Welcome to the Bioemporium
In 1974, the bioethicist and physician Willard Gaylin published an article in Harper’s with the unsettling title “Harvesting the Dead.” It had recently become possible to keep brain-dead patients on life support for extended periods so that their organs could be removed for transplantation.
1974 年，生物伦理学家兼医生威拉德·盖林 (Willard Gaylin) 在《哈泼斯》杂志上发表了一篇文章，标题令人不安：“收割死者”。最近，脑死亡患者可以长时间维持生命，以便摘除他们的器官进行移植。
I use the words patients and life support, but as Gaylin pointed out, if a patient is brain-dead, it isn’t really a patient anymore.
我用了“病人”和“生命维持系统”这两个词，但正如盖林指出的，如果病人脑死亡，那么他就不再是真正的病人了。
It is a cadaver on a ventilator.
这是一具戴着呼吸机的尸体。
To distinguish these kinds of cadavers from the cold ones in the morgue, Gaylin proposed that we call them neomorts .
为了将这类尸体与太平间里冰冷的尸体区分开来，盖林建议我们称它们为新死者。
And to distinguish a specialized unit used to house neomorts from ordinary hospital wards, he suggested the term bioemporium .
为了区分用于容纳新生儿的专门病房与普通医院病房，他建议使用“生物商场”一词。
To Gaylin, it was clear that organ transplantation was saving lives.
对于盖林来说，器官移植显然可以挽救生命。
But why stop there?
但为什么要停在那里呢？
Look at all the hormones a neomort produces.
看看新生儿产生的所有激素。
Insulin, growth hormone, estrogen, testosterone—a neomort is a veritable hormone factory.
胰岛素、生长激素、雌激素、睾酮——新胚胎是名副其实的激素工厂。
Even better, consider how useful neomorts would be for medical training.
更好的是，考虑一下新生儿对于医疗培训有多么有用。
Students could practice potentially embarrassing pelvic and rectal exams on neomorts, and surgical residents could use them as practice dummies for hernia repairs and limb amputations.
学生可以对新生儿进行可能令人尴尬的骨盆和直肠检查，外科住院医生可以将它们用作疝气修复和肢体截肢的练习假人。
Neomorts are also ideally suited for medical research.
Neomorts 也非常适合医学研究。
Take, for example, Phase 1 drug trials, in which pharmaceutical researchers test the safety of an experimental drug by giving it to healthy subjects.
以第一阶段药物试验为例，药物研究人员通过将实验药物给予健康受试者来测试其安全性。
Such trials are uncomfortable, lengthy, and potentially hazardous.
这样的试验是不舒服的、漫长的并且有潜在危险。
Often the researchers push the dose higher and higher until the subjects start to experience side effects.
研究人员通常会不断提高剂量，直到受试者开始出现副作用。
But if researchers could use neomorts instead, they could administer as much of a drug as they wanted without worry, or even infect a neomort with a virus to test the cure.
但如果研究人员可以使用新死亡病毒来代替，他们就可以放心地服用尽可能多的药物，甚至可以用病毒感染新死亡病毒来测试治疗方法。
Researchers could poison neomorts and try out an antidote, administer a carcinogen and test a potentially toxic chemotherapy, or give them an experimental vaccine followed by a deadly infectious disease like Ebola or anthrax—all without endangering the life or health of a conscious subject.
研究人员可以毒害新生动物并尝试解毒剂，使用致癌剂并测试可能有毒的化疗，或者给它们注射实验疫苗，然后注射埃博拉或炭疽等致命传染病——所有这些都不会危及有意识的受试者的生命或健康。
Gaylin’s proposal never really took off: Medical students still practice pelvic exams on living patients, and drug safety is still tested on healthy, conscious subjects.
盖林的提议从未真正成功：医学生仍在对活着的患者进行盆腔检查，药物安全性仍在健康、有意识的受试者身上进行测试。
Yet neither has the proposal entirely vanished.
但该提议也没有完全消失。
In 2021, a surgical team at NYU tested a genetically modified pig kidney by suturing it to the leg of a brain-dead research subject.
2021 年，纽约大学的一个外科团队将转基因猪肾缝合到一名脑死亡研究对象的腿上进行了测试。
Shortly afterward, another team of surgeons implanted two pig kidneys into the body of a brain-dead subject at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
不久之后，另一组外科医生将两个猪肾植入伯明翰阿拉巴马大学一名脑死亡受试者的体内。
Some bioethicists have suggested a similar experiment for childbirth.
一些生物伦理学家建议对分娩进行类似的实验。
Noting that the bodies of pregnant women who are brain-dead or irreversibly comatose can be maintained for months before a child is delivered, Anna Smajdor has proposed that brain-dead cadavers could be artificially impregnated and used as gestational surrogates.
安娜·斯马伊多（Anna Smajdor）指出，脑死亡或不可逆昏迷的孕妇的尸体在孩子出生前可以保存数月，因此提出脑死亡尸体可以被人工受孕并用作妊娠代孕者。
Whether Gaylin intended “Harvesting the Dead” as a serious plan or a modest proposal is unclear (he died in 2022 at age 97), but either way, his utilitarian logic is not easy to refute.
盖林将“收割死者”作为一个严肃的计划还是一个温和的建议尚不清楚（他于 2022 年去世，享年 97 岁），但无论哪种方式，他的功利主义逻辑都不容易反驳。
When I raise his ideas at conferences or in seminars, the response is often an uneasy silence.
当我在会议或研讨会上提出他的想法时，得到的反应往往是令人不安的沉默。
Many people seem disturbed by the idea of impregnating a brain-dead body or using it to practice limb amputations, yet being able to explain their reactions is another matter.
许多人似乎对植入脑死亡尸体或用它来练习截肢的想法感到不安，但能够解释他们的反应是另一回事。
“This whole thing makes me feel squirrely,” they’ll say, “but I can’t really say why.”
“这整件事让我感觉很奇怪，”他们会说，“但我真的说不出为什么。”
Bioethicists often refer to such responses as the “yuck factor”: a gut feeling of disgust or repulsion that a proper philosophical education could put to rest.
生物伦理学家经常将这种反应称为“恶心因素”：一种本能的厌恶或排斥感，适当的哲学教育可以平息这种感觉。
My diagnosis would be a little different.
我的诊断会有点不同。
For me, the point at which each of Gaylin’s proposals feels unsettling is roughly the same point at which it starts to feel degrading.
对我来说，盖林的每项提议让人感到不安的时刻，与它开始让人感到有辱人格的时刻大致相同。
To be degraded is to be reduced in rank—to be lessened, diminished, or demeaned.
降级是指等级降低——被削弱、削弱或贬低。
Adults feel degraded when they are treated like children; workers feel degraded when they are treated like robots; patients feel degraded when they are treated like medical curiosities.
当成年人被当作孩子对待时，他们会感到被侮辱；当工人被当作机器人对待时，他们会感到被侮辱；当病人被当作医学好奇心对待时，他们会感到被侮辱。
Degradation doesn’t necessarily involve people.
退化不一定涉及人。
Sometimes objects are treated in a way that is degrading, such as when a grave is desecrated.
有时，物体会被以有辱人格的方式对待，例如亵渎坟墓。
The currency of degradation is disrespect.
贬低的通货就是不尊重。
If it is possible to imagine someone or something as deserving of respect, it is usually possible to imagine it degraded when the proper respect is withheld.
如果可以想象某人或某物值得尊重，那么通常也可以想象当适当的尊重被剥夺时，它就会被贬低。
Degradation takes many forms, but one of the most familiar ways to degrade something is to commodify it and bring it into the market sphere.
退化有多种形式，但最常见的退化方法之一是将其商品化并将其带入市场领域。
This is part of the argument against prostitution, commercial surrogacy, and organ markets.
这是反对卖淫、商业代孕和器官市场的论点的一部分。
When something is put up for sale—priced, advertised, perhaps discounted for a special summer blowout—it is being valued instrumentally, as a means of generating income.
当某样东西被出售时——定价、做广告，也许是为了夏季特别热销而打折——它就被作为一种创收手段进行了工具性的评估。
This may seem fine if the good in question is a mattress or a propane grill, but it seems degrading for the kind of good that ought to be valued for its own sake.
如果所讨论的商品是床垫或丙烷烤架，这似乎没什么问题，但对于应该因其本身的价值而估价的商品来说，这似乎是有辱人格的。
This is one reason we have adoption agencies rather than baby markets: Treating children as property would threaten their status as human beings.
这是我们设立收养机构而不是婴儿市场的原因之一：将儿童视为财产会威胁到他们作为人类的地位。
Degradation is one of a number of related English words—such as disgrace, dishonor, or debasement —that describe the variety of ways in which something or someone can be brought low.
Degradation 是许多相关的英语单词之一，例如 disgrace、dishonor 或 debasement，这些单词描述了使某物或某人贬低的各种方式。
Unlike desecration or defilement, degradation doesn’t always imply that something sacred has been violated.
与亵渎或玷污不同，堕落并不总是意味着神圣的东西受到了侵犯。
Yet it does suggest the contamination or deterioration of a moral ideal.
然而，它确实表明了道德理想的污染或恶化。
Like debasement, degradation sounds like a word from a 19th-century novel, perhaps in connection to an old-fashioned vice like drunkenness, gluttony, or sexual promiscuity.
就像贬义一样，贬义听起来像是 19 世纪小说中的一个词，可能与酗酒、暴食或性乱等老式恶习有关。
To say that a man has debased himself is to imply that he has lowered himself in a way that offends both morality and good taste.
说一个人贬低了自己，就意味着他以一种既违背道德又违背品味的方式贬低了自己。
Often it suggests behavior that a person should be ashamed of, but isn’t.
通常它暗示一个人应该感到羞耻的行为，但事实并非如此。
Exactly what constitutes degrading treatment of a brain-dead body can be difficult to parse, not least because of the unusual position the corpse occupies in our culture.
究竟什么构成了对脑死亡尸体的侮辱性对待可能很难解析，尤其是因为尸体在我们的文化中占据着不寻常的地位。
It is no longer a person, yet it is closely connected to one; it is not exactly property, yet it has instrumental value; it has deep personal meaning, yet from the moment of death it is handled completely by paid professionals working behind closed doors.
它不再是一个人，但却与一个人紧密相连；它不完全是财产，但具有工具价值；它具有深刻的个人意义，但从死亡那一刻起，它完全由受薪专业人士在幕后工作处理。
Virtually every culture has developed ritualized ways of expressing respect for the dead body, but in ours the default setting for respect is whatever the individual wishes.
事实上，每种文化都发展了仪式化的方式来表达对尸体的尊重，但在我们的文化中，尊重的默认设置是个人的意愿。
Perhaps it will be possible to use brain-dead bodies instrumentally and preserve some measure of respect for them.
也许可以将脑死亡尸体用作工具，并保留对他们的某种程度的尊重。
But if past experience is any guide, our moral attitudes toward brain-dead bodies will be shaped less by conscious choice than by the forces of the market.
但如果以过去的经验为指导的话，我们对脑死亡尸体的道德态度将更多地受到市场力量的影响，而不是有意识的选择。
If you were a mortician in 1902, visiting Milwaukee for a meeting of the National Funeral Directors Association, you would have witnessed an early marvel of American embalming technology.
如果您是 1902 年的殡仪馆工作人员，前往密尔沃基参加全国殡葬承办人协会会议，您一定会亲眼目睹美国防腐技术的早期奇迹。
His name was Bisga Man.
他的名字叫比斯加·曼。
Although Bisga Man had been dead for three months, he did not lie in a coffin.
虽然比斯加曼已经死了三个月，但他并没有躺在棺材里。
Instead, he sat upright in an ornate, high-backed chair: legs crossed, rigid as a pole, a newspaper folded in his lap.
相反，他笔直地坐在一张华丽的高背椅上：双腿交叉，像一根杆子一样僵硬，一张报纸折叠在他的腿上。
His blank stare and tweed jacket gave him the look of an anesthetized banker.
他茫然的眼神和粗花呢夹克让他看起来像一个麻木的银行家。
Bisga Man was the star feature in an exhibit of preserved human body parts intended to advertise Bisga Embalming Fluid, a product developed by two instructors at the Chicago College of Embalming.
Bisga Man 是一场保存完好的人体部位展览的主角，该展览旨在宣传 Bisga 防腐液，该产品由芝加哥防腐学院的两名讲师开发。
According to a report in The Casket, a trade journal for morticians, Bisga Man was “one of the most remarkable specimens of embalming ever produced in this country.” By “remarkable,” The Casket meant “remarkably lifelike.” If the purpose of embalming is to prepare a corpse to be seen, the promise of Bisga Embalming Fluid was to prepare it to be seen in an altogether new way: so pink and vivid that it no longer looked like a corpse.
根据殡葬行业杂志《棺材》的一篇报道，比斯加人是“这个国家有史以来最引人注目的防腐标本之一”。 《棺材》中的“非凡”意思是“非常栩栩如生”。如果防腐的目的是准备让尸体被人看到，那么 Bisga 防腐液的承诺就是让尸体以一种全新的方式被看到：如此粉红色和生动，以至于它看起来不再像尸体。
John Troyer, the former director of the Center for Death Studies at the University of Bath, has described the appearance of Bisga Man as “unnaturally alive,” a phrase that captures both the hyperreality of the embalmer’s art and the weirdness of posing a dead man in a wingback chair.
巴斯大学死亡研究中心前主任约翰·特罗耶 (John Troyer) 将比斯加人的外貌描述为“非自然地活着”，这句话既体现了防腐师艺术的超现实性，也体现了将死者摆在靠背椅上的怪异感。
Bisga Man represented the culmination of a long technological arc.
比斯加人代表了漫长技术弧线的顶峰。
Until the mid-19th century, the job of disposing of dead bodies in America fell to family members and close friends.
直到 19 世纪中叶，在美国处理尸体的工作都落在了家庭成员和亲密的朋友身上。
They would “lay out” the body, wash it, shave it if necessary, dress it in a shroud, and place it in a coffin, which was usually made by a local carpenter.
他们会“摆放”尸体，清洗，必要时剃须，裹上裹尸布，然后放入棺材中，棺材通常由当地木匠制作。
The family would keep the body in the home for one to three days, often in a designated room such as the parlor, where there would be a vigil or wake.
家人会将尸体在家中保存一到三天，通常是在客厅等指定房间里，在那里进行守夜或守灵活动。
That changed with the development of embalming.
随着防腐技术的发展，这种情况发生了变化。
Prior to the Civil War, embalming was a medical technique mainly used to preserve cadavers for dissection.
内战之前，防腐是一种主要用于保存尸体以供解剖的医疗技术。
But in the 1860s, when an unprecedented number of young American men met their deaths on distant battlefields, embalming made it possible to preserve their bodies for the long journey home.
但在 1860 年代，空前数量的美国年轻男子在遥远的战场上阵亡，防腐处理使得他们的尸体得以保存，以备长途归家之需。
Later it allowed funeral services to be delayed longer so that mourners could travel to the ceremonies.
后来，它允许葬礼推迟更长时间，以便哀悼者可以前往参加仪式。
Of course, embalming also required skills and equipment that could be provided only by trained specialists.
当然，防腐还需要技能和设备，而这些只能由经过培训的专家提供。
So by the early decades of the 20th century, the care of the corpse was no longer a ritualized family affair.
因此，到了20世纪初期，照顾尸体不再是一件仪式化的家庭事务。
It was a commercial endeavor conducted by professionals.
这是由专业人士进行的商业活动。
At the heart of this endeavor was the idea that the corpse should be publicly displayed.
这项努力的核心想法是应该公开展示尸体。
As Troyer points out, the invention of the daguerreotype in 1839 made possible the rise of “death photography,” allowing anyone to view a corpse at any time.
正如 Troyer 指出的那样，1839 年银版照相术的发明使“死亡摄影”的兴起成为可能，让任何人都可以随时观看尸体。
Death photographers typically posed the deceased in a style and setting that suggested a deep sleep, an aesthetic later mimicked by morticians when mechanical embalming techniques allowed the body to be displayed for longer periods.
死亡摄影师通常以一种暗示死者深度睡眠的风格和环境来拍摄死者的姿势，后来，当机械防腐技术允许尸体更长时间地展示时，殡葬师模仿了这种美学。
By 1920, it was possible for a Boston mortician to advertise, “For composing features, $1.
到 1920 年，波士顿殡葬师可以打出这样的广告：“撰写功能，1 美元。
For giving the features a look of quiet resignation, $2.
给这些功能一种安静听天由命的感觉，2 美元。
For giving the features the appearance of Christian hope and contentment, $5.”
赋予这些特征基督教希望和满足的外观，5 美元。”
Today, of course, paying a mortician to take care of a corpse seems no stranger than paying a nanny to take care of a child or paying a home-health aide to take care of an elderly parent.
当然，如今，付钱给殡葬师来照顾尸体似乎并不比付钱给保姆来照顾孩子或付钱给家庭保健助理来照顾年迈的父母更奇怪。
A task once seen as a moral duty and an expression of love has become commodified—a job to be outsourced to paid professionals.
一项曾经被视为道德义务和爱的表达的任务已经变得商品化——一项外包给付费专业人士的工作。
And although commodification may have come with social costs, most of us are satisfied with the trade-off.
尽管商品化可能会带来社会成本，但我们大多数人对这种权衡感到满意。
The death of a family member is a traumatic event that comes with a disconcerting array of social and legal expectations.
家庭成员的死亡是一件令人痛苦的事件，伴随着一系列令人不安的社会和法律期望。
Most people are glad that preparing the body for a funeral service is no longer among them.
大多数人很高兴不再需要为葬礼准备遗体。
How did the early funeral directors avoid the taint of commerce?
早期的殡葬承办人如何避免商业的污染？
They came to a simple but profound realization: Commerce can provide meaningful rituals of its own.
他们得出了一个简单而深刻的认识：商业可以提供自己有意义的仪式。
Along with the new technology of embalming, for instance, came the ritual of viewing the body.
例如，随着防腐新技术的出现，瞻仰尸体的仪式也随之出现。
A similar transformation took place with floral arrangements, coffins, cemetery plots, headstones, and hearses, all of which were monetized and incorporated into the formalized customs of the funeral.
插花、棺材、墓地、墓碑和灵车也发生了类似的转变，所有这些都被货币化并纳入葬礼的正式习俗中。
And whereas many people see funeral arrangements as expensive, even exploitative, nobody really argues that they are degrading.
尽管许多人认为葬礼安排昂贵，甚至是剥削性的，但没有人真正认为这是有辱人格的。
Just the opposite, in fact.
事实上恰恰相反。
Part of what people are buying from the funeral industry is a guarantee that the dead body will be treated with respect.
人们从殡葬业购买的部分产品是为了保证死者的尸体会受到尊重。
Yet once a good or practice has moved to the market sphere, it becomes subject to commercial norms.
然而，一旦一种商品或做法进入市场领域，它就会受到商业规范的约束。
According to those norms, status often marches hand in hand with money.
根据这些规范，地位往往与金钱齐头并进。
If you concede that it is morally acceptable to buy and sell sex, you also submit to a system in which visiting a high-priced escort at the Ritz-Carlton is superior to a 15-minute encounter in the alleyway behind a Greyhound station.
如果你承认买卖性在道德上是可以接受的，那么你也就接受了一种制度，在这种制度下，在丽思卡尔顿酒店拜访高价的伴游要优于在灰狗车站后面的小巷里进行 15 分钟的邂逅。
So when it became possible to buy mortuary services, it was no surprise that expensive funerals soon became a status symbol and the inability to afford one became a mark of shame.
因此，当人们可以购买太平间服务时，昂贵的葬礼很快就成为一种身份象征，而无力承担葬礼则成为一种耻辱，也就不足为奇了。
That the tide seems to be turning back now with the middle-class preference for cremation and green funerals is less a rejection of the market than a predictable shift in consumer taste.
随着中产阶级对火葬和绿色葬礼的偏好，这种趋势现在似乎正在逆转，这与其说是对市场的拒绝，不如说是消费者品味的可预见的转变。
Such is the logic of consumer capitalism.
这就是消费资本主义的逻辑。
Once we cross the boundary into the market sphere, it doesn’t take long for us to grow accustomed to our surroundings.
一旦我们跨入市场领域，很快我们就会适应周围的环境。
Fashions change, and so do markers of status.
时尚在变，地位的标志也在变。
Practices that once seemed degrading, profane, or disrespectful eventually come to seem ordinary.
曾经看似有辱人格、亵渎或无礼的做法最终会变得司空见惯。
I can still remember the shock I felt in 1985 the first time I saw a credit card sign in a doctor’s office.
我仍然记得 1985 年，当我第一次在医生办公室看到信用卡标志时，我感到多么震惊。
Today pharmaceutical companies advertise their drugs on television, patients have been rebranded as “clients,” and entire medical schools are named for corporate executives.
如今，制药公司在电视上为其药品做广告，患者被重新命名为“客户”，整个医学院都以公司高管的名字命名。
The notion that I was dismayed by any of this strikes my children as comically old-fashioned, as if I were a Victorian gentleman scandalized by modern bathing costumes.
我对这一切感到沮丧，这让我的孩子们觉得我是个可笑的老派，就好像我是一位维多利亚时代的绅士，对现代泳装感到震惊一样。
Even this sense of shock can be monetized.
甚至这种震撼感也可以货币化。
Take, for instance, Body Worlds, the boundary-pushing science exhibit developed by the German anatomist Gunther von Hagens.
以德国解剖学家冈瑟·冯·哈根斯 (Gunther von Hagens) 发起的突破界限的科学展览“身体世界”为例。
Like Bisga Man, Body Worlds was made possible by a new technology—in this case, plastination, a process that replaces the fat and water in the body with plastics.
与《Bisga Man》一样，《Body Worlds》也是通过一项新技术实现的——在本例中是塑化技术，这是一种用塑料代替体内脂肪和水的过程。
The product is a hardened corpse that does not decay.
该产品是一具不会腐烂的硬化尸体。
Von Hagens displayed skinned, dissected corpses in poses intended to be entertaining and instructive: kicking a soccer ball, pirouetting like a ballerina, rearing up like the Lone Ranger on a giant dissected stallion.
冯·哈根斯展示了剥皮、解剖的尸体，其姿势既有趣又具有启发性：踢足球，像芭蕾舞演员一样旋转，像独行侠一样骑在一匹巨大的解剖种马上。
After opening in Tokyo in 1995, Body Worlds went on to break attendance records all over the globe.
Body Worlds 于 1995 年在东京开幕后，不断打破全球的参观人数记录。
Von Hagens marketed Body Worlds as the latter-day equivalent of a 19th-century medical museum: an educational science exhibit that would reveal the secrets of human anatomy to the general public.
冯·哈根斯将《人体世界》宣传为现代 19 世纪医学博物馆：一个向公众揭示人体解剖学秘密的教育科学展览。
An ethics advisory committee called Body Worlds a “ground-breaking educational exhibition” and a “gold standard for the field.” But the real allure of the exhibit was the way it violated an invisible boundary between the sacred and the profane, promising visitors the frisson of seeing a dead body that was not lying in a casket.
道德咨询委员会称“身体世界”是“突破性的教育展览”和“该领域的黄金标准”。但这次展览真正的吸引力在于它打破了神圣与世俗之间无形的界限，让参观者看到一具不在棺材里的尸体会感到颤栗。
Von Hagens even posed some of the corpses in ways designed to get a laugh.
冯·哈根斯甚至还摆出一些尸体的姿势来博人发笑。
One held his liver out in front of him, like a waiter holding a tray.
其中一人把他的肝脏放在他面前，就像服务员端着托盘一样。
Another looked like a flasher opening his raincoat: his torso butterflied like a chicken, a fedora perched on his head, his dissected genitalia dangling between his legs.
另一个看起来像一个打开雨衣的闪光者：他的躯干像一只鸡一样蝴蝶般地飞舞，一顶软呢帽栖息在他的头上，他被解剖的生殖器在他的两腿之间晃来晃去。
In 2009, von Hagens introduced an exhibit in which two plastinated corpses were posed having sex in front of a mirrored wall.
2009年，冯·哈根斯推出了一场展览，其中两具塑化尸体在镜面墙前摆出性交姿势。
In 1974, when Gaylin published “Harvesting the Dead,” the concept of brain death was only six years old.
1974年，当盖林发表《收割死者》时，脑死亡的概念只有六年的历史。
The criteria were formalized in 1968 by an ad hoc committee at Harvard Medical School.
该标准于 1968 年由哈佛医学院的一个特设委员会正式制定。
Yet even then the concept was intertwined with the need for transplantable organs.
然而即便如此，这个概念仍然与可移植器官的需求交织在一起。
Surgeons had performed the first transplant from a brain-dead donor five years earlier.
五年前，外科医生对脑死亡捐献者进行了第一例移植手术。
The Harvard committee declared that if someone’s brain is permanently nonfunctional, the person is “for all practical purposes” dead—even though the heart is beating, the hair is growing, and the subject may occasionally raise its arms and drop them across its chest, a reflex known as the “Lazarus Sign.”
哈佛大学委员会宣称，如果一个人的大脑永久失去功能，那么这个人“实际上”已经死亡——尽管心脏在跳动，头发在生长，并且受试者偶尔会举起手臂并将其放在胸前，这种反射被称为“拉撒路征”。
The state of being “dead” and the state of being “dead for all practical purposes” are not quite the same thing; if they were, we wouldn’t need the term brain-dead .
“死亡”的状态和“出于所有实际目的而死亡”的状态并不完全相同。如果是的话，我们就不需要“脑死亡”这个词了。
Yet the concept is critical for the support of organ transplantation.
然而，这个概念对于支持器官移植至关重要。
The Australian philosopher Peter Singer has famously called brain death “a concept so desirable in its consequences that it is unthinkable to give up, and so shaky on its foundations that it can scarcely be supported.” Noting the instrumental rationale for the concept, the anthropologist Margaret Lock has suggested that a more apt phrase would be as-good-as-dead .
澳大利亚哲学家彼得·辛格（Peter Singer）曾将脑死亡称为“一个概念，其后果如此令人向往，以至于无法想象放弃，但其基础又如此摇摇欲坠，几乎无法得到支持”。人类学家玛格丽特·洛克（Margaret Lock）注意到这个概念的工具性原理，并建议更恰当的短语是“和死一样好”。
Outside the culture of medicine, in which the concept of brain death is firmly established, the moral status of brain-dead bodies is not nearly so settled.
在脑死亡概念已被牢固确立的医学文化之外，脑死亡尸体的道德地位却远没有那么确定。
For example, when a French doctor performed a nitrous oxide experiment on a brain-dead subject in 1988, he was vilified.
例如，1988年，当一名法国医生对脑死亡受试者进行一氧化二氮实验时，他遭到了诽谤。
‘‘I find it revolting that in this country these types of experiments on human beings are considered,” the French minister of health said.
法国卫生部长说：“我觉得在这个国家考虑进行此类人体实验令人反感。”
A similar response greeted Anna Smajdor’s suggestion that brain-dead women could be artificially impregnated and used as gestational surrogates.
Anna Smajdor 提出可以对脑死亡女性进行人工受孕并用作妊娠代孕者的建议，也得到了类似的回应。
Commentators found the proposal “outrageous,” “dehumanizing,” and “dystopian.”
评论家认为该提案“令人愤慨”、“非人化”和“反乌托邦”。
To many people, brain death seems like a fate worse than death itself: the body trapped in a liminal state, not exactly alive but not exactly dead, suspended in a cool, sterile web of medical machinery.
对许多人来说，脑死亡似乎是一种比死亡本身更糟糕的命运：身体陷入一种阈限状态，不完全是活着，也不完全是死亡，悬浮在凉爽、无菌的医疗机器网络中。
We are taught from an early age to treat other human beings with respect, and we have customs and rituals for the respectful treatment of the dead body.
我们从小就被教导要尊重他人，我们也有尊重尸体的习俗和仪式。
But how to treat the brain-dead body with respect remains a troubled question decades after the diagnosis was established.
但在确诊数十年后，如何尊重地对待脑死亡尸体仍然是一个棘手的问题。
At least part of the reason is because we remain unsettled about the place of brain death within larger frameworks of meaning that extend beyond the language of individual rights and personal autonomy.
至少部分原因是我们对脑死亡在超越个人权利和个人自主的语言的更大意义框架中的地位仍然感到不安。
Two decades ago, a team led by the cultural psychologist Jonathan Haidt presented students at the University of Virginia with a series of hypothetical scenarios designed to test moral reasoning.
二十年前，由文化心理学家乔纳森·海特领导的团队向弗吉尼亚大学的学生展示了一系列旨在测试道德推理的假设场景。
In one scenario, a research assistant in a pathology lab sees a cadaver that is about to be cremated.
在一个场景中，病理实验室的研究助理看到一具即将火化的尸体。
Although the research assistant is a vegetarian who believes it is wrong to kill animals for food, she is disturbed by the thought of perfectly edible meat going to waste.
尽管研究助理是一名素食主义者，她认为捕杀动物作为食物是错误的，但她对完全可食用的肉类会被浪费的想法感到不安。
So she cuts off a piece of muscle from the cadaver, takes it home, and cooks it for dinner.
于是她从尸体上切下一块肌肉，把它带回家煮晚餐。
Haidt asked the students: Is there anything wrong with this?
海特问学生：这有什么问题吗？
Not many of the students were willing to defend cannibalism, yet they struggled to explain why it was wrong.
没有多少学生愿意为食人行为辩护，但他们却很难解释为什么这是错误的。
They were just as puzzled by other hypothetical scenarios.
他们对其他假设场景也同样感到困惑。
In one, an adult brother and sister decide to have sex—only once, in secret, using birth control.
在其中一个故事中，一对成年兄弟姐妹决定发生性行为——只有一次，而且是秘密的，使用避孕措施。
In another, after a pet dog is accidentally killed, family members add its meat to a tasty stew and eat it for dinner.
另一种情况是，一只宠物狗被意外杀死后，家人将其肉放入美味的炖菜中作为晚餐食用。
These actions struck the students as reprehensible in ways that they couldn’t easily express.
这些行为让学生们感到应受谴责，但他们却无法轻易表达出来。
As Haidt writes, the students were “rendered speechless by their inability to explain verbally what they knew intuitively.” Haidt calls this “moral dumbfounding.”
正如海特所写，学生们“因为无法口头解释他们凭直觉知道的事情而哑口无言”。海特称之为“道德上令人哭笑不得”。
In most parts of the world, Haidt contends, morality can be mapped onto one of three axes: individualism, community, and divinity.
海特认为，在世界大部分地区，道德可以映射到三个轴之一：个人主义、社区和神性。
Moral concepts such as rights, liberty, justice, and tolerance come from the ethic of individualism.
权利、自由、正义、宽容等道德概念来源于个人主义伦理。
The purpose of these concepts is to protect the interests of individuals as they pursue their needs and desires.
这些概念的目的是在个人追求自己的需求和愿望时保护他们的利益。
Concepts such as duty, authority, and patriotism come from the ethic of community.
义务、权威和爱国主义等概念来自社区伦理。
These help preserve the social fabric by protecting collectives such as families, armies, and nations.
这些通过保护家庭、军队和国家等集体来帮助维护社会结构。
But it is from the ethic of divinity that we get concepts such as desecration, defilement, and degradation.
但正是从神性伦理中，我们得到了亵渎、玷污和堕落等概念。
The ethic of divinity sees the person as a spiritual being who is connected to a sacred or natural order; living in accordance with these moral concepts maintains that order and protects the soul from being degraded.
神性伦理将人视为与神圣或自然秩序相关的精神存在。按照这些道德观念生活可以维持秩序并保护灵魂免遭堕落。
Often these notions are tied to rules regarding the body: eating, menstruation, sexual activity, and the treatment of the corpse.
这些概念通常与有关身体的规则联系在一起：饮食、月经、性活动和尸体的处理。
The reason educated, liberal westerners are morally dumbfounded by Haidt’s scenarios is because many of us reason almost exclusively along a single axis: the ethic of individualism.
受过教育的自由派西方人之所以在道德上对海特的情景感到震惊，是因为我们中的许多人几乎完全沿着一个轴进行推理：个人主义伦理。
On this axis, a moral violation typically involves cruelty, unfairness, or dishonesty.
在这个轴上，道德违规通常涉及残忍、不公平或不诚实。
But violations such as cannibalism, bestiality, and incest are offenses against norms of purity or sanctity.
但食人、兽交和乱伦等违法行为都是对纯洁或神圣规范的冒犯。
To the extent that there is a moral problem with eating the flesh of a human corpse, it is that the act feels like a defilement, a violation of the respect a dead body should be accorded.
就吃人尸体的肉存在的道德问题而言，这种行为感觉像是一种玷污，违反了对尸体应有的尊重。
There is a reason the term desecration is used in law to describe illicit interference with a dead body or a grave.
法律中使用“亵渎”一词来描述对尸体或坟墓的非法干扰是有原因的。
The actions are transgressions against some notion of the sacred.
这些行为违反了某些神圣观念。
Although the word desecration suggests an offense against God, there are secular equivalents as well.
尽管亵渎这个词暗示着对上帝的冒犯，但也有世俗的同义词。
Burning the American flag is sometimes described as desecration, especially by social conservatives.
焚烧美国国旗有时被描述为亵渎，尤其是社会保守派。
Many Americans on the left would feel a similar sense of violation if the Minnesota Boundary Waters were turned into an industrial waste site, or if a pharmaceutical company began using Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech to market Ambien.
如果明尼苏达州边界水域变成工业废物场，或者一家制药公司开始利用马丁·路德·金的“我有一个梦想”演讲来推销安必恩，许多左翼美国人也会感到类似的侵犯感。
Almost everyone has some institution, place, or figure for whom admiration borders on awe and reverence.
几乎每个人都有一些令人钦佩近乎敬畏的机构、场所或人物。
I remember talking to an English friend who was offended by a comedy sketch making fun of David Bowie.
我记得和一位英国朋友交谈时，他被一部取笑大卫·鲍伊的喜剧小品冒犯了。
Often our reaction toward violations of sanctity or purity is not mere condemnation but disgust.
通常，我们对侵犯神圣性或纯洁性的行为的反应不仅仅是谴责，而是厌恶。
We might denounce burglary and fraud, but we feel viscerally repulsed by necrophilia or child sex trafficking.
我们可能会谴责入室盗窃和欺诈，但我们对恋尸癖或儿童性交易感到发自内心的厌恶。
Offenses against these norms seem to extend beyond wrongs to individual victims and to pollute society as a whole.
违反这些规范的行为似乎不仅对个别受害者造成伤害，而且污染了整个社会。
Think, for example, of the collective impulse to destroy the houses where violent sex offenders have tortured and killed their victims, or when people say they need to take a shower after seeing or reading an account of an especially twisted crime.
例如，想一想摧毁暴力性犯罪者折磨和杀害受害者的房屋的集体冲动，或者当人们在看到或阅读了特别扭曲的犯罪记录后说他们需要洗澡时。
It is as if a moral stain must be removed before order can be restored.
就好像必须清除道德污点才能恢复秩序一样。
What makes violations of sanctity or purity difficult to articulate and justify—at least for many of us in the West—is that they are no longer explicitly supported by any larger conceptual scaffolding.
至少对我们西方许多人来说，破坏神圣性或纯洁性的行为变得难以阐明和辩护，因为它们不再得到任何更大的概念框架的明确支持。
Words such as desecration and debasement sound archaic and prudish, even reactionary.
诸如亵渎和贬低之类的词听起来既过时又正经，甚至是反动的。
Faced with a conflict between emotion and reason, many people feel that the only appropriate response is simply to change their minds and admit that their gut feelings were wrong.
面对情感与理性的冲突，许多人认为唯一合适的反应就是改变主意并承认自己的直觉是错误的。
When one of Haidt’s interviewees was presented with the case of a man who has sex with a supermarket chicken before consuming it, he replied, “It’s his chicken, he’s eating it, nobody is getting hurt.” What the interviewee did not say (but may have felt) is that a man who has sex with a dead chicken has degraded himself, even if he enjoyed the experience.
当海特的一位受访者听到一名男子在吃超市鸡肉之前与它发生性关系的案例时，他回答说：“这是他的鸡，他正在吃它，没有人受伤。”受访者没有说（但可能感觉到）的是，与死鸡发生性关系的男人已经贬低了自己，即使他很享受这种经历。
Such judgments are a form of what the philosopher Charles Taylor calls “strong evaluation”—a judgment of better or worse (or higher or lower) that stands independent of one’s own tastes, desires, and preferences.
这种判断是哲学家查尔斯·泰勒所说的“强评价”的一种形式——一种独立于个人品味、欲望和偏好的好坏（或更高或更低）的判断。
It can be a narrowly moral judgment, such as condemning a practice as cruel or unfair, but it can also be much broader.
它可以是狭隘的道德判断，例如谴责某种行为残忍或不公平，但它也可以更广泛。
To tell someone that he is wasting his life is not exactly a moral condemnation as typically understood, but neither is it a casual expression of personal preference.
告诉某人他正在浪费生命，并不完全是通常理解的道德谴责，但也不是个人喜好的随意表达。
It appeals to a larger framework of meaning within which a human life can be judged a success or a failure.
它诉诸于更大的意义框架，在这个框架内可以判断人类生活的成功或失败。
It is within this larger framework of meaning that judgments about degradation get their purchase.
正是在这个更大的意义框架内，人们才对退化做出了判断。
Taylor calls it “spiritual”; others might prefer the term “existential.” Either way, it is the framework within which we might speak of a life as having meaning or purpose.
泰勒称之为“精神的”；其他人可能更喜欢“存在主义”这个词。无论哪种方式，它都是我们可以谈论生命具有意义或目的的框架。
To say that someone has degraded himself by having sex with a chicken carcass or eating the flesh of a cadaver is to make a judgment about the place of such actions in an admirable human life and the way such a life should end.
说某人通过与鸡尸体发生性关系或吃尸体的肉来贬低自己，就是对这种行为在令人钦佩的人类生活中的地位以及这种生活应该如何结束做出判断。
No one’s rights have been violated when a dead body is displayed having sex, but to feel uneasy about the display is more than just a “yuck factor.” It is the sense that the bodies on display have been degraded, even if the reasons why are difficult to articulate.
当尸体被展示做爱时，没有人的权利受到侵犯，但对展示感到不安不仅仅是一个“令人厌恶的因素”。这是一种感觉，展出的尸体已经退化，尽管原因很难说清楚。
“My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul.
“我对他的态度就是对灵魂的态度。
I am not of the opinion that he has a soul,” Ludwig Wittgenstein writes in The Philosophical Investigations (tr.
我不认为他有灵魂，”路德维希·维特根斯坦在《哲学研究》（tr.1）中写道。
by G.
通过 G.
E.
E.
M.
M。
Anscombe).
安斯科姆）。
By an “attitude towards a soul,” Wittgenstein was referring to the stance that is implicit in our relationships with other human beings.
维特根斯坦所说的“对灵魂的态度”是指我们与其他人的关系中隐含的立场。
Some aspects of this stance are explicitly moral—for example, the notion that other human beings have rights and that they are accountable for their actions.
这种立场的某些方面显然是道德的——例如，其他人拥有权利并且他们对自己的行为负责的观念。
But other aspects are close to custom or habit, such as the idea that people should be addressed by name rather than a number, or that they should eat at a table rather than from a bowl on the floor, or that they deserve a funeral when they die.
但其他方面则接近习俗或习惯，例如人们应该用名字而不是数字来称呼，或者他们应该在桌子上吃饭而不是用地板上的碗吃饭，或者他们死后应该举行葬礼。
An attitude toward a soul is usually less a matter of conscious deliberation than the background for that deliberation.
对灵魂的态度通常与其说是有意识的深思熟虑的问题，不如说是有意识深思熟虑的背景问题。
We simply take the attitude reflexively, in accordance with how we have been taught and what the situation seems to demand.
我们只是根据我们所受的教育和情况的要求，条件反射地采取这种态度。
The premise of “Harvesting the Dead” is that we should take the same attitude toward a brain-dead body that we do toward a donated cadaver.
《收割死者》的前提是，我们对待脑死亡的尸体应该像对待捐赠的尸体一样。
Yet when Margaret Lock interviewed North American nurses, she found that not a single one was able to think of the brain-dead body as simply a cadaver.
然而，当玛格丽特·洛克采访北美护士时，她发现没有人能够将脑死亡尸体简单地视为一具尸体。
This was not because they had any difficulty accepting brain death as a diagnosis.
这并不是因为他们难以接受脑死亡的诊断。
Yet if they happened to be taking care of an unconscious patient who was later declared brain-dead, the declaration of death did little to change their attitudes.
然而，如果他们碰巧正在照顾一名昏迷不醒的病人，而这名病人后来被宣布脑死亡，那么死亡的宣告并不能改变他们的态度。
The anthropologist Lesley Sharp documented a similar dynamic at work in Strange Harvest, her ethnography of organ transplantation.
人类学家莱斯利·夏普（Lesley Sharp）在她的器官移植民族志《奇怪的收获》中记录了类似的动态。
According to Sharp, relatives of a brain-dead organ donor usually respond to the body of their loved one as if the person is still present, speaking to and caressing the body up until the moment when it is taken to surgery.
夏普说，脑死亡器官捐献者的亲属通常会对亲人的尸体做出反应，就好像这个人仍然在场一样，与尸体交谈并爱抚尸体，直到被送往手术的那一刻。
Contrast that with the bluntly instrumental attitude taken by employees of organ procurement organizations (OPOs), which are responsible for obtaining and evaluating organs for transplantation.
与此形成鲜明对比的是，负责获取和评估移植器官的器官获取组织（OPO）员工所采取的直率工具态度。
According to Sharp, organ procurement specialists do not refer to donors as “patients” and rarely use a patient’s name.
夏普表示，器官获取专家不会将捐赠者称为“患者”，也很少使用患者的名字。
Instead, they simply say “he” or “she.” Instead of “life support,” they use phrases like “mechanical support” and “artificial support.” They measure the quality of a brain-dead body by how many organs can be harvested, with the ideal being a “nine-organ donor.”
相反，他们只是说“他”或“她”。他们使用“机械支持”和“人工支持”等短语，而不是“生命支持”。他们通过可以摘取的器官数量来衡量脑死亡尸体的质量，最理想的是“九个器官捐献者”。
To see the body in such a starkly instrumental way is not the result of malice or ill will.
以如此纯粹的工具性方式看待身体并不是恶意或恶意的结果。
Organ procurement is emotionally draining and demands enormous sensitivity.
器官获取是一种精神上的消耗，需要高度的敏感性。
Its very nature makes the process extraordinarily difficult: a grieving family, the pressure of time, the brutality of organ and tissue retrieval itself.
其本质使得整个过程异常困难：悲伤的家庭、时间的压力、器官和组织回收本身的残酷性。
But there is no avoiding the fact that the brain-dead body is being used instrumentally as a source of salvageable parts.
但无可避免的事实是，脑死亡的尸体正被用作可抢救部件的来源。
Many organ procurement specialists have to remind themselves that their work serves a larger social good.
许多器官获取专家必须提醒自己，他们的工作服务于更大的社会公益。
OPOs take care to emphasize the altruistic nature of organ transplantation.
OPO 非常重视器官移植的利他性质。
Organs are “donated,” not sold; donors “give the gift of life.” Yet behind the language of altruism lies a very profitable business.
器官是“捐赠”的，而不是出售的；捐赠者“给予生命的礼物”。然而，利他主义语言的背后却隐藏着一项非常有利可图的生意。
In 2022, the global transplantation market was valued at $8.5 billion.
2022年，全球移植市场价值85亿美元。
And though there is no legal market in the United States for most human organs, the same is not true of human tissue—such as bone, cartilage, and eyes—which is collected and sold by tissue banks.
尽管大多数人体器官在美国没有合法市场，但由组织库收集和出售的人体组织（例如骨骼、软骨和眼睛）却并非如此。
In 2012, a National Public Radio investigation estimated the market value of a single human body at roughly $80,000 or more.
2012 年，国家公共广播电台的一项调查估计，单个人体的市场价值约为 8 万美元或更多。
Unlike organ recovery, which is a skilled procedure performed by surgeons, human tissue is harvested by technicians using crude instruments like hammers and metal wedges.
与器官恢复不同的是，器官恢复是由外科医生执行的熟练程序，而人体组织是由技术人员使用锤子和金属楔子等原始仪器采集的。
Tissue salvagers pull out the large bones from arms and legs and replace them with plastic or wooden pipes.
组织回收者从手臂和腿上拔出大骨头，并用塑料或木管代替。
They split open the chest to get to the heart valves, and they peel veins from the inside of the skin.
他们切开胸部到达心脏瓣膜，并从皮肤内部剥离静脉。
To remove the skin, they use a dermatone, a specialized instrument that one salvager describes as “kind of a cross between a cheese grater and an electric razor.” Some companies offer their salvagers financial incentives and prizes for recovering as much tissue as possible.
为了去除皮肤，他们使用了 dermatone，这是一种专门的工具，一位回收者将其描述为“一种奶酪刨丝器和电动剃须刀的混合体”。一些公司为回收者提供经济奖励和奖品，以尽可能多地回收组织。
At one such company, called Allograft, this prize for skin recovery was known as “The Golden Dermatone.”
在一家名为 Allograft 的公司中，这项皮肤修复奖被称为“金色 Dermatone”。
The sudden shift in attitudes—from seeing people as patients to seeing them as organ and tissue donors—can be hard for caregivers to navigate.
态度的突然转变——从将人们视为病人到将他们视为器官和组织捐赠者——对于护理人员来说可能很难驾驭。
Margaret Lock interviewed a Canadian physician who, as a resident in the 1970s, spent a morning trying to save the life of a young boy.
玛格丽特·洛克采访了一位加拿大医生，这位 20 世纪 70 年代的住院医师花了一个上午的时间试图挽救一名小男孩的生命。
When the boy was declared brain-dead, the physician was then required to assist the transplant team in opening the boy up and removing his organs.
当男孩被宣布脑死亡后，医生被要求协助移植小组打开男孩并取出他的器官。
The doctor’s physical revulsion was so intense that he left the room and vomited.
医生的身体厌恶感如此强烈，以至于他离开了房间并呕吐了。
He described the experience as the worst moment of his medical career.
他形容这次经历是他医疗生涯中最糟糕的时刻。
The notion of degradation typically depends on a hierarchy of value.
退化的概念通常取决于价值等级。
In 1956, when the sociologist Harold Garfinkel introduced the concept of a “status degradation ceremony,” he had in mind rituals of public denunciation: stripping military officers of their rank, pronouncing a prison sentence on a convicted offender, having a security guard escort a fired employee out of a building.
1956 年，当社会学家哈罗德·加芬克尔 (Harold Garfinkel) 提出“地位降级仪式”的概念时，他想到的是公开谴责的仪式：剥夺军官军衔、对已定罪的罪犯判处监禁、让保安护送被解雇的员工离开大楼。
The purpose of such rituals is to express moral indignation.
此类仪式的目的是表达道德义愤。
Yet that purpose can be fulfilled only if there is an agreed-upon status hierarchy within which the target of the ceremony can be lowered.
然而，只有存在一个商定的地位等级制度并在其中降低仪式的目标，这一目的才能实现。
When there is no shame in being fired, sentenced, or expelled, no status degradation will follow.
当被解雇、判刑或开除并不令人羞耻时，地位就不会随之下降。
Hierarchies themselves are culturally and historically contingent.
等级制度本身在文化和历史上是偶然的。
A marker of high status in one culture is a marker of low status in another; just compare the difference in how the elderly are revered in China or Japan with the way they are treated in the United States.
在一种文化中地位高的标志在另一种文化中地位低。只要比较一下中国或日本对老年人的尊重方式与美国对待老年人的方式的差异即可。
Status can also change dramatically over time.
随着时间的推移，状态也会发生巨大变化。
The status of the clergy in Western cultures has declined over the past 200 years while that of scientists has risen.
过去200年来，西方文化中神职人员的地位有所下降，而科学家的地位却有所上升。
And when status hierarchies are flattened—as they were in the United States when legal rights were extended to women, racial minorities, and gay people—the degradation associated with crossing a boundary dissipates.
当地位等级被扁平化时——就像在美国，法律权利延伸到女性、少数族裔和同性恋者——与跨越边界相关的退化就会消失。
Not so long ago, many white Americans saw school integration and interracial marriage as degrading.
不久前，许多美国白人认为学校融合和异族通婚是有辱人格的。
But when the status hierarchies associated with race began to crumble, what was once seen as degradation began to look like moral progress.
但当与种族相关的地位等级开始崩溃时，曾经被视为堕落的东西开始看起来像是道德进步。
Despite its contingency, however, the feeling of violation that accompanies degradation can be profound.
然而，尽管存在偶然性，伴随着退化而来的侵犯感可能是深刻的。
For an extreme example, consider the degrading ways in which American soldiers treated prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison during the war in Iraq: stripped naked and photographed, stacked in human pyramids, forced to simulate sexual acts.
举一个极端的例子，想想伊拉克战争期间美国士兵在阿布格莱布监狱对待囚犯的有辱人格的方式：脱光衣服拍照，堆放在人形金字塔里，被迫模拟性行为。
The force of degradation as an offense against human dignity was reflected in the deep sense of shame that many Americans felt when photographs of the Abu Ghraib prisoners were made public.
当阿布格莱布监狱囚犯的照片被公开时，许多美国人感到深深的羞耻感，这反映了作为对人类尊严的侵犯的贬低力量。
It is for this reason that the Geneva Conventions prohibit not just torture and acts of cruelty but also “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.” This prohibition extends to the treatment of dead bodies, which the Geneva Conventions prohibit from being “mutilated” or “despoiled.”
正是出于这个原因，《日内瓦公约》不仅禁止酷刑和残忍行为，还禁止“侵犯个人尊严，特别是侮辱性和有辱人格的待遇”。这项禁令也适用于尸体的处理，《日内瓦公约》禁止对尸体进行“肢解”或“掠夺”。
The depth of such violations can be measured by the moral injury experienced by at least some of those who have engaged in it.
这种侵犯行为的严重程度可以通过至少一些参与其中的人所遭受的道德伤害来衡量。
In Achilles in Vietnam, the psychiatrist Jonathan Shay writes that American soldiers in Vietnam who desecrated corpses later struggled with those memories even more than they did with their exposure to combat.
精神病学家乔纳森·谢伊在《越南的阿喀琉斯》一书中写道，在越南亵渎尸体的美国士兵后来对这些记忆的挣扎甚至比他们在战斗中的挣扎还要强烈。
One soldier had intrusive memories every Christmas about “this dead [guy] we hung on a tree with a big banner that said ‘Merry Fucking Christmas.’ ” Another had flashbacks about mutilating a corpse.
每年圣诞节，一名士兵都会回忆起“这个死去的[家伙]，我们把它挂在一棵树上，上面挂着一张大横幅，上面写着‘圣诞快乐’。”另一名士兵则回忆起肢解尸体的情景。
As much as the soldiers were haunted by the act of killing, they were haunted even more by dishonoring the bodies of the dead.
尽管士兵们对杀戮行为感到困扰，但他们更对侮辱死者尸体感到困扰。
Soldiers who desecrate the corpse of an enemy do it to express their contempt.
士兵们亵渎敌人的尸体是为了表达他们的蔑视。
This brute fact separates the action morally from the damage that accompanies organ and tissue harvesting.
这个残酷的事实将这种行为在道德上与摘取器官和组织所造成的损害区分开来。
Yet in the early days of transplantation, surgeons had to deal with the accusation that they were disrespecting the bodies of the dead.
然而，在移植的早期，外科医生不得不面对他们不尊重死者尸体的指控。
“To the butcher of Groote Schuur Hospital,” read a letter sent to Christiaan Barnard shortly after he performed the first heart transplant in Cape Town in 1967.
克里斯蒂安·巴纳德 (Christiaan Barnard) 于 1967 年在开普敦进行了首例心脏移植手术后不久，他在一封写给他的信中写道：“致格鲁特·舒尔医院 (Groote Schuur Hospital) 的屠夫。”
The sheer success of transplantation has done much to change public attitudes, but so too has the development of practices that emphasize the higher moral purpose of organ harvesting while hiding its more mercenary aspects: walls of honor for those who volunteer, privacy protocols to shield the practices from public view, a vocabulary of altruism to obscure the financial stakes.
移植的巨大成功极大地改变了公众的态度，但强调器官摘取更高道德目的同时隐藏其更唯利是图的做法的发展也带来了影响：为志愿者设置荣誉墙，保护这些做法免受公众视野的隐私协议，用利他主义的词汇来掩盖经济利益。
In this way, the public’s understanding of organ harvesting has been transformed.
这样，公众对活摘器官的认识就发生了转变。
In Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace imagines a dystopian future in which the government has sold naming rights for time, such that years have become known by the names of their corporate sponsors: “The Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad,” or “The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment.” In 1996, that read as satire.
在《无尽的玩笑》中，大卫·福斯特·华莱士想象了一个反乌托邦的未来，政府出售了时间的冠名权，这样，时间就以其企业赞助商的名字而闻名：“Tucks 药垫之年”或“Depend 成人内衣之年”。 1996 年，这读起来像是讽刺。
Twenty years later, KFC paid a couple $11,000 to name their baby after Colonel Sanders, and an online casino gave a Utah woman $10,000 to have “GoldenPalace.com” tattooed on her forehead.
二十年后，肯德基支付了一对夫妇 11,000 美元，以桑德斯上校的名字为他们的孩子命名，一家在线赌场给了一位犹他州妇女 10,000 美元，让她在额头上纹上“GoldenPalace.com”。
Willard Gaylin’s neomorts may have sounded fantastical in 1974, yet we now live in a country where it is possible to order a human head on the Internet for $640.
威拉德·盖林 (Willard Gaylin) 的新人头在 1974 年听起来可能很梦幻，但我们现在生活在一个可以在互联网上以 640 美元订购人头的国家。
If such a transformation in social attitudes could happen for organ harvesting, it could also happen for other uses of the body.
如果社会态度的这种转变可以发生在器官摘取上，那么它也可能发生在身体的其他用途上。
If it did, the concept of the neomort would no doubt be accompanied by a set of customs and rituals designed to disguise and soften what occurred in the medical setting.
如果确实如此，新死亡的概念无疑将伴随着一系列旨在掩盖和软化医疗环境中发生的事情的习俗和仪式。
The difficulty is predicting what would be lost.
困难在于预测会损失什么。
It is possible that future generations might look back on pre-neomort times with a sense of longing, in the way that we might remember an old-growth forest before it was turned into a golf course, or the way the characters in the 1973 film Soylent Green remember naturally grown vegetables.
未来几代人可能会怀着一种向往的心情回顾前新艺术时代，就像我们记得一片古老的森林被变成高尔夫球场之前一样，或者就像 1973 年电影《Soylent Green》中的人物记得自然种植的蔬菜一样。
But it is also possible that they would see the changes as a reasonable sacrifice in light of the goods produced: risk-free drug testing, shame-free pelvic exams, more babies for those incapable of childbearing.
但考虑到所生产的产品，他们也可能会认为这些变化是合理的牺牲：无风险的药物测试、无耻的骨盆检查、为那些无法生育的人提供更多的婴儿。
Nor is it impossible that a latter-day Gunther von Hagens might do for neomorts what was once done for plastinated corpses.
近代的冈瑟·冯·哈根斯也并非不可能为新死亡者做曾经对塑化尸体所做的事情。
Body Worlds for the brain-dead would walk the same thin line that von Hagens navigated in 1995: close enough to medical reality to produce a shiver, yet far enough away to feel safe.
脑死亡者的身体世界将走冯·哈根斯在 1995 年所走的同样的路线：离医学现实足够近，让人不寒而栗，但又足够远，让人感到安全。
The faces of the neomorts could be obscured while their internal organs are displayed.
新死者的面部可能会被遮盖，而其内脏却会被展示出来。
Perhaps visitors could view the neomort’s digestive system through a porthole, like the “cannulated cow” at the Arkansas State Fair.
也许游客可以通过舷窗观察新动物的消化系统，就像阿肯色州博览会上的“空心牛”一样。
Other exhibits might be interactive: Visitors could inject the neomort with epinephrine to increase the heart rate or diuretics to increase the production of urine.
其他展品可能是互动的：参观者可以给新死亡者注射肾上腺素以提高心率，或注射利尿剂以增加尿液的产生。
Critics will be shocked and scandalized, of course, but defenders will assure us we are seeing a landmark in educational instruction, the “gold standard” for the field.
当然，批评者会感到震惊和愤慨，但捍卫者会向我们保证，我们正在看到教育教学的里程碑，即该领域的“黄金标准”。
Over time, our objections will slowly fade into the past.
随着时间的推移，我们的反对意见也会慢慢成为过去。