What is it for a thing to be dead? Fred Feldman holds, correctly in my view, that a definition of ‘dead’ should leave open both (1) the possibility of things that go directly from being dead to being alive, and (2) the possibility of things that go directly from being alive to being neither alive nor dead, but merely in suspended animation. But if this is right, then surely such a definition should also leave open the possibility of things that (...) go directly from being dead to being neither alive nor dead, but merely in suspended animation. I show that Feldman’s own definition of ‘dead’ (in terms of ‘lives’ and ‘dies’) does not leave this possibility open. I propose a new definition that does. (shrink)

The traditional Western understanding of life and death as a strict dichotomy is challenged by a more descriptively accurate model of life's progressive cessation. Dying can be defined by a bounded zone of residual states of life that fits better with moral intuition and more sensitively guides action toward the dying.

Usually, the organization of living systems is explained by appealing to an intrinsic purpose that is based on the biological survival. However, paradigmatically, it is inevitable to observe that the final destiny of all living organisms is death. In this work, we defend that, from an organizational approach, there is a form of death—Regulatory Cell Death—that, far from being a mere "absence of life", is a process of biological regulation and a feature of self-maintenance in multicellular organisms.