I am not harmed, it seems, by failing to be brilliant, or rich and beautiful. But compare my life as it is, with my unimpressive IQ, income and looks, to my life as it would be were I brilliant or rich or beautiful: the former is considerably worse than the latter. My not being a genius or rich and so forth precludes my coming to have many goods.
It makes my life worse than it otherwise would be, so comparativism seems to imply that not being a genius is bad for me.
Suppose you have the winning Mega Millions jacpot ticket, and you decide to give it to me. Before you hand it over, you have a stroke and die. Has your death harmed me? Epicureans might renew their attack on the harm thesis by exploiting examples like these. The examples appear to show that things can have enormous negative value for me without harming me. Similarly, Epicureans might insist, the preclusion of goods by death is harmless: cut short, my life is worse than it would be were I not to die, but this comparative difference does not show that I am harmed.
It seems that the comparative criteria work well when we evaluate losses, such as the loss of my arms, and also when we evaluate some lacks, such as the inability to see or to feel pleasure. But, arguably, the criteria have worrisome implications when we evaluate certain other lacks, such as my lack of genius. It is relatively clear that a person is harmed by the inability to see but less clear that he is harmed by the lack of genius.
Why is that? Another explanation might focus on the relative importance of having some goods rather than others. In some moods, we may consider it harmful to be deprived of a good just when it is important for us to have it.
The troublesome lacks we have been discussing might be lacks of goods it is unimportant to have; such lacks would not be harmful even though we would be better off without them. But if, against all odds, a person is a genius, or rich, or beautiful, would taking these away be harmless to her?
The argument he developed involved a thought experiment:. According to his symmetry argument, it is irrational to object to death, assuming it ends our existence, since we do not find it objectionable that we failed to exist prior to being alive, and the way things were for us while not existing then is just like the way things will be for us after death ends our existence; our pre-vital nonexistence and our posthumous nonexistence are symmetrical, alike in all relevant respects, so that any objection to the one would apply to the other.
On one interpretation, the argument is this: the ending of life is not bad, since the only thing we could hold against it is the fact that it is followed by our nonexistence, yet the latter is not objectionable, as is shown by the fact that we do not object to our nonexistence before birth.
So understood, the symmetry argument is weak. It would have some force for someone who thought initially that death puts us into a state or condition that is ghastly, perhaps painful, but that need not be our complaint.
Instead, our complaint might be that death precludes our having more good life. Notice that the mirror image of death is birth or, more precisely, becoming alive , and the two affect us in very different ways: birth makes life possible; if a life ends up being good for us, birth starts a good thing going.
Death makes further life impossible; it brings a good thing to a close. Perhaps Lucretius only meant to argue that being dead is not bad, since the only thing we could hold against it is our nonexistence, which is not really objectionable, as witness our attitude about pre-vital nonexistence. Truly, our pre-vital nonexistence does not concern us much. But perhaps that is because our pre-vital nonexistence is followed by our existence.
Perhaps we would not worry overly about our post-vital nonexistence if it, too, were followed by our existence. If we could move in and out of existence, say with the help of futuristic machines that could dismantle us, then rebuild us, molecule by molecule, after a period of nonexistence, we would not be overly upset about the intervening gaps, and, rather like hibernating bears, we might enjoy taking occasional breaks from life while the world gets more interesting.
But undergoing temporary nonexistence is not the same as undergoing permanent nonexistence. What is upsetting might be the permanence of post-vital nonexistence—not nonexistence per se. There is another way to use considerations of symmetry against the harm thesis: we want to die later, or not at all, because it is a way of extending life, but this attitude is irrational, Lucretius might say, since we do not want to be born earlier we do not want to have always existed , which is also a way to extend life.
As this argument suggests, we are more concerned about the indefinite continuation of our lives than about their indefinite extension. Be careful when you rub the magic lamp: if you wish that your life be extended, the genie might make you older!
Some of us might welcome the prospect of having lived a life stretching indefinitely into the past, given fortuitous circumstances. But we would prefer a life stretching indefinitely into the future. Is it irrational to want future life more than past life?
No; it is not surprising to find ourselves with no desire to extend life into the past, since the structure of the world permits life extension only into the future, and that is good enough.
But what if life extension were possible in either direction? Would we still be indifferent about a lengthier past? And should our attitude about future life match our attitude about past life? Our attitude about future life should match our attitude about past life if our interests and attitudes are limited in certain ways. If quantity of life is the only concern, a preference for future life is irrational.
Similarly, the preference is irrational if our only concern is to maximize how much pleasure we experience over the course of our lives without regard to its temporal distribution. But our attitude is not that of the life- or pleasure-gourmand. According to Parfit, we have a far-reaching bias extending to goods in general: we prefer that any good things, not just pleasures, be in our future, and that bad things, if they happen at all, be in our past. He argues that if we take this extensive bias for granted, and assume that, because of it, it is better for us to have goods in the future than in the past, we can explain why it is rational to deplore death more than we do our not having always existed: the former, not the latter, deprives us of good things in the future he need not say that it is because it is in the past that we worry about the life-limiting event at the beginning of our lives less than the life-limiting event at the end.
This preference for future goods is unfortunate, however, according to Parfit. If cultivated, the temporal insensitivity of the life- or pleasure-gourmand could lower our sensitivity to death: towards the end of life, we would find it unsettling that our supply of pleasures cannot be increased in the future, but we would be comforted by the pleasures we have accumulated. Whether or not we have the extensive bias described by Parfit, it is true that the accumulation of life and pleasure, and the passive contemplation thereof, are not our only interests.
We also have active, forward—looking goals and concerns. However, we cannot make and pursue plans for our past. We must project our plans our self—realization into the future, which explains our forward bias. We could have been devising and pursuing plans in the past, but these plans will not be extensions of our present concerns. It is not irrational to prefer that our lives be extended into the future rather than the past, if for no other reason than this: only the former makes our existing forward-looking pursuits possible.
It is not irrational to prefer not to be at the end of our lives, unable to shape them further, and limited to reminiscing about days gone by. As Frances Kamm , emphasizes, we do not want our lives to be all over with. Nevertheless, it does not follow that we should be indifferent about the extent of our pasts. Being in the grip of forward-looking pursuits is important, but we have passive interests as well, which make a more extensive past preferable.
Moreover, having been devising and pursuing plans in the past is worthwhile. If fated to die tomorrow, most of us would prefer to have a thousand years of glory behind us rather than fifty. We want to have lived well. It is entirely reasonable not to want to come into existence earlier even though we want to live longer, Nagel said, because it is metaphysically impossible for a person to have come into existence significantly earlier than she did, even though it is possible for a person to have existed longer than she actually did.
Imagine someone who originated from a zygote that had been frozen for a very long time. Mightn't that zygote have been frozen for a brief time instead? According to Frederik Kaufman , p. The belief Aristotle reported in this passage is that a person may be benefitted or harmed by things that happen while she is dead.
Nagel , p. It is an injury to the dead man. But this way of speaking is potentially misleading, as theorists who argue that posthumous events may harm us need not assume that the victims are worse off while they are dead. Is there such a thing as posthumous harm? The main reason to doubt the possibility of posthumous harm is the assumption that it presupposes the dubious possibility of backwards causation.
The dead may be wronged, Partridge thought, but being wronged is not a kind of harm. The claim that a person may be wronged by actions others take after she is dead is itself quite controversial. Like Partridge, some theorists think that people may be wronged but not harmed posthumously.
Priorists typically argue that both are possible, while other, theorists, such as J. Taylor , argue that neither is possible. We might also question the possibility of posthumous harm by drawing on the assumption made by Mark Bernstein , p. For simplicity, we can focus on one version of this view, namely intrinsic hedonism.
Suppose we assume that a person is harmed only by what is intrinsically or extrinsically bad for her, that intrinsic hedonism is the correct account of intrinsic harm and comparativism is the correct account of extrinsic harm, and also that the termination thesis people do not exist while dead is true.
On these assumptions, it is impossible for an event that occurs after a person dies to be bad for her. It cannot be bad for her in itself and it cannot be overall bad for her either. To be overall bad for a person, a posthumous event would have to make her have fewer goods or more evils or both than she would have had if that event had not occurred. But nothing that happens after a person dies and ceases to exist has any bearing on the amounts of pleasure or pain in her life.
Nothing that occurs after she ceases to exist modifies any of her intrinsic properties. Although the above assumptions rule out the possibility of posthumous harm, they are entirely consistent, we have seen, with the possibility of mortal harm, the possibility that people are harmed by dying.
We might think otherwise if, as some theorists do, we assume that a person no longer exists at the time she dies. Those who defend the possibility of posthumous harm deny that it involves backwards causation. But how could posthumous events affect people if not via backwards causation? Some theorists for example, Pitcher , Feinberg , Luper and , and Scarre appeal to preferentialism to explain the possibility of posthumous harm.
We noted earlier that preferentialists can defend the idea that some events harm their victims retroactively, and that death is such an event. Preferentialists can take a similar stance on posthumous events, assuming that things that happen after we die may determine whether desires we have while alive are fulfilled or thwarted. According to Pitcher, posthumous events harm us by being responsible for truths that thwart our desires.
For example, being slandered while I am dead makes it true that my reputation is to be damaged, and this harms me at all and only those times when I desire that my reputation be untarnished. Similarly, my desire that my child have a happy upbringing even if I am not there to provide it will be thwarted if, after I die, she catches some devastating illness.
The event that makes it true that my child will be miserable occurs after I am gone, but this truth thwarts my desire about my child now, so it is now that I am worse off. The posthumous events themselves harm me only indirectly; directly I am harmed by their making things true that bear on my interests.
However, the desire-based case for the possibility of posthumous harm remains controversial. It will be rejected by theorists who doubt that people are harmed by events that do not modify their intrinsic features, and by theorists who think that it hinges on the possibility of backwards causation, of course.
Velleman , p. Consider an event that thwarts one of a person's desires. To harm her by virtue of thwarting that desire, Partridge claims, the event must occur while she still has that desire , while she still cares about whether it is fulfilled, but she and her desire are gone by the time a posthumous event occurs. For some theorists Vorobej, , Suits , the point is that we have no reason to care whether our desires are fulfilled by events that occur once we no longer have those desires, and we no longer have desires after we die.
Parfit resisted this charge by noting that while some of our desires are conditional on their own persistence we want them fulfilled at a time only on condition that we will still have them at that time , others are not. Is it always a misfortune for us to die? Would never dying instead be bad for us? In a pair of influential essays, Thomas Nagel defends an affirmative answer to the first question, while Bernard Williams defends an affirmative answer to the second.
The additional positive weight is supplied by experience itself, rather than by any of its contents. Nagel does not argue that being deprived of continued life would be a misfortune if that life were entirely devoid of experience.
Nagel considers objections to his view towards the end of his essay. One might argue, Nagel points out as noted earlier , that mortality is not a misfortune on the grounds that the nonrealization of remote possibilities like being immortal is not harmful, or on the grounds that limitations that are normal to the species like mortality are not harmful.
However, the latter is implausible, as is evident to anyone who would rather be sedated into unconsciousness than undergo the suffering she would otherwise experience during surgery. Under such circumstances, sedation is overall good for us, despite the fact that indeed: because it stops us from experiencing things for a time. And once this is acknowledged, it seems reasonable to add that, under certain circumstances, dying would be overall good for us, and hence not bad for us after all.
It would be overall good for us if the further life we otherwise would have would bring us great evils, such as suffering, that are not offset by goods. Bernard Williams and others, such as Shelly Kagan takes the view that it would be bad to live forever, even under the best of circumstances.
In arguing for these views, Williams draws upon the notion of a categorical desire, which we can clarify as follows.
Consider a woman who wants to die. She might still take the view that if she is to live on, then she should be well fed and clothed. She wants food and clothing on condition she remain alive. In this sense her desires for food and clothes are conditional on her remaining alive, and, in being conditional on her living on, they do not give her reason to live.
Contrast a father who desires that his beloved daughter have a good start in life. His desire is not conditional on his remaining alive. In this sense, it is, Williams says, categorical. In fact, his desire gives him reason to live, because he can see to her well-being if he survives. Williams thinks that our categorical desires are not only what motivate us to live on, they give meaning to our lives, and are important elements of our characters. He also thinks that it is by virtue of the fact that we will retain the same character until a later time that it is clear to us that we will be the same person until then.
The bearing on death, according to Williams, is, first, that we have good reason to condemn a death that is premature in the sense that it thwarts our categorical desires. Second, mortality is good, for if we live long enough, eventually we will lose our categorical desires. At that point we will no longer be motivated to live on, and oppressive boredom will set in. When we contemplate this fate from our vantage point in the present, we find it that it is not even clear to us that these bored seniors are us.
Several theorists including Nagel , p. Life under the future desires is detached from life under my current categorical desires. Moreover, the desires I give myself in the future will be elements of a character that is very different from my current character; replacing my current character with an entirely different one later in life makes it far less clear, Williams appears to think, that the individual living that later life is me. It is not obvious that eternal life is undesirable if it involves changing our categorical desires and characters insofar as our characters are defined by the desires.
Yet it seems reasonable to take the view now that it would be good for me to develop and fulfil desires in the future—desires I now lack. Many of us would welcome the prospect of gradually transforming our interests and projects over time. The gradual, continuous transformation of our desires and projects does not end our lives, or existence. It is distinct from, and preferable to, annihilation. If we could live endlessly, the stages of our lives would display reduced connectedness, yet remain continuous, which is a property that is important in the kind of survival most of us prize.
Even after drinking from the fountain of eternal youth, we would tend to focus on relatively short stretches of our indefinitely extensive lives, being animated by the specific projects and relationships we have then. However, sometimes we would turn our attention to long stretches of life, and then, prizing continuity, we might well phase in new and worthwhile undertakings that build upon, and do not wholly replace, the old.
For further discussion of the desirability of eternal life, see Overall , Bortolotti , Smuts , Luper b, Altshuler , Buben , Cholbi , and Fischer Even if death is usually bad for those of us who die, perhaps it need not be bad for us, if we prepare ourselves suitably. This might be possible if some form of preferentialism is true, and if, by altering our desires, we could cease to have any interests that dying would impair. For then we might be able to thanatize our desires, in this sense: we might abandon all desires that death might thwart.
Among these are desires we can satisfy only if we live on for a few days, but also desires we cannot possibly satisfy within the span of a normal lifetime, and the desire for immortality itself. Instead of desiring that some project of mine succeed, which is a desire that might be thwarted by my death, I might instead adopt a conditionalized version of this desire, namely: should I live on, let my project succeed.
If all goes well, thanatizing would insulate us from harm from death by leaving us with no interests with which dying interferes. Unfortunately, this strategy will backfire. The main problem is that death can interfere with desire fulfillment not just by falsifying the objects of our desires but also by precluding our having desires Luper So even if we resolve, from now on, to limit ourselves to desires whose objects cannot be falsified by death, we are still vulnerable to the harm death will do us if it precludes our having and fulfilling desires.
Hence thanatizing would force us to avoid having any desires whose fulfillment would have benefitted us, and to deny ourselves such desires would be as bad for us as the harm we are trying to avoid. However, the core idea of adapting our desires is useful, if not taken to an extreme. It is prudent to avoid taking on goals we cannot possibly attain, and hence prudent to eschew projects that cannot possibly be completed during the course of a normal lifetime.
This article considers several questions concerning the philosophy of death. Life 1. Death 2. Epicurus and the Harm Thesis 3. The Timing Puzzle 4. Further Reservations Concerning the Harm Thesis 5. Posthumous Harm 6. Never Dying 7. Life To die is to cease to be alive. Let us describe, in a bit more detail, what the molecules that compose living objects can do: Working together, these molecules can engage in activities that are integrated in conformity with under the control of the information that some of them carry information that is comparable to blueprints and instructions , much as soldiers that make up an army can engage in activities that are integrated in conformity with battle plans and instructions issued by the commanding officers that are among them.
Deploying these activities, the molecules can self-modify, in the sense that they can bond new perhaps recently ingested molecules to themselves, or prune and excrete some away, combining themselves in various ways e. The molecules can also pass along their ability to self-modify, enabling the molecules to which they give way to continue these activities, thus allowing the object they compose to sustain a given form or forms over time say that of a dog despite the fact that what composes that object at one time differs from what composes it at another time.
Death The previous section discussed the nature of life, thereby clarifying what it is that death ends. Epicurus and the Harm Thesis Is death bad for some people who die? Is it good for some of them? From this view it follows that something is intrinsically good or bad for a person only if it is an experience. Let us add this to the argument: extrinsic instrumentalism is true: something is extrinsically good or bad for a person only if it makes her have things that are intrinsically good or bad for her.
To complete the argument against the harm thesis, Epicurus would need an additional assumption, such as this: something is good or bad for a person only if it is either intrinsically or extrinsically good or bad for her.
Let us say that something is extrinsically good bad for us if and only if, and to the extent that, it is overall good bad for us simpliciter , where: an event is overall good bad for us simpliciter if and only if, and to the extent that, it makes our lifetime welfare level higher lower than it otherwise would be. Comparativists can say that: an event is overall good bad for us at some time t if and only if, and to the extent that, it makes our lifetime welfare level higher lower at t than it otherwise would be.
The Timing Puzzle If we cannot identify a time when something makes us worse off than we otherwise would be, we might well doubt that it really was bad for us. Further Reservations Concerning the Harm Theses Before we move on, let us consider some further objections to the harm thesis and the deprivationist defense of it.
The argument he developed involved a thought experiment: Look back at time … before our birth. In this way Nature holds before our eyes the mirror of our future after death. Is this so grim, so gloomy?
Lucretius According to his symmetry argument, it is irrational to object to death, assuming it ends our existence, since we do not find it objectionable that we failed to exist prior to being alive, and the way things were for us while not existing then is just like the way things will be for us after death ends our existence; our pre-vital nonexistence and our posthumous nonexistence are symmetrical, alike in all relevant respects, so that any objection to the one would apply to the other.
Posthumous Harm According to Aristotle, a dead man is popularly believed to be capable of having both good and ill fortune—honour and dishonour and prosperity and the loss of it among his children and descendants generally—in exactly the same way as if he were alive but unaware or unobservant of what was happening Nicomachean Ethics 1. Never Dying Is it always a misfortune for us to die?
Bibliography Altshuler, R. Bedau, M. Luper ed. Belshaw, C. Bernstein, M. On moral considerability: an essay on who morally matters , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bortolotti, L. Braddock, G. Bradley, B. Cholbi, M. DeGrazia, D. Draper, K. Driesch, H. The History and Theory of Vitalism , C. K Ogden trans. Feit, N. Feinberg, J. Feldman, F. Bradley, F. Feldman and J. Johansson, eds. Fischer, J. Gilmore, C. Johansson eds. Glannon, W. Green, M. Grover, D. Kagan, S. Kamm, F. Kaufman, F. Lamont, J. Levenbook, B.
Taylor ed. Locke, J. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. On the Nature of the Universe. Latham, reg. With more than entries, the Encyclopedia of Death and the Human Experience includes the complex cultural beliefs and traditions and the institutionalized social rituals that surround dying and death, as well as the array of emotional responses relating to bereavement, grieving, and mourning. The Encyclopedia is enriched through important multidisciplinary contributions and perspectives as it arranges, organizes, defines, and clarifies a comprehensive list of death-related perspectives, concepts, and theories.
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