Abstract

Drawing upon Lynne Baker's idea of the person derivatively possessing the properties of a constituting organism, I argue that even if persons aren't identical to living organisms, they can each literally die a biological death. Thus we can accept that we're not essentially organisms and can still die without having to admit that there are two concepts and criteria of death as Jeff McMahan and Robert Veatch do. Furthermore, we can accept James Bernat's definition of "death" without having to insist, as he does, that persons are identical to organisms or that persons can only die metaphorical deaths.