Analysis Of Mcmahan s The Metaphysics Of Brain Death

McMahan s The Metaphysics of Brain Death presents a case for the distinction between the body as the organism and the mind as the person. In defining this â€Å"mind-body dualism† (sec. 0, abstract), McMahan s distinction brings forth a greater implication in the criterion for the death of a person, exploring the â€Å"dominant conception of brain death† which reasons that the loss of capacity for consciousness, caused by irreversible damage to the whole brain or brain stem, is sufficient for such a declaration as a persons ceasing to live (sec. 1, pars. 1-3). McMahan does not oppose the argument of brain death on the grounds of capacity for consciousness, but rather uses this to present that â€Å"the death of the entire brain is not equivalent to†¦show more content†¦McMahan first introduces twinning when he is making his case against person-as-organism, challenging that idea by arguing that if that were true, then it stands to reason, â€Å"if we assume t hat my organism began to exist at the time of its conception, then we must accept that I [as a person] began to exist at conception† (sec. 2, par. 2). It is here that McMahan articulates an argument that an organism might not exist until syngamy, and further that, in the case of monozygotic twinning, â€Å"since it seems arbitrary to say that one of the subsequent embryos is identical with the original zygote while the other is not, it seems reasonable to conclude that the original zygote ceases to exist when it splits and that two new embryos, and thus two new organisms, begin to exist†. From this, McMahan argues that it is inconceivable that the capacity for consciousness, a prerequisite for the existence of a person, has been reached in the case of a zygotal stage of organism life (sec. 2, par. 3). It makes rational sense to argue that at this point, McMahan has thus presented a grounds to reason for the quantitative measurement of requirement for consciousness (it w ould be no difficult to go off from this point, but that is a different problem for a different argument which could certainly be made). In any case, McMahan goes on to lay out a scenario to further separate the person from the organism, introducing the case of P and his brother. In this thought-experiment, P s