact, still alive. As time progressed, we used the presence of circulatory and respiratory functioning to determine that someone was alive. The modern world presents a new set of puzzles: we are able to keep the circulatory and respiratory function going indefinitely with the help of medical technology. When, then, is a person dead?

The way that we answer this question has significant practical consequences. Hospitals are frequently low on beds, personnel, and other resources, especially during outbreaks of disease. Patients can only permanently vacate those beds when they are well enough to leave or when they are dead. We also need to be able to harvest certain organs from donors, which can occur only after the patient is dead.

What’s more, it would be unusual if there was variation among definitions of death across the country. The result could be that a person is dead in one state and not in another. In response to this concern, in 1981, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research arrived at the following definition which they expressed in the Uniform Definition of Death Act: An individual who has sustained either (1) irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions or (2) irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem, is dead. A determination must be made in accordance with accepted medical standards.

Since the time that the Commission took up the issue, this definition has faced a range of objections from all sides. No one is particularly bothered by the first criterion, but the second is the source of much debate. Some object that the Presidential Commission requires too much for a person to be considered alive; they argue that it is not the case that the entire brain must cease to function, only that the higher brain has irreversibly stopped working. They reason that it is the higher brain that is responsible for the characteristics that make an entity a person: consciousness, personality, memory, a sense of psychological continuity, and so on.

Others argue that the Commission has not gone far enough, in other words, they argue that a person who is kept alive on a ventilator is still alive, even when they have no brain function of any kind. It is possible for the body to do things while kept alive on a ventilator that only living bodies can do; among other things, bodies can go through puberty, carry a fetus to term, grow taller, grow hair, and so on. Some argue that to call such bodies “dead” is just demonstrably inaccurate.

It seems that our social conception of death has a crucial metaphysical component. Most cultures with advanced medical technology don’t tend to wait to declare a person dead until they start to decay. It’s worth asking — what, exactly, is it that we are trying to preserve when we categorize a being as “alive”? Are we being consistent in our standards? Under ordinary conditions, we wouldn’t hesitate to say that grass, clams, or coral reefs are alive (when they are). Would we use the same standards to determine when these organisms are no longer alive that we would use to determine whether a human person is no longer alive? Some argue that testing for the biological functions that give rise to personhood is the right approach when it comes to determining the status of a human being. Are humans the only organisms to whom we should apply that test?

Questions about death are philosophically compelling to reflect on in the abstract, but they are also practically important for everyone. The decision that someone is dead has significant consequences that will inevitably be devastating to some people. Consider the case of Jahi McMath and her family. In 2013, Jahi underwent a standard procedure to get her tonsils removed; she experienced severe blood loss which led to significant brain damage. She was declared brain dead on December 12th, 2013, three days after the procedure. Jahi’s family fought to overturn the diagnosis, but a judge agreed with the hospital that Jahi was brain dead. The family did not give up, but transferred Jahi to a private facility for care where she was connected to life-sustaining technology for almost four years. Jahi was declared dead in June, 2018; the cause of death listed on her death certificate was “complications due to liver failure.” Jahi never regained consciousness.

Jahi’s mother sold her house and spent all the money she had to pay for Jahi’s care, and she does not regret doing so. She appreciated the opportunity to watch Jahi change and grow, commenting to reporters, ““She grew taller and her features started to change and she went through puberty and everything. And I know for sure, dead people don’t do that.”

According to the Uniform Definition of Death Act, Jahi died in 2013, not in 2018. Not everyone agrees with the standard established by the act. People have different religious, cultural, and philosophical understanding of when death occurs. That said, a person isn’t alive simply because there is someone willing to insist that they are — Julius Caesar and Elizabeth I are dead regardless of anyone’s protestations to the contrary. The time and resources of medical professionals are limited. When someone believes that the life of someone they love is at stake, they may be willing to pay any amount of money in order to keep hope alive. Liberal democracies allow for pluralism about many things. Should the definition of death be one of them?

September 27, 2021December 14, 2022

Resurrection Through Chatbot?

There is nothing that causes more grief than the death of a loved one; it can inflict an open wound that never fully heals, even if we can temporarily forget that it’s there. We are social beings and our identities aren’t contained within our own human-shaped space. Who we are is a matter of the roles we take on, the people we care for, and the relationships that allow us to practice and feel love. The people we love are part of who we are and when one of them dies, it can feel like part of us dies as well. For many of us, the idea that we will never interact with our loved one again is unbearable.

Some entrepreneurs see any desire as an opportunity, even the existential impulses and longings that come along with death. In response to the need to have loved ones back in our lives, tech companies have found a new use for their deepfake technology. Typically used to simulate the behavior of celebrities and politicians, some startups have recognized the potential in programming deepfake chat-bots to behave like dead loved ones. The companies that create these bots harvest data from the deceased person’s social media accounts. Artificial intelligence is then used to predict what the person in question would say in a wide range of circumstances. A bereaved friend or family member can then chat with the resulting intelligence and, if things go well, it will be indistinguishable from the person who passed away.

Some people are concerned that this is just another way for corporations to exploit grieving people. Producers of the chatbots aren’t interested in the well-being of their clients, they’re only concerned with making money. It may be the case that this is an inherently manipulative practice, and in the worst of ways. How could it possibly be acceptable to profit from people experiencing the lowest points in their lives?

That said, the death industry is thriving, even without the addition of chatbots. Companies sell survivors of the deceased burial plots, coffins, flowers, cosmetic services, and all sorts of other products. Customers can decide for themselves which goods and services they’d like to pay for. The same is true with a chatbot. No one is forced to strike up a conversation with a simulated loved one, they have a chance to do so only if they have decided for themselves that it is a good idea for them.

In addition to the set of objections related to coercion, there are objections concerning the autonomy of the people being simulated. If it’s possible to harm the dead, then in some cases that may be what’s going on here. We don’t know what the chatbot is going to say, and it may be difficult for the person interacting with the bot to maintain the distinction between the bot and the real person they’ve lost. The bot may take on commitments or express values that the living person never had. The same principle is at play when it comes to using artificial intelligence to create versions of actors to play roles. The real person may never have consented to say or do the things that the manufactured version of them says or does. Presumably, the deceased person, while living, had a set of desires related to their legacy and the ways in which they wanted other people to think of them. We can’t control what’s in the heads of others, but perhaps our memories should not be tarnished nor our posthumous desires frustrated by people looking to resurrect our psychologies for some quick cash.

In response, some might argue that dead people can’t be harmed. As Epicurus said, “When we exist, death is not; and when death exists, we are not. All sensation and consciousness ends with death and therefore in death there is neither pleasure nor pain.” There may be some living people who are disturbed by what the bot is doing, but that harm doesn’t befall the dead person — the dead person no longer exists. It’s important to respect autonomy, but such respect is only possible for people who are capable of exercising it, and dead people can’t.

Another criticism of the use of chat-bots is that it makes it more difficult for people to arrive at some form of closure. Instead, they are prolonging the experience of having the deceased with them indefinitely. Feeling grief in a healthy way involves the recognition that the loved one in question is really gone.

In response, some might argue that everyone feels grief differently and that there is no single healthy way to experience it. For some people, it might help to use a chat-bot to say goodbye, to express love to a realistic copy of their loved one, or to unburden themselves by sharing some other sentiment that they always needed to let out but never got the chance.

Other worries about chatbot technology are not unique to bots that simulate the responses of people who have passed on. Instead, the concern is about the role that technology, and artificial intelligence in particular, should be playing in human lives. Some people, will, no doubt, opt to continue to engage in a relationship with the chat-bot. This motivates the question: can we flourish as human beings if we trade in our interpersonal relationships with other sentient beings for relationships with realistic, but nevertheless non-sentient artificial intelligence? Human beings help one another achieve the virtues that come along with friendship, the parent-child relationship, mentorship, and romantic love (to name just a few). It may be the case that developing interpersonal virtues involves responding to the autonomy and vulnerability of creatures with thoughts and feelings who can share in the familiar sentiments that make it beautiful to be alive.

Care ethicists offer the insight that when we enter into relationships, we take on role-based obligations that require care. Care can only take place when the parties to the relationship are capable of caring. In recent years we have experimented with robotic health care providers, robotic sex workers, and robotic priests. Critics of this kind of technological encroachment wonder whether such functions ought to be replaced by uncaring robots. Living a human life requires give and take, expressing and responding to need. This is a dynamic that is not fully present when these roles are filled by robots.

Some may respond that we have yet to imagine the range of possibilities that relationships with artificial intelligence may provide. In an ideal world, everyone has loving, caring companions and people help one another live healthy, flourishing lives. In the world in which we live, however, some people are desperately lonely. Such people benefit from affection behavior, even if the affection is not coming from a sentient creature. For such people, it would be better to have lengthy conversations with a realistic chat-bot than to have no conversations at all.

What’s more, our response to affection between human beings and artificial intelligence may say more about our biases against the unfamiliar than it does against the permissibility of these kinds of interactions. Our experiences with the world up to this point have motivated reflection on the kinds of experiences that are virtuous, valuable, and meaningful. Doing so has necessitated a rejection of certain myopic ways of viewing the boundaries of meaningful experience. We may be at the start of a riveting new chapter on the forms of possible engagement between carbon and silicon. For all we know, these interactions may be great additions to the narrative.

July 16, 2021December 14, 2022

The Virtuous Life and the Certainty of Death

painting of sailboat at sea with darkening clouds

In the winter of 2019-2020, people in the United States and around the world watched the events unfolding in Wuhan, and, later, across China more broadly, with disbelief. News coverage showed hauntingly empty streets occasionally populated by isolated figures wearing hazmat suits and facemasks. The mystery illness unfolding there was horrifying, but it seemed to many of us to be a distant threat, something that could affect others, but not us, not here.

The human tendency to think of illness and death as misfortunes that happen only to other people is a form of bad faith that is discussed at length in existential literature.

Tolstoy explores these themes in The Death of Ivan Ilyich. The titular character suffers a minor accident which leads to his unexpected and untimely demise. He discovers with horror that he must die alone — no one around him is having his set of experiences, so no one can empathize with what he is going through. His friends and family can’t relate because they live their lives in denial of the possibility of their own respective deaths. Tolstoy describes the reaction of one of Ilych’s friends and colleagues on the occasion of his funeral,

“Three days of frightful suffering and then death! Why, that might suddenly, at any time, happen to me,” he thought, and for a moment he felt terrified. But—he did not himself know how—the customary reflection at once occurred to him that this had happened to Ivan Ilyich and not to him, and that it should not and could not happen to him, and that to think it could would be yielding to depression which he ought not to do…After which reflection Peter Ivanovich felt reassured, and began to ask with interest about the details of Ivan Ilych’s death, as though death was an accident natural to Ivan Ilyich but certainly not to himself.

There is something relatable about Ivanovich’s response to his friend’s death, but when Tolstoy presents it to us in the third-person we can’t help but to recognize the absurdity of it. Of course death will come for Ivanovich — as it will for us all. Denial doesn’t change anything. Yet, denial is a common response when death and devastation surround us.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a tragic example of this. At the time of this writing, it has killed a (conservative) estimate of over 4 million people. Despite this fact, many refuse to recognize the severity of the threat and resist safety measures and vaccination. Throughout the pandemic, news agencies have reported the stories of families who deeply regret that they did not take COVID-19 seriously, often because they contracted a debilitating case themselves, or they have lost a friend, family member, or significant other to the virus. Missouri resident David Long commented, after losing his wife to the virus, “If you love your loved ones, take care of them.”

In times like this (and in all times, really) the attitude that senseless death won’t or can’t affect you or those you love is the very thing that hastens it.

Unsurprisingly, many schools of philosophy have focused on adopting a healthy and virtuous perspective toward death. The ancient Stoics taught that we ought not to live in denial of it; living virtuously involves accepting the inevitable features of existence over which we have no control. This approach to death emphasizes coming to terms with that which we cannot change rather than denying our powerlessness.

Some schools of Buddhism offer similar guidance. Mindfulness of death (maaranasati) is an important aspect of right living. Diligent Buddhists frequently engage in the practice of focusing on the image of a corpse during meditation. Doing so reminds the practitioner of the inevitability of death, but at the same time reduces anxiety related to it through a process of familiarization and acceptance.

The senseless ways in which pandemics maim and kill threaten our sense of control over our circumstances. They reveal to us the absurdity of the human condition. This is something that many people would rather not think about, and the result is that many refuse to do so. As Camus writes in The Myth of Sisyphus,

Eluding is the invariable game. The typical act of eluding, the fatal evasion … is hope. Hope of another life one must “deserve” or trickery of those who live, not for life itself, but for some great idea that will transcend it, refute it, give it a meaning, and betray it.

Escapism has the potential to do much harm, not just to the self, but to others. When we think of death and disease as experiences that happen not to us, but only to others, we create in-groups and out-groups, as humans predictably do. When we see another living being as a member of an out-group, we have less compassion and empathy for their suffering.

We all die alone, and COVID-19 reminds us of that more starkly than other ways of dying. Often, the victims are quite literally alone when they experience their last moments. When we see suffering and death as a universal experience for sentient beings and that we are no different, the barriers that keep us from understanding one another fall away. We all are in a position to relate to the suffering and death of another regardless of the identity categories to which that other belongs.

As Camus puts it in The Plague,

One can have fellow-feelings toward people who are haunted by the idea that when they least expect it plague may lay its cold hand on their shoulders, and is, perhaps, about to do so at the very moment when one is congratulating oneself on being safe and sound.

And as his character Tarrou says of another character, Cattard, while in lockdown due to plague,

like all of us who have not yet died of plague he fully realizes that his freedom and his life may be snatched from him at any moment. But since he, personally, has learned what it is to live in a state of constant fear, he finds it normal that others should come to know this state. Or perhaps it should be put like this: fear seems to him more bearable under these conditions than it was when he had to bear its burden alone.

All of these considerations provide us with compelling reasons to think of the COVID-19 pandemic as relevant to each of us, regardless of whether we are young or old, or suffer from health ailments or are temporarily healthy. We should treat the frailty of human life as seriously in the case of others as we would want it treated in our own case.

April 12, 2021December 14, 2022

Art, Death, and Experience

In 2010, Lithuanian artist Julijonas Urbonas created a work of conceptual art that posed, and continues to pose, a fascinating challenge to contemporary notions of death. The piece is called the “Euthanasia coaster,” represented materially by a small model of a roller coaster made of thin wire. Described on Urbonas’ website as “a hypothetic death machine in the form of a roller coaster,” the machine is “engineered to humanely–with elegance and euphoria–take the life of a human being,” or more accurately, twenty-four human beings at once.

Urbonas is right, the model does have an austere elegance. The tracks rise in a narrow but staggeringly tall parabola, then plummet back to the ground, finishing in a series of loops that grow smaller and smaller until the ride is over. The loops generate enough centrifugal force that the passengers are deprived of oxygen quickly enough to die before the car reaches the end of the line.

When we talk about medically-assisted suicide, we usually ask whether or not the terminally ill have the right to humane euthanasia. A far less common but no less interesting question, which takes for granted the notion that those who wish to die have a legal right to do so, is whether or not euthanasia in a clinical hospital setting is the best way to aid the suffering. Has the ritualistic and cultural significance of death been eroded by our efforts to be humane, and are there ways to restore that lost meaning to our final moments?

It’s easy to be put off by the idea of death by roller coaster. Urbonas was partly inspired by his stint working at a theme park, but to many, hopping on a coaster may seem a flippant or macabre way to spend one’s last moments. However, the roller coaster is a very polyvalent symbol, especially in relation to death. It isn’t a space for quiet reflection, like a hospice, but a visceral experience of power and speed. It’s also a communal experience, which reminds us of how often death is a solitary experience in the modern world. There also may be meaning in the form of the coaster; tall, sloping coasters often resemble mountains, which have long been associated with divinity (Mount Olympus is just one example), and the idea of ascending to one’s death has parallels in many world religions.

Perhaps most importantly, the ride creates an increased sense of bodily awareness in the participant, just as the body is about to die. You give up bodily control to the track, but you get something in return: terror and ecstasy. These words, terror and ecstasy, are often linked in the ancient Greek tradition of death. Through this piece, Urbanos seems to suggest that we have lost touch with that older tradition, and exchanged the vitality of full acceptance for sterility.

The idea of death as a machine is bound to make us flinch. The guillotine, which has inspired terror and revulsion for centuries, is a machine of death inspired by Enlightenment values. It kills with cold, rational efficiency, and in many ways, Urbanos’ coaster is the anti-guillotine. His work is about joy rather than rationality, and though it may involve a kind of spectacle, like the guillotine, it’s less about efficiency and more about the bodily experience of the deceased. His work also reminds us that we live in a culture where death and mourning are relegated to private spaces. Roller coasters are hulking monuments that dominate the landscape, and their silhouette of sprawling rib-like tracks are unmistakable from a distance. Death is not hidden in Urbanos’ work, but forced out into the open.

It is, of course, just a conceptual experiment. Urbanos has no plans to actually build his roller coaster of death, as the legality (and ethics) of the machine would be highly questionable. But his art still raises many questions about how we experience death, and whether or not we should expand the options available to those suffering from terminal illnesses. The solution to their plight isn’t to build a macabre theme park, but to question our understanding of death as unspeakable and unthinkable.

April 7, 2021December 14, 2022

The Ethics of Dark Tourism

In February 2020, Netflix released a four-part docuseries called Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel. The series focuses on the death of Elisa Lam, but along the way it tells the story of the building. It was built in the 1920s with all of the glamour that is often associated with hotels of that age in that area. The hotel struggled during the Great Depression. It is located on skid row, and eventually it became a common resting point for the city’s poor. The Cecil is infamous for the deaths that have taken place there and for the fact that two famous serial killers, Richard Ramirez and Jack Unterweger, stayed there during the period in which they were actively killing people. A season of American Horror Story was based on the folklore that surrounds the Cecil Hotel.

Elisa Lam was a 21-year-old student at the University of British Columbia. She vacationed in California in the early months of 2013. Several days into her trip, she checked into the Cecil Hotel. It was frequented by international travelers because it was inexpensive and functioned as a hostel. These travelers were also largely unfamiliar with the hotel’s past and as a result they were undeterred by it. During her stay, Lam initially shared a room with some of the hotel’s other international travelers. She was moved to her own room when those travelers complained about her erratic behavior. Shortly thereafter, Lam disappeared. The last known images of her are captured on a hotel security tape. Her behavior is unusual. The police released the tape and the video went viral, causing internet sleuths across the globe to speculate about what happened to her. At times, she appears to be checking for something or someone outside the elevator door. She moves her hands in unusual ways and presses the buttons to all of the floors. Finally, she walks awkwardly out of the elevator and down the hall. She was found weeks later, naked, dead in the water tower on top of the hotel which a maintenance worker checked after guests complained that their shower and tap water was coming out black.

After the series came out, there was renewed interest in staying at the Cecil Hotel. Crime aficionados and ghost hunters were eager to spend the night — preferably in a room in which Ramirez or Lam once stayed. The hotel has been closed for renovations since 2017, but this has not stopped “dark tourists” and social media personalities from sneaking in to take pictures and footage.

Many people would rather visit the home of a serial killer, the location where a famous murder happened, or the site of a natural disaster than a sandy beach or a world heritage site. Dark tourism isn’t new. People often feel powerful connections to some of the world’s most tragic events. This connection is so strong that thousands of people visit Gettysburg every year, not simply to observe a historical site or to pay their respects to the many human beings that died in that battle, but to actually take on roles and act out what occurred there.

People will engage in dark tourism even when there is risk that doing so might be dangerous to their health and safety. For instance, for years tourists have been visiting Chernobyl, the location of the nuclear disaster that led to agonizing death and long-term illness for so many people in the 1980s and beyond. The risk of exposure to radiation has been no source of concern for many tourists who just want to be close to tragedy.

One way of viewing this kind of behavior is as just one form that an interest in history can take, and there is no reason to be critical of anyone for taking an interest in history. Millions of people visit the Tower of London every year. The fact that terrible things happened there is part of what makes it an interesting place. Most cities and the buildings in them have a rich variety of stories to tell. The ability these destinations have to call up our sense of empathy and shared humanity is part of what makes many of us interested in traveling in the first place.

On the other hand, intentions may turn out to matter quite a bit. If a person gets a charge from visiting the home of a serial killer and their preferred vacation destination is a tour of death, that person may have some soul searching to do.

It also might matter whether it is “too soon” to treat the location in question as a place where tourists can get cheap thrills. Since the Battle of Bosworth happened in 1485, it may be the case that no one can be thought of as particularly perverse for experiencing excitement when visiting the location where it took place. If the event occurred in living memory, it may be wise to be more circumspect. There are actual living, breathing human beings that might be hurt by the decision to treat the location of their personal tragedy as if it is a great spot to grab an Instagram photo on spring break. In the case of Elisa Lam, there is good reason to believe that mental illness played a role in her death. When people visit the Cecil Hotel hoping to contact the ghost they believe killed her, it minimizes the real tragedy of what likely actually happened.

That said, it may be that some events were so inhumane that it is never appropriate to visit sites associated with them for kicks. For instance, over the years there has been much discussion about what to do with Hitler’s childhood home. There was discussion for a while of turning it into a museum dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Nazis. In recent years, Austria has decided to tear it down to reduce or eliminate the attraction the location has for neo-Nazis.

In Salem, Massachusetts, visitors can buy a ticket to the Salem Witch Dungeon, which is ostensibly a site to educate tourists about what the trials, imprisonment, and execution of people accused of witchcraft would have been like for those who experienced them. Unfortunately, at many turns the Witch Dungeon is more like a modern haunted house than it is a respectful educational opportunity. When people wearing spooky makeup are hired to generate screams, it can be easy to forget that everyone who was accused of witchcraft was innocent of that charge and that the events that are being reenacted in the dungeons are based on the last torturous days of the innocent.

Aristotle thought that part of what it is to be a virtuous person is to habituate the dispositions to have apt feelings and reactions to one’s circumstances. This requires practice and keeping a close eye on others who have well-developed characters. Having the right response to a location associated with tragedy may not be a matter of avoiding these locations, but, instead, visiting with the appropriate amount of respect and understanding.

February 6, 2020December 14, 2022

The Good Place and the Good Life

Warning: This article contains spoilers.

Students all across the country have recently found new motivation to be interested in philosophy—NBC’s The Good Place, which aired its final episode on January 30, 2020. The series explicitly engages with philosophy through the storyline of one of the central characters—Chidi Adagonye—who was, in life, a philosophy professor. In the afterlife, Chidi teaches ethics to a group of wayward souls who, as the show progresses, become the best of friends. Chidi provides a useful narrative vehicle for direct discussion of philosophy. Even in the absence of Chidi’s philosophical explanations, the show is inherently philosophical. It demonstrates that, rather than being an exclusively scholarly pursuit, living philosophically is part of what it is to be a flourishing person.

On the face of it, the series appears to be about death. It begins with Eleanor Shellstrop’s arrival in what appears to be heaven, where she meets an angelic architect named Michael. As the show progresses, however, it becomes clear that, far from being about death, the series is actually about what it is to live a good life. Throughout, the audience is left wondering “what makes heaven heavenly?” And, by contrast, what would make hell torture? Fundamentally these are questions about what kinds of things are worth avoiding and what kinds of things are really worth pursuing.

By the end of the first season, the cast of characters come to the realization that they were not, as they had been told, in “The Good Place.” Instead, they are in “The Bad Place.” Michael is not an angelic architect after all, but a fire demon conducting an experiment. Instead of setting people on fire or feeding them to swarms of insects, Michael is attempting to torture departed humans using the particulars of individual personalities and exposure to other people.

One of the reasons that this storyline is surprising is that the people involved seem to be pretty good people. They certainly have their faults, but none of them are the kind of person that we might think deserves to be tortured for all eternity. As David Lewis argues in his paper, Divine Evil, infinite punishment may be unjust for any finite crime. Even so, if we picture anyone in hell, it tends to be people like Hitler rather than childlike petty criminals like Jason Mendoza. At this stage, the cast of friends is put in a position to analyze their own behavior. They become reflective agents, considering their virtues and vices. They learn lessons in Aristotelian moderation. Eleanor learns to be less selfish, Chidi less indecisive, and Tahani less concerned with what other people think of her. Interestingly, Jason’s personality is such that he might be largely forgiven for his bad actions in life, so it seems somewhat unfair that he’s in The Bad Place at all.

The group also learns that it is not possible to live a flawless human life. As this storyline unfolds, the series gently ribs Peter Singer and the Effective Altruism movement (which turns out to be for the best—Kristen Bell contributed her voice to the free audiobook of Singer’s The Life You Can Save, which you can find here). A character based roughly on Singer (or at least his philosophy), Doug Forcett, is celebrated in the afterlife because, during a drug-induced hallucination, he guessed exactly what the structure of life after death is like. To do well on the cosmic scorecard, he spends his entire life avoiding doing any harm and actively trying to do the most good he can do. Nevertheless, in our global culture in which every consumer choice we make has implications far beyond what we can see, Forcett’s scorecard is still insufficient to get into The Good Place. The lesson we are left with is that we should do the most good we can do, in full recognition that we’ll never be perfect. We can live meaningful lives by actively doing as much good for others as we reasonably can.

In many ways, the series is about living a meaningful life by living a morally good life. Some people understand life’s meaning by appeal to a grand plan set into motion before any being lived on earth, perhaps by a divine authority like God. One interesting feature about The Good Place is that, despite the fact that it is, on its face, a show about the afterlife, it remains remarkably agnostic about religion. We encounter angels and demons, but not God or the Devil. The Good Place is a show about persons; it is a story about moral beings that make choices, act for reasons, have weaknesses, grow, and change. Like Sartre’s No Exit, the afterlife is about interactions with other persons. The Good Place does not conclude, like Sartre, that “hell is other people.” Instead, the message is quite the opposite: it is our interactions with other people that allow us to grow into the best possible versions of ourselves.

The penultimate episode of the show includes a surprising twist. The group of friends, including Janet and Michael, all make it to The Good Place. Chidi looks forward to meeting the philosophers he is sure he will find there, but he learns that, for various reasons, many of his favorite historical thinkers didn’t make it. He does find Hypatia, an Ancient Greek female philosopher played by Lisa Kudrow. The group of friends learns from Hypatia that heaven is not all that it’s cracked up to be. Infinite pleasure for eternity is boring, and it changes one’s mind to mush. As the new architect of The Good Place, Michael comes up with a solution—when they’re satisfied with the experiences they’ve had, a person can walk through a door and fade into non-existence. The idea that conscious experience can end lends meaning to existence.

This storyline tracks a classic debate in philosophy: what makes death bad for the person who dies? On the other side of the coin, would immortality be desirable? In philosopher Bernard William’s famous paper, The Makropolus Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality, he argues that death is bad for the person that no longer exists because their desires go unsatisfied. The things they wanted in life can no longer be achieved. That said, according to Williams, immortality is not desirable. If we lived forever, we would either change so much that our future identity would be, from our current perspective, unrecognizable to us, or we would become bored.

The final episode of The Good Place takes some lessons from Williams. Most people desire existence to come to an end. The real Good Place is a place where you can try everything and perfect every skill. Unlike in William’s paper, the desire to bring an end to existence is not motivated by boredom—not exactly. Final departure from The Good Place comes with a sense of peaceful satisfaction. Chidi describes a metaphor from Buddhist philosophy—the person is a wave returning to the ocean.

Though generally held in very high esteem, some viewers struggled with what they thought of as a dark ending to an otherwise light-hearted comedy. After all, most of the main characters cease to exist! In many ways, there is no more fitting way for the show to end. The show was never about heaven or hell; it was always about living a good life with the help of good friends. Crucially, it was about living a philosophical life, which is incomplete without coming to terms with death.

November 18, 2019December 14, 2022

Is Death Forever?: The Case of Benjamin Schreiber

photograph of defibrillator practice on a CPR dummy

On Wednesday, November 6th, an appeals court confirmed a lower court’s ruling that a death row inmate had not fulfilled his sentence when his heart stopped in a medical procedure in 2015. The inmate, Benjamin Schreiber, was convicted of murder in 1996 and sentenced to life without parole. Shreiber had argued that his sentence ended when his heart stopped during a medical emergency four years ago, even though he was later revived.

There are cases that blur the line between life and death, either because it is difficult to determine death or define it. In 2018, a woman in South Africa woke up in a morgue after mistakenly being declared dead. Paramedics at the scene found no heartbeat and detected no signs of life, but were later flummoxed when they spotted the patient breathing.

Cases like this are obviously uncommon, but they do happen. At least 38 times since 1982, patients have been recorded as experiencing “Lazarus Syndrome,” or autoresuscitation, after failed cardiopulmonary resuscitation. In such cases, medical intervention failed to restart a patient’s heart but nevertheless the patient’s heart restarted.

Definitions of medical death have changed with advances in possible medical interventions. Globally and historically, people have looked to circulation and breathing as standards for life and death. Schreiber’s standard here, therefore, the lack of a pulse, or circulation of blood throughout the body, is not without precedent. These standards became complicated the more we learned about the brain and its connection to our lives as individuals.

In 1968 the medical community came together to try to address definitions of death as organ transplants became more successful. Removing organs from patients who still had circulating and oxygenating blood increased the probability of successful transplant, but insured the death of the donor patient. According to our legal and moral standards of wrongful harm, there are reasons to only perform such procedures on patients formally pronounced dead. New understandings of the importance of brain functioning for identity and personhood provided useful distinctions to inform this pronouncement.

We know now that blood can continue to circulate without there being any hope of meaningful interaction with the world again on the patient’s part. Neuroscience, meanwhile, shows that certain brain function is necessary for personhood and when particular lacks of brain function occur, doctors can determine that death in the sense of loss of personhood has also occurred. Thus patients can be pronounced dead while their organs are still viable for transplant.

When deciding whether or not to harvest organs, the permanence or irreversibility of the state of the patient is a crucial consideration. As philosophers, we can wonder whether the finality of death is a crucial aspect of the concept for other applications, and potential applications in the future.

Using this ambiguity behind our evolving definition of “death,” Schrieber claimed to have served his time. He accepted his initial sentence of life without parole, but would not accept “life plus one day” (Schreiber claims to have been revived from septic shock against his wishes). The court found Schreiber’s claim original, but refused to side with him on the grounds that he was “unlikely” to be dead, having represented himself legally and signed his own documents.

While definitions of death today include some criterion of finality (such as the cessation of life or the permanent loss of a human’s personhood), the discussion in this case leaves open an interesting possibility: If Schreiber is present to represent his interests in court, then could he nevertheless have been dead, thus fulfilling his sentence? In other words, is a death penalty meant to shorten someone’s life or ensure they experience death?

If we can imagine a future where someone exists after a period of cessation of life that we currently understand as death under some medical criteria, then Schreiber’s case may be a relic of our stage in medical technology (just as pronouncements of life while brains lacked functioning were relics of previous centuries’ understandings of life and death). Say technology advances to the point where we can map the complicated and dynamic connections that make you who you are. If we have the ability to produce such an intelligent mapping, then your physical body could cease to live according to our current medical definitions, but there is the possibility that we could recreate a physical foundation for the map to run so as to support your conscious existence in the world once more.

If this possibility existed, there are two important questions related to Schreiber’s case. First, would we continue to use “death” in a sufficiently close enough way so as to say that if he experienced this process, he would qualify as “dead” at one time? If so, then the legal system could declare his sentence fulfilled if they understand it in a particular way (until death), or not if they understand it differently (for all of Schreiber’s life).

Second, if we had the technology described above, would the person brought into existence with the dynamic mapping of Schreiber be Schreiber? If the original person in the original body ceased to exist, then creating a supporting body for the dynamic mapping may bring in as exact a copy as possible, but this may not count as the original Schreiber. If this is the case, then it would be wrong to apply the legal punishment to the created Schreiber.

We can have a definition of death that does not include finality. With this caveat, Schreiber’s appeal becomes more compelling if the penalty applied to him is understood as “until death.” Regardless, the case brings out how we mean punishment to apply, and raises theoretical questions about how we may apply them in the future.

October 2, 2019December 14, 2022

Are Green Burials an Ethical Good?

Roughly 7000 years ago a group of hunter-gatherers in Chile began to mummify their dead. According to Helen Thompson, the evidence suggests that this change was locally driven rather than being introduced from elsewhere. In fact, this cultural practice may have been influenced by climate change, which has spurred other past cultural developments as well. With climate change now becoming a major concern, there are those who argue we now have good ethical reasons to rethink what we should do with the dead. Several new environmentally-friendly ways of dealing with the dead have developed in recent years and this raises a moral question about what we should be doing with dead bodies.

Generally, there are two ways dead bodies are commonly dealt with; they are either buried or they are cremated. Cremation has become far more popular over the last century, and in some countries it is the far more common method. In Canada, for instance, cremation occurs roughly 65% of the time. In the United States the rate of cremation is far lower (only 47%), but this is an increase from only 25% in 1999. One of the reasons cremation is a popular method is because it is fairly cost-effective. In especially populated regions the difference between the cost of a burial and the cost of cremation can be several thousands of dollars. Cremation can also be less wasteful since it doesn’t inherently require cemeteries, headstones, or concrete burial vaults.

However, arguments have made about the moral superiority of burial over cremation. In an article published in the journal The New Bioethics, Toni C. Saad argues that cremation deprives a local community of a shared memory of those who were once apart of it and made the community what it was. He notes,

“of course, gravesite maintenance and location might become tiresome, but the continuing possibility of family memory-pilgrimage is not negligible. Additionally, since the memory of private loved ones is permanently tied to a public physical location, there remains a visual reminder to all, not merely relatives, of the significance of this person who is now dead.”

He suggests that private cremation contributes to a privatization of memory whereas a public cemetery allows us to connect to our local ancestry and allow us to better process the idea of death and mortality.

Both practices of the standard burial and cremation have become socially-engrained and there may be an argument that they are both morally important as part of our culture. However, there is a growing argument that these practices, as typically performed, are not environmentally friendly. Every year 90,000 tons of steel, 1.6 million tons of concrete, and 800,000 gallons of embalming fluid are used to bury the deceased. In addition, cemeteries take up large amounts of land and require pesticides in their upkeep. A single cremation requires two SUV tanks worth of fuel. It can also release substances like dioxin, hydrochloric acid, sulfur dioxide, and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Such practices do contribute to climate change, and if we have moral obligations to do something to reduce the threat of climate change, then we may be morally obligated to reconsider our rituals regarding death.

In the last few years several eco-friendly alternatives have been presented. For example, instead of an expensive wood casket, biodegradable caskets are now available and can ensure that bodies that decompose over time will become part of the local ecosystem. Instead of burial in a traditional cemetery, burial options are now available in more natural landscapes. Instead of a headstone, a tree may be planted over the burial site. A similar option is available for those who are cremated; ashes are placed into a biodegradable urn that contains a seed. Or, ashes can be placed underwater as part of an artificial reef.

Even the embalming process offers new possibilities. As opposed to formaldehyde, natural and essential oils may be used to preserve the body. In place of the standard cremation one alternative allows for the use of pressure and chemicals to dissolve the body. This process called alkaline hydrolysis uses 90% less energy than traditional cremation. There are new technological possibilities as well. Promession involves freeze-drying a corpse with liquid nitrogen and then breaking the body apart. Mercury fillings and surgical implants are removed and the powdered remains are buried in a shallow grave. This allows water and oxygen to mix with the remains and turn them into compost.

The fact that there are these alternatives and the fact that they may be more environmentally friendly does not necessarily mean that they are more ethical. However, given the climate crisis, there may be ethical reasons to adopt such new practices. In an article for the Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, Chen Zeng, William Sweet, and Qian Cheng argue that green burials reflect a number of ecological values including a harmonious relationship with nature, recognizing the worth of nature, the rights of all living things, and the limits of resources. They note,

“Green burial offers a way to minimize ecological pollution during the process of funeral, interment, and related religious rituals; it offers a means by which the affected environment can return to its prior, ‘natural’ state in a short time. Thus, the practice of green burial manifests a positive environmental and ethical attitude towards life.”

This only raises more questions. If it is more ethical to adopt eco-friendly practices than traditional practices for dealing with the dead, should we carefully study which practice is the least harmful the planet, and if so, are we then morally obliged to adopt that practice uniformly? As I began, climate change has affected the way humans deal with death. But how exactly should climate change today affect how we deal with death? Are we obliged to change our usual practices regarding death and would be it be morally wrong not to?

May 1, 2019December 14, 2022

Death and Consciousness: The Prospect of Brain Resuscitation

Recently published by Nature, Yale School of Medicine completed a study where they were able to revive disembodied pig brains several hours after death. In their study, they looked at 32 brains from pigs that had been dead for four hours. The brains were separated from the body and hooked up to a machine called BrainEx. On this system oxygen, nutrients, and protective chemicals were pumped into the organ for approx 6 hours. The study found that the brain tissue was largely intact and functional compared to those that did not receive the BrainEx treatment. The cells were alive, able to take up oxygen and produce carbon dioxide, but there was no further brain communication between the cells.

These findings are considered a breakthrough for the scientific community because they challenge the previously believed fact that brain cells are irreversibly damaged after a few minutes from being oxygen deprived. In general, when an organ is oxygen deprived for about 15 minutes, it should die. Nenad Stestan, a Yale neuroscientist explained during a press conference, “Previously, findings have shown that in basically minutes, the cells undergo a process of cell death. What we’re showing is that the process of cell death is a gradual step-wise process, and some of those processes can either be postponed, preserved, or even reversed.” BrainEx, a tool developed to study the living brain beyond the confines of the body, has allowed researchers a new way to look at brain cells. Previously, studies were limited to slices of the brain from dead animals, which explains our lack of knowledge on the complex organ. We now have the means to study the interrelational association between the many parts of the brain.

Bioethicists have been equally excited and alarmed with the new means of brain research. This kind of study in is uncharted territory. Technically, because the brain is taken from a dead animal, it doesn’t fall into the category of animal research. Animal research is protected through the ethical guidelines that animals should not be subjected to unnecessary harm. However, do we know enough about consciousness to truly know if the pig is experiencing harm in the process? If the pig were to feel harm during this experiment, would it make it an unethical practice?

The scientists took a measure of steps to be proactive in protecting the possibility of the pig gaining consciousness. A series of chemicals were pumped into the brain by the BrainEx machine, one of which was supposed to stop any possibility of neural interaction that would lead to consciousness. An electroencephalogram (EEG) monitored the brains throughout the whole study. Researchers said that if they had detected any levels of consciousness, they would shut down the experiment immediately. In addition, they were standing by with anesthesia to administer. Luckily, the only findings were that cell metabolism could be recovered and no consciousness was detected. With little well known about consciousness in general, can we even be sure that an EEG should be the only indicator of consciousness or perception? It is still unknown how many neurons are needed to be activated for the pig to have any feelings at all.

Weighing the cost of the unknown harm with the benefits is one step for researchers to consider with this project. Ultimately, we will gain expertise of the interactions of a mammalian brain. Understanding the internetwork of relations between the many parts of the brain can point scientists towards new cures for dementia, brain diseases, or injuries that were once considered irreversible. Future studies can include testing drugs, studying neural pathways, and furthering general knowledge of neuroanatomy.

What cannot be ignored with these studies are the implications for long-term changes in the medical community. These findings could challenge the definition of death as it is right now. According to MedicineNet, the current law standard for death is the following: “An individual who has sustained either (1) irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions, or (2) irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem is dead. A determination of death must be made in accordance with accepted medical standards.” This definition was approved and accepted by the American Medical Association in 1980. With the findings from the Yale study, it challenges the notion that all brain cells are irreversibly damaged. Could doctors continue with this assessment if these studies lead to a means to reverse the damage, and if so, how do we now declare when someone has died?

Another worry is related to organ transplant. According to the United Network for Organ Sharing, someone is added to the transplant waiting list every 10 minutes. In the US, 18 people die every day while waiting for a transplant. Described in a commentary by Stuart Youngner and Insoo Hun, is the worry that doctors would feel reluctant to harvest organs for donation. If people could become candidates for brain resuscitation rather than donation, when, where, and for who do doctors make this decision? There is already the struggle for when do doctors switch from saving someone’s life to saving their organs for the benefit of another person. The answers only come down to moral decision making and the possibility of brain resuscitation further complicates the answers.

The continuation of these studies have the potential to make a huge difference for our expertise of neural anatomy and the process of cell death. For now, researchers have weighed the perceived benefits to outweigh the possibility of harm to the research subject. With the means to learn more about the definitions of consciousness and death, it is necessary for after each study to reevaluate the process of BrainEx in order to continue the study in an ethical manner.

April 23, 2019December 14, 2022

From Picking Fruit to Buying It: The Health of California Farmworkers

Photograph of 5 figures in a field, wearing hats and bending over to reach for fruit

Picking fruit in temperatures reaching upwards of 100 degrees Fahrenheit is a reality for California farmworkers. However, most Americans scarcely think about the implications of this hard labor as they purchase fruit on their weekly grocery trip. Raising awareness about the degree of heat exposure farmworkers experience is imperative, particularly when considering how climate change will raise average temperatures and contribute to work conditions with lasting health consequences for these individuals. Ensuring accessible healthcare, strictly-enforced safety policies, and proper compensation are steps which need to be implemented in order to address this growing crisis.

The New York Times article titled “Long Days in the Fields, Without Earning Overtime” by Joseph Berger outlines the unequal pay characteristic of these workers livelihoods, which can be attributed to a power dynamic created due to the workers immigrant identities. Berger interviews one worker who discusses the long work days and lack of compensation: “Sometimes we don’t get a day of rest…This week my boss told me I don’t have a day off.” The long hours are expected and no overtime pay is provided — in fact, eight dollars an hour is all these workers make.

Stories like this one describing grueling work schedules with minimal payoff are numerous. Beyond long days in the sun, workers describe the enormous strain this fruit picking job has had on their health and a lack of medical attention. An article published in High Country News introduces Maria Isabel Vásquez Jiménez, a nineteen-year-old who was working in grapevine fields in 95 degree weather. After a few hours she collapsed next to her fiancé. The water cooler was a ten-minute walk from their location and farm management did not even immediately take her to the hospital. Maria went into a coma and died two days later. The neglect of farmworkers has become an issue so grave that individuals are risking their lives to work these jobs. Arturo Rodríguez president of the United Farmworkers Union made this statement after Vásquez Jiménez’s death: “The reality is that the machinery of growers is taken better care of than the lives of farmworkers. You wouldn’t take a machine out into the field without putting oil in it. How can you take the life of a person and not even give them the basics?”

Although California’s labor policies are stricter than many other states, significant issues remain with the enforcement of their laws and consideration of heightening temperatures due to climate change need to be addressed. Research provided by the University of California projects that “The average annual temperature in the Central Valley region is projected to increase by 5 to 6 degrees during this century… heat waves will be longer, more intense, and more frequent than they were a decade or two ago.” As we move towards a future where farm working will become even more dangerous, it is imperative that states introduce stricter regulations which prioritize safety over productivity.

Understanding that many of these workers lack access to healthcare coverage due to undocumented status is an important facet of this crisis. Investigative research into the health of Californian farmworkers by anthropologist Sarah Horton exposed these injustices by following individuals’ stories over many years, and the struggles associated with seeking out help when working with undocumented status. For example, Silvestra, a corn harvester who had been working in the fields since he was 16, began experiencing extreme nausea and vomiting during work. Silvestre eventually took a day off of work to go to a doctor who told him to return in order to undergo some tests to figure out a cause to the nausea. Horton writes, “Undocumented and unable to pay for the tests, Silvestre worked for an additional month and a half, retching each morning.” The danger of not being able to afford immediate medical attention has put undocumented farmworkers in deadly and entirely preventable situations. The primary assistance granted to these workers relies on a proof of disability as Horton explains, “The government’s disproportionate weighting of applicants’ age in determining eligibility automatically disqualifies many middle-aged farmworkers with severe chronic disease. The price of such delayed assistance is seen in aggravated chronic illness and a diminished quality of life.” Overall, the lack of preventative medical attention available for working age undocumented farmworkers contributes to a larger crisis concerned with dangerous heart and kidney complications, often resulting in permanent disability or even death.

Overall, examining the source of the fruit in our grocery stores unveils an important ethical dilemma concerning which individuals are often forgotten in the fight for labor rights. Discussing pay reform in addition to national discussions about providing preventative healthcare to these workers in order to reduce the number of deaths from repeated heat exposure is a critical issue.

March 13, 2019December 14, 2022

Our Bodies, Ourselves? Death, Values, and the Material We Leave Behind

Photograph of a replica of Lincoln's coffin. It is black and draped with white cloth and has a few flowers on top

Death of those we care about is deeply distressing for many reasons, one of which is that the empty space the person once occupied is often soon filled with dangling, unanswered questions. Many of these questions will likely never be answered, but some of the most captivating might be addressed by analysis of the biological material the person left behind. What considerations ought to guide our behavior when it comes to use of a person’s remaining biological material?

A fairly straightforward answer would be to say that there are no constraints that should govern our behavior. The motivating philosophy behind this view might be that when a person is dead, they can no longer be harmed, because that person no longer exists. If we find this argument compelling, we might have to rethink our attitudes about things like respect for a person’s wishes after death and about the moral permissibility of necrophilia. After all, if bodies are just things, we can’t do them any moral harm. Even the most expansive theories about the kinds of things that are deserving of moral consideration maintain that, for an entity to be morally considerable, it must have interests—there must be ways in which things can go better or worse for it. Dead bodies don’t meet this condition. In this sense, a dead body is more like a stone or a glass of water.

Our social policies suggest that plenty of people disagree with this position. Necrophilia is a crime, and we have many laws that govern the use of a person’s biological material after death. Many of these policies may be justified, but many may also not be.

One domain in which we seem to feel fairly comfortable treating a dead body as a thing is when we conduct autopsies on the victims of crime. One of the motivating considerations behind performing an autopsy is the idea that the body left behind potentially has many important secrets to reveal. Some of these secrets might turn out to be embarrassing or harmful to the ongoing reputation of the victim or might be painful to the loved ones left behind. Nevertheless, it seems that we have concluded, rightly or wrongly, that there are two related values that are more important in these kinds of cases than harm to the deceased—protection of the community against potential future crimes, and retributive justice.

On some occasions, bodies are exhumed so that genetic relationships can be evaluated. If they are old enough, some cases intuitively fall under the heading of forensic archaeology. When a body dating back to the 15th century was found under a Leicester car park in 2013, genetic tests were done to confirm that it was indeed the body of notorious British monarch Richard III. Officials have continued to take a different position when it comes to King Richard’s two young nephews. The bodies of two young boys were found in a wooden box buried on the grounds of the Tower of London in 1647. They were buried in Westminster Abbey, but their identity has never been confirmed. The concerns protecting the princes seem to be more pragmatic than moral in motivation. What should be done with the remains if the test reveals that they are not the princes? What might the tests tell us about lines of succession? In any event, it is interesting that time seems to make some difference in our perception of the moral landscape of these kinds of cases. Many seem to view disruption of a long dead body as morally neutral, while they view the exhumation of the more recently dead as disrespectful. Perhaps this is simply an irrational bias. On the other hand, it may well be that, at some point, the value of the historical knowledge we obtain from these kinds of cases outweighs the more limited privacy interests of the long dead.

Famous exhumations to test for parentage have been done in more recent cases as well. Famously, in 2017, the body of Salvador Dali was exhumed to determine if he was the father of Spanish astrologer and tarot card reader Pilar Abel. The result? Not the father. Similarly, chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer was exhumed in 2010 to determine whether he was the father of a then nine-year–old girl. The result? Not the father. There is an element of historical value involved in these cases as well—after all, both Dali and Fischer were famous individuals. There may be some value in knowing more of their stories. In addition to these considerations, one might think that children have the right to know who their parents are. For many people, knowledge about their parents is important on an existential level—it tells them something about who they are. One might also think that a person’s child has certain rights to inheritance that, at least at first glance, should be respected. On the other hand, anyone can make a paternity claim. Under what conditions would such a claim justify the exhumation of a body?

Moral dilemmas of this type don’t always involve exhumations. Sometimes they involve more accessible biological material—and sometimes that material is used for perhaps even more controversial purposes. Well-known utilitarian Jeremy Bentham left behind unusual instructions for his body. He wanted it preserved as an “auto-icon” and kept on display at the University College, London.His wishes were honored. Recently, scientists have collected biological samples that they intend to use to determine whether Bentham was autistic. Similarly, sheets on the bedding on which Abraham Lincoln died are being tested to determine whether the beloved president had a genetic condition known as Marfan Syndrome—a condition characterized in part by towering height and long limbs. These cases motivate important moral questions. Is it morally defensible to reveal a person’s personal medical information after they have died? Does revealing such information serve to further stigmatize and sensationalize medical conditions, or should we understand these revelations as normalizing and empowering? Should these decisions be governed by respect for the wishes of the dead, or should they be made in a way that promotes the best interests of the living?

October 22, 2018December 14, 2022

Decisions for the Dead: The Moral Dimensions of Body Disposal

Photograph of a graveyard overlooking hills and plains

When Monique Martinot died of ovarian cancer in 1984, her husband, hoping to achieve immortality for his wife through cryonics, placed her body in an industrial size freezer in his chateau in the town of Neuil–sur–Layon, France. When the husband, Raymond Martinot, realized, years later at the age of eighty, that his own death was imminent, he conveyed to his son that he would like to be frozen alongside his wife until such time that their bodies could be revived. French courts objected to this method of body disposal and demanded that both bodies be removed from the freezer and disposed of in a method consistent with national law—the bodies must be buried, cremated, or donated to science.

Dead bodies are objects, but they are objects of a fascinating and unique kind—they were once possessed by autonomous beings. Autonomous beings, according to every known moral theory, are deserving of moral consideration. Once the being has left its erstwhile vessel, does some lingering moral status remain? Once a person is dead, what, if any, relationship exists between that person’s autonomous choices and the body-object they have left behind? Is there a moral obligation to honor the wishes of the deceased with respect to what should be done with their body after death? Should Monique and Raymond have been allowed to rest unmolested in their modest freezer without intrusion by the government?

Under certain conditions, dead bodies can be a threat to public health. If the deceased died of an infectious disease, the infectious agents may still be active and can be transmitted after death. Because of the threat posed to the public in these kinds of cases, some control by the government over the disposal of dead bodies may be morally justified. In at least some kinds of cases, then, if an individual has a right to determine what happens to their own body after death, the right of the government to protect the public against threats to general health trumps this right. It’s worth noting, however, that the commonly held belief that all dead bodies pose public health threats is a myth. Belief in the myth has carried with it some fairly tragic consequences. In the aftermath of natural disasters and other mass tragedies, unidentified bodies are often buried in mass graves to get rid of the “threat to public health.” As a result, many individuals never learn what happened to their deceased loved ones. It seems, then, that the government’s right to intervene may rest on the contingent fact that some bodies spread disease. In a possible world in which infectious disease is eradicated, we’d need to revisit the question of whether the government can tell its citizens that they can’t keep their dead loved ones in freezers in the basement or under the rose garden in the backyard.

If the government’s right to decide what can be done with a body after death can supersede the wishes of the deceased individual in some cases, might there be others in which governmental intervention is justified? Consider the case of organ donation. There are currently 114,555 individuals on the waiting list for donated organs in the United States. Twenty people die every day waiting for a donated organ. Fifty-four percent of people in The United States are registered organ donors. This might sound like a pretty impressive number, but it is dwarfed by the percentage of the population that donates organs in countries that have an “opt out” process for organ donation. In these countries, everyone is automatically put on the organ donor list, with the option of “opting out” if they decide they’d rather not donate. In those countries, 90% of the population is on the list of registered donors. Only 3 in 1,000 people die in a way that allows for organs to be successfully transplanted, so the more donors the better the odds that lives will be saved. If the government is justified in determining what happens to dead bodies when their goal is to promote public health, would they be justified in enacting “opt out” policies? After all, the need for donated organs is also a public health issue. It’s far from clear that the “rights” of the being that once occupied the dead body are a more pressing concern than the lives lost when the organs are wasted.

There are other reasons for the government to step in when it comes to disposal of the dead. The practice of burying the dead in caskets is terrible for the environment. Many unnecessary resources are wasted in the process, including precious trees for caskets and water to maintain pristine lawns in graveyards. During the embalming process, formaldehyde—a known human carcinogen—is pumped into human bodies. When those bodies are buried, that carcinogen eventually seeps out, polluting soil and groundwater. Burying bodies also takes up lots of space. The practice is unsustainable. Cremation is arguably better for the environment, but not much. The practice releases harmful greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, contributing to climate change. We aren’t without options; there are some eco-friendly ways of disposing of human remains. Bodies can be destroyed using a process of alkaline hydrolysis, used to liquefy human flesh. The remaining bones can then be ground into ash in a way that uses fewer resources than cremation. Bodies can also be encased in pods that eventually grow into trees or sealed into a ball that is then sunk to the bottom of the ocean where it will feed coral reefs. These are far more environmentally friendly ways of disposing of human remains. Given that climate change poses serious threats to public health, would governments be justified in mandating that bodies are disposed of in more environmentally friendly ways?

It seems unlikely that changes to our organ donation or funerary practices would be met with swells of public support. This reticence should give us pause. Many variables inform cultural practices involving dead bodies. Humans have the capacity to reflect on their own mortality, and, unsurprisingly, many of us find it terrifying. Fear, grief, and love are powerful and crucial emotions, but they have the potential to motivate the formation of superstitious rituals and guidelines for cultural practice that are ultimately indefensible when challenged.

September 26, 2018December 14, 2022

Reflection on Responsibility: National Suicide Prevention Month

Photo of a sign at the Golden Gate Bridge that says "Crisis counseling - There is hope - Make the call - The consequences of jumping from this bridge are fatal and tragic".

Content warning: discussion of suicide

September is National Suicide Prevention month, and September 10th marked World Suicide Prevention Day. Organizations such as the Suicide Prevention Lifeline, American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and the International Association for Suicide Prevention all hosted social media hashtags and encouraged everyone to spread awareness of suicide and how to prevent it. Suicide has long been considered an epidemic in the United States, but a recent study published by the CDC in July showed that the rate of suicide in the U.S. has increased dramatically in the past 20 years. By and large, suicide is considered negative in our society, often framed as tragic due to its preventability. Several pop culture idols have committed suicide since the beginning of 2018, including chef and TV personality Anthony Bourdain and fashion designer Kate Spade. During this month, it is pertinent to examine exactly what our culture’s stance on suicide truly is. Does framing suicide as negative require us to make judgements about those who commit it? Does an anti-suicide stance require us to also oppose assisted suicide? And finally, who should we hold accountable for fixing and preventing the suicide epidemic; our culture, ourselves, or our public institutions?

As quite literally a life or death matter, the way that we talk about suicide is a delicate matter. In an article titled “Is Suicide Selfish?” Senior Director of Suicide Prevention and Postvention Initiatives, Shauna Springer, examines from a psychological perspective if we can truly hold those who attempt or commit suicide can considered selfish. While Springer doesn’t deny that suicide has consequences on those other than the victim, she holds that it ultimately is not a selfish act, due to the fact that “suicidal mode is an altered state of consciousness.” Because those suffering from suicidal thoughts “often have distorted perceptions of reality,” we cannot make judgements about their character and actions in a similar way that we would a healthy person. Others however, feel differently. In an article titled “I Still Think Suicide Is Selfish And No, I’m Not Ignorant For Believing So” Lesly Salazer defends her position by using her personal experience with depression and suicidal thoughts. Salazer explains that growing up, she was told “‘There’s more to life than yourself and your sadness. You can’t let your emotions overpower your common sense. God has a plan for you, and killing yourself is just plain stupid.’” She believes that this attitude toward suicide saved her life, because she felt she was doing a moral wrong by killing herself. The traditional methods of hotlines and therapy did not work for Salazer, though she acknowledges they may help some. In conclusion, Salazer defends her belief that suicide is selfish on the basis that such a belief might prevent people from killing themselves. However, one could argue that such an attitude towards suicide might actually hinder people from finding help, because they do not feel like they can talk about their suicidal thoughts. While it might help some like Salazer, it has the potential to hurt many others.

If we decide as a culture and society to take a negative stance toward suicide, can we also consistently advocate for methods that make ending one’s life easier or less painless? The legalization of physician assisted suicide has been a debate in recent years, with states like Oregon and California passing legislation to legalize physician-assisted suicide. But how do suicide prevention organizations view physician assisted suicide? In October of 2017, the American Association of Suicidology released an article clarifying that they, as an organization, do not considered assisted suicide as suicide, but instead as “death with dignity’ or “physician aid in dying.” The article explains that the organization “ does not assume that there cannot be ‘overlap’ cases, but only that the two practices can in principle be conceptually distinguished and that the professional obligations of those involved in suicide prevention may differ.” The organization goes on to list 15 key differences between physician-assisted suicide and the type of suicide that the AAS aims to prevent. The key distinctions AAS claims exist between suicide and physician-assisted death are medical and conceptual. One observation is that those seeking assisted suicide are often facing physical chronic illness, whereas those seeking to commit suicide are often plagued by mental illness, impairing their judgement and ability to make reasonable decisions. However, those against physician-assisted suicide argue that taking such a stance worsens the stigma associated with mental illness as not as serious or legitimate as physical diseases and conditions. Should the decision to end one’s life be treated differently or more dignified on the basis of physical or mental conditions? A previous Prindle Post article by Amy Elyse Gordon examines this issue. One could surely argue that in the case of terminal illness, physician-assisted suicide provides relief and control to those facing death. Additionally, this type of ending one’s life may not have the same adverse effects on family and friends as other forms suicide do.

If we accept that suicide is detrimental to society, whose responsibility is it to prevent it? This question is a difficult one, because it, in a way, assumes that suicide can be influenced by others, and that they in some way hold a moral responsibility to prevent it. At what level we hold people accountable can be difficult to determine. Giving the government the complete burden of preventing suicide may lead to its criminalization. Indeed, suicide was considered a crime in the U.K. until 1961, when suicide became framed less as a sin or moral wrong and more of a medical and psychological problem. However, the government can help prevent suicide in more ways than criminalization. A 2016 study found that rising poverty rates were highly correlative of rising suicide rates during the 2008-2009 economic recession. This study suggests that poverty and economic burden can influence the rate of suicide and if our goal is to prevent suicide, perhaps we should hold our politicians and government accountable for supporting those that are impoverished or enforcing stricter regulations on financial institutions to ensure economic stability. On the other hand, some might argue this alone is not enough.

Suicide is undoubtedly influenced by mental illness in many cases, regardless of external factors. Perhaps it is the responsibility of organizations such as the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention to help support those who feel suicidal and raise awareness about the topic. Some might argue this still is not effective enough alone because those who are considering suicide may not have access to these resources or may not have the motivation to seek out help.

So, we might then believe that it is every individual’s responsibility to prevent suicide. One example of the application of this type of thinking is the involuntary manslaughter sentencing of Michele Carter in 2017. Carter was a teenager suffering from mental illness, whose boyfriend, Conrad Roy III, committed suicide in 2014 (discussed in detail in this Prindle Post article). Text messages minutes before his Roy’s death show that Carter encouraged him to kill himself, texting him to get back in the carbon monoxide car after he had second thoughts about killing himself. Carter’s verdict implies that people can be held legally and morally responsible for their loved one’s decision to commit suicide. In the case of Carter, it was not just her failure to stop Roy, but also her encouraging attitude toward suicide that made her guilty, according to the judge. If we decide to hold individuals accountable for preventing suicide, we may have to accept verdicts such as the one in the Michele Carter case. This becomes difficult, because it implies that those surrounding suicidal people, including loved ones, could be held legally and morally responsible for their death. Additionally, is assigning blame in the case of suicide really necessary or morally correct?

Suicide is not an easy topic, and probably never will be. The decision to take one’s own life cannot be boiled down to one or even a few causes. During September, we should all collectively think critically about suicide and how we are failing as a society to prevent it.

May 21, 2018November 9, 2023

Moral Responsibility at the U.S.-Mexico Border

Photo of a monument memorializing deaths of migrants who tried to cross the U.S.-Mexico border

On May 15, 2018, CNN reported that the U.S. Border Patrol, which is “tasked with tracking and trying to prevent border-crossing deaths,” has been undercounting the number of deaths of people who perished trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border in contravention of U.S. Immigration laws. CNN reportedly identified more than 500 deaths over and above the Border Patrol’s official tally over the last 16 fiscal years. As CNN reports, undercounting deaths “minimizes the magnitude of the humanitarian crisis associated with illegal crossings” and “makes it harder for the United States to assess the full impact of a border policy, in place since the mid-1990s, that uses barriers and other enforcement tools to push migrants to more remote, deadlier crossing points.”

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May 7, 2018January 23, 2024

“Minibrains” and the Future of Drug Testing

Image of a scientist swabbing a petri dish.

This article has a set of discussion questions tailored for classroom use. Click here to download them. To see a full list of articles with discussion questions and other resources, visit our “Educational Resources” page.

NPR recently reported on the efforts of scientists who are growing small and “extremely rudimentary versions of an actual human brain” by transforming human skin cells into neural stem cells and letting them grow into structures like those found in the human brain. These tissues are called cerebral organoids but are more popularly known as “minibrains.” While this may all sound like science fiction, their use has already led to new discoveries in the medical sciences.

The impetus for developing cerebral organoids comes from the difficult situation imposed on research into brain diseases. It is difficult to model complex conditions like autism and schizophrenia using the brains of mice and other animals. Yet, there are also obvious ethical obstacles to experimenting on live human subjects. Cerebral organoids provide a way out of this trap because they present models more akin to the human brain. Already, they have led to notable advances. Cerebral organoids were used in research into how the Zika virus disrupts normal brain development. The potential to use cerebral organoids to test future therapies for such conditions as schizophrenia, autism, and Alzheimer’s Disease seems quite promising.

The experimental use of cerebral organoids is still quite new; the first ones were successfully developed in 2013. As such, it is the right time to begin serious reflection on the potential ethical hurdles for research conducted on cerebral organoids. To that end, a group of ethicists, law professors, biologists, and neuroscientists recently published a commentary in Nature on the ethics of minibrains.

The commentary raises many interesting issues. Let us consider just three:

The prospect of conscious cerebral organoids

Thus far, the cerebral organoids experimented upon have been roughly the size of peas. According to the Nature commentary, they lack certain cell types, receive sensory input only in primitive form, and have limited connection between brain regions. Yet, there do not appear to be insurmountable hurdles to advances that will allow us to scale these organoids up into larger and more complex neural structures. As the brain is the seat of consciousness, scaled-up organoids may rise to the level of such sensitivity to external stimuli that it may be proper to ascribe consciousness to them. Conscious organisms sensitive to external stimuli can likely experience negative and positive sensations. Such beings have welfare interests. Whether we had ethical obligations to these organoids prior to the onset of feelings, it would be difficult to deny such obligations to them once they achieve this state. Bioethicists and medical researchers ought to develop principles to govern these obligations. They may be able to model them after our current approaches to research obligations regarding animal test subjects. However, it is likely the biological affinity between cerebral organoids and human beings will require significant departure from the animal test subject model.

Additionally, research into consciousness has not nailed down the neural correlates of consciousness. As such, we may not necessarily know if a particularly advanced cerebral organoid is likely to be conscious. Either we ought to purposefully slow the progress into developing complex cerebral organoids until we understand consciousness better, or we pre-emptively treat organoids as beings deserving moral consideration so that we don’t accidentally mistreat an organoid we incorrectly identify as non-conscious.

Human-animal blurring

Cerebral organoids have also been developed in the brains of other animals. This gives the brain cells a more “physiologically natural” environment. According to the Nature commentary, cerebral organoids have been transplanted into mice and have become vascularized in the process. Such vascularization is an important step in the further development in size and complexity of cerebral organoids.

There appears to be a general aversion to the prospect of transplanting human minibrains into mice. Many perceive the creation of such human-animal hybrids (chimeras) as crossing the inviolable boundary between species. The transplantation of any cells of one animal, especially those of a human (and even more especially those of the brain cells of a human) may violate this sacred boundary.

An earlier entry on The Prindle Post approached the vexing issues of the creation of human-animal chimeras. It appeared that much of the opposition to chimeras was based in part on an objection to “playing God.” Though some have ridiculed the “playing God” argument as based on “a meaningless, dangerous cliché,” people’s strong intuitions against the blurring of species boundaries ought to influence policies put in place to govern such research. If anything, this will help tamp down a strong public backlash.

Changing definitions of death

Cerebral organoids may also threaten the scientific and legal consensus around defining death as the permanent cessation of organismic functioning and understanding the criterion in humans for this as the cessation of functioning in the whole brain. This consensus itself developed in response to emerging technologies in the 1950’s and 1960’s enabling doctors to maintain the functioning of a person’s cardio-pulmonary system after their brain had ceased functioning. Because of this technological change, the criterion of death could no longer be the stopping of the heart. What if research into cerebral organoids and stem cell biology enables us to restore some functions of the brain to a person already declared brain dead? This undercuts the notion that brain death is permanent and may force us to revisit the consensus on death once again.

Minibrains raise many other ethical issues not considered in this brief post. How should medical researchers obtain consent from the human beings who donate cells that are eventually turned into cerebral organoids? Will cerebral organoids who develop feelings need to be appointed legally empowered guardians to look after their interests? Who is the rightful owner of these minibrains? Let us get in front of these ethical questions before science sets its own path.

April 9, 2018December 14, 2022

In Caring for Dementia Patients, Testing the Limits of Patient Autonomy

Image of a caretaker wheeling an elderly person in a wheelchair.

NPR recently reported on a new advance directive (AD) form developed by a New York end-of-life agency. This AD enables patients to express in advance the preference that they would not want to be given food or water, should they be diagnosed with severe dementia. This AD broaches new territory, as the patient’s decision, as expressed on the form, implies that they would not want to be given any food or water, even if they were still cooperative in eating food and appeared to want it. Such a possibility has not yet been formalized in an AD for dementia patients.

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March 27, 2018December 14, 2022

Who Should Program the Morality of Self-Driving Cars?

On Sunday, March 18, Elaine Herzberg died after being hit by Uber’s self-driving car on the road in Tempe, Arizona. Out for a test-run, the video of the collisions suggests that there was a failure of the self-driving technology as well as the in-car driver meant to supervise the testing of the test drive. Uber has removed its self-driving cars from the road while cooperating with investigations, and discussions of the quickly advancing future of driverless vehicles have once again been stirred up in the press.

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February 26, 2018January 23, 2024

Questions on the Ethics of Triage, Posed by a Sub-Saharan Ant

In a new study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, behavioral ecologist Erik Frank at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and his colleagues discuss their findings that a species of sub-Saharan ants bring their wounded hive-mates back to the colony after a termite hunt. This practice of not leaving wounded ants behind is noteworthy on its own, but Frank and fellow behavioral ecologists note that the Matabele ants (Megaponera analis) engage in triage judgments to determine which injured ants are worth or possible to save–not all living wounded are brought back to the nest for treatment.

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