Death without Essence? Towards a Practice-Dependent Ontology

Abstract Despite legal convergence on neurological and circulatory standards in many jurisdictions, death continues to resist conceptual unification. Drawing on three recent paradigmatic political events in Denmark concerning euthanasia, abortion, and organ donation, we argue that this resistance can be attributed to the context-sensitivity of human understanding. Death may be most plausibly construed as a normative (but non-ethical) concept whose adequacy conditions depend on its practical function within an acknowledged margin of descriptive uncertainty. Each of the three domains highlights a distinct yet complementary ontological dimension—alongside the normativity of death, its irreversibility and opposition to life. Thus, while pragmatic integration can reconcile heterogeneous criteria without collapsing them into a reductive essence, the transfer of conceptual frames across the three domains may help resolve conflicts surrounding the dead donor rule, assisted suicide, and the contested boundaries of human life in utero. However, with respect to the morality of these cases, it appears that the intention behind the act of killing—rather than the act itself or indeed death as its consequence—plays the discriminatory role.