 A second major challenge confronting any traditional approach is the specter of highly unpalatable practical consequences (Magnus, Wilfond, and Caplan 2014). Currently the whole-brain standard is enshrined in law. Suppose we reversed legislative course and returned to traditional criteria (whether updated in formulation or not). Then a patient who satisfied whole-brain criteria but not traditional criteria would count as alive. Unless we overturned the “dead-donor rule”—the policy of permitting extraction of vital organs only from dead bodies—then it would be illegal to procure organs from these living patients who have incurred total brain failure; yet the viability of their organs would require maintaining respiration and circulation with life-supports. There is broad agreement that having to wait until traditional criteria are met to harvest organs would constitute a great setback to organ transplantation (even if donation after cardiac death, which invokes traditional criteria, is permitted). Moreover, a legal return to traditional criteria for death might lead physicians to feel they had lost the authority to discontinue treatment unilaterally—when a family requests continued treatment—upon a determination of total brain failure despite what many would consider the futility of further treatment. Furthermore, laws for determining death would have to be revised.