DEATH TAX

a levy imposed on the estate left by a decedent or on the inheritance of a beneficiary. Like the gift tax, it is a levy imposed on gratuitous transfers of propertyi.e., transfers made without compensation. Death in most countries is considered a taxable event. Death taxes can be supported on both legal and social grounds. Legally, the tax may be considered a fee for the privilege of passing property on after death. Socially, the tax tends to reduce inequalities in the distribution of wealth and provides an opportunity to break up large estates. The main argument against large death taxes rests on their possible negative effects on incentives. An economic limit to the usefulness of death taxes may be said to exist when the accumulation of wealth is discouraged to the point of hampering economic growth. Death taxes are of greater symbolic than practical significance. They are among the taxes least productive of revenue, and their relative importance has dwindled with the growth of income, sales, and excise taxes. The U.S. federal estate tax produces less than 2 percent of federal tax revenues. A similar percentage is produced in most nations with advanced tax systems. The main effect of death taxes is to encourage estate planning and the employment of legal services to minimize taxes. The effect on consumption in the economy as a whole is trivial. Death taxes do tend to achieve a more equal distribution of wealth, but the magnitude of the effect is small in most countries. A significant, but often overlooked effect is that on business structure and practices, which stems from the need to set a valuation on the estate for tax purposes and from the problem of liquidity that may arise when the estate consists of a small business or farm. Death taxes generally appear to be highly progressive, with rates in some countries that approach 100 percent in the highest brackets. In fact, most people do not incur any death taxes at all, and, for those who are subject, efforts at avoidance are highly successful and present a serious problem of equity. Tax avoidance tactics include various trusteeship arrangements, giving one's property away before death, or making gifts to charitable, religious, and educational institutions (which are generally exempt from death and gift taxes). The existing exemption and rate structure is an expression of social policy toward institutions that are to be favoured. Exemptions or low rates on gifts and bequests to a spouse and children or to charitable institutions represent a social policy in favour of the family unit or private support of charity. The biological problems Whether one considers the death of individual cells, the death of small multicellular organisms, or the death of a human being, certain problems are repeatedly met. The physicist may encounter difficulties in trying to define death in terms of entropy change and the second law of thermodynamics. So may the histologist looking at the ultrastructure of dying tissue through an electron microscope. Pope Pius XII, speaking to an International Congress of Anesthesiologists in 1957, raised the question of when, in the intensive care unit, the soul actually left the body. More secularly inclined philosophers have meanwhile pondered what it was that was so essential to the nature of man that its loss should be called death. The questions of what may or may not be legitimately demanded of a beating-heart cadaver (in terms of supplying donor organs for transplants or of serving as a subject for physiological experimentation) has given new poignancy to the quip made by the English author Sir Thomas Browne in 1643: With what strife and pains we come into the world we know not, but 'tis commonly no easy matter to get out of it. Common conceptual difficulties underlie many of these questions. Death: process or event The American physician and writer Oliver Wendell Holmes said to live is to function and that is all there is in living. But who or what is the subject who lives because it functions? Is death the irreversible loss of function of the whole organism (or cell); that is, of every one of its component parts? Or is it the irreversible loss of function of the organism (or cell) as a whole; that is, as a meaningful and independent biological unit? To perceive the difference between the two questions is to understand many modern controversies about death. The described dichotomy is clearly part of a much wider one: civilizations fall apart yet their component societies live on; societies disintegrate but their citizens survive; individuals die while their cells, perversely, still metabolize; finally, cells can be disrupted yet the enzymes they release may, for a while, remain active. Such problems would not arise if nature were tidier. In nearly all circumstances human death is a process rather than an event. Unless caught up in nuclear explosions people do not die suddenly, like the bursting of a bubble. A quiet, classical death provides perhaps the best illustration of death as a process. Several minutes after the heart has stopped beating, a mini-electrocardiogram may be recorded, if one probes for signals from within the cardiac cavity. Three hours later, the pupils still respond to pilocarpine drops by contracting, and muscles repeatedly tapped may still mechanically shorten. A viable skin graft may be obtained from the deceased 24 hours after the heart has stopped, a viable bone graft 48 hours later, and a viable arterial graft as late as 72 hours after the onset of irreversible asystole (cardiac stoppage). Cells clearly differ widely in their ability to withstand the deprivation of oxygen supply that follows arrest of the circulation. Similar problems arise, but on a vastly larger scale, when the brain is dead but the heart (and other organs) are kept going artificially. Under such circumstances, it can be argued, the organism as a whole may be deemed dead, although the majority of its cells are still alive. The cultural background Throughout history, specific cultural contexts have always played a crucial role in how people perceived death. Different societies have held widely diverging views on the breath of life and on how the soul left the body at the time of death. Such ideas are worth reviewing (1) because of the light they throw on important residual elements of popular belief; (2) because they illustrate the distance traveled (or not traveled) between early beliefs and current ones; and (3) because of the relevance of certain old ideas to contemporary debates about brain-stem death and about the philosophical legitimacy of organ transplantation. The following discussion therefore focuses on how certain cultural ideas about death compare or contrast with the modern concept. For an overview of various eschatologies from a cross-cultural perspective, see death rite: Death rites and customs. Ancient Egypt Two ideas that prevailed in ancient Egypt came to exert great influence on the concept of death in other cultures. The first was the notion, epitomized in the Osirian myth, of a dying and rising saviour god who could confer on devotees the gift of immortality; this afterlife was first sought by the pharaohs and then by millions of ordinary people. The second was the concept of a postmortem judgment, in which the quality of the deceased's life would influence his ultimate fate. Egyptian society, it has been said, consisted of the dead, the gods, and the living. During all periods of their history, the ancient Egyptians seem to have spent much of their time thinking of death and making provisions for their afterlife. The vast size, awe-inspiring character, and the ubiquity of their funerary monuments bear testimony to this obsession. The physical preservation of the body was central to all concerns about an afterlife; the Egyptians were a practical people, and the notion of a disembodied existence would have been totally unacceptable to them. The components of the person were viewed as many, subtle, and complex; moreover, they were thought to suffer different fates at the time of death. The physical body was a person's khat, a term that implied inherent decay. The ka was the individual's doppelgnger, or double; it was endowed with all the person's qualities and faults. It is uncertain where the ka resided during life, but to go to one's ka was a euphemism for death. The ka denoted power and prosperity. After death it could eat, drink, and enjoy the odour of incense. It had to be fed, and this task was to devolve on a specific group of priests. The ka gave comfort and protection to the deceased: its hieroglyphic sign showed two arms outstretched upward, in an attitude of embrace. The ba (often translated as the soul) conveyed notions of the noble and the sublime. It could enter the body or become incorporeal at will. It was represented as a human-headed falcon, presumably to emphasize its mobility. The ba remained sentimentally attached to the dead body, for whose well-being it was somehow responsible. It is often depicted flying about the portal of the tomb or perched on a nearby tree. Although its anatomical substratum was ill-defined, it could not survive without the preserved body. Other important attributes were an individual's khu (spiritual intelligence), sekhem (power), khaibit (shadow), and ren (name). In the pyramid of King Pepi I, who ruled during the 6th dynasty (c. 2345c. 2182 BC), it is recorded how the dead king had walked through the iron which is the ceiling of heaven. With his panther skin upon him, Pepi passeth with his flesh, he is happy with his name, and he liveth with his double. The depictions of the dead were blueprints for immortality. Conversely, to blot out a person's name was to destroy that individual for all eternity, to eliminate him from the historical record. The Stalinist and Maoist regimes in the Soviet Union and China were later to resort to the same means, with the same end in mind. They also, however, invented the concept of posthumous rehabilitation. The heart played a central part in how the Egyptians thought about the functioning of the body. Political and religious considerations probably lay behind the major role attributed to the heart. Many of the so-called facts reported in the Ebers papyrus (a kind of medical encyclopaedia dating from the early part of the 18th dynasty; i.e., from about 1550 BC) are really just speculations. This is surprising in view of how often bodies were opened during embalmment. A tubular system was rightly said to go from the heart to all members and the heart was said to speak out of the vessels of every limb. But the vessels were thought to convey a mixture of air, blood, tears, urine, saliva, nasal mucus, semen, and at times even feces. During the process of embalming, the heart was always left in situ or replaced in the thorax. According to the renowned Orientalist Sir Wallis Budge, the Egyptians saw the heart as the source of life and being, and any damage to it would have resulted in a second death in which everything (ka, ba, khu, and ren) would be destroyed. In some sarcophagi one can still read the pathetic plea spare us a second death. The anatomical heart was the haty, the word ib referring to the heart as a metaphysical entity embodying not only thought, intelligence, memory, and wisdom, but also bravery, sadness, and love. It was the heart in its sense of ib that was weighed in the famous judgment scene depicted in the Ani papyrus and elsewhere. After the deceased had enumerated the many sins he had not committed (the so-called negative confession), the heart was weighed against the feather of Ma'at (i.e., against what was deemed right and true). It had to prove itself capable of achieving balance with the symbol of the law. The deceased who was judged pure was introduced to Osiris (in fact, became an Osiris). The deceased who failed was devoured by the monster Am-mit, the eater of the dead. It was never the physical body on earth that was resurrected, but a new entity (the Sahu) that germinated from it and into which the soul would slip. The Egyptians were concerned that the dead should be able to breathe again. The Pyramid Texts describe the ceremony of the opening of the mouth, by which this was achieved. Immediately before the mummy was consigned to the sepulchral chamber, specially qualified priests placed it upright, touched the face with an adz, and proclaimed thy mouth is opened by Horus with his little finger, with which he also opened the mouth of his father Osiris. It has proved difficult to relate this ritual, in any meaningful way, to specific beliefs about the ka or ba. The brain is not mentioned much in any of the extant medical papyruses from ancient Egypt. It is occasionally described as an organ producing mucus, which drained out through the nose; or it is referred to by a generic term applicable to the viscera as a whole. Life and death were matters of the heart, although the suggested relationships were at times bizarrefor example, it was said that the mind passed away when the vessels of the heart were contaminated with feces. The only reference that might relate death to the brain stem is the strange statement in the Ebers papyrus (gloss 854f) to the effect that life entered the body through the left ear, and departed through the right one. It is clear why the Egyptians never cremated their dead: to do so would have destroyed for the deceased all prospects of an afterlife. Fortunately, there was no question of organ transplantation; in the prevailing cultural context, it would never have been tolerated. Whether the pharaohs would have been powerful enoughor rash enoughto transgress accepted norms had transplantation been feasible is quite another matter.