death philosophy essay

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How death shapes life

As global COVID toll hits 5 million, Harvard philosopher ponders the intimate, universal experience of knowing the end will come but not knowing when

Colleen Walsh

Harvard Staff Writer

Does the understanding that our final breath could come tomorrow affect the way we choose to live? And how do we make sense of a life cut short by a random accident, or a collective existence in which the loss of 5 million lives to a pandemic often seems eclipsed by other headlines? For answers, the Gazette turned to Susanna Siegel, Harvard’s Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy. Interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Susanna Siegel

GAZETTE: How do we get through the day with death all around us?

SIEGEL: This question arises because we can be made to feel uneasy, distracted, or derailed by death in any form: mass death, or the prospect of our own; deaths of people unknown to us that we only hear or read about; or deaths of people who tear the fabric of our lives when they go. Both in politics and in everyday life, one of the worst things we could do is get used to death, treat it as unremarkable or as anything other than a loss. This fact has profound consequences for every facet of life: politics and governance, interpersonal relationships, and all forms of human consciousness.

When things go well, death stays in the background, and from there, covertly, it shapes our awareness of everything else. Even when we get through the day with ease, the prospect of death is still in some way all around us.

GAZETTE: Can philosophy help illuminate how death impacts consciousness?

SIEGEL: The philosophers Soren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger each discuss death, in their own ways, as a horizon that implicitly shapes our consciousness. It’s what gives future times the pressure they exert on us. A horizon is the kind of thing that is normally in the background — something that limits, partly defines, and sets the stage for what you focus on. These two philosophers help us see the ways that death occupies the background of consciousness — and that the background is where it belongs.

“Both in politics and in everyday life, one of the worst things we could do is get used to death, treat it as unremarkable or as anything other than a loss,” says Susanna Siegel, Harvard’s Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy.

Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

These philosophical insights are vivid in Rainer Marie Rilke’s short and stunning poem “Der Tod” (“Death”). As Burton Pike translates it from German, the poem begins: “There stands death, a bluish concoction/in a cup without a saucer.” This opening gets me every time. Death is standing. It’s standing in the way liquid stands still in a container. Sometimes cooking instructions tell you to boil a mixture and then let it stand, while you complete another part of the recipe. That’s the way death is in the poem: standing, waiting for you to get farther along with whatever you are doing. It will be there while you’re working, it will be there when you’re done, and in some way, it is a background part of those other tasks.

A few lines later, it’s suggested in the poem that someone long ago, “at a distant breakfast,” saw a dusty, cracked cup — that cup with the bluish concoction standing in it — and this person read the word “hope” written in faded letters on the side of mug. Hope is a future-directed feeling, and in the poem, the word is written on a surface that contains death underneath. As it stands, death shapes the horizon of life.

GAZETTE: What are the ethical consequences of these philosophical views?

SIEGEL: We’re familiar with the ways that making the prospect of death salient can unnerve, paralyze, or derail a person. An extreme example is shown by people with Cotard syndrome , who report feeling that they have already died. It is considered a “monothematic” delusion, because this odd reaction is circumscribed by the sufferers’ other beliefs. They freely acknowledge how strange it is to be both dead and yet still there to report on it. They are typically deeply depressed, burdened with a feeling that all possibilities of action have simply been shut down, closed off, made unavailable. Robbed of a feeling of futurity, seemingly without affordances for action, it feels natural to people in this state to describe it as the state of being already dead.

Cotard syndrome is an extreme case that illustrates how bringing death into the foreground of consciousness can feel utterly disempowering. This observation has political consequences, which are evident in a culture that treats any kind of lethal violence as something we have to expect and plan for. A glaring example would be gun violence, with its lockdown drills for children, its steady stream of the same types of events, over and over — as if these deaths could only be met with a shrug and a sigh, because they are simply part of the cost of other people exercising their freedom.

It isn’t just depressing to bring death into the foreground of consciousness by creating an atmosphere of violence — it’s also dangerous. Any political arrangement that lets masses of people die thematizes death, by making lethal violence perceptible, frequent, salient, talked-about, and tolerated. Raising death to salience in this way can create and then leverage feelings of existential precarity, which in turn emotionally equip people on a mass, nationwide scale to tolerate violence as a tool to gain political power. It’s now a regular occurrence to ram into protestors with vehicles, intimidate voters and poll workers, and prepare to attack government buildings and the people inside. This atmosphere disparages life, and then promises violence as defense against such cheapening, and a means of control.

GAZETTE: When we read about an accidental death in the newspaper, it can be truly unnerving, even though the victim is a stranger. And we’ve been hearing about a steady stream of deaths from COVID-19 for almost two years, to the point where the death count is just part of the daily news. Why is the process of thinking about these losses important?

SIEGEL: It might not seem directly related to politics, but when you react to a life cut short by thinking, “If this terrible thing could happen to them, then it could happen to me,” that reaction is a basic form of civic regard. It’s fragile, and highly sensitive to how deaths are reported and rendered in public. The passing moment of concern may seem insignificant, but it gets supplanted by something much worse when deaths are rendered in ways likely to prompt such questions as “What did they do to get in trouble?” or such suspicions as “They probably had it coming,” or such callous resignations as “They were going to die anyway.” We have seen some of those reactions during the pandemic. They are refusals to recognize the terribleness of death.

Deaths can seem even more haunting when they’re not recognized as a real loss, which is why it’s so important how deaths are depicted by governments and in mass communication. The genre of the obituary is there to present deaths as a loss to the public. The movement for Black lives brought into focus for everyone what many people knew and felt all along, which was that when deaths are not rendered as losses to the public, then they are depicted in a way that erodes civic regard.

When anyone dies from COVID, our political representatives should acknowledge it in a way that does justice to the gravity of that death. Recognizing COVID deaths as a public emergency belongs to the kind of governance that aims to keep the blue concoction where it belongs.

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There is one thing I can be sure of: I am going to die. But what am I to make of that fact? This course will examine a number of issues that arise once we begin to reflect on our mortality. The possibility that death may not actually be the end is considered. Are we, in some sense, immortal? Would immortality be desirable? Also a clearer notion of what it is to die is examined. What does it mean to say that a person has died? What kind of fact is that? And, finally, different attitudes to death are evaluated. Is death an evil? How? Why? Is suicide morally permissible? Is it rational? How should the knowledge that I am going to die affect the way I live my life?

This Yale College course, taught on campus twice per week for 50 minutes, was recorded for Open Yale Courses in Spring 2007.

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For more information about Professor Kagan’s book Death , click here .

Plato, Phaedo John Perry, A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych

Course Packet: Barnes, Julian. “The Dream.” In History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters .

Brandt, Richard. “The Morality and Rationality of Suicide.” In Moral Problems . Edited by James Rachels. New York: Harper & Row, 1979.

Edwards, Paul. “Existentialism and Death: A Survey of Some Confusions and Absurdities.” In Philosophy, Science and Method: Essays in Honor of Ernest Nagel . Edited by Sidney Morgenbesser, Patrick Suppes and Morton White. New York: St. Matrin’s Press, 1969. pp. 473-505

Feldman, Fred. “The Enigma of Death.” In Confrontations with the Reaper: A Philosophical Study of Nature and Value of Death . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. pp. 56-71

Hume, David. “On Suicide.” In Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary .

Kaufmann, Walter. “Death.” In The Faith of a Heretic . New York: New American Library, 1959. pp. 353-376

Kaufmann, Walter. “Death Without Dread.” In Existentialism, Religion, and Death: Thirteen Essays . New York: New American Library, 1976. pp. 224-248

Martin, Robert. “The Identity of Animal and People.” In There are Two Errors in the the Title of This Book: A Sourcebook of Philosophical Puzzles, Problems, and Paradoxes . Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2002. pp. 223-226

Montaigne, Michel de. “That to Philosophize is to Learn to Die.” In The Complete Essays .

Nagel, Thomas. “Death.” In Mortal Questions . New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979. pp. 1-10

Rosenberg, Jay. “Life After Death: In Search of the Question.” In Thinking Clearly About Death . Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1983. pp. 18-22

Schick, Theodore and Lewis Vaughn. “Near-Death Experiences.” In How to Think About Weird Things . New York: McGraw Hill, 2005. pp 307-323

Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels , Part III, chapter 10.

Williams, Bernard. “The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality.” In Language, Metaphysics, and Death . Edited by John Donnelly. New York: Fordham University Press, 1978. pp. 229-242

All students must attend discussion sections. Participation can help raise one’s grade, but can never hurt. However, poor attendance or non-participation will lower one’s grade.

There will be three short papers. Each should be 5 pages, double-spaced. All papers are worth equally. If papers show improvements over the term, however, the later work will be counted even more heavily.

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Discussion section attendance and participation: 25% Three short papers: 25% each (total: 75%)

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What the Stoics Understood About Death (And Can Teach Us)

David fideler on what awareness of mortality does to a life.

“Wherever I turn, I see signs of my old age,” Seneca wrote to Lucilius. Seneca had just arrived at his villa outside of Rome, where he was having a conversation with his property manager about the high cost of maintaining the disintegrating old building. But Seneca then explained, “My estate manager told me it was not his fault: he was doing everything possible, but the country home was old. And this villa was built under my supervision! What will my future look like if stonework of my own age is already crumbling?”

At that time, Seneca was in his late sixties, and he was starting to feel the aches and pains of old age. But he also found old age to be pleasurable. However, the older you get, the more challenging things become. Extreme old age, he said, is like a lasting illness you never recover from; and when the body really declines, it’s like a ship that starts springing leaks, one after another.

Where I currently live, in Sarajevo, I see extremely old people, who are quite close to death, on an almost daily basis. It seems that some of my neighbors—thin, frail, and bent over, often walking with a cane at a snail’s pace over the old stone streets—could drop over and expire at any moment. That said, seeing extremely elderly people out and about is an inspiring and heartfelt experience for me. First of all, it’s lovely to see people who have lived for so long, often against challenging odds, and it’s impossible to see them without feeling a great sense of tenderness for them. Second, they are a timely reminder of my own mortality. It’s also very different from what I remember seeing in the United States.

Unlike many other countries, the United States has accomplished a world-class disappearing act when it comes to keeping older adults (and any other reminders of death) out of sight and out of mind. With its shiny glass and steel buildings, shopping malls, and spread-out suburbs, the American landscape has been sterilized and artificially “cleaned up” in such a way that extremely old people are rarely seen on public display. But here in a historic European city with ancient stone buildings that go back centuries, and well-established neighborhoods with cobblestone streets, extremely old people, hobbling along, are a happy part of daily life. They remind me that life is not without extreme struggle. And when people die, which can happen at any age, the local religious communities post death notices, with photos of the deceased, in local neighborhoods all over town. It’s another nice custom that reminds us of being mortal.

A Stoic wants to live well—and living well means dying well, too. A Stoic lives well through having a good character, and death is the final test of it. While every death will be a bit different, the Roman Stoics believed that a good death would be characterized by mental tranquility, a lack of complaining, and gratitude for the life we’ve been given. In other words, as the final act of living, a good death is characterized by acceptance and gratitude. Also, having a real philosophy of life, and having worked on developing a sound character, allows a person to die without any feelings of regret.

Seneca frequently thought and wrote about death. Some of this must have been due to his poor health. Because he suffered from tuberculosis and asthma from a young age, he must have sensed the certainty and nearness of his own death throughout his entire life. In Letter 54 he describes, in graphic detail, a recent asthma attack that nearly killed him. But much earlier, probably in his twenties, he was so sick, and so near death, that he thought about ending his own life, to finally stop the suffering. He didn’t follow through on that, fortunately, out of love for his father. As he writes,

I often felt the urge to end my life, but the old age of my dear father held me back. For while I thought that I could die bravely, I knew he could not bear the loss bravely. And so I commanded myself to live. Sometimes it’s an act of courage just to keep living.

For a Stoic (and for other ancient philosophers, too), memento mori —contemplating our inevitable death—was an essential philosophical exercise, and one that comes with unexpected benefits. As an anticipation of future adversity, memento mori allows us to prepare for death, and helps remove our fears of death. It also encourages us to take our current lives more seriously, because we realize they’re limited. As I’ve discovered in a practical sense, reflecting on my own death—and the inevitable death of those dear to me—has had a totally unexpected and powerful benefit: feeling a more profound sense of gratitude for the time we still have together.

The Latin phrase memento mori literally means “remember that you have to die.” Over the centuries, scholars often would keep a symbolic memento mori image in their study, like a skull, as a reminder of their own mortality.

In the world of philosophy, the model of someone dying well, without an ounce of fear, was Socrates. Imprisoned on trumped-up charges for corrupting the youth of Athens, Socrates was detained for thirty days before facing his death sentence of drinking hemlock poison. At the time of his death in 399 BC, Socrates was around seventy years old. If he had wished, he could have very easily escaped prison, with his friends’ help, and then set up life elsewhere in Greece. But it would have gone against everything he believed in. Also, escaping would have permanently damaged his reputation. Since one of Socrates’s main goals was to improve society, that implied he should follow society’s laws, even if he had been treated unjustly.

This allowed Socrates thirty final days to meet with his friends and his students to continue their philosophical discussions. He had challenged the morality of those who called for his death with a very memorable line: “If you kill me,” he said, “you will not harm me so much as yourselves.” This thought was much appreciated by the later Stoics, since, in their view, nothing can harm the character of a wise person. During his last meeting with his students, right before his death, Socrates discussed and questioned the possibility of an afterlife. He also said, memorably, that “philosophy is a preparation for death,” which was probably the real beginning of the memento mori tradition (at least for philosophers). When his final conversation was complete, Socrates drank the hemlock, and he peacefully passed away, surrounded by his students.

According to Seneca, the philosopher Epicurus said, “Rehearse for death,” which is a practice Seneca himself greatly encouraged. For Seneca and the other Roman Stoics, death was “the master fear,” and once someone learns how to overcome it, little else remains fearful either.

The Stoic philosopher Epictetus told his students that when you kiss your child goodnight, you should remind yourself that your child could die tomorrow. While it is literally true that your child could die tomorrow, many modern readers recoil at the idea of even contemplating such a thought. However, that might be a measure of their reluctance to accept the inevitability of death, or a way of repressing the fact that death can arrive unexpectedly, at any moment. As someone who personally uses this practice, I can tell you that it’s perfectly harmless, once you get past any initial discomfort. The huge benefit it brings is the greater sense of gratitude you experience with your loved ones. When you perform this practice, you consciously realize that someday, which nobody can predict, will be your last time together—so you experience much greater gratitude for the time you spend together now. As Seneca wisely recommended, let us greedily enjoy our friends and our loved ones now, while we still have them.

What is it like emotionally to contemplate your own death or the death of a close family member? I’ve been experimenting with this for some time now and can report only positive results. That’s because, when I think of the mortality of a loved one and the fact that all of our time together is by definition limited, it improves the quality of my life. It makes me feel a much deeper sense of appreciation for all the time we are together. If you don’t remember that your time is limited and finite, you are much more likely to take things for granted.

I most often remember death when I’m with my son, Benjamin, seven and a half as I write. That’s a delightful age because he’s very playful and now capable of having fun conversations. We’re also starting to talk about philosophical things.

Of course, it’s impossible for most children of his age to grasp the gravity or finality of death, because most of them have never had any firsthand experience of losing a loved one. Children live in a kind of psychological Golden Age, in which all their needs seem magically provided for. Since they live in a protected sphere, most haven’t yet been exposed to the more challenging aspects of life.

Because of that, I’ve been trying to teach Benjamin a little bit about death and the fact that daddy, mommy, and he will someday die. This effort is a bit of basic Stoic training for a kid, and I’m curious if it might be possible to increase his appreciation for the limited time we have together, even at such a young age? At the very least, I hope it will greatly reduce the level of shock he experiences when someone close to him does die, because he’ll be expecting it.

The other day, we were driving home after feasting on some fast food, and Benjamin spoke to me about God for the first time in his life. With a boyish sense of delight, he explained to me, “God has some amazing powers, like being able to see and hear everything. But his greatest superpower is that he’s invisible!”

I chuckled at his use of the word “superpower,” which made God sound like a superhero, just like Spider-Man! But laughter aside, he had opened up the doorway to speak about some profound issues, so I brought up the topic of death.

“Benjamin,” I asked, “do you know that, someday, mommy, daddy, and you are going to die?”

“Yes,” he replied.

“I’m almost sixty,” I explained, “so I could live another twenty years.”

“I don’t think you’ll live quite that long,” he said. “But maybe something like that.” (Thank you, Benjamin! We’ll just have to see how things go.)

Then I asked, “Did you know that you could die at any time?”

He said, “I don’t think I’ll die anytime soon.”

“But,” I replied, “you could. This is not something in our control. You are young, so you could live for a very long time. But since we’re driving in a car, we could be in a car crash five minutes from now, and we could both be killed instantly. So even if you’re very, very young, you can die at any time. If you stay healthy, the chances that you’ll live a long life go up. But in the end, when we die is not under our control.”

Benjamin nodded and seemed to understand. And fortunately, we arrived home safely a few minutes later.

__________________________________

From Breakfast with Seneca: A Stoic Guide to the Art of Living by David Fideler, published by W. W. Norton.

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Introduction: Death and Dying in Comparative Philosophical Perspective

First Online: 03 September 2019

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Timothy D Knepper 18

Part of the book series: Comparative Philosophy of Religion ((COPR,volume 2))

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This introductory chapter previews the content and conclusions of The Comparison Project’s 2015–2017 programming cycle on death and dying. First, it explicates each of the 12 content essays on death and dying, especially with respect to the focus of the series—how traditional theologies of death and rituals of dying are affected by and respond to the medicalization of death. Then, it highlights the four, brief comparative conclusions to the series.

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For obvious reasons, we did not include here the four interfaith dialogues involving representatives of local religious communities, the performance of Tibetan Buddhist rituals related to death and dying, and the reading of non-fiction essays by cancer survivors. The supplemental essay by M. Allison Prude on “Death in Tibetan Buddhism” replaces the Tibetan Buddhist ritual performance with an academic analysis of theologies of death and rituals of dying in Tibetan Buddhism, while the supplemental essay by Mark Berkson on “Death in Ancient Chinese Thought” provides coverage of a lacuna in our series.

Our secular perspective, as reflected in the essay of Amy Hollywood, is in no way an attempt to develop a secular bioethics. Instead, it is an imaginative exploration of the role that “difficult literature” might play in the preparation for death of those who are no longer religious. For the attempt to develop formal, secular bioethics, see especially Engelhardt ( 1991 ).

Our understanding of the medicalization of death refers to the substitution of doctors, hospitals, and technology for family, home, and comfort during the process of dying. More fundamentally, it views death as a purely biological phenomenon rather than a cultural, emotional, and religious experience that is a natural part of human existence.

As Keown indicates, this view constitutes a reversal of the position that he espoused over 20 years ago in Buddhism and Bioethics , wherein he asserted that the concept of brain death would be acceptable to Buddhism.

Engelhardt, H. Tristram, Jr. 1991. Bioethics and secular humanism: The search for a common morality . Eugene: Wipf & Stock.

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Knepper, T.D. (2019). Introduction: Death and Dying in Comparative Philosophical Perspective. In: Knepper, T.D., Bregman, L., Gottschalk, M. (eds) Death and Dying. Comparative Philosophy of Religion, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19300-3_1

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Taylor Carman

Maxine Sheets-Johnstone

This article considers the relationship of Heidegger’s metaphysics of Being-toward-death to what Heidegger describes as “the enigma of motion,” that is, to Dasein’s “historicality.” In doing so, the article confronts a series of questions concerning fundamental realities of animate life, realities centering on angst in the face of death, but including curiosity and fear, for example, all such realities being what Heidegger terms “states-of-mind” or “moods.” Thus, the article basically questions Heidegger’s elision of a Leibkörper, not only in terms of feelings but in terms of an exaltation of language, an insular notion of Dasein’s historicality, and a narrow and deficient depiction of animals in his “philosophical biology.” Through a critical examination of the phenomenological disclosure that Heidegger seeks in his metaphysics of Being-toward-death, the article shows that death and the very concept of death hinges on being a body, a temporally finite animate body. Thus, however metaphysical its exposition, Being-toward-death is existentially anchored in being a body. keywords: “enigma of motion,” concept of death, poetry, being “poor in world,” being poor in body, states-of-mind, feelings

Lennart Belfrage

THE EXPERIENCE OF DEATH and the Moral Problem of Suicide

Edouard d'Araille

Ground-breaking analysis of Death by the key Existentialist philosopher Paul-Louis Landsberg who died in a German concentration camp during the Second World War. A part of the group of philosophers embracing Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir, Paul-Louis Landsberg was published in the journal 'Les Temps Modernes' and released several works before his premature death at the hands of the Nazis. The present work 'The Experience of Death' is coupled with an equally forceful study of the 'Moral Problem of Suicide'. The portion of the work on death is perhaps the most perceptive and searching existentialist analysis of death apart from that of Martin Heidegger which features in his magnum opus 'Being and Time'. Landsberg was a Christian yet although he expresses some Christian views in his work he does not force any of his beliefs on his readers. In fact, as a Christian philosopher he is a controversial figure because of his liberal and forward-thinking views on suicide. This is a book that makes a deep impact upon anyone who dares to accompany the author on his honest explorations of Death and Suicide. - Brief biographical details and a bibliography are provided as well as full textual annotations and an Editor's Note as introduction. The volume is edited by the Historian of Thought Edouard d'Araille and has been provided as a complete text on Academia.edu for the last twelve months, courtesy of Living Time Global, the publishers. In place of the complete text, a key extract from the work is now provided at this web location.

Actual Problems of Mind. Philosophy Journal, (22), 108-136. https://doi.org/10.31812/apd.v0i22.4445

Andrii Leonov

In this paper, I am dealing with the phenomena of "life" and "death". The questions that I attempt to answer are "What is life, and what is death?" "Is it bad to die?" and Is there life after death?. The method that I am using in this paper is that of phenomenology. The latter I understand as an inquiry into meaning, that is, what makes this or that phenomenon as such. Thus, I am approaching the phenomena in question from the point of view of their meaning in the first place. I claim that ordinarily we constitute phenomena of "life" and "death" in a twofold way. When it comes to "life", one can specify "life-as-biological", and "life-as-a-possibility" senses. The former I understand as a cluster of biological processes that unfold in physical time. By "life-as-a-possibility", I understand a cluster of projects, potentials that depend on our subjectivity. I claim that we essentially perceive life-as-biological through life-as-a-possibility. When it comes to "death", I argue that we essentially constitute this phenomenon in a similar manner. On the one hand, we perceive "death" in the "death-as-biological/physical" sense which signifies the end of the organism's biological processes. On the other hand, we constitute "death" as the "existential/practical death"/"death-of-possibility." By that I mean an annihilation of all possibilities, and projects. In short, it is a situation when one's life suddenly loses all its meaning and value: death of meaning. I argue that what constitutes the significance of "death-as-biological" for us is what I call the "existential/practical death" or "death-of-possibility". I use the phenomena of mourning and suicide to illustrate my point better. Reflecting on whether it is bad to die, I claim that if we accept the hypotheses I am defending in the paper, it appears that death is bad because it entails the loss of all possibilities. I also want to show that people’s desire for immortality is in fact reasonable, because the more one lives, the more possibilities one is able to realize. In other words, people’s desire for immortality is grounded in the essential understanding of the phenomenon of life" as a possibility. Reflecting on whether there is life after death, my answer is twofold. Since there is no scientific evidence of life after physical/biological death, I think there is no reason to believe in such as well. But when it comes to the question whether there is life after the existential/practical death, my answer is positive: "Yes, there is!" I try to show that it is always possible to find the meaning of life even in the light of the most terrible events. In this sense, there is always a light at the end of the tunnel.

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2. Misfortune

3. the harm theses, 4. the timing puzzle, 5. is death always a misfortune.

6. Can Death's Harmfulness be Reduced?

Bibliography

Other internet resources, related entries.

Death is life's ending. Let us say that vital processes are those by which organisms develop or maintain themselves. These processes include chemosynthesis, photosynthesis, cellular respiration, cell generation, and maintenance of homeostasis. Then death is the ending of the vital processes by which an organism sustains itself. However, life's ending is one thing, and the condition of having life over is another. ‘Death’ can refer to either.

Let us add that ‘the ending of life’ is itself potentially ambiguous. On one hand it might be a process wherein our lives are progressively extinguished, until finally they are gone. On the other it might be a momentary event. This event might be understood in three ways. First, it might be the ending of the dying process—the loss of the very last trace of life. Call this ‘denouement death’. Second, it might be the point in the dying process when extinction is assured, no matter what is done to stop it. Call this moment ‘threshold death’. A third possibility is that life ends when the physiological systems of the body irreversibly cease to function as an integrated whole (defended, for example, by Belshaw 2009). Call this ‘integration death’.

Thus death can be a state (being dead), the process of extinction (dying), or one of three events that occur during the dying process. Death in all of these senses can be further distinguished from events—such as being shot with an arrow—that cause death.

1.1 The Permanence of Death

‘Death’ is also unclear in at least two ways. First, the concept of life is not entirely clear. For example, suppose we could construct a machine, the HAL 1.01, with (nearly) all of the psychological attributes of persons: would HAL 1.01 be alive? To the extent that we are puzzled about what life entails, we will be puzzled about what is entailed by the ending of life, that is, death. (For accounts of life, see Van Inwagen 1990 or Luper 2009.) Second, it seems somewhat indeterminate whether a temporary ending of life suffices for death, or whether death entails a permanent loss of life. Usually, whenever a creature's life stops, the condition is permanent; so ‘death’, as commonly used, need not be sensitive to the distinction between the temporary and permanent ending of life. Yet life may stop temporarily: a life might be suspended then revived . Or it might be restored . Life in the case of seeds and spores is suspended indefinitely. Freezing frogs and human embryos suspends their lives, too. Suppose that I were frozen and later revived: it is tempting to say that my life stops while I am frozen —I am in a state of suspended animation. But I am not dead. Now imagine a futuristic device, the Disassembler-Reassembler , that reduces me to small cubes, or individual cells, or disconnected atoms, which it stores and later reassembles just as they were before. Many of us will say that I would survive—my life would continue—after Reassembly, but it is quite clear that I would not live during intervals when my atoms are stacked in storage. I would not even exist during such intervals; Disassembly kills me. After I cease to exist, presumably I cannot be revived; nor can my vital processes be revived. If I can be Reassembled, my life would be restored, not revived. Restoration, not revival, is a way of bringing a creature back from the dead.

Assuming that creatures whose lives are suspended are not dead, but creatures who are Disassembled are dead even if later Reassembled, it might be best to say that a creature has died just when its vital processes are irreversibly discontinued, that is, when its vital processes can no longer be revived.

1.2 Death and What We Are

Death for you and me is constituted by the irreversible discontinuation of the vital processes by which we are sustained. This characterization of death could be sharpened if we had a clearer idea of what we are , and the conditions under which we persist. However, the latter is a matter of controversy.

There are three main views: animalism , which says that we are human beings (Snowdon 1990, Olson 1997, 2007); personism , which says that we are creatures with the capacity for self-awareness; and mindism , which says that we are minds (which may or may not have the capacity for self-awareness) (McMahan 2002). Animalism suggests that we persist over time just in case we remain the same animal; mindism suggests that we persist just when we remain the same mind. Personism is usually paired with the view that our persistence is determined by our psychological features and the relations among them (Locke 1689, Parfit 1984).

If we are animals, with the persistence conditions of animals, our deaths are constituted by the irreversible cessation of the vital processes that sustain our existence as human beings. If we are minds, our deaths are constituted by the irreversible extinction of the vital processes that sustain our existence as minds. And if persistence is determined by our retaining certain psychological features, then the loss of those features will constitute death.

These three ways of understanding death have very different implications. Severe dementia can destroy a great many psychological features without destroying the mind, which suggests that death as understood by personists can occur even though death as understood by mindists has not. Moreover, human beings sometimes survive the destruction of the mind, as when the cerebrum dies, leaving an individual in a persistent vegetative state. It is also conceivable that the mind can survive the extinction of the human being: this might occur if the brain is removed from the body, kept alive artificially, and the remainder of the body is destroyed (assuming that a bare brain is not a human being). These possibilities suggest that death as understood by mindists can occur even though death as understood by animalists has not (and also that the latter sort of death need not be accompanied by the former.)

1.3 Death and Existence

What is the relationship between existence and death? May people and other creatures continue to exist after dying, or cease to exist without dying?

Take the first question: may you and I and other creatures continue to exist for some time after our lives end? The view that death entails our annihilation has been called the termination thesis (Feldman 2000). The position that we can indeed survive death we might call the dead survivors view . The dead survivors view might be defended on the grounds that we commonly refer to ‘dead animals’ (and ‘dead plants’) which may suggest that we believe that animals continue to exist, as animals, while no longer alive. The idea might be that an animal continues to count as the same animal if enough of its original components remain in much the same order, and animals continue to meet this condition for a time following death (Mackie 1997). On this view, if you and I are animals (as animalists say) then we could survive for a time after we are dead, albeit as corpses. In fact, we could survive indefinitely, by arranging to have our corpses preserved.

However, this way of defending the dead survivors view may not be decisive. The terms ‘dead animal’ and ‘dead person’ seem ambiguous. Normally, when we use ‘dead people’ or ‘dead animal’ we mean to speak of persons or animals who lived in the past. One dead person I can name is Socrates; he is now a ‘dead person’ even though his corpse surely has ceased to exist. However, in certain contexts, such as in morgues, we seem to use the terms ‘dead animal’ and ‘dead person’ to mean “remains of something that was an animal” or “remains of something that was a person.” On this interpretation, even in morgues calling something a dead person does not imply that it is a person.

What about the second question: can creatures cease to exist without dying? Certainly things that never were alive, such as bubbles and statues, can be deathlessly annihilated. Arguably, there are also ways that living creatures can be deathlessly annihilated. It is plausible to say that an amoeba's existence ends when it splits, replacing itself with two amoebas. Yet when amoebas split, the vital processes that sustain them do not cease. If people could divide like amoebas, perhaps they, too could cease to exist without dying. (For a famous discussion of division and its implications, see Parfit 1981.)

1.4 Criteria for Death

Defining death is one thing; providing criteria by which it can be readily detected or verified is another. A definition is an account of what death is ; when, and only when its definition is met, death has necessarily occurred. The definition offered above was that a creature is dead just when the vital processes by which it is sustained have irreversibly ceased. A criterion for death, by contrast, lays out conditions by which all and only actual deaths may be readily identified. Such a criterion falls short of a definition, but plays a practical role. For example, it would help physicians and jurists determine when death has occurred.

In the United States, the states have adopted criteria for death modeled on the Uniform Determination of Death Act (developed by the President's Commission, 1981), which says that “an individual who has sustained either (1) irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions, or (2) irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem, is dead. A determination of death must be made in accordance with accepted medical standards.” In the United Kingdom, the accepted criterion is brain stem death, or the “permanent functional death of the brain stem” (Pallis 1982).

These current criteria are subject to criticism. Animalists might resist the criteria since the vital processes of human beings whose entire brains have ceased irreversibly to function can be sustained artificially using cardiopulmonary assistance. Mindists and personists might also resist the criteria, on the grounds that minds and all psychological features can be irretrievably destroyed in human beings whose brain stems are intact. For example, cerebral death can leave its victim with an intact brain stem, yet mindless and devoid of self-awareness.

May death or posthumous events harm us? Might they benefit us? Perhaps; in order to decide, we will need an analysis of welfare , which tells us what well-being is and how well off we are. We will also need an account of personal interests , which tells us what it is for something to be in our interests or against our interests.

2.1 Comparativism

The most widely accepted account of our interests is comparativism . In order to clarify comparativism, it is best to distinguish different senses in which an event can have value.

Some events are intrinsically good (or bad) for a subject; such events are good (bad) for their own sakes, rather than in virtue of their contingent effects. By contrast, some events are extrinsically good (bad) for a subject; they are good (bad) because of their contingent effects. For example, many people count their pleasure as intrinsically good and their pain as intrinsically bad; aspirin would be extrinsically good, since it eliminates pain, and really bad puns would be extrinsically bad in that they are painful.

Events can have value in a different way: they can be overall good (bad) for a subject; that is, they can be good (bad) all things considered. Events are overall good (bad) for me when (and to the extent that) they make my life better (worse) than it would be if those events had not occurred. Contrast events that are partially good (bad) for me: these make my life better (worse) only in some respects. Partial goods may be overall bad for me. For example, playing video games every day gives me pleasure, and is hence partially good for me, but if it also causes me to neglect my job, health and family, it might well be overall bad for me.

According to comparativism, the value an event E has for me is roughly E 's overall value for me. But let us attempt to formulate the comparativist account a bit more precisely.

To assess the value for me of an event E , we begin by distinguishing two possible situations, or possible worlds. One of these is the actual world, which is the world as it actually is, past present and future. The other is the possible world that is the way things would be if E had not occurred. We can assume that this is the world that is as similar to the actual world as possible, and in that way ‘closest’ to the actual world, except that E does not occur, and various other things are different because of E 's nonoccurrence. We can call the actual world W E , in this way reminding ourselves that E actually occurred. And by W ~ E we can indicate the closest world to the actual world in which E does not occur. Here the tilde, ‘~’, stands for ‘not’.

The next step is to assess my welfare level in W E and my welfare level in W ~ E . My welfare level in W E is the intrinsic value for me of my life in W E ; it is the value my life actually has for me, measured in terms of intrinsic goods and intrinsic evils. To calculate my welfare level in W E , we start by assigning a value to my intrinsic goods in W E . This will be a positive value representing the sum of these goods. Next we assign a value to my intrinsic evils in W E ; this will be a negative value. Next we sum these values; the goods will raise this sum, while the evils will lower it. Some symbolism might help fix ideas (although it may give the false impression that our subject matter admits of more precision that is actually possible). Let G ( S , W ) stand for the sum of the values of S 's intrinsic goods in world W, and let B ( S , W ) stand for the sum of the values of S 's intrinsic evils in W . So far we have said that S 's welfare level in W E equals G ( S , W E ) + B ( S , W E ). If we let IV ( S , W ) stand for the intrinsic value of world W for subject S , the claim is that

IV ( S , W E ) = G ( S , W E ) + B ( S , W E ).

My welfare level in W ~ E is assessed similarly; it is the sum of my intrinsic goods and evils in W ~ E .

Finally, we subtract the value for me of my life in W ~ E from the value for me of my life in W E . According to comparativism, this is the value E has for me. Letting V ( S , E ) stand for the value of E for subject S, comparativism says that

V ( S , E ) = IV ( S , W E ) − IV ( S , W ~ E ).

This value determines whether an event is overall bad (good) for a subject S . If E 's value for S is negative, that is, if V ( S , E ) < 0, then E is overall bad for S . If E 's value is positive, then E is overall good for S . The more negative (positive) E 's value is, the worse (better) E is for S .

Consider an example. Suppose that we are looking to identify the value for me of drinking this cup of coffee. Call this event Drink . Then the first step is to distinguish the actual world, W Drink , in which I drank the coffee, from the closest world in which I did not, W ~ Drink . Then we calculate my welfare level in W Drink , IV ( Luper , W Drink ) and in W ~ Drink , IV ( Luper , W ~ Drink ). The former, IV ( Luper , W Drink ), equals the value of the intrinsic goods I will enjoy in my life plus the value of the intrinsic evils I will endure. For simplicity, let us pull a number out of the hat to indicate the value of the goods I will enjoy in my life before I drink the coffee, say 100, and another number to indicate the value of the evils I will endure in my life before I drink the coffee, say −50. Let us also assume that drinking the coffee will give me some pleasure for one hour, which has a value of 10, and drinking the coffee will not cause me to endure any evils. Finally, let us assume that after that hour of savoring my coffee, I will go on to enjoy goods with a value of 50, and evils with a value of −10. Then IV ( Luper , W Drink ) = 100 + 10 + 50 + −50 + 0 + −10 = 100. Assuming that my life one hour after drinking my coffee would be just like my life would have been were I not to drink my coffee, more or less, so that drinking my coffee benefits me only during the hour I savor it, we can say that IV ( Luper , W ~ Drink ) = 100 + 0 + 50 + −50 + 0 + −10 = 90. Given these assumptions, V ( Luper , W Drink ) = IV ( Luper , W Drink ) − IV ( Luper , W ~ Drink ) = 100 − 90 = 10. Drinking the coffee, then, was good for me, as 10 is a positive value.

We can now offer a rough statement of the comparativist account of interests.

An event E is in S 's interests just in case E overall benefits (is good for) S , making S 's life better than it would have been if E had not occurred, which E does just when its value for S is positive. An event E is against S 's interests just in case E overall harms (is bad for) S , making S 's life worse than it would have been if E had not occurred, which E does just when its value for S is negative. How much E benefits (harms) S depends on how much better (worse) S 's life is in the actual world than it would have been if E had not occurred: the better (worse) S 's life is, the more beneficial (harmful) E is.

In order to refine the comparativist account, we will need to distinguish between event tokens and event types . Event tokens are concrete events, such as the bombing of the World Trade Center. Event types are abstract entities such as bombings, leapings and burials. One token of the type bombing is the bombing of the World Trade Center. Earlier we used the letter ‘ E ’ to refer to event tokens rather than event types. What is more, we assumed that the event tokens to which ‘ E ’ referred were actual events, not merely possible events. But perhaps we can also offer a comparativist account of the value of the occurrence of an E -type event; that is, a comparativist account of how valuable it would be for a subject S if an event of type E were to occur.

To this end, we might assess the value for S of the occurrence of an E -type event by working out S 's welfare level in the actual world (where presumably an E -type event did not occur) then S 's welfare level in the closest world in which an E -type event does occur, and subtracting the first from the second. When the result is a positive value, the occurrence of an E -type event would be good for S ; when negative, the occurrence would be bad for S .

In sum, the comparativist view may be stated as follows:

Comparativist Account of Interests : An event E is in S 's interests just in case E overall benefits (is good for) S , making S 's life better than it would have been if E did not occur, which E does just when its value for S is positive. An event E is against S 's interests just in case E overall harms (is bad for) S , making S 's life worse than it would have been if E did not occur, which E does just when its value for S is negative. The occurrence of an E -type event is in S 's interests just in case it would overall benefit (be good for) S . The occurrence of an E -type event would benefit S if and only if its value for S is positive. The occurrence of an E -type event is against S 's interests just in case it would overall harm (be bad for) S . The occurrence of an E -type event would harm S if and only if its value for S is negative. How much E benefits (harms) S depends on how much better (worse) S 's life is in the actual world than it would have been if E had not occurred: the better (worse) S 's life is, the more beneficial (harmful) E is. Similarly, how much the occurrence of an E-type event would benefit (harm) S depends on how much worse (better) S 's life is in the actual world than it would have been if an E -type event had occurred: the worse (better) S 's life is, the more beneficial (harmful) the occurrence of an E -type event would have been.

We sometimes say things that suggest that we can have interests at particular times which we lack at others. For example, we might say that having a tooth drilled by a dentist is not in our interests while we are undergoing the procedure, even though it is in our long-term interests. The idea seems to be that what makes a subject S better off at time t is in S 's interests-at-time- t . But it is important to distinguish interests-at-t from interests . What is in our interests-at-time- t 1 need not be in our interests-at-time- t 2 . This is not true of our interests. Whatever interests we have we have at all times. If something is in our interests, it is timelessly in our interests.

2.2 Welfare

Comparativism analyses our interests in terms of our welfare, and is compatible with any number of views of welfare. There are three main ways of understanding welfare itself: positive hedonism, preferentialism, and pluralism. Let us briefly consider each of these three views.

Positive hedonism is the following position:

Positive Hedonism : for any subject S , experiencing pleasure at t is the one and only thing that is intrinsically good for S at t , while experiencing pain at t is the one and only thing that is intrinsically bad for S at t . The more pleasure (pain) S experiences at t , the greater the intrinsic good (evil) for S at t .

Positive hedonism has been defended (by J.S.Mill 1863) on the grounds that it resolves the problem of commensurability. The difficulty arises when we attempt to equate units of different sorts of goods. For example, how do we decide when one unit of love is worth one unit of achievements, assuming that both love and achievements are intrinsically good? The problem does not arise for hedonists, who evaluate all things in terms of the pleasure and pain that they give us.

However, most theorists consider positive hedonism to be implausible. Nagel argues that I would harm you if I were to cause you to revert to a pleasant infantile state for the rest of your life, yet by hedonist standards I have not harmed you at all. Similarly, it would be a grave misfortune for you if your spouse came to despise you, but for some reason pretended to love you, so that you underwent no loss of pleasure. And Nozick notes that we would refuse to attach ourselves to an Experience Machine that would give us extremely pleasant experiences for the rest of our lives. By hypothesis, the Machine would give us far more pleasure (and less pain) than is otherwise possible. Our reluctance to use the Machine suggests that things other than pleasure are intrinsically good: it is because we do not wish to miss out on these other goods that we refuse to use the Machine.

Preferentialism assesses welfare in terms of desire fulfillment. To desire is to desire that some proposition P hold; when we desire P , P is the object of our desire. According to preferentialism, our welfare turns on whether the objects of our desires hold:

Preferentialism : for any subject S , it is intrinsically good for S at t that, at t , S desires P and P holds; it is intrinsically bad for S at t that, at t , S desires P and ~ P holds. The stronger S 's desire for P is, the better (worse) it is for S that P holds (~ P holds).

In this, its unrefined form, preferentialism is implausible. Many of the things we desire do not appear to contribute to our welfare. Consider, for example, Rawls' famous example of the man whose main desire is to count blades of grass. In response to the grass counter case, Rawls (1971) adopts critical preferentialism , which says that welfare is advanced by the fulfillment of rational aims. Assuming that counting grass blades is irrational because it is pointless, fulfilling the desire to count grass blades is not intrinsically good. However, even critical preferentialism seems vulnerable to attack, since the fulfillment even of rational desires need not advance one's welfare. Parfit (1984) illustrates the point by supposing that you have the (rational) desire that a stranger's disease be overcome: the fulfilment of this desire advances the stranger's welfare, not yours. This example can be handled by egocentric preferentialism, which says that only desires that make essential reference to the self can advance our welfare when fulfilled (Overvold 1980). Thus the fulfilment of my desire that I be happy is intrinsically good for me, but the fulfilment of my desire that somebody or other be happy is not. A further variant of preferentialism might be called achievement preferentialism . This view says that subject S 's accomplishing one of S 's goals (or ends) is intrinsically good for S , and that being thwarted from accomplishing such a goal is intrinsically bad for S (Scanlon 1998; Keller 2004; Portmore 2007).

Pluralism is the third main account of welfare. Pluralists can agree with the hedonist position that a person's pleasure is intrinsically good for that person, and with the preferentialist's view that the fulfilment of a person's desire is intrinsically good for that person. However, pluralism says that various other sorts of things are intrinsically good, too. Some traditional examples are wisdom, friendship and love, and honor. Another example might be engaging in self-determination (Luper 2009).

Typically, those who value life accept the harm thesis: death is, at least sometimes, bad for those who die, and in this sense something that ‘harms’ them. It is important to know what to make of this thesis, since our response itself can be harmful. This might happen as follows: suppose that we love life, and reason that since it is good, more would be better. Our thoughts then turn to death, and we decide it is bad: the better life is, we think, the better more life would be, and the worse death is. At this point, we are in danger of condemning the human condition, which embraces life and death, on the grounds that it has a tragic side, namely death. It will help some if we remind ourselves that our situation also has a good side. Indeed, our condemnation of death is here based on the assumption that more life would be good. But such consolations are not for everyone. (They are unavailable if we crave immortality on the basis of demanding standards by which the only worthwhile projects are endless in duration, for then we will condemn the condition of mere mortals as tragic through and through, and may, as Unamuno (1913) points out, end up suicidal, fearing that the only life available is not worth having.) And a favorable assessment of life may be a limited consolation, since it leaves open the possibility that, viewing the human condition as a whole, the bad cancels much of the good. In any case it is grim enough to conclude that, given the harm thesis, the human condition has a tragic side. It is no wonder that theorists over the millennia have sought to defeat the harm thesis. We will examine their efforts, as well as the challenges to the posthumous harm thesis, according to which events occurring after we die can harm us. First, however, let us see how the harm theses might be defended.

3.1 The Main Defense

Those theorists who defend the harm theses typically draw upon some version of comparativism (e.g., Nagel 1970, Quinn 1984, Feldman 1991). According to comparativism, a person's death may well harm that person. Death may also be harmless. To decide whether a person's death is bad for that person, we must compare her actual welfare level to the welfare level she would have had if she had not died. Suppose, for example, that Hilda died on December 1, 2008 at age 25 and that, had she not died, she would have prospered for 25 years and suffered during her final five years. To apply comparativism, we must first select an account of welfare with which to assess Hilda's well-being. For simplicity, let us adopt positive hedonism. The next step is to sum the pleasure and pain she had over her lifetime. Suppose that she had considerably more pleasure than pain. We can stipulate that her lifetime welfare level came to a value of 250. Next we sum the pleasure and pain she would have had if she had not died on December 1, 2008. The first 25 years of her life would be just as they actually were, so the value of these would be 250. We can suppose that her next 25 years would also receive the value of 250. And let us stipulate that her final 5 years, spent mostly suffering, carry a value of −50. Then, had she not died, her lifetime welfare level would have been 250 + 250 − 50 = 450. Subtracting this value from her actual lifetime welfare level of 250 gives us −200. This is the value for her of dying on December 1, 2008. According to comparativism, then, her death was quite bad for her. Things would have been different if the last 30 years of her life would have been spent in unrelenting agony. On that assumption, her death would have been good for her.

Our example concerned a particular death at a specific time. Comparativism also has implications concerning whether dying young is bad for the one who dies, and whether it is bad for us that we die at all. In both cases the answer depends on how our lives would have gone had we not died. Usually dying young deprives us of many years of good life, so usually dying young is bad for us. As for whether or not it is bad to be mortal, that depends on whether the life we would lead as an immortal being would be a good one or not.

According to comparativism, when death is bad for us, it is bad for us because it precludes our coming to have various intrinsic goods which we would have had if we had not died. We might say that death is bad for us because of the goods it deprives us of, and not, or at least not always, because of any intrinsic evils for which it is responsible.

So much for the harm thesis. Now let us ask how the posthumous harm thesis might be defended.

Note first that we must reject the posthumous harm thesis if we adopt positive hedonism and combine it with comparativism, for nothing that happens after we die can boost or reduce the amounts of pleasure or pain in our lives.

However, posthumous events might well be bad for us on other accounts of welfare. Suppose that I want to be remembered after I die. Given preferentialism, something could happen after I die that might be bad for me, namely my being forgotten, because it thwarts my desire.

These ways of defending the harm theses seem quite plausible. Nevertheless, there are several strategies for criticizing the harm theses. Let us turn to these criticisms now, starting with some strategies developed in the ancient world by Epicurus and his follower Lucretius.

3.2 The Symmetry Argument

One challenge to the harm thesis is an attempt to show that the state death puts us in, nonexistence, is not bad. According to the symmetry argument , posed by Lucretius, a follower of Epicurus, we can prove this to ourselves by thinking about our state before we were born:

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 1951)

The idea is clear to a point: it is irrational to object to death, since we do not object to pre-vital nonexistence (the state of nonexistence that preceded our lives), and the two are alike in all relevant respects, so that any objection to the one would apply to the other. However, Lucretius' argument admits of more than one interpretation, depending on whether it is supposed to address death understood as the ending of life or death understood as the state we are in after life is ended (or both).

On the first interpretation, 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. Our complaint about death need not be that the state of nonexistence is ghastly. Instead, our complaint might be that death brings life, which is a good thing, to an end, and, all things being equal, what ends good things is bad. 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; it starts a good thing going. Death makes life impossible; it brings a good thing to a close. As Frances Kamm (1998) emphasizes, we do not want our lives to be all over with.

Perhaps Lucretius only meant to argue that the death state is not bad, since the only thing we could hold against the death state is that it is nonexistence, which is not really objectionable, as witness our attitude about pre-vital nonexistence. So interpreted, there is a kernel of truth in Lucretius' argument. Truly, our pre-vital nonexistence does not concern us much. But that is because pre-vital nonexistence is followed by existence. Nor would we worry overly about post-vital nonexistence if it, too, were followed by 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. Unlike the former, the latter entails death in the fullest sense. What is upsetting is the death that precedes post-vital nonexistence — or, what comes to the same thing, the permanence of post-vital nonexistence — not nonexistence per se.

There is another way to use considerations of symmetry to argue 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!) A life can be extended by adding to its future or to its past. 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. Engaging in such pursuits has its own value; for many of us, these pursuits, and not passive interests, are central to our identities. 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, I assume, 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.

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.

3.3 Epicurean Challenges: Death Cannot Affect Us

Further challenges to the harm theses are offered by Epicurus (341-270) in his Letter to Menoeceus :

Death …, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.

We might restate Epicurus' brief argument as follows: if death harms the individual who dies, there must exist a subject who is harmed by death, a clear harm that is received, and a time when that harm is received. As to the timing issue, there seems to be two possible solutions, given that death follows immediately upon life: either death harms its victims while they are alive or later. If we opt for the second solution we appear to run head on into the problem of the subject, for assuming that we do not exist after we are alive, no one is left to incur harm. We also encounter the problem of specifying a harm that might be accrued by a nonexistent person. If we opt for the first solution — death harms its victims while they are alive — we have a ready solution to the problem of the subject but we face the problem of supplying a clear way in which death is bad: death seems unable to have any ill effect on us while we are living since it will not yet have occurred. Seeing that there is no coherent solution to all three issues, Epicurus rejects the harm thesis.

Epicurus focuses on death, but if his argument is good, it applies more generally, to include all events that follow death.

In some respects Epicurus's argument is not clear. One problem is that what he means by ‘death’ is unclear. For now let us assume that he meant to refer to the process by which our lives are ended. Another interpretive problem arises as well: his intent might be to show that neither death nor posthumous events can affect us at all . From this claim it would follow that death and posthumous events are harmless, assuming that an event harms us only if it somehow affects us at some time (perhaps well after it occurs).

Let us see if it is possible to show that death and posthumous events do not affect us. Then we can try out (in the next section) a weaker thesis: that death and posthumous events cannot affect us in a way that is bad for us . This weaker claim is easier to defend, but the stronger claim is worth exploring.

We can start with some assumptions about when an event can affect us. To this end, let us adopt the causal account of responsibility :

An event (or state of affairs) can affect some subject (person or thing) S only by having a causal effect on S (the causal impact thesis).
A subject S cannot be causally affected by an event while S is nonexistent.
A subject cannot be causally affected by an event before the event occurs (the ban on backwards causation ).

From the causal account, together with some plausible assumptions, it follows that a post -mortem event, such as the burning of one's corpse, cannot affect us after we are dead, since, by (a), to be affected is to be affected causally, but, by (b), nonexistent people cannot be causally affected by any event. It also follows that the state of being dead cannot affect us while we are dead. Here we are assuming that people cease to exist when they die (the termination thesis). From the causal account it also follows that neither being dead, nor any events that follow, can affect us while we are alive, given the ban on backwards causation:

An event can affect us only by causally affecting us (the causal impact thesis).
We cannot be causally affected by an event while we are nonexistent.
We do not exist while dead (the termination thesis).
So neither being dead, nor any posthumous event, can affect us while we are dead (by 1–3).
We cannot be causally affected by an event before the event occurs (the ban on backwards causation).
So neither being dead, nor any posthumous event, can affect us while we are alive (by 1 and 5).
So neither being dead, nor any posthumous event, can ever affect us (by 4 and 6).

So far so good: neither the state of being dead nor any post-mortem event can ever affect us. However, it has not been shown that we cannot be affected by the dying process. Of course, the thesis that we must exist to be affected, together with the termination thesis, rule out the possibility that death affects us after it occurs (after we are nonexistent). And the ban on backwards causation rules out the possibility that death affects us before it occurs. Thus:

Death cannot affect us after it occurs (by 1–3).
Death cannot affect us before it occurs (by 1 and 5).
So death can affect us, if at all, only when it occurs (by 8 and 9).

But nothing said so far rules out the possibility that death affects us exactly when it occurs. In particular, the problem of the subject does not arise since it is a living, existing person who is harmed by death while it occurs. Is there any way to establish that death cannot affect us even at the time it occurs? There might be two ways. First, we might claim that death occurs only after we are nonexistent. This assumption has the odd consequence that death can affect us only if posthumous events can. It will follow from (7) that death cannot ever affect us. Second, we might claim that death is instantaneous; it happens too quickly to affect us.

Some theorists have indeed defined ‘death’ — the ending of life — in such a way as to imply that it occurs only after we are nonexistent. For example, Feinberg (1984), following Levenbook (1984), defines death as “the first moment of the subject's nonexistence.” Perhaps this definition is motivated by the awkwardness of attaching ‘death’ to a moment in the dying process when a spark of life persists. However, it is at least as awkward to attach ‘death’ to a moment after the dying process is over — to suggest that the ending of life occurs while we are in a state of death. It is also to concede too much to the Epicurean, who could then establish that death is no evil merely by showing that posthumous events are innocuous.

What about the suggestion that death happens too quickly to affect us?

Recall that ‘death’ can be used in the process as well as the denouement sense (Section 1). Death, in the process sense, unfolds over a period of time, and it obviously affects us while it occurs. — even if instantly.

What if we opt for the denouement sense of ‘death’? Is it plausible to say that losing the very last of life can have no affect on us? It is difficult to see why. If we were correct when we said that the complete destruction of our vital capacities affects us, surely we are also affected, albeit less, by losing the very last of the vital capacities that sustain us.

Let's review. Granting them some leeway, Epicureans can show:

Neither being dead, nor any posthumous event, can ever affect us, and the dying process itself can affect us, if at all, only while it occurs (by 7 and 10).

They can then argue as follows:

An event harms us only if it somehow affects us at some time.
So neither being dead, nor any posthumous event, can harm us, and the dying process can harm us, if at all, only while it occurs (by 11 and 12).

For a more rigorous presentation of the above argument, see the supplementary document:

The Argument: Death and Posthumous Events Don't Affect Us

But Epicureans lack a convincing argument against the possibility that the dying process and some of its effects overlap in time; hence they cannot refute the harm thesis. We have a subject, harm, and time: the subject of death is a live creature who endures its effects at the very time the creature dies.

3.4 Epicurean Challenges: Death Is Harmless

Instead of trying to establish that death cannot affect us at all, Epicureans might argue that death cannot affect us in a way that is bad for us. To that end, they can provide a condition for something's being bad for us and argue that death fails to meet it.

The condition which Epicurus himself supplied is this: an event (or state of affairs) harms us only if it causes in us the presence of some condition we find unpleasant. For simplicity, we can call all such conditions pain or suffering. That condition, the suffering, need not occur at the same time as the event that causes its presence in us. An event may occur long before it has any direct impact on us; it may occur even before we exist, as when someone times a bomb to go off 150 years later, killing everyone around. Epicurus himself did not spell out a complete view of welfare. He did not make it entirely clear when things are, overall, beneficial or harmful to a person. But he surely did think that something harms us only if it causes us to suffer.

On the Epicurean view, clearly neither the state nor process of death is inherently harmful — it is, in itself, not bad for us. For death is not necessarily painful. One can die painlessly, as when one dies while unconscious. But Epicurus did not say merely that death need not be harmful; he claimed that death was never harmful; on his criterion, this means that death never causes the subject to suffer.

To show that death can have no salient effect on us, Epicureans might argue that death cannot be responsible for any condition's presence in us, salient or otherwise. It can only be responsible for our ceasing to be in a condition. However, this thesis is clearly false on the process sense of ‘death:’ moving from being wholly alive to completely lacking life might well introduce the presence of some bad condition in us, such as pain. No doubt Epicureans gravitate to the denouement sense of death since the ending of the final trace of life might occur extremely quickly, perhaps so quickly that it has no salient effect on us while it happens. Nevertheless, Epicureans may argue, with some degree of plausibility, that denouement death cannot harm us:

Denouement death occurs too quickly to be responsible for the presence of any unpleasant condition in us at the time it occurs.
Only something responsible for the presence of an unpleasant condition in us is harmful to us.
So denouement death cannot harm us at the time it occurs (by 14 and 15).

By combining 16 with 13, established earlier, Epicureans may conclude that:

Neither posthumous events nor the state of death nor denouement death may ever harm us, and process death may harm us only while it occurs.

However, this conclusion will disappoint people who wonder whether dying is a misfortune: they want to know whether losing their lives is a bad thing, not just whether, having nearly completely lost life, it is bad to lose the very last of it (Luper 2004). Even for Epicurus himself this conclusion is not entirely adequate. For it leaves in place the possibility that the dying process can be harmful.

So why did Epicurus say that death is nothing to us? He surely knew that the dying process can be harmful to us. One possibility is that he did not really intend to show that death is innocuous. Many commentators insist that he wanted only to show that being dead , that is, the state of death, is nothing to us, and that he realized that dying is often a misfortune. It is also possible that Epicurus did not believe that what we have called ‘process death’ is part of death; instead, death is what we have called ‘denouement death’. This line of thought would position him to admit that ‘process death’ is bad for us, but it is only the precursor to death.

However, if Epicurus meant to show only that denouement death is harmless, or that the state of being dead is harmless, his efforts are disappointing given his own goal, which was to enable us to achieve ataraxia, or complete tranquility. He cannot reach this goal if he does not free us from our concern about the dying process or the events leading up to the dying process.

The best Epicurus could do is to downplay the painfulness of process death and its cause, and this he appears to do:

Continuous pain does not last long in the flesh; on the contrary, pain, if extreme, is present a very short time. … Illnesses of long duration even permit of an excess of pleasure over pain in the flesh (Principal Doctrines, Doctrine 4)

Unfortunately, Epicurus was wrong; the dying process and its cause can be excruciating.

There are things other than death that seem bad for us. To prepare us for complete tranquility in the fact of these things, Epicurus would need to address them as well. Let us consider some examples, and what Epicurus might say about them.

One example is obvious: we suffer when we anticipate death. Epicurus would probably admit that anticipating death is a bad thing if it upsets us. But he emphasizes that our (present) anticipatory fear is not caused by our (future) death, since future events are powerless to affect the past. Hence, by the painfulness criterion, the fear of death is not grounds for saying that death is harmful. Moreover, fear is irrational unless its object is genuinely evil in some way, which death is not:

He speaks idly who says the he fears death, not because it will be painful when present but because it is painful in anticipation. For if something causes no distress when present, it is fruitless to be pained by the expectation of it (Letter to Menoeceus).

Something else that is related to death seems bad for us: namely, the grief others experience when we die. But Epicurus would urge us to distinguish what is bad for us from what is bad for others. At most, the fact that your family grieves at your death supports the claim that your demise harms them, not that it harms you. (Too, your distress at anticipating your family's grief over your death is not grounds for you to regard your death as a bad thing: the suffering your death brings them cannot affect you, and your anticipatory grief is irrational.) Furthermore, their grief should be mitigated by the fact that your death is not bad for you. Their grief is entirely self-centered, exactly like the self-pity a stamp collector might feel at the destruction of a treasured stamp, in that the stamp is not harmed by its own destruction.

These examples illustrate that Epicurus can address some death-related concerns by showing that they are misguided, if we grant him his claim that we can be harmed only by what causes us to suffer. However, some death-related concerns cannot be handled this way. For example, the fact that everyone dies causes us distress and is therefore harmful to us even on Epicurus' criterion. At most Epicurus can say that mortality need not be harmful to us, and that it will not be if we can manage not to be distressed by it (Luper 2009).

3.5 Further Objections to the Harm Theses

Epicurus' case against the harm theses hinged on the assumption that we can be harmed only by what causes us to suffer. However, in section 3.1 we supported the harm theses by combining comparativism with one of the three leading accounts of welfare. We noted that death and posthumous events seem harmful because they deprive us of goods we would otherwise have had. If our argument was correct, then Epicurus' assumption must be mistaken. It must be false that harm requires incurring pain. Instead, harm can consist in being deprived of goods.

Are there ways Epicureans could resist the view that being deprived of goods can be bad for us? Perhaps. Epicureans could criticize comparativism. They could also defend some view of welfare that is more congenial to their position. Let us consider each strategy, starting with the second.

Epicurus may have accepted the following view of welfare:

Negative Hedonism : for any subject S , S 's experiencing pain is the one and only thing that is intrinsically bad for S , and nothing is intrinsically good for S .

When paired with comparativism, this view has implications that Epicurus would have welcomed. It implies that harm is limited to what increases our pain, and benefit is limited to what reduces it. Consequently death is harmless to those who die painlessly, no matter how good the life they would have had would have been. Moreover, death can be beneficial: it can preclude our suffering.

However, the implications of negative hedonism are quite absurd. For example, it implies that we never have reason to endure pain for the sake of pleasure or any other good. It also implies that we should end our lives as quickly and painlessly as we can since living on will harm us and cannot possibly benefit us. The negative hedonist account of welfare is clearly false.

Perhaps Epicureans would have better success if they were to reject comparativism itself. To that end, they might adopt one of four strategies which we will discuss in turn.

Bifurcated Comparativism

It is quite possible that Epicurus himself rejected comparativism, as formulated above. Perhaps he thought that the harmfulness of an event E is not a matter of the good it deprives us of, but rather a matter of how much intrinsic harm it causes, and the goodness of E is a matter of how much intrinsic good it causes. Earlier we let B ( S , W ) stand for the sum of the values of the things which are intrinsically bad for S in world W , and we let G ( S , W ) stand for the sum of the values of the things which are intrinsically good for S in world W . Using this symbolism, we can state the following alternative to comparativism:

Bifurcated Comparativism : E harms S if and only if B ( S , W E ) < B ( S , W ~ E ); E benefits S if and only if G ( S , W E ) > G ( S , W ~ E ).

Bifurcated comparativism implies that goods do not offset evils, but might eliminate them: that is, the goods E brings do not reduce the harmfulness of E unless they cause us to have less pain or less of some other evil. Similarly, evils do not offset goods. Combined with positive hedonism, bifurcated comparativism implies that we are harmed only by what increases our suffering, and benefitted only by what increases our pleasure; all else is a matter of indifference. Epicurus might have been drawn to this combination because it implies that death can neither harm nor benefit us, ignoring the pain it can cause while it occurs.

However, bifurcated comparativism is implausible. One problem is its implication that that goods and evils do not offset each other. Another worry is that surely some events or states of affairs harm us without causing us pain or some other intrinsic evil, and benefit us without giving us pleasure or some other intrinsic good. It is better to be anaethetized before surgery, but not if bifurcated comparativism is true. Moreover, if I slip into a temporary coma, which precludes my suffering from injuries inflicted upon me in a car crash, the coma benefits me, even though it does not give me pleasure or other goods. Similarly, a coma that precludes my enjoying a week's worth of good life harms me, yet gives me no pain or other evils.

Surely death is capable of benefitting us the same way that anesthetization and unconsciousness can. It can preclude our enduring great suffering. Similarly, like anesthetization and unconsciousness, death can harm us by precluding our living well. Comparativism gets things right and bifurcated comparativism gets things wrong in all of these examples.

Temporal Relativism

Comparativism assesses our interests in a temporally neutral way. It implies that, at each point in my life, it is in my interests that my welfare be as high as possible across my entire life, so that it is prudent for me now to do what will boost my welfare later, other things being equal. Famously, Derek Parfit (compare McMahan 2002) supplies grounds for assessing our interests in a temporally relative way instead of a temporally neutral way. Assessing our interests in a temporally relative way may help Epicureans to undermine the harm theses.

Consider that sometimes we have no reason whatever to satisfy a desire. Parfit gives two examples. First, a desire might be implicitly conditional on its own persistence, in the sense that we want to satisfy it only on condition that we still have it. The desire to play cards is like this. We lose all reason to satisfy such desires as soon as we cease to have them. Compare desires, mentioned earlier, that are conditional on our persistence. We might have reason to satisfy these right up until our last day, even if we cease to have them much earlier. Second, Parfit notes, we might change our values or ideals, which might lead us to condemn some of our desires. In this case it is reasonable to forego any opportunity to satisfy them. When a property, such as conditionality, undermines the importance of satisfying a desire for P , so that P 's holding is not intrinsically good for us (and ~ P 's holding is not intrinsically bad for us), let us say that it is an undermining feature.

When we no longer want something, we may speak of a past desire. Perhaps a desire is undermined by being past, as Parfit has claimed (compare Suits 2001). Then Epicureans may be able to revive their attack on the posthumous harm thesis: dying ensures that we cannot be harmed by posthumous events, since we are without desires long before these occur (Vorobej, 1998). This strategy does not seem to vindicate death itself, since death may preclude the fulfillment of some of the very desires it destroys. However, the die-hard Epicurean might suggest that a desire is undermined, in passing, at the very moment of its destruction; if it is later thwarted, no harm is done.

In any case, it is far from clear that our interests should be assessed in a temporally relative way. The matter is quite controversial. Consider Parfit's claim that our desires are undermined by their pastness: neutralists, who assess our interests in the temporally neutral way prescribed by comparativism, can resist Parfit's claim by finding a feature other than pastness that tends to undermine desires that we no longer have. One possibility becomes evident once we notice that most of our aims are tentative in the sense that we adopt them in the expectation that we may later revise them. An extreme way to revise a desire for P is to stop wanting P altogether — to end the desire for P , say on the grounds that it conflicts with other, more pressing interests. We defer to future exercises of our own autonomy, realizing that we may reassess our priorities, until our life plan matures. In particular, we are always prepared to revise desires in light of the projects and commitments with which we identify, and loath to abandon projects and commitments which have become parts of our identities. We favor some of the ways our desires change, and take what steps we can to coax them in preferred directions. As a rough approximation, we may say that, unless our desires change in ways we (do or) would oppose, the changes are voluntary (Cf. Harry Frankfurt 1971). For our purposes we can even count, as voluntary, the intentional elimination of a desire using artificial means, as when we take pills to remove the desire to smoke cigarettes. If we voluntarily stop wanting P , ~ P can no longer harm us. It will not harm us during the time we wanted P , or later, when our desire is thwarted. So we undermine a desire when we voluntarily abandon it (Luper 1987). On this view, Epicureans cannot show that desires are harmlessly thwarted by death and posthumous events on the grounds that such desires are past at the time death or posthumous events thwart them.

Actualist Comparativism

Comparativism says that the value of my dying at time t depends on the intrinsic goods (and evils) I would have accrued after t had I not died, even though I am actually dead after t . Being dead, I am incapable of accruing any intrinsic goods or evils after t , and in that sense I am unresponsive after t . Interest actualism denies that the value of my dying at t can depend on these goods. It says that the value for S of event E is not affected by the intrinsic goods or evils S would have accrued had E not occurred, if S would have accrued them after S has actually become unresponsive.

Accepting interest actualism would force us to modify comparativism. The actualist view would be this:

Actualist Comparativism : E 's value for S equals the intrinsic value for S of S 's life in W E , the actual world in which E occurs, minus the intrinsic value for S of S 's life in the closest world, W ~ E , in which E does not occur excluding any intrinsic value S would accrue in W ~ E after S ceases to be responsive in W E .

However, actualist comparativism does not appear to be more plausible than standard comparativism. If I die at t , accruing goods after t is not in my interests-after- t , but it does not follow that it is not in my interests. If developing and fulfilling certain desires is entailed in making my life as a whole as good as possible, then it is in my interests to develop and fulfill those desires. Even though I will die before I develop and fulfill the desires, it is in my interests to develop and fulfill them, and bad for me not to develop and fulfill them.

Moot Preclusion

One other line of thought might be pressed against the comparativist account of interests. Comparativism says that something harms me when it makes my life worse than it would have been. However, there seem to be events and states of affairs that do not harm me even though their value for me is negative. I am not harmed, it seems, by failing to be a genius, 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. By failing to be brilliant, rich and beautiful, I am precluded from having many goods, but we might say that the preclusion is moot, in the sense that it is harmless to 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 moot: 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 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?

There are various responses to the problem of moot preclusion. One is to deny that it makes any sense to speak of ‘negativities', or events that consist in things not happening. This does not stop us from evaluating the event or process of dying (as opposed to the state of death) which is not a ‘negativity’. Comparativists are right to claim that things harm us by making our lives worse than they would have been otherwise; negativities are not counterexamples, since they do not exist. Another response is that moot preclusion involves cases in which the events or states of affairs that would be good for us if they held are highly improbable (Draper 1999). A further explanation involves 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.

In section 3 we showed that the harm theses can be defended on the basis of comparativism together with a plausible view of welfare. We also considered ways of attacking this defense, and some possible responses. In this section we consider another worry about the view that death may harm its victims by depriving them of goods (or benefit them by precluding their incurring evils). Roughly, the worry is this: suppose we accept the presumption that something can harm a subject only if there is a (period of) time when it does so. Let us call this the Epicurean presumption . Then death can harm us by depriving us of goods only if there is a time during which we are harmfully deprived. However, it is not clear that there is such a time. If the Epicurean presumption is really true, then proponents of the harm thesis will need to clarify when it is that being deprived of goods harms a victim. In this section we will consider several possibilities. First, however, we will examine the Epicurean presumption itself.

4.1 The Epicurean Presumption

There is more than one way to understand the Epicurean presumption. It might mean this:

P1: An event E harms a subject S only if there is a time when E is against S 's interests.

On this reading, the presumption is surely true. But it is also quite easy to supply the time when something such as death is against the interests of its victim. All it takes for an event to be against my interests is that it makes my life as a whole worse than it would have been had the event not occurred. Suppose, for example, that I will be infected tomorrow and, because of its effects on me during next week, the infection will worsen my life as a whole. Then being infected is against my interests, period. That means it is against my interests now and at all other times I exist. This may seem mysterious, unless we notice that something's being against my interests, according to the terms of comparativism, is not an event, and hence not an event occurring at some time.

There is another way to understand the Epicurean presumption. Recall the distinction made earlier (at the end of 2.1) between my interests, on one hand, and my interests-at-time- t , or what makes me better or worse off at time t , on the other. The Epicurean presumption might be that harm affects my interests-at- t , at some time t , rather than my interests. That is, the presumption might be understood as follows:

P2: E harms S only if at some time t , E is against S 's interests-at-time- t .

Now, if comparativism is true, this version of the Epicurean presumption is false. To see why, let us distinguish between two ways in which something might be bad for me. On the one hand, something might bring it about that, for a while, I am worse off than I would have been. For example, a coma might prevent me from enjoying a week's worth of pleasant activities, so that, while comatose, my welfare level would be lower than it would have been had I not fallen into a coma. On the other hand, something might cause it to be the case that my life as a whole is worse than it would have been. Usually, things that make our lives as wholes worse (such as comas) do so by making us worse off for a while. However, what makes our lives worse need not make us worse off for any period of time. Death can prevent me from enjoying years of pleasant activities, making my life as a whole worse than it would have been had I not died, even if I am not worse off at any time during my life. Death is an injury to my life as a whole.

The Epicurean presumption can be sustained if it is equated with P1, but it is easy to point to the time when death is against the interests of its victims: if it is against their interests at all, it is timelessly against their interests, according to comparativism. If, by contrast, we equate the presumption with P2, we will look for the time during which we are worse off because of death than we would have been had we not died, and worry about the fact that it is difficult to supply that time. However, there is good reason to reject P2. We have already seen that comparativism is extremely plausible, and P2 is false if comparativism is true.

Even if P2 is false, and death can harm us without leaving us worse off, there might still be times when, due to death or posthumous events, we are worse off. Many theorists have offered explanations of when it is that we incur such harm. There seem to be five possibilities (and various combinations thereof):

at all times (eternalism)
after they occur (subsequentism)
before they occur (priorism)
at the time they (the mortem events) occur (concurrentism)
at an indeterminate time (indefinitism).

Let us consider each of the five.

4.2 Eternalism

Feldman (1991) seems to argue for the eternalist view that my death is always bad for me if bad for me at all. If my death harms me, it harms me while I am alive, while I am dead, and even before I came into existence. However, theorists (among them Lamont 1998, Silverstein 2000 and Feit 2002) who interpret Feldman this way argue that he is wrong to accept eternalism. Suppose I stubbed my toe, and we ask ‘when was the stubbing bad for me?’ What exactly do we want to know? Perhaps we want to know when it is true that the stubbing was bad for me. If so, the answer is: ‘eternally, if ever.’ However, our question might be: ‘at which times do I incur harm for which the stubbing was responsible?’ If so, the answer is: ‘I incur that harm at all and only those times when my toe is throbbing as a result of the stubbing.’ A question concerning the timing of death's harmfulness might be similarly ambiguous. In asking, ‘when is Lincoln's death bad for him?’ we might want to know when it is true that his death is bad for him. The answer is presumably that it is an eternal truth. Feldman appears to answer this first question. But his critics are looking for an answer to a second question, namely this: ‘at which times does Lincoln incur the harm for which his death is responsible?’ To this latter question it is absurd to reply that Lincoln is always incurring harm.

4.3 Subsequentism

The termination thesis poses a significant obstacle to the subsequentist view that death and posthumous events harm us after they occur, for it implies that death annihilates its victims, from which it appears to follow that there is no subject who is a candidate for further harm. How can we make sense of the idea that death or posthumous events can harm an individual after she has died?

Subsequentists might adopt a metaphysical view that is sometimes called metaphysical eternalism (defended by Nagel 1970 and Silverstein 1980, among others). On this view, past and future objects are ontologically on a par with present objects. Existing things are spread out in both space and time. Lincoln and Socrates and other dead people may be said to ‘exist,’ where ‘exist’ is used tenselessly. Given metaphysical eternalism, we can still refer to Socrates even though ‘Socrates’ refers to something temporally located wholly in the past, and say of him that he is not alive. Perhaps, then, we can also make sense of the idea that people undergo harm while dead, assuming that harm can consist in the absence of some salient good: we can interpret “Socrates' death harmed him while his life was over” as “The living Socrates lacked various salient goods during a time following his death.”

Palle Yourgrau offers a (Meinongian) alternative to metaphysical eternalism. He suggests that we speak of the dead (meaning dead people), as well as the unborn, as objects, where an object has a kind of reality even if it does not exist . He speaks of two modes of reality: the mode he calls ‘being,’ enjoyed by ‘objects’ such as Socrates, you, and your future grandchildren's possessions, and the mode he calls ‘existing,’ enjoyed only by some beings, such as live creatures and the array of things surrounding them. Thus Socrates, who once existed, no longer does, but he is a being as fully as you and I. You and I enjoy both modes of reality; the dead (and unborn) have only being. Even if the dead are in some sense real, it is difficult to imagine a condition, such as pain, whose presence in them constitutes a state of harm. But it seems possible for Yourgrau to say, of the (nonexistent but real) object Socrates, that he was harmed while dead, in that he lacked various salient goods (such as existence) while dead. Indeed, Yourgrau suggests that the unborn, like the dead, are unfortunate in having endured “the deprivation of nonexistence” (Yourgrau 1987, p. 149).

Is it plausible to argue that dead people can incur harm on the grounds that they have some mode of reality and hence can be subjects of harm? There remain significant obstacles to this line of thought. Here are some relevant considerations:

Many kinds of things — boulders, numbers, and my shoe, for example — cannot be harmed yet lack goods. Also, it would be strange to say that a corpse, or the dust left when it decomposes, is harmed by lacking life. Let us say that a creature is responsive at t just in case it has the capacity to accrue at t the intrinsic goods or evils in which welfare consists. Because (living) people are responsive, and shoes are not, the former and not the latter can be deprived of goods, and hence can be harmed. Yourgrau's dead and “unborn” objects are not responsive; why, then, should we think they are the sort of things that can be deprived of (as opposed to lacking) goods?

Recent defenses of subsequentism seem vulnerable to the charge from unresponsiveness. According to Neil Feit (2002), Lincoln's death was bad for him, if at all, throughout the period he was deprived of life. To determine whether, and when, dying at time t harms me, we compare the situation in which I die at t to the situation (the nearest possible world W ) I would be in were I not to die at t . If I would fare better in W , my dying at t harms me; roughly, it begins to harm me at the time when I begin to fare better in W , and ends at the time when I cease to fare better in W . Ben Bradley (2004, 2009) refines Feit's version of subsequentism. According to Bradley, “death is bad for the person who dies at all and only those times when the person would have been living well, or living a life worth living, had she not died when she did.” Is subsequentism defensible on the Feit-Bradley approach? Perhaps, but they owe us an explanation of how it is that we can incur harm, albeit by deprivation, during a stretch of time when we are unresponsive.

4.4 Concurrentism

Concurrentism says we incur mortal harm precisely when death occurs. It also says that those posthumous events that are bad for us harm us precisely when they occur. One concurrentist, Julian Lamont (1998), puts the view this way: we incur deprivation harm at the time some event ensures that we will not retain or attain some good that is otherwise available. Call such an event an ensuring event. Death may itself be an ensuring event, so death and at least many deprivation harms may occur simultaneously. Similar reasoning might support the concurrentist story about when posthumous events harm us, for, like death, posthumous events ensure that we will not attain some goods we otherwise would have had, such as our not being slandered posthumously. The upshot is a unified story about when death and posthumous events harm us.

However, the concurrentist story about when posthumous events harm their victims seems worrisome. The view is that posthumous events that are bad for us harm us precisely when they occur. The problem, of course, is that by the time posthumous events occur nothing remaining of us is capable of incurring harm. This is the point that was just pressed against subsequentism. Nevertheless, concurrentists could be correct about when death harms us even if they are wrong about the time we incur harm from posthumous events. Indeed, they could say that while death can harm us, posthumous events cannot.

4.5 Priorism

To solve the timing puzzle, we might try rejecting one or more elements of the Epicurean's causal account of responsibility, and see if there is a way to defend the priorist claim that death and posthumous events can harm the living . To defend priorism, we will need to deny the assumption that a thing can affect us only causally. For that assumption, together with the ban on backwards causation, forces us to dismiss the idea that harm can occur before the event that precipitates it takes place. Yet, as George Pitcher (1984) says, this is precisely the idea we need in order to understand the harmfulness of post-mortem events. They can harm us by being responsible for truths that affect our interests. 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. It is while I am alive that I care about my reputation's always being intact, and it is while I am alive that my well-being is brought lower by posthumous slander. The posthumous events themselves harm me only indirectly; directly I am harmed by their making things true that bear on my interests.

Pitcher's idea can be applied to death as well as post-mortem events. Death can harm us by making things true that negatively affect our interests, in which case we incur harm during such time as our well-being is lower than it otherwise would have been. For example, dying before I complete some treasured project ensures that “I shall never complete my project” is true of me; because of this, my well-being is lower than it would have been, at such times as I am interested in the success of my project.

Assuming that comparativism is correct, priorism is not a complete account of the harmfulness of death and posthumous events, for comparativism, supplemented with some form of the preferentialist account of welfare, implies that death can be objectionable, in part, because it thwarts desires which we would have had and fulfilled had we not died. Because we never actually will have such desires, we can never be worse off if they are thwarted. Comparativism also suggests that death is objectionable insofar as it precludes the pleasure which we would have enjoyed had we not died, even if we never desired the pleasure of which death deprives us.

There is another way to extend priorism. We might object to the state of death, since coming to be dead makes it true of us that we have desires that will be unfulfilled. But instead of saying that being dead is objectionable, it seems better to say something else, once we notice that the state of death is simply the state of nonexistence initiated by the event of death. Perhaps being dead is powerless to harm us since any harm that might be associated with it is entailed in, and brought about by, death itself, which is responsible for limiting the duration of our lives, and all that that entails.

4.6 Indefinitism

The last possibility — that death and posthumous events harm us but at no determinate time (Nagel 1979; Silverstein 1980) — is criticized by Julian Lamont (1998) on the grounds that it implies that some events take place but at no particular time. But William Grey (1999) counters that Lamont has misunderstood Nagel's (and Grey's) indefinitist position, which is that the harm death causes is incurred during a stretch of time that has blurry boundaries (compare: the time of the onset of baldness).

As Grey understands it, indefinitism is correct only if subsequentism, priorism or concurrentism is true (Grey opts for subsequentism), for even a period of time with blurry edges must occur before, after or at the same time as a mortem event (eternalism is an exception since an infinite period has no boundaries to blur).

4.7 Summing Up

Eternalism, the position that those who are harmed by death are always incurring harm, is surely wrong. Subsequentism is more plausible, but it is hard to make sense of the idea of incurring harm posthumously, since we are not responsive while dead. The indefinitist view, as we have understood it, is also unhelpful; it tells us that the boundaries of the time death harms us are blurry, yet fails to say when that time is. Concurrentism or priorism, or some combination of the two, seem to provide the most promising answers to the timing problem (the problem of specifying when a victim incurs the harm for which death and posthumous events are responsible). It does seem reasonable to say that death may harm us while it occurs. It is far less plausible to say that posthumous events may harm us while they occur, since we are not responsive then. It is also plausible to say that both death and posthumous events may harm us while we are alive, for living people may have interests that depend on what happens in the future.

At this time it is worth repeating what was stated in section 4.1: proponents of the harm theses do not need a solution to the timing puzzle, for something can harm us timelessly; that is, it can be against our interests even if there is no time t at which, because of it, we are worse off at t than we would have been otherwise. As comparativism says, anything that makes our lives worse than they otherwise would have been is against our interests. This death usually does. But at no time after death are we worse off than we would have been had we not died, for the simple reason that we do not exist. Death might make us worse off while it occurs; however, it, and a posthumous event, might also make us worse off before it occurs, since it may be against the interests we once had.

Are all deaths misfortunes? Perhaps, but there is a strong case to the contrary.

5.1 Only Premature Death Is a Misfortune

To support the conclusion that death is not always a misfortune, we might adopt some version of preferentialism. Perhaps it is not bad to die at an advanced enough age, for people who live long enough may be ground down by life until they give up many of their goals. Also, they will have attained many of their aspirations. If already satisfied, or given up, a desire cannot be thwarted, even by death, so as we lose our motivation for living, death ceases to be objectionable to us. Perhaps death is bad for us only if premature in the sense that it comes when we still have interests such as salient desires that propel us forward in life, and only if meeting these interests is a real prospect.

5.2 Immortality Is a Misfortune

We are left to wonder whether death would ever cease to be objectionable were we not ravaged by bad health and other hardships. Bernard Williams argues that it would be bad to live forever, even under the best of circumstances. His view is based on an assumption about the relationship between our identities and the desires that motivate us to live.

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 are conditional , and do not give her reason to live. Contrast a father who is committed to rearing a beloved daughter: he desires unconditionally that the child do well, and his desire gives him reason to live, because he can rear his child only if he survives. In this sense, his desire is categorical, or unconditional. Williams thinks that categorical desires are essential to identity, and give meaning to life. Through categorical desires, we are attached to projects or relationships that are definitive of the self; faced with their destruction, we would feel our lives are meaningless, and that in an important sense we cannot survive as the persons we once were.

The bearing on death, according to Williams, is, first, that people have good reason to condemn a death that is premature in the sense that it thwarts their categorical desires. Second, mortality is good, since people who live long enough eventually will lose the categorical desires with which they identify. Life will lose its novelty, and oppressive boredom will set in. To avoid ennui, superseniors would have to replace their fundamental desires, again and again. But this is to abandon their identities; it is tantamount to death.

As Williams says, lives of unimaginative routine will eventually grow stale if extended long enough. Of course, this is not supposed to comfort ordinary mortals, most of whom will die long before routine undermines the joy in living. However, as several theorists, including Nagel (1986, p. 224, n. 3) Glover (1977, p. 57), and Fischer (1994) have suggested, it is not obvious that life must become dull. Williams may have overlooked how rich and complex life can be, especially for superseniors who pursue multiple open-ended projects in the company of other superseniors. His response to this kind of criticism is that even rich and open-ended projects eventually will become routine (say after a few billion years), so our pursuits must be replaced periodically if we are to remain interested in life. But to phase in wholly new projects is to lose our identity.

Williams's response faces objections. First, we might avoid boredom by adding to our pursuits, and varying the way we approach them, without abandoning certain core interests that define us. Second, Williams is working with a view of identity that may be too narrow. Many of us would welcome a possibility that he downplays: gradually transforming our interests and projects over time. Transformation is not death. It is distinct from, and preferable to, annihilation. Transformation would be death only if identity were wholly a matter of retaining (most of) our psychological features over time. However, it is questionable that persistence requires this kind of connectedness. Even if our persistence hinges on our psychological features, transformation need not be death, since transformation is consistent with the gradual, continuous change of our psychological features. If we could live endlessly, the stages of our lives would display reduced connectedness, yet they could be continuous, which is a property that is important in the kind of survival most of us prize. Even after drinking at the fountain of eternal youth, we would tend to focus on relatively short stretches of our indefinitely extensive lives, and over these periods we would prize connectedness, since we are animated by specific projects and relationships that can be developed only if there are strong interconnections among the temporal stages of our lives. However, sometimes we would turn our attention to relatively long stretches of life, and then, prizing continuity, we would phase in new and worthwhile undertakings that build upon, and do not wholly replace, the old.

6. Can Death's Harmfulness be Reduced

Even if death is usually bad for those who die, it is possible that death 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: 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.

Thanatizing would insulate us from harm from death by leaving us with no interests with which dying interferes. Unfortunately, our desires may not be malleable enough to fully thanatize them. Moreover, even if we could fully thanatize, doing so would have a significant drawback: it would leave us with an impoverished conception of our interests. For example, we could not have an unconditional desire that some project of ours succeed, or an unconditional desire that a loved one flourish. We could retain conditionalized versions of these desires, namely: should I live on, let my wife flourish, and my project succeed. But limiting myself to a conditionalized regard for my wife's well-being precludes my loving her: if I love her, I cannot be indifferent about the way an event will affect her so long as I will not live through it. Moreover, conditionalized desires cannot motivate us to live. It is unconditional desires that prompt us to live on. Hence in avoiding all desires that would leave us vulnerable to death, we must give up the view that life is worth living, as well as the projects and concerns that constitute grounds for thinking that life is good. Any reason to (want to) live is an excellent reason to want not to die; to avoid the latter, we must avoid the former.

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.

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Epicurus | identity | well-being

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The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death

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15 Immortality

John Martin Fischer is Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside, where he has held a University of California President’s Chair (2006‒2010). He has written on various topics in philosophy, including free will and moral responsibility. He has published papers on the metaphysical and ethical dimensions of death, and he is the editor of The Metaphysics of Death (Stanford University Press, 1993). His collection Our Stories (Oxford University Press, 2007) includes papers on death, immortality, and the meaning of life.

Published: 28 December 2012
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This chapter, which analyzes questions about death and immortality, explains the different notions of immortality and discusses three challenges to the idea that any kind of immortality could be appealing to us. It proposes ways of responding to these challenges and argues against the view of the Immortality Curmudgeons, which holds that immortality is not necessarily of any positive value to human beings.

If one lives intensely, the time comes when sleep means bliss. If one loves intensely, the time comes when death seems bliss…The life I want is a life I could not endure in eternity. It is a life of love and intensity, suffering and creation that makes life worthwhile and death welcome. —( Kaufman , 1963 , p. 372) No animal endowed with much power of memory ought to live forever, or could want to, I should maintain; for the longer it lives, the more that just balance between novelty and repetition, which is the basis of zest and satisfaction, must be upset in favor of repetition, hence of monotony and boredom. Old animals and old people, in principle (exceptions are in degrees only) are bored animals and bored people. This is not essentially a glandular or circulatory phenomenon. It is psychological: one has felt and done most of the things that must be felt and done so many times before. As Jefferson wrote to a friend: “I am tired of putting my clothes on every morning and taking them off every evening.” Thus, he concluded, the Creator prepares us for death. Thus indeed. That many old people are spry and eager only proves that their chronological age gives but a rough index of psychological age. Thus all complaint against death itself seems misguided. Death is needed for the solution of an aesthetic problem, how memory is to be reconciled with zest. —( Hartshorne , 1958 , p. 387)

1. Introduction

Since the inception of philosophy, we have been interested in questions about death and immortality. In this “overview” paper, I will begin by distinguishing various different notions of immortality. I will then present three challenges to the idea that any kind of immortality could be appealing to us. These challenges come in part from a classic article by Bernard Williams ( 1973 , reprinted in Fischer, ed., 1993 , pp. 71–92), but they are also raised by various other philosophers. In this discussion I will focus primarily on a certain salient kind of immortality; antecedently, this sort of immortality would seem to be most promising candidate to present itself as choiceworthy (were it feasible) or, at least, appealing to human beings. I shall then sketch various ways of responding to the challenges. I shall defend the contention that certain kinds of immortality could be appealing to human beings; that is, I shall argue against the view of the Immortality Curmudgeons that immortality (in any of its forms) is necessarily not of any positive value (or in any way appealing) to human beings.

2. Various Kinds of Immortality

One might think that immortality is simply living forever. But, as usual in philosophy, the issues are a bit more complicated. First, one might distinguish between actually living forever (but with the possibility of dying) and necessarily living forever (that is, living forever without the possibility of dying). As far as I know, the first philosopher to make this distinction in print was H. Steele, who made the distinction between “contingent body-bound immortality” and “necessary body-bound immortality” (Steele, 1976 ; also, see Burley, 2009a ). A second distinction has to do with the immortal individual’s epistemic status, and it cuts across the first distinction. That is, it is possible that one be either contingently or necessarily immortal and not know it; it is also possible that one indeed knows that one is immortal (either contingently or necessarily). For the purposes of this paper, I will focus primarily on necessary immortality in which the individual knows that he is necessarily immortal; one might call this “robust immortality,” although I will generally dispense with this term and simply use “immortality.”

Many different kinds of immortality have been discussed in literature and philosophy. (For a taxonomy and discussion, see Fischer and Curl, 1996 , reprinted in Fischer, ed., 2009 , pp. 93–102.) Some conceptions of immortality are “nonatomistic”; they posit the fusion of the individual with another individual or individuals. In contrast, I shall fix on “atomistic” conceptions of immortality. Whereas some atomistic conceptions of immortality appear to involve “serial” lives (such as in certain Hindu and Buddhist conceptions of reincarnation), of greater interest to me in this piece will be atomistic, nonserial conceptions.

Even so, there are many different ways of conceptualizing such immortality. I shall assume that the immortality in question is bodily immortality. Additionally, I assume that the individual in question is biologically “frozen” at some age understood as the biological “prime of life.” Bernard Williams took this to be age forty-two (which was his age when he delivered the lecture at Berkeley that was the basis for Williams, 1973 ). Williams says, “If one had to spend eternity at any age, that seems an admirable age to spend it at” (Williams, in Fischer, ed., 1993 , p. 81). It is interesting that Todd May chooses a rather earlier age as relevant—early to mid-thirties (May, 2009 ). Indeed, May says, “For some, this might be too old: mid-twenties may capture the point of physical and intellectual peak” (May, 2009 , p. 55). The point is to imagine that by some means or another one is in possession of one’s biological features and capacities at a relatively healthy point, and although one of course ages chronologically, one does not “age” biologically. (This does not imply that one is not subject to the consequences of risky choices, which may indeed result in temporary or even permanent physical consequences. One might worry that if physical injury is possible, then, given an infinite period of time, it would be highly likely that one would become crippled to the point of incapacity. I don’t have the space here to address such worries adequately; one could however imagine the possibility of regeneration of biological health after a certain period of diminished capacity.)

The fact that one would not be subject to biological aging and deterioration is obviously important. Although there are different versions of the myth, in the ancient Greek myth of Tithonus, the youth is granted eternal life but, lamentably, not eternal youth. Similarly, in Gulliver’s Travels , Jonathan Swift depicts the struldbrugs as immortal but subject to biological aging. The struldbrugs begin their biological decay at around age thirty, and this eventually leads to blindness and other maladies of old age. Reflections on Tithonus and the struldbrugs should make it evident that an immortality that involves biological aging and deterioration would be anything but desirable.

In what follows I shall focus mainly on robust immortality of the atomistic, nonserial sort in which the individual somehow is ensured eternal “youth”; that is, the individual is biologically in the prime of life, is healthy, and does not deteriorate biologically over time. It is plausible that this sort of immortality is the best candidate for being of value to human beings. Also, I shall assume that the individual knows, not just that he will necessarily live forever, but also that his immortality is atomistic and that he will not be subject to biological aging.

3. Three Challenges to the Appeal of Immortality

It will be helpful to employ Bernard Williams’s framework for analyzing the potential desirability or value to humans of immortality, supplemented by an additional challenge. More specifically, Williams can be interpreted as posing two challenges to the appeal or value of immortality for human beings. (Williams, 1973 ; for discussion, see Fischer, 1994 ; and Fischer and Curl, 1996 ) These two challenges might be taken to presuppose two conditions on the appeal to us of any proposed conception of immortal existence: the identity condition and the attractiveness condition. Williams’s view is that any proposed story that purportedly presents (say) my immortal existence must fail to satisfy at least one of these conditions: either the story does not depict the life of an individual who is genuinely identical to me, or it does not depict an attractive life.

I believe that it is analytically helpful to introduce a third condition: the “recognizability” condition. That is, many philosophers object to certain depictions of immortality as not presenting the story of an individual who is leading a “recognizably human life.” This sort of objection might be thought to fit under either Williams’s identity challenge or his attractiveness challenge. For the purposes of this paper, I will break the challenges into three: identity, recognizability, and attractiveness. So the Immortality Curmudgeon is here interpreted as contending that any story purporting to present my immortal existence either does not tell my story, or it does not tell the story of any human being at all, or the life it depicts is not attractive to me (although arguably it is the story of a recognizably human being: me).

Let us begin with the challenge to the identity condition. With respect to what appears to be a version of this condition, Williams says:

The state in which I survive should be one that, to me looking forward, will be adequately related, in the life it presents, to those aims I now have in wanting to survive at all. That is a vague formula, and necessarily so, for what exactly that relation will be must depend to some extent on what kind of aims and (as one might say) prospects for myself I now have. What we can say is that since I am propelled forward into longer life by categorical desires, what is promised must hold out some hopes for those desires…at least this seems demanded, that any image I have of those future desires should make it comprehensible to me how in terms of my character they could be my desires. (Williams in Fischer, ed., 1993 , p. 85)

The concern then is that in an infinite life, it is plausible that one’s “categorical desires”—desires that propel one forward and are not simply conditional on continuing to live (such as the desire to be wellnourished if one continues to live, and so forth)—will change substantially (and, presumably, entirely). If an individual depicted in a story of infinitely long life has substantially or completely different categorical desires from mine now, how can this be my story? Why would I care especially about this individual (in the way in which we care especially about ourselves?

The second challenge—or set of challenges—comes from the worry that any story of an individual who lives an infinitely long life would not be the story of an individual who is recognizably human—sufficiently similar to us that we can understand the life as “human.” (Of course, a positive answer to the identity challenge would entail a positive answer to the recognizability challenge, but not vice versa.) Williams suggests a version of the recognizability worry when he contends that EM (Elina Makropulos, who has taken an elixir of eternal life and is “now” chronologically 342 years old) might lack any coherent character at all. (EM is a character in a story originally presented in a 1922 play by Karel Čapek, The Makropulos Case , and also told in a 1926 opera by Leos Janacek) That is, if the categorical desires are not allowed to change over time, her character is in danger of falling apart or disintegrating. If the categorical desires are allowed to change, then we are back to the identity problem sketched above.)

But there are various other worries that can arguably be considered versions of the recognizability challenge. Some have argued that aspects of the content of our lives depend precisely on the fact that our lives are finite; on this view, a life without borders would be “indeterminate” or “formless” (Heidegger, 1927 ; May, 2009 ) Perhaps a related worry is that our lives are structured essentially by anxieties (either conscious or unconscious) about death. One might say that our lives are in this way fraught (May, 2009 ). If the possibility of death is taken away, arguably this also changes the fundamental experiential nature of our lives—and perhaps our deepest values as well (Nussbaum, 1994 , 1999 , and forthcoming ).

Similarly, some have contended that our lives are “narratives” and that narratives must have endings; these philosophers conclude that since the accounts of infinite lives could not have endings, these accounts would not be “narratives,” strictly speaking (May, 2009 , pp. 70–72). Finally, some philosophers have simply pointed out that infinity is fundamentally different from finite magnitudes, and thus we cannot extrapolate from features of finite lives to those of infinite lives (Burley, 2009a ). They would point out that, even if certain features would obtain in very, very long finite lives, there is no guarantee that they would obtain in infinite lives. We might then worry that we cannot even get a grasp on infinite lives; we cannot understand them well enough even to judge whether they are recognizably human.

A final challenge puts aside all the “recognizability” worries and simply posits that an infinitely long life would necessarily be unattractive. Perhaps the most salient version of this worry comes from Williams, who suggests that even if EM can be understood to have a determinate and recognizably human character, she would inevitably become hopelessly bored and alienated over the course of time. He says about EM:

Her trouble was, it seems, boredom: a boredom connected with the fact that everything that could happen and make sense to one particular human being of 42 had already happened to her. Or, rather, all the sorts of things that could make sense to one woman of a certain character. (Williams, in Fischer, ed., 1993 , p. 82)

Williams’s argument in defense of the necessary unattractiveness claim is (roughly) a trilemma. Over time in an immortal life, the individual will either change his or her character (and categorical desires), or not. If the former, then evidently the story will not meet the identity criterion. If the latter, there are two possibilities. If experience does not affect the individual, he or she will become alienated and completely disengaged from life. But if one is indeed affected by experience without the possibility of that experience changing one’s basic character, one will inevitably become bored.

4. The Identity Challenge

On Williams’s view, we are propelled into the future by “categorical desires”—such as the desire to raise a family, write a book, help the needy, save the planet from environmental destruction, make a fortune, find a true love, master the Goldberg Variations, and so forth. These are distinguished from “conditional desires,” such as the desire to be healthy, if alive, and so forth. Williams claims that it is the thwarting of categorical desires that makes death a bad thing for an individual who dies; thus, he contends that a life without any categorical desires would not be worth living. But equally problematic, it might seem, would be a future in which the categorical desires have changed substantially or even completely. Williams contends that a story of an individual with substantially different categorical desires would not be a story of me in a sense relevant to my special concern for my own future.

But the issues here are complicated. Suppose I now like to “challenge” myself in lots of ways—in work as well as hobbies. For example, I undertake many challenging commitments to write, lecture, and travel all across the world, and in my spare time I pursue “extreme sports,” such as rock climbing and skydiving as well as world travel to exotic destinations. (The reader will note that this is obviously an entirely hypothetical scenario!) Even so, I might recognize that over time my preferences will change, so that toward the end of my career and life I will wish to be much more “conservative,” undertaking less travel, fewer challenging commitments, and so forth. This is entirely “normal,” and it does not in any way etiolate my concern for my future, so envisaged. I can also entertain the possibilities that I will undergo significant and even radical changes in my ethical, political, and religious beliefs without diminishing my current concern for my future self. If this is the situation in a finite life, why not also in an immortal life (Fischer, 1994 )?

Employing the terminology of Frederik Kaufman, we might distinguish between the “thick self” and the “thin self” (Kaufman, 1999 and 2000 ). The thick self includes the categorical desires, whereas the thin self does not. One might think of the thick self as similar to the “moral self” or “moral personality” in the literature on autonomy, whereas the thin self is more like the “metaphysical self” (a self that can persist through changes in personality). Kaufman argues that invoking the distinction between thick and thin selves can help us to explain the intuitive asymmetry in our attitudes toward prenatal and posthumous nonexistence. On his view, we care about living longer than we actually do because we can envisage the thick self continuing at least for some period; but we are indifferent to having been born significantly earlier because the thick self could not have come into existence significantly earlier. After all, any individual who came into existence significantly earlier than I did would not have been me, thickly construed. (Here I will not pause to evaluate the inference from the previous sentence to the clause just before it; but, as I (and my coauthor) have argued elsewhere, the second sentence—with the merely subjunctive “would not”—does not entail the first—with “could not”: Fischer and Speak, 2000 ). And note that this approach to the asymmetry problem seems to apply nicely to the identity worry. If we care about our thick selves, and if immortal life would inevitably cause a substantial or total change in our thick selves, then we would not wish to be immortal—the focus of our care would necessarily be extinguished.

But elsewhere I have argued against the thesis that our commonsense asymmetry in attitudes between prenatal and posthumous nonexistence can be explained by reference to the contention that we care only about our thick selves (and that our thick selves could not have come into being significantly earlier) (Fischer and Speak, 2000 ; and Fischer, 2006b ). Note, for instance, that an individual adopted as an infant might regret that he was not raised by his biological parents; but this regret cannot be accommodated on the view that we only care about our thick selves. Also, it does not seem fundamentally confused (in the way envisaged by the proponents of the thick self view) to regret not having lived in a different era entirely. In these cases it seems that we can coherently care about our thin selves; our regret is that our thin selves did not get “filled out” in certain ways.

And a similar point would seem to apply to the identity challenge. That is, if I am correct in supposing that I can indeed care about my future self, even when I envisage significant (or even total) changes in my categorical desires, then it seems, again, that I do not only care only about my thick self. Arguably, I care about my thin self—my metaphysical self—in that special way that I care about my own future. This would appear to diffuse the identity challenge, insofar as it is based on the notions that I only care about my thick self that over time my thick self (categorical desires) will change significantly.

It might, however, be helpful to pause to make a distinction here. That is, we should distinguish between the special way in which I care about my own future and its being the case that that future is desirable. I suppose that a proponent of a version of the identity challenge could concede that it is possible to care in the special way about the thin self, but still not deem it desirable to continue as a mere thin or “bare” self through significant changes of categorical desires. (This then pushes the objection toward the “attractiveness challenge.”) But, as I contended above, we do appear to identify with, care about, and also judge desirable futures in which our categorical desires change considerably. It may be that what matters to us is that these changes take place “organically,” as it were, or via certain processes, rather than others. For example, one might feel the challenge strongly if one envisages that the changes in categorical desires are brought about via unconsented-to brainwashing, subliminal advertising, and even direct manipulation of the brain. But the crucial point is that it would be dialectically infelicitous to extrapolate from these special cases to the general claim that we would not ever find it desirable that our thin self continue to live through significant thick-self changes. That is, it is does not follow from the undesirability of such scenarios that we could not judge it desirable to live infinitely long lives, where our categorical desires are envisaged as changing organically (or even via certain radical and abrupt conversion experiences).

5. The Recognizability Challenge

In a sense, the recognizability challenge is even more “basic” than the identity challenge, since it contends that no story of an immortal life could be the story of a recognizable human life (much less the story of me). So if a story fails to meet the recognizability challenge, then (simply in virtue of this failure) it could not meet the identity or attractiveness challenges. The recognizability worry comes in different forms, and it will be helpful to address them individually.

5.1 Borders and Content

Some would argue that, in various more specific ways, an infinitely long life would lack the borders that define human life as we know it. One version of this worry makes the point that in general a thing is what it is at least in part because of its borders. So a particular sculpture is what it is in part because of its borders, a particular carpet is what it is because of its borders, and so forth. If one expands the borders of the carpet, one presumably generates a different carpet; and it might be argued that at a certain point, the imaginative expansion yields no carpet at all. Similarly, many have thought that an infinitely long life simply could not have any determinate content—it would not be a life of an individual human being at all. Todd May gives particularly vivid expression to this worry:

For humans, an immortal life would be shapeless. It would be without borders or contours. Its colour would fade, and we could anticipate the fading from the outset. An immortal life would be impossible to make my life, or your life. Because it would drag on endlessly, it would, sooner or later, just be a string of events lacking all form. It would become impossible to distinguish background from foreground. (May, 2009 , pp. 68–69)

Not so fast, though! First, note that extending one dimension of an object or process to infinity does not imply extending all dimensions similarly. So, for example, one can presumably imagine an infinitely long electrocardiogram (Fischer, 2006a ). From the fact that its “horizontal dimension” extends to infinity, it does not follow that at any particular time the electrocardiogram is amorphous. There are objects and processes that can have a determinate shape, even though (say) one dimension goes to infinity, and from the fact that we allow one dimension to extend to infinity, it does not follow that we must allow all the dimension to extend similarly.

Now, it may well be the case that, for some kinds of objects, a change in any ofthe borders of a particular object of that kind will imply that it is a different particular object. So, presumably a change in the borders of a particular sculpture—especially a change of a significant sort—will result in a different particular sculpture. Further, I doubt whether we would even have a sculpture (or, say, a carpet), if any of its spatial boundaries were allowed to extend infinitely. But it does not follow that all objects and processes are similar in this respect. For example, the set of positive integers has various determinate features, although it is infinitely large. So it would be a spurious transition to extrapolate from (say) carpets and sculptures to (for example) electrocardiograms and human lives.

Think of the dialectic this way. Arguably, at least, there are things and processes that can have determinate structure or content while having aspects or dimensions that are infinite. There are other objects that, by their very nature, arguably cannot have certain infinite aspects or dimensions while maintaining their integrity. The question then becomes whether life is in the first or second subclass. Given this way of conceptualizing matters, it would clearly be dialectically unfair to note that there are things such as sculptures and carpets that appear to fall into the second subclass and then precipitously to conclude that life could not have an infinitely long temporal dimension! That would indeed be too fast. Of course, this way of framing the dialectic presupposes that there might indeed be some things or processes that have at least one infinite dimension but still have determinate structure or content; my point is simply that does not follow from the existence of examples that appear to fall into the subclass that does not admit of infinity along one dimension that all cases must be similar in this respect. (For a similar analysis of the dialectic concerning whether death can be a bad thing for an individual despite not involving unpleasant experiences, see Fischer, 1997 .)

5.2 Human Lives Are Fraught

This worry comes in various specific forms. Sometimes it is put in terms of the essential nature of human experience. The idea here is that it is essential to our experience of life (in any recognizably human life) that we are aware—either consciously or somehow unconsciously—of its finitude. The possibility of death “haunts” us—either explicitly or implicitly. In the absence of this quality of being “fraught,” life would lose its preciousness—its urgency and its intense beauty (as well, perhaps, as its capacity for poignant tragedy.) Without this structural feature of human experience, it might seem that we would not have genuinely human experience. Todd May gives more concrete expression to this sort of worry as follows:

We learn as we grow older that one cannot be everything one wants to be. One must make choices. I would have liked to be a novelist, and have even written a couple of manuscripts. However, I could not become a novelist and a philosopher, and circumstances led me towards the latter. All of us, at some point or another, let go of futures we have envisaged for ourselves… If we were immortal, we would not face those choices. Our lives would not be constrained by the choices we do make, because we would be able to make others. I could be a philosopher and then be a novelist. I could ride a bike from New York to Arizona, as I once hoped I would…In this sense, it would eliminate one of the great sadnesses of life: regret. It would not eliminate all regret, of course. I could still, for instance, do things to others that I would come to regret. However, there is a certain and devastating kind of regret that immortality would eliminate …associated with who or what one tried to become or, better, allowed oneself to try to become. To fail to become something one works or trains or educates oneself for is a disappointment. But it pales in comparison to the regret of wondering whether one could have been that if one had only taken one’s chances. If we were immortal, we would not be subject to those regrets….There would always be time to try something….Personal relationships would change as well. They would become less serious, since less would be at stake. The bonds between parents and children would probably slacken if children were no long dependent on their parents for survival….The same would be true of friendships. The activities I perform with a friend, the confidences I share, the vulnerability I display, the competition we provide for each other: all these things could still happen, but their significance would be diminished by the limitations my immortality places on my ability to sacrifice for him. Moreover, given an infinite amount of time, there would always be the possibility of the same kind of friendship with someone else: if not sooner, then later. There would always be time. (May, 2009 , pp. 60–63)

Similarly, Martha Nussbaum states:

[T]he intensity and dedication with which very many human activities are pursued cannot be explained without reference to the awareness that our opportunities are finite, that we cannot choose these activities indefinitely many times. In raising a child, in cherishing a lover, in performing a demanding task of work or thought or artistic creation, we are aware, at some level, of the thought that each of these efforts is structured and constrained by time. (Nussbaum, 1994 , p. 229)

Nussbaum has also emphasized the importance of finitude and death for human values. In particular, certain virtues—such as courage—seem to be defined at least in part by the way in which the individual confronts the possibility of death (Nussbaum, 1994 , 1999 , and forthcoming ).

But I am not entirely convinced that such considerations show that an immortal life could not be recognizably human in the relevant respects. Start with a virtue such as courage. Why exactly is death (or an awareness of the possibility of death) required for courage? Why couldn’t one show courage in the face of a whole range of terrible dangers, such as pain, dismemberment and/or disability, separation, loneliness, depression, and so forth? Courage, it seems to me, involves persistence despite an awareness of significant danger; but I do not think the dangers in question need to include death. Of course, for an immortal being the precise ways in which courage would be instantiated might well not be the same ways in which courage actually is instantiated in our finite lives. But it does not follow that the relevant behavior would not be courage (that is, it would not follow that the behavior would not instantiate the crucial feature of persistence in light of danger). I could contend that similar considerations apply to the other virtues.

One might also ask why human life would inevitably lose its urgency and beauty if one were immortal. Certain tasks do not lose their difficulty in an immortal life—it would still be extraordinarily difficult to write a great novel or a lovely poem, to paint a beautiful picture, to establish decisively that causal determinism is compatible with moral responsibility, to master Bach’s Two-Part Inventions, or to run a four-minute mile (to name just a few tasks). Merely having more time does not make any of these tasks easy; also, to accomplish any challenging task would still be rewarding, even in an immortal life. With respect to other tasks, the bar might well go up in an immortal life. Given higher expectations that come with the opportunity for more attempts or more experience and skill, challenges will certainly remain.

Now, as May contends, in an immortal life at least we can sincerely try everything we truly care about. (Of course, as Jens Johansson has pointed out to me, we must believe that the actions in question are available to us; so, for example, I cannot try to be the first to swim the English Channel, insofar as I know that someone else has already done so.) I certainly grant that immortality would not be just like our finite lives. In an infinite life perhaps we can indeed try everything (or everything that might matter to us). Butthere would still be many and robust opportunities for failure in implementing our attempts. It does seem that an immortal life could be filled with challenges that would render it on balance sufficiently similar to finite life that we would deem it recognizably human.

Various features of our personal relationships would not change, under the assumption of immortality. Imagine that one is deeply in love with someone. Although one can certainly try to have a close and rewarding relationship with her, it takes two to tango, as they say. Further, the mere addition of an infinite amount of time does not diminish the pain, frustration, and loneliness attendant upon rejection; nor, if my own past experience is any guide, does it make it very likely that the rejections will (even eventually) turn into embraces. More time might simply provide more opportunities for rejection, separation, and despair. Further, we human beings seem to be acutely sensitive to what is going on with us now; arguably, we also are keenly attuned to what we take will happen to us in the future. But the mere thought—even if I had it—that eventually (say, after four hundred thousand years or a million years) my beloved will accept me (for awhile) does not provide much comfort to me now. If one is in pain or depression now, it is hardly comforting to know that eventually and given enough time one will feel better. We human beings are, as it were, psychologically attuned to the present and relatively near future. (Of course, someone might contend that this attunement is an artifact of our mortality. A less sketchy defense of my suggestion here would require serious consideration of the possibility that our psychological attunements would change under very different conditions, such as immortality.)

Even in an infinite life, there could be very long stretches in which I don’t have what I want—I am separated from someone I love, I have not accomplished something I have set out to accomplish, and so forth. And there is no guarantee that the mere addition of more time will rectify the situation (or do so without bringing new challenges). In these ways infinite life would be no different from finite life. Also, I do not see any reason to suppose that the mere fact of infinitely long life would imply that my choices and actions at a particular time (or during a stretch of time) would not rule out other choices or close off other possibilities (including possibilities of relationships) at that time or into the foreseeable future. Granted: immortal life would not be just like finite life. But it is a mistake to leap to the conclusion that it would not be sufficiently similar to finite life to count as recognizably human. Although the challenges would be different in certain ways, they would, no doubt, reemerge in new forms.

5.3 Our Lives Are Narratives

Some have claimed that human lives are—or correspond to—narratives, and, as such, they cannot be infinitely long. According to this view, an essential feature of a narrative is that it has an ending; indeed, the distinctive kind of illumination provided by a narrative involves a resolution or a holistic grasping of the totality of the relevant sequence of events. We might say that a narrative provides totalizing illumination, and there can be no such illumination of an endless sequence. Stories must have endings, and thus immortal lives cannot be stories (strictly speaking). If being—or corresponding to—a narrative is essential to human life, then an immortal life could not be recognizably human.

One might, however, distinguish various features of narratives; it might be that immortal lives have some but not all such features, and in virtue of possessing some features of narratives, immortal lives could be sufficiently similar to finite human lives (although, as noted above, not just like finite human lives). Since immortal lives extend infinitely, their depiction cannot have endings, and thus such lives will not have an important feature of narratives. But I contend that an immortal life can have another of the crucial features of narrativity—a distinctive kind of “meaning holism.”

In a narrative, an event gets its meaning from its relationships to other events in certain distinctive ways. The meaning of an event is not fixed and immutable, but it can change as the narrative develops in virtue of its relationships to subsequent events in the sequence; similarly, the meaning of an event in a narrative is in part a function of the event’s relationships to prior events. So, for example, a difficult period in a marriage might be a “deadweight loss” if nothing positive comes of it; alternatively, if one or both members of the couple learn from the difficult time, it can have quite a different meaning. In general, when one learns from or grows as a person as a result of a putative misfortune, the meaning of the “misfortune” is transformed. Also, flourishing as a result of one’s own hard work might well have a different meaning from the same flourishing that occurs as a result of a windfall (such as winning the lottery.) Similarly, subsequent events can vindicate a risky decision (or course of action) or exhibit it to have been wrong (Velleman, 1991 ; and Fischer, 1999 ).

Infinitely long lives could then be conceptualized as similar to (say) a series of novels (sets of interlocking stories) (Fischer, 2005 ). For instance, consider your favorite series of detective novels or even J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Also, think of television “soap operas,” whichare frequently referred to as “stories”; my grandmother used to excuse herself to go and watch she called “her story”—a TV soap opera. Nowadays, most successful (dare one say “good”?) television shows are essentially soap operas (in the sense that they feature a relatively stable set of characters who develop over time through an interlocking set of stories): Six Feet Under , Curb Your Enthusiasm , The Sopranos , The Office , Arrested Development , Mad Men , and so forth. A series of interlocking stories—short stories, novels, television shows—can exhibit the sort of meaning holism that is distinctive of narrativity. My contention is that an infinitely long life could exhibit exactly this sort of meaning holism, even in the absence of the possibility of totalizing illumination. Thus it might well be the case that immortal life could have enough similarity to finite human life to be recognizably human. Even though it would not have all the elements of narrativity, it could have an important and central feature of narrativity. Thus, granting (for the sake of this discussion) that narrativity is essential to human life, immortal life could still be sufficiently similar to finite human life, even if not just like our ordinary, finite human lives.

5.4 Infinity Is Fundamentally Different

Some have highlighted the fact—and it is indisputably a fact—that infinite magnitudes are in important ways different from finite magnitudes. They have concluded that immortality would be fundamentally different from even very long finite life. Perhaps their conclusion is epistemic: given that infinity is fundamentally different, we cannot know that immortal life would be sufficiently like finite life to render it recognizably human.

Various versions of this sort of worry can be distinguished. I shall begin by focusing on what I take to be a problematic version. Mikel Burley gives a clear expression of it here:

It seems reasonable to suppose that a proper judgment about the desirability of a life requires, as a minimal condition, the possibility of conceiving of that life in its entirety, rather than just some portions of it. With the possible exception of some mathematical contexts, it seems to make no sense to speak of completed infinite series. As many philosophers, from Aristotle to Kant to Wittgenstein, have pointed out, while we can make sense of the notion of a potentially infinite series—and hence of a process that could, in principle, be continued without end—there is nothing that could count as an infinite series that has reached its completion, for an infinite series is, precisely, a series that never reaches a point of completion: it just goes on and on forever. So if one agrees that a necessary condition of being able to assess the desirability of a life is that the life be conceivable as a whole, then it looks as though such an assessment cannot be made in the case of a putative immortal life (2009a, p. 539).

Burley goes on to emphasize what he takes to be a crucial difference between our finite lives and purportedly immortal lives:

[I]n the case of a finite life, even if we have only limited information available to us, we could in principle acquire a fully rounded picture of the life in question, and could thus reach a well-informed judgement about the desirability of that life. In the case of a purportedly infinite life, by contrast, we could not acquire such a picture even in principle, since there is nothing that could count as a “fully-rounded” picture of an endless life. (2009a, p. 540)

Here the “fundamental difference” between finite life and purportedly immortal life flows from our manifest inability to conceive of an immortal life as a whole. But I do not know why we would need to conceive of immortal life as a whole, in order to judge such life as recognizably human. It might be that Burley is pointing to the impossibility of totalizing illumination in an immortal life; whereas I am willing to concede this point, I argued above that it is not clear that the possibility of such illumination is required to render a life recognizably human.(After all, such a life could still be importantly like a narrative in possessing meaning-holism.) Note that, on my view, “totalizing illumination” need not involve complete knowledge of all details of a life; rather, it involves a certain distinctive kind of “resolution” that can only come from conceiving the life as a whole.

Further, note that at any point in an immortal life, the individual has not yet lived for an infinite number of years. The important insight here flows from a distinction that is implicit in Burley’s formulation above; that is, it is illuminating to distinguish between a potentially infinite series and an actually infinite series. (This distinction is also important in the discussions of the Kalam Version of the Cosmological Argument.) With the distinction in hand, we should notice that at any given point in even an immortal life, the individual has not yet lived an infinitely long time. At any given point in time, the individual has the potential to live for an infinitely long time, but he has not yet actually lived an infinitely long time. So, if we wonder about how such a life is going, we can, as it were, “freeze it” in our imagination at any given, arbitrary time and evaluate it relative to that time; and, for any such time, the individual in question would not have lived for an infinitely long duration (and thus there should be no special bar to envisaging and evaluating the life thus far). Given that we can so evaluate an immortal life with respect to any given time, it seems to me perfectly reasonable to suppose that this is enough to defuse the worry.

Perhaps we could put the point this way. It is frankly mind-boggling to try to imagine an infinitely long life as a whole. Friedrich Schleiermacher could be interpreted as capturing this idea when he asked, “[W]ho can endure the effort to conceive an endless temporal existence?” (Schleiermacher, 1799/1958 , p. 100). But it is a mistake, in my view, even to try to conceive an infinite temporal sequence. Rather, it seems to me enough that we are able to conceive of (and evaluate) the entire life up to any arbitrarily given time, even in a potentially infinite life.

But even so, I admit that there are deep mysteries lurking in the relationship between finitely and infinitely long lives. Todd May says:

What we have not really grasped yet is the temporal aspect of immortality. We have not yet come to terms with how long immortality really lasts. It is, after all, an infinite amount of time. [An aspect of immortality] that may challenge us as human beings is that our lives keep going on and on. (May, 2009 )

Right, and it is difficult to know exactly what to make of this. At the very least, it should make us circumspect in extrapolating from features of our ordinary finite lives (or even very long finite lives that we can imagine) to immortal lives. The situation here is a bit like the situation with respect to the Divine Attributes. Some argue that insofar as infinite magnitudes are fundamentally different from finite magnitudes (and thus God’s infinite goodness is fundamentally different from the finite goodness of which human beings are capable, and God’s infinite powers are fundamentally different from the finite powers possessed by human beings, and so forth), God’s nature must remain mysterious and inaccessible to us. Others would argue that we can understand the Divine Attributes on analogy with our own finite properties; so, on this sort of view, God’s goodness is to be understood as analogous to our (finite) goodness, and so forth. Thus, on this view, although God’s attributes are not just like ours, they are sufficiently similar to ours to allow us to grasp them.

In summary, I have argued that immortal life could be “recognizably human.” But perhaps I have conceded too much to Bernard Williams, who himself accepts the bodily identity criterion of personal identity, which would seem to imply that continuing to be human is a necessary condition of personal identity. In replying to Williams on immortality, it is helpful to accept as much as possible of his overall framework. But I do not see why we would need to accept that remaining human is a prerequisite for having a life recognizably like ours; and perhaps all that is required (with respect to this criterion for the appeal of immortality) is that the life in question be sufficiently like ours, not that it be recognizably human. As Nicholas Smith has pointed out, it is not obvious that the main character in the film Avatar makes a mistake in supposing that the lives of the Na/vi (the natives of the planet, Pandora), could be appealing (even from a human perspective). Also, the requirement that a life be “recognizably human” would seem to rule out, from the start, various Buddhist and Hindu conceptions of immortality. Whereas there are various difficulties with such conceptions, it is not clear to me they should be ruled out in virtue of embodying reincarnation, including the possibility of reincarnation as a member of another species.

6. The Attractiveness Challenge

Let us suppose that the identity and recognizability challenges have been met. We still want to know whether immortality (envisaged as we have been thinking of it) could be attractive. The Immortality Curmudgeons—such as Heidegger, Charles Hartshorne, Walter Kaufman, and Bernard Williams—contend that no sort of immortality could be attractive to us human beings. Williams emphasized that, under circumstances in which the identity and recognizability conditions are met, one would eventually suffer from boredom in an immortal life—a boredom so thorough, relentless, and alienating that it would render such life unattractive.

Recently Todd May has joined the Parade of the Immortality Curmudgeons (or, better, the torrent of rain on the Immortality Parade):

There is no reason to think that I couldn’t [immerse myself far more in jazz saxophone]. I might have decided to throw myself into jazz, staying up late at night to go to clubs, listening over and over again to old jazz records, practicing with possibilities the horn has to offer. But for how long? Even if I became dedicated to the music, could I do it for a thousand years? Five thousand? At some point, it begins to strain credulity to believe that one could stay immersed in a practice for an infinite amount of time. Does it, though? Great musicians practice for hours a day, day after day. They never seem to get tired of it. However, musicians, like the rest of us, are mortal. They throw themselves into what they are doing because they want to be as accomplished as possible in the limited amount of time they have to play. And that time is very limited: seventy to eighty years at the outside. Multiply that amount of time by ten. Then by a hundred. Then by a thousand. That is an awfully long time to be playing an instrument. And it would only be the beginning. There would always be more time to practice (May, 2009 , p. 61).

But I would suggest that the view of the Immortality Curmudgeons may be excessively bleak. I would concede that certain projects and activities—and the associated pleasurable experiences—might lose their force over time, perhaps becoming entirely extinguished at some point. I would however distinguish between what I have called “self-exhausting” pleasures and “repeatable pleasures.” If we focus entirely on activities that produce self-exhausting pleasures, we can lose sight of the existence of activities that plausibly generate positive experiences that are “repeatable”; I have called the latter experiences, “repeatable pleasures” (Fischer, 1994 ). An immortal life with an appropriate mix (or distribution) of activities that generate repeatable pleasures would not necessarily be boring, and would seem to offer at least one model of an attractive immortality (for an interesting discussions, see Wisnewski, 2005 ; and Burley, 2009b ).

I have contended that such activities as sex, eating fine meals, listening to music, experiencing beautiful works of art or nature, meditation, and prayer might provide repeatable pleasures (although perhaps “pleasures” was a slightly misleading term). It might have been better to put my pointas follows: such activities (and others) might well reliably (and repeatedly) generate experiences that are sufficiently compelling to render an immortal life attractive on balance. Unbeknownst to me, I was following a tradition (Lamont, 1965 ; Momeyer, 1988 ; see also the recent Chappell, 2009 ). Replying to Hartshorne’s curmudgeonly attitude toward immortality (expressed in the epigraph to this paper), Corliss Lamont says:

I deny that repetition as such leads necessarily to “monotony and boredom.” Consider, for instance, the basic biological drives of thirst, hunger, and sex. Pure, cool water is the best drink in the world, and I have been drinking it for sixty-two years. If we follow through with Hartshorne, I ought to be so tired of water by this time that I seek to quench my thirst solely by wine, beer, and coca cola! Yet I still love water. By the same token, the average person does not fall into a state of ennui through the satisfaction of hunger or sexual desire.(Lamont, 1965 , p. 33)

Although it is difficult to prove my contention, I am confident that a suitable mix or distribution of such activities could in fact reliably produce compelling experiences, even in an immortal life. Such a life could well be on balance attractive, even if it had periods of pain, suffering and boredom. After all, we do not suppose that a worthwhile finite life must never contain pain or boredom; why would we insist on a higher bar for an immoral life than a mortal life in this respect? Wouldn’t that constitute a doublestandard?

One might ask why so many excellent philosophers have focused on certain activities that arguably generate self-exhausting pleasures and have thus ignored the activities that could plausibly generate repeatable pleasures. I would offer the speculative suggestion that philosophers are attracted (at least in their philosophizing) to activities that reflect the uniqueness of human beings, rather than those that we share with mere animals. Some of the salient suggestions for repeatable pleasures come from behavior we share with the brutes, such as eating and sex. It is hard for many philosophers to confront the notion that such animal pleasures (rather than the higher, distinctively human rational activities) might be a basis for the appeal of immortal life.

Note, however, that the animal pleasures are not the only pleasures (or compelling experiences) on my list; I also included those associated with confrontation with beauty in art or nature, meditation, and prayer. Presumably, some will find doing mathematics or philosophy similarly compelling. There is no magic to any particular list, and, I would argue, no shame in sharing the fun with the animals (as it were!). Further, note that my suggestion proposes one way of addressing the problem of boredom in an infinite life; I do not suppose that this is the only promising way of addressing this problem. I certainly do not seek to reduce all value to pleasures of a certain sort (or even experience). It is important to emphasize this last point: nothing in my view implies a reduction of all value in our finite lives to pleasures or experiences. Our finite human lives may well have a rich texture of valuable activities of various kinds, for all I have said about the potential appeal of a certain sort of immortality.

I have observed that the Immortality Curmudgeons tend to focus on “projects” and activities that require “discipline” (such as practicing a musical instrument). There is a sense of the word “project” that involves something that one undertakes just to keep busy or take up time; I think here of activities one does in the last few minutes of an elementary school class before the bell rings (or after school and before one’s parents pick one up). And practicing a musical instrument can be a chore. Maybe the Immortality Curmudgeons are such spoilsports because they are operating too much within the framework of projects and activities that require effort and discipline. In some moods, I am tempted to think that they (or, at least some of them) just need to chill out a bit and allow themselves to be receptive to the magic and beauty of life as it unfolds. (This point evidently does not apply to Walter Kaufman, as quoted in the first epigraph to this paper.)

But even I must confess that it seems a bit reductionistic to fix even in part on (say) the pleasures of sex rather than the beauty of friendship and love, or the pleasures of eating good food rather than undertaking important and great accomplishments. If all other activities, including the development of relationships and striving for great accomplishments were to lose their power to engage us in an immortal life, this would, I confess, be significant and terrible. I am simply unsure about whether it is indeed true that in an immoral life, all “projects” involving activities that typically do not generate repeatable pleasures (or reliably compelling experiences) would become boring. But I wish to emphasize that nothing in my views requires taking a stand on this thesis. For all I know, one could still care about the development and enjoyment of deep relationships, even in an immortal life. (Sometimes I think that marriage requires an infinity of time to have a chance at getting it right!) All I am committed to is the notion that the activities associated with the repeatable pleasures could themselves be enough to warrant a positive attitude about immortality, quite apart from the difficult question about whether other activities would eventually and necessarily become boring. More needs to be said about these issues, but (lamentably!) I don’t have forever (or unlimited space)… 1

I am very grateful to helpful and generous comments by Mikel Burley, Todd May, Jens Johansson, and Ben Bradley. I have given a version of this paper at the Lewis and Clark College; I have benefited from comments I received on that occasion, in particular from Nicholas Smith, Rebecca Copenhaver, and Joel Martinez. Also, I have given a version of this paper as the College of Humanities and Social Sciences Distinguished Research Lecture at the University of California, Riverside.

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The Philosophy of Death: Is it Rational to Fear Death?

In this article we consider Greek philosopher Epicurus’ reasons as to why we should not fear death, as well as some contemporary opinions on the philosophy of death.

Each of us has our own philosophy of death, our own thoughts about what it is to die and whether we should fear our end. In this article we explore the views on death of Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 BC), who proposed that we have no good reason to fear death and that we must relinquish our fear in order to live a happy life. We then consider the views of Thomas Nagel (b.1937), a contemporary philosopher whose views on the subject have proved influential.

Philosophy as Preparation for Death

Let us go back in time, to a place where philosophers roamed the earth. We find ourselves in classical Athens, in a period where Socrates , Plato , Aristotle and of course Epicurus lived and breathed. This was a time of great intellectual accomplishment and it was to form the bedrock of philosophy until this day. We are fortunate to have many surviving works of Plato, who wrote about the life and philosophy of Socrates in a series of dialogues. In one such Dialogue, entitled Phaedo , he reiterated Socrates’ philosophy of death :

“… the true philosophers are ever studying death; to them, of all men, death is the least terrible.”

jacques louis david death socrates painting

Very early on in the history of philosophy we see that death is seen as the raison d’etre of philosophy. Death is what motivates us towards achieving our goals, which helps us to appreciate our loved ones and which concludes our story. It is our marching towards death that forces us to consider how we ought to live and, contrastingly, how we ought to die. For Socrates and Plato the purpose of philosophy is obvious: it is preparation for death. For Plato, our preparation for death was also a preparation for a kind of afterlife, which is something that Epicurus did not agree with.

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Please check your inbox to activate your subscription, who was epicurus.

Epicurus was born approximately seven years after Plato died and began his philosophical journey at the age of fourteen as a revolt against his teachers. He moved to Athens at the age of eighteen at the time Aristotle (a student of Plato’s Academy) was teaching at Chalcis, about eighty kilometres north of Athens. It was in Athens that Epicurus strayed from the esoteric teachings of Plato and formed his own naturalistic view of the world, which he published in hundreds of manuscripts (of which almost none survive and of which we know about through his disciples ’ writings and historical documents ).

Epicurus proposed that the world was made up of atoms (over two thousand years before they were shown to exist) and that the universe was infinite. He rejected Plato’s claims about the afterlife , believing that the soul dies with the body. He also encouraged a form of pleasurable living that was rejected by the Stoics , who thought his way of life was degenerate. Epicurus proposed that pleasure (defined as a lack of pain and mental disturbance) was the goal of life. But to achieve that goal we needed to rid ourselves of fear, especially the fear of death.

Is it Rational to Fear Death?

Epicurus believed that our fear of death is the worst fear we face in life because it pervades our thoughts while we are alive. According to Epicurus our fear of death stops us from living. To live properly and happily we must rid ourselves of the fear of death. But how do we do that?

Most of what we know about Epicurus’ philosophy of death comes from a surviving letter of his to one of his students, Menoeceus :

Accustom thyself to believe that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply sentience, and death is the privation of all sentience; therefore a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding to life an illimitable time, but by taking away the yearning after immortality. For life has no terrors for him who has thoroughly apprehended that there are no terrors for him in ceasing to live. Foolish, therefore, is the man who says that he fears death, not because it will pain when it comes, but because it pains in the prospect. Whatsoever causes no annoyance when it is present, causes only a groundless pain in the expectation. Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer.

Epicurus’ Argument

william stott garden epicurus leontium ternissa painting

Let’s break Epicurus’ argument down.

Things are only bad for us if they are experientially unpleasant
The dead have no experience
Therefore by 1 and 2 nothing can be bad for the dead
It is irrational to fear what will not be bad
Therefore by 3 and 4 it is irrational to fear death itself

For Epicurus’ argument to be persuasive you would need to accept at least two assumptions in his view, namely:

That death is the end of consciousness and that consciousness does not transcend the body;
You cannot be harmed by things you cannot experience.

If you accept both assumptions, you probably will agree with Epicurus that it is irrational to fear death. If you disagree with the first assumption (if you believe in the life of the soul after death, for example) you may find yourself seeking answers within theology about whether death should be feared.

Things become interesting if you dispute the second assumption.

Is Death a Harm?

Imagine you land a new job and are invited to a company party. You are having a nice time talking to the host, enjoying the atmosphere and the food provided. At this moment you assume that everything is going well. However, in the back room – away from earshot – your old work colleague Dave, who you invited as your plus-one, is telling the other guests about how much of a loser you are. Dave is eager to tell these people how slack you were in the old job and how everyone at the old job secretly despises you. At this moment your reputation among your new work colleagues is tainted, even though they keep their mouths shut around you and you never find out that Dave spread rumors about you.

The question is, have you been harmed?

Thomas Nagel, a contemporary American philosopher, argues that ‘yes,’ you have been harmed even though you do not experience the harm. We can think of many examples that may apply here, such as your partner cheating on you without you ever knowing. In such instances, he proposes that you have been harmed. What exactly about you is harmed is a question that could be asked, whereby the answer seems to depend on your view of personal identity. If you think that you are your thoughts and your body in the present moment, Nagel’s argument probably will not be persuasive since you do not experience the harm directly. This is the type of view that Epicurus seems to take.

However, if you think of yourself as a kind of narrative or story stretched over time, like Nagel seems to, then ‘you’ are your story, even if parts of your story are not known by you.

Thomas Nagel’s Philosophy of Death

How does this apply to the philosophy of death? For Nagel, death is a harm because it deprives us of life which he believes is intrinsically good. He states in his book Mortal Questions in a chapter titled Death that “All of us, I believe, are fortunate to have been born.” It is from this conviction about the value of life that he builds his argument for why death is a harm:

“If we are to make sense of the view that to die is bad, it must be on the ground that life is a good and death is the corresponding deprivation or loss [of that good]”

Nagel, unlike Epicurus, thinks that we are harmed by death because “the time after his death is time of which his death deprives him.” In other words, death deprives us of more life . It is for this reason that we step away from oncoming traffic and for why we mourn the death of a young person more intensely than that of an elderly person. However, the implications of Nagel’s deprivation view are endless. How can we psychologically deal with our own impending death? Should we seek out immortality ? Nagel’s philosophy of death, for better or for worse, puts the fear back into death.

Towards a Philosophy of Death

One’s answer to the question ‘is it rational to fear death?’ will determine a large part of their philosophy of death. To begin, we can ask which view is more reasonable, Nagel’s or Epicurus’s?

On one hand, Nagel’s view seems to make sense of our emotions about death and our behaviour towards it. However, Epicurus seems to suggest that our typical emotions about death and our behaviour towards it may not be rational.

One could question Nagel’s view that life is intrinsically good, or one could question whether we fear death itself, or if we fear the broader impacts and circumstances of our death, thus challenging Epicurus’ view. Perhaps, as is often the case, the answer lies somewhere in the middle. Could there be a way to dislike death and yet not fear it? Could we accept death in a way that allows us to live happy and fulfilling lives? That is up to us to determine, as we each form our own philosophy of death.

Socrates’ Philosophy And Art: The Origins Of Ancient Aesthetic Thought

By Casey Scott MA Philosophy, GDipEd English and Humanities, BA(Hons) Professional & Creative Writing Casey teaches philosophy and culture studies at a leading Australian university. His postgraduate research examined the metaphysics of biological concepts. He is a qualified English teacher with a degree in professional and creative writing and is about to begin his third degree in zoology and animal sciences.

two philosophy drawings jean arp and ernst barlach

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Heidegger on Death: A Critical Theological Essay

George Pattison, Heidegger on Death: A Critical Theological Essay , Ashgate, 2013, 170pp., $34.95 (pbk), ISBN 9781409466957.

Reviewed by Jeffrey L. Kosky, Washington and Lee University

George Pattison describes his book as a critical theological reflection on death in the wake of modernity. It reflects on the meaning death can have today in human existence in general and Christian existence more particularly. But it is just as much a reflection on life and the meaning human being might or might not possess when confronted with the peculiar forms of the modern determination of death.

To conduct these reflections, Pattison proposes to meditate seriously on the thinker who perhaps more than any modern philosopher "articulate[s] something central to the modern conception of being human" (4): Martin Heidegger. What makes Heidegger's reflection on the human condition distinctive for Pattison is "the persistent rigor with which [it] thinks through the human condition in the perspective of its thrownness toward death" (4). In Heidegger, the modern dismissal of belief in life after death achieves consummate expression in a philosophy that is prepared to contemplate, without flinching, "the scandal of the entire annihilation of self and world" (5).

Pattison has chosen his interlocutor wisely.

The scandal raised by this conception of the human condition is, of course, the utter ruin of every enterprise of meaning-making. The threat of nihilism seems to run high when every aspiration begins in the contingency of thrown being-in-the-world and ends in the nothingness of death. But Heidegger is not easily positioned as a nihilist, and his philosophy resists easy characterization as a "philosophy of death." While Pattison does not make either charge in those exact terms, his account might invite such a reading. Readers should keep this in mind. Abandoning an otherworldly aspiration or divine telos of human existence does not destroy the phenomenon of the world, and much of Heidegger's thinking is an effort to recall this phenomenon of world and with it the human being that inheres in it. In this way, it provides a leading example of what could be called a secular turn of human thought and existence, a turn to the world or saeculum , as distinct from a turn away from the world often associated with certain forms of theological otherworldliness or otherworldly theology.

Heidegger's secular turn re-discovers something like the question of the significance of existence. Being-in-the-world, he shows, is structured in such a way that the question of significance is inhabited when existence takes up its being in the world authentically. This authentic taking up of existence thrown toward death happens in anticipatory resoluteness, the Macquarrie-Robinson translation of vorlaufende Entschlossenheit, which Pattison frequently renders, not unreasonably, though not inconsequentially either, as "resolute running ahead toward death." On Pattison's reading, then, Heidegger represents the distinctly modern condition in which the aspiration to eternal life with God has been replaced by resolutely running toward death as the realization of authentic human selfhood. For Heidegger, the existence of such a self, though void of divine aspiration, is not without significance; indeed hearing the call to authentic existence represents a turning toward the networks of significance that Heidegger believed was the world and human inherence in it. Pattison, in opposition, does not believe that this determination of selfhood allows for the question of meaning or authenticity to be answered in a satisfying way.

This is where Pattison's reading of Heidegger becomes critical. His objections purport to target not the determination of death as nothingness, but rather the form of human existence characterized by the primacy Heidegger accords to resolute running ahead toward death. They can be summarized, I believe, in this way: authentic existence in Heideggerian terms is without hope or gratitude, overly heroic or self-determined, and, most significantly, incapable of love or ethical regard for others.

Readers should understand what is implied in these claims. For if what is distinctive about Heidegger's philosophy is its secular turn, then Pattison is in effect suggesting that love is a secular impossibility, that hope is a secular impossibility, that authentic being with others is impossible to work out within the horizon opened by a resolutely secular turn, especially as such a turn is exemplified in Heidegger's thought of being in the world.

Pattison's objections are made from two perspectives or points of view, each of which, it is worth noting, appears to give him access to the same charges.

The first perspective is confessedly Christian. It forms the expressed intention of the book's critical thrust. What are "the objections that a Christian response to Heidegger must make if it is to be true to its sources and its hope" (4)? This then gives voice to the constructive intention of the book as it "works its way towards the hope and gratitude with which a Christian response to death must begin" (7). The specifically Christian perspective and the constructive intention that proceeds from it is marked further by declarations such these: "Read in the perspective of Christian ethics, this is problematic" (94), and "For Christian faith such words of faithfulness and hope also anticipate and are, in their own way, expressive of another Word" (125).

Such phrases indicate that Pattison is speaking from a position already defined by truths presented in Christianity. This gives him secure truths by which to measure and assess the Heideggerian account of human existence, and in this assessment, the Heidggerian account just doesn't measure up. Pattison's invocation of Christianity thus affords him a fair amount of critical leverage and power, as it gives him knowledge and terms in which to level such a critique.

I have no objections to speaking from a perspective, and I have no criticism to make of Christian truths. I want only to point out how Pattison's book performs or enacts, I would say, a difference between, on one hand, a certain form of the secular turn, in which existence comes into and remains a question, and, on the other hand, a certain form of Christian belief, in which the question of existence has been settled or resolved. Someone lacking in Pattison's commitment to established truths, or someone who does not have secure access to knowledge of what it means to be a Christian or, more generally, of what it means to be, finds herself in want of the language and knowledge that would settle, put to rest, or resolve the question as it is raised by Heidegger.

Pattison's Christian response is developed largely through readings of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Martin Luther and Søren Kierkegaard, in particular Luther's pastoral works and Kierkegaard's edifying discourses. Pattison notes that these Christian authors are the ones Heidegger was reading in the early formative years when he developed the account of human existence as "mortal anxiety" (85-6). The theologians' account of the sinful condition of human existence culminating in death provided Heidegger with ontic evidence for developing his own account of human being-in-the-world as abandonment to death. But, Pattison contends, Heidegger omits from his reading of these authors precisely what would make the meditation on death and human nothingness into a transformative event, one generative of human meaning. These omissions concern chiefly reference to the divine and a theology of Creation, making for what Pattison calls "a secularized version of radical Protestant theology" (86) -- evidence again of Heidegger's secular turn.

More particularly, what Pattison finds in the theologians is that a confrontation with the nothingness of the human self is managed not by the encounter with death as it is in Heidegger, but by the self's being before God, coram deo . Confrontation with the divine creator brings the self to realize its own nothingness as a creature entirely and forever dependent on an other for its existence. Creature status, then, undoes the autonomy of the existential self more radically than does confrontation with thrownness toward death because the creature will never be able to overcome the passivity of its creation, whereas existing Dasein, Pattison contends (similarly to Emmanuel Levinas), does transform the passivity of its thrownness toward death into the basis for existential comprehension when it takes up this passivity in resolutely running ahead toward death. This change in the event in which authentic selfhood is realized has important consequences for the determination of the fundamental mood of human being: whereas the resolute taking up of human existence as Dasein thrown toward death happens in a mood of anxiety (Heidegger), the authentic realization of the human condition as creature happens in a mood of hope and gratitude (Luther, Kierkegaard, and Pattison), for the creature realizes her own nothingness in the face of the one who saves her and to whom she is therefore thankful. This, I think, makes the realization of authentic nothingness somewhat convenient in that it is at once redeemed.

At least for the Christian it is, but Heidegger's secular turn has omitted from his reading of Christian sources precisely what Pattison contends makes it possible for existence to be affected in such hopeful and thankful ways. This difference is at the heart of Pattison's theological critique of Heidegger: existence thrown toward death gives no ground for hope, while Christian existence created by and for God does include hope.

But is hope really a secular impossibility? And is hope (Christian or otherwise) so sure of its future? To my ears, the hope Pattison describes sounds at times more like the expectation of what it knows will come -- a future present, indeed a good one (life after death, a God who saves, and so on), expected with certainty because founded on an encounter already experienced (the God who saved). The worry or anxious concern that accompanies hope often seems pressed out of Pattison's account. But one might want to distinguish hope from expectation and contend that hope becomes meaningful when the future is unknown and indeterminate, that the nothingness of death is therefore the ground of hope, not its opposite but what calls for it: only a being aware of future nothingness hopes to be. Dasein's resoluteness, then, would not be desperate or despairing running-ahead-to-death, but in anticipating the nothingness of death, would expose us to that which makes hope a meaningful existential possibility.

The second perspective from which Pattison objects to Heidegger is not explicitly theological or religious, but aspires to a phenomenological legitimacy that would be of general or perhaps universal human significance. "A closer phenomenological reading of our relations to the dead than Heidegger himself offers" (125), Pattison claims, shows that in assigning being toward death the exclusive role in determining authentic understanding of human existence, Heidegger fails to portray correctly "the defining characteristics of human Dasein in the here and now" (14).

The failed characterization of "human Dasein in the here and now" revolves around Heidegger's account of resoluteness ( vorlaufende Entschlossenheit ). Pattison points out that the resolution required for taking up our thrown existence in running ahead toward death is rare, indeed foreign to our human condition. The far more authentically human response is cowering, sticking your head in the sand, and crying -- "crying his very I out" as Franz Rosenzweig put it (56). We come to authentic existence not in running ahead toward our own death, but in our desire "just to remain, to stay alive" (57) and in the love and pity we show to our fellow men who suffer the same fear and share the same desire. Human weakness in the face of death does not condemn existence to inauthenticity and insignificance, according to Pattison, for our being is constituted most fundamentally in connection with others whose pain we feel as ours and whose death we suffer as our own loss. Works of love, rituals of grieving, and words of consolation in which the existence of the self is bound up with others thus realize authentic selfhood, according to Pattison, without demanding the heroism of the isolated, reticent I running ahead resolutely toward death without the community of others.

Accounts of the trials of faith offer far better testimony to authentic human existence, Pattison contends, than does Heidegger's account of Dasein'sheroic resoluteness. For what religious life teaches us is that "even life's decisive moments turn out to be not so decisive after all" (75). Life remains to be lived after the moment of decision, and the temptations to stray must be resisted again and again. Dostoyevsky's Alyosha must confront doubts that arise with the rotting corpse of the beloved holy man, Father Zossima, and Abraham can always turn back as he ascends Mount Moriah. And, Pattison adds, "the same might be said of the face to face with death" (75). He intends this remark to be critical of Heidegger -- who Pattison claims argues that, in resolute anticipation of death, Dasein gains "a conclusive view of its own life" (54) and comes to be itself finally and definitively, as it truly is as a whole. This supposed Heideggerian selfsame self-constancy, being-as-a-whole, is not true to life or human existence, Pattison objects, for resoluteness will always unravel in time, leaving Dasein doomed to inauthentic existence. There is no triumphant act of resolution in which I would decide myself once and for all and then maintain myself as myself throughout the whole of my life. Indeed such a resolution would be ethically dangerous insofar as it would make for a selfsame self closed to otherness and unaffected by others.

Now all this might hold as critique of Heidegger's existential analysis if it were really his position. I don't believe it is. The problems focus on the interpretation of anticipatory resoluteness. Pattison is, I acknowledge, in good company in offering the reading he does of the resoluteness of conscientious Dasein. His objections parallel those of Jean-Luc Marion, who interprets anticipatory resoluteness as 'autarky' and a form of self-possession, and they are heard in Levinas, who argues that in converting existential thrownness into project, anticipatory resoluteness makes existence a self-grounding principal unalterable and closed to the other. But it is far from clear to me that these readings of anticipatory resoluteness convey Heidegger's thought about the human condition.

One could object to Pattison, first of all, by stressing that anticipatory resoluteness gives possibility to existence: in opening Dasein to a possibility (death) that always remains outstanding so long as Dasein is, anticipatory resoluteness renders all that is actual not final or definitive. In this sense, anticipatory resoluteness means mutability and exposure to change; it does not mean constantly remaining the same, but openness – indeed, vulnerability to what always affects us, the world, overwhelming and altering us. If this is how authentic selfhood is realized, then far from offering the promise of disclosing the truth of our being permanently and as a whole, authentic existence entails the impossibility of Dasein picturing itself to itself in its entirety. Pattison, failing to grant this, interprets resoluteness as something like a strong-willed resolution, one made by a person of great enough willpower to keep it, a certain resolve that therefore produces a self-identical self. I, on the other hand, read it as something more like an openness that demands re-solving, repeatedly, the problems of an ever-new situation, again and again, each time. The whole that appears to resoluteness, Heidegger emphasizes, is a whole that can be and is always again taken back. [1] This makes Heidegger's concern for presenting Dasein as a whole something other, and less problematic, than Pattison contends it is.

Next, one could point out that Heidegger knows very well that authenticity unravels in time -- in fact, he makes such unraveling intrinsic to the being of Dasein when he shows how anticipatory resoluteness turns Dasein toward what turns it back to the inauthenticity of everyday absorbed concern. That is, the resoluteness that takes up existence authentically also takes up the possibility of the straying, falling, and inauthentic existence that flees the nothingness disclosed by resolute anticipation of death. Far from describing the extraction from or triumph over everyday concern, then, what Heidegger has described is something like the genesis of its characteristic traits and the inevitability of our fall into it. Dasein is not as heroic as Pattison contends, if it finds itself in its ever falling into inauthenticity when it turns toward being-in-the-world in authenticity. [2] Nor is it so triumphant, so capable of maintaining the willpower necessary to make the moment of decision a finally decisive moment of extraction from the failures associated with immersion in the everydayness of concern. [3] Anticipatory resoluteness concerns a specific way to take up this everydayness, not our extraction from it. This is why Heidegger insists, time and again, that authentic existence is a modification of everydayness, a different way to be in the everyday, not an escape or evasion of it.

Why then does Pattison think it necessary to turn from Heidegger to Kierkegaard's edifying discourses to conclude that "death's decisiveness is how it turns us around so as to see what is really decisive, namely, what we are doing in and with our lives" (89)? Does he think that Heidegger is talking only about death, that all Heidegger's talk about the resolute anticipation of death does not aim to uncover a possible way to be of existence? When Pattison claims that "anxiety in the face of death is a natural human response to ceasing to be, but the ethical and religious way of dealing with this anxiety is to turn away from the vision of death itself to what should be engaging us in our lives" (103), does he think resolute anticipation of death does not give Dasein a new way of life and that, if it does, this way of life does not include ethical engagement and love of others?

Yes, that is what he thinks, especially the last point: love and ethics are foreclosed by the resolute running ahead toward death in which Dasein realizes authentic selfhood. This point is argued throughout the book, but is the focus of chapters four and five. Most telling is a footnote in which Pattison rejects efforts made by Thomas Carlson to work out a thought of love in Heideggerian terms. Though recognizing that Carlson "attributes to Heidegger a view very similar to that which [Pattison himself develops] against Heidegger," Pattison objects that Heidegger's "work, especially Being and Time , [contains] elements that, so to speak, suppress it [ viz . developing an account of authentic being with others in terms of love] at birth" (126). These elements are chiefly the privilege Heidegger grants running ahead toward death in determining authentic human existence: a self that realizes its authentic human existence in running ahead toward death is incapable of love, and it cannot be with others authentically because it cannot love. Repeating the solipsism of idealism's ego in existential terms, Dasein does not need others to realize authentic selfhood and is too consumed by its anticipation of death to have any time to give to others. In short, resolute running ahead toward death produces a "hyper-individualized anxiety" (125), caring too much for itself to care for others.

I have already indicated my own suspicion that resoluteness in Heidegger does not mean what Pattison makes it out to imply. This has important consequences for understanding the ethical possibilities of being-in-the-world. Sometimes, not always, Pattison's reading of anticipatory resoluteness makes it sound like something done to the exclusion of other dealings with which I might be concerned, as if I was busy obsessing about death and couldn't help others. But resolute anticipation of death is not something done to the exclusion of other concerned dealings of existence. [4] It is what lets Dasein take up authentically being-in-the-world, which includes as a structural item being-with-others. Authenticity, Heidegger insists, is not an extraction from the everyday, but a modification of it: it is a way to be in the everyday of existence, which includes publicness. More specifically, the issue is how to inhabit being-in-the-world and the everyday as something that matters, that is at-issue, that I care about, or else as something whose mattering is lost. With particular regard to being-with-others and publicness, then, the question posed by Heidegger is: How can my dealings with others be taken up authentically and in a way that these others matter?

To elaborate the possibility that Pattison says cannot be, a secular possibility of being-in-the-world, one would have to reconsider the sense of anticipatory resoluteness. This I take to be Carlson's project. [5] He asks: What would it mean for running ahead toward death to be the condition that opens the possibility of authentic being-with-others? Dasein's being-in-the-world, its secularity, Heidegger emphasizes again and again, includes being-with-others; the latter is a constitutive element of the former, separable for purposes of analysis, but not in reality. The issue is how to be in the world authentically such that the being-with-others constitutive of being-in-the-world also is authentic. Heidegger's point is that authentic being-with-others has to include an enactment of the distinction that differentiates self and other lest being-with be leveled down to indifference, rendering the other not different from myself, nor myself from her. The difference of separation is enacted in my resolute running ahead toward death, understood existentially as my own most nonsubstitutable possibility. In existing toward my death, I become an isolated individual, inhabiting being in such a way that it matters to me, and thereby able to be with the other authentically -- that is to say, without taking over her being or confusing mine with hers. This would be the beginning of the secular possibility of love. Pattison does not think such a possibility possible.

However one might take this review, I enjoyed Pattison's book and recommend reading it. Clearly written, well illustrated with abundant instances of literary figures that make the account poignant and salient, it should be read for the wealth of discussion it ought to provoke -- but discussion can be maintained only so long as we do not agree too quickly to the positions and interpretations of our interlocutors, or assume that their perspectives are our own. Philosophical discussion is the squabble of lovers, a squabble I have tried to keep open in pointing out the positions, interpretations, and perspectives that belong uniquely to the author of this fine book.

[1] " What then does the certainty which belongs to such resoluteness signify ? Such certainty must maintain itself in what is disclosed by the resolution. But this means that it simply cannot become rigid as regards the Situation . . . The certainty of such resolution signifies that one holds oneself free for the possibility of taking it back . . . [This] is authentic resoluteness which resolves to keep repeating itself " ( Being and Time , 355).

[2] "Anticipatory resoluteness gives Dasein at the same time the primordial certainty that it has been closed off. In anticipatory resoluteness, Dasein holds itself open for its constant lostness in the irresoluteness of the 'they'" ( Being and Time , 356).

[3] "In the moment of vision, indeed, and often just 'for that moment', existence can even gain mastery over the everyday; but it can never extinguish it" ( Being and Time , 422).

[4] Translating vorlaufende Entschlossenheit as "resolutely running ahead (toward death)" contributes to the mistaken portrayal of Heideggerian philosophy as a philosophy of death, and of being-towards-death as a practice of life done alongside of, and therefore to the exclusion of, other practices and activities. A major problem with employing "resolutely running ahead towards death" is that the phrase makes active what I think is more passive. It achieves this sense by rendering the adjective vorlaufende as a nominal phrase, "running ahead", and the noun Entschlossenheit as an adjective or adverb. "Anticipatory resoluteness" makes more palpable the sense in which the activity at issue, if indeed it is an activity, is at best the act of patience or waiting. This becomes clear in Heidegger's later use of Entschlossenheit as nearly synonymous with Gelassenheit .

[5] See Thomas A. Carlson, "Notes on Love and Death in Augustine and Heidegger," Medieval Mystical Theology 21.1 (2012): 9-33. The possibility that a Heideggerian conception of authentic being-with-others founded on anticipatory resoluteness might be thought in terms of love is also explored by Christian Sommer in Heidegger, Aristote, Luther: Les sources aristtotéliciennes et néotestamentaires d'Etre et Temps (274ff).

Philosophy: “Death” Essay by Thomas Nagel Essay

Death is an integral part of a person’s life, although some people choose to think of it as dreadfull, while others consider it natural. While from a biological or medical perspective defining death, and thus one’s attitude is easy because it is the termination of vital activities, the philosophical view of it is more complicated. Therefore, the attitudes towards death and its inevitability and permanence may differ, leading to some people believing that death is evil. This paper aims to evaluate the arguments about death and the perception of this phenomenon presented by Thomas Nagel in his essay “Death” as well as examine the most severe difficulty with viewing death as an evil.

Firstly, the author defines death as a permanent state, leaving aside discussions regarding the possible survival of consciousness. As such, death can be viewed as something that deprives a person of all good things that exist in life. This approach can include wishes and desires, as well as happiness itself. Nagel (1970) argues that in this regard, the valuable attributes of one’s life are not connected to the mere organic survival of the body. Therefore, the first element of viewing death is evil that the author examines is the contrast of this occurrence to life, which is perceived as good.

Hence, when comparing those who lived long lives with those who lived less, one can argue that the former experienced more of this good, which would suggest that death is evil. However, Nagel (1970) cites an example of temporary freezing and renewal as a case that illustrates the view of existing or not existing at a certain period of time as a misfortune. If one were to be frozen and then revived, lack of his presence at a given point would not be perceived as bad, as Nagel (1970) suggests. Besides, none of the individuals perceive the fact that they did not exist before they were born as evil.

Secondly, it is essential to establish what is the most severe difficulty associated with viewing death as evil. Nagel (1970) argues that following the common belief that death is the inevitable and final element of a human’s life, it is necessary to determine if dying is a bad thing since it is usually perceived as such. The most serious difficulty, which arises as a result of viewing death as evil, is the direction of time and the associated opportunities and possibilities that people can have.

The examination of the concepts of life and evil, assigning the two phenomena with characteristics of good or bad, suggests that the fact that after dying a person can more extensive experience is the main attribute of death. According to Nagel (1970), evil is a lack or a deprivation of a certain quality. Also, it can be argued that death deprives a person of conscious life. As a result, an individual cannot experience the positive aspects of his or her life. This is because the activity of experiencing something is future-oriented and thus cannot be achieved after dying.

The counterargument to this claim is the idea that such deprivation does not harm the deceased as they cannot experience this difficulty. From this perspective, death is the ultimate end, and it is nor good nor bad, meaning that no dilemma with determining it as evil exists. However, Nagel (1970) states that “even if we can dispose of the objections against admitting misfortune that is not experienced, … we still have to set some limits on how possible a possibility must be for its nonrealization to be a misfortune ” (p. 80). The author considered this issue as the most severe difficulty when reviewing death as evil. In general, the death of a young individual is considered a tragedy as opposed to the death of an old individual. The latter is natural and implies that he or she had lived and experienced all the good elemnts of life. The former, however, was deprived of this opportunity and did not have as many good and positive experiences.

When comparing the deaths of Tolstoy and Keats, the author argues that the latter, who died at twenty-four, lost a lot more than the former. This approach is based on the mathematical calculations of the years of life and assumptions that Tolstoy experienced a lot more of the good aspects of life. Therefore, as Nagel (1970) argues, “in a clear sense, Keats’ loss was greater” (p. 80). Then, a controversy arises as one can argue that this approach results in the conclusion that losing Tolstoy was insignificant. From this perspective, determining whether death is evil in one case and not as evil in the other is the main issue. Arguably, in most cases, both Tolstoy and Keats died, which was an evil, as regardless of when and what age a person dies, it is a deprivation.

In essence, if people were to live only twenty or thirty years, the described difficulty would not arise. However, Nagel (1970) states that “the trouble is that life familiarizes us with the goods of which death deprives us” (p. 80). This means that humans can make a distinction between dying at a young age and dying at an old age. Hence, we appreciate the years of life and the good it brings. As a result of this, the distinction between the deprivation as a result of dying at twenty-four and eighty is a significant philosophical problem.

The author concludes his essay by arguing that the main issue of death is, in fact, the deprivation of life’s continuation. The mix of the good and bad experiences that a person has throughout life should also be considered. According to Nagel’s (1970) view, life is the biggest treasure that a person has, and thus losing it is a tragedy. In essence, this future-oriented view and the need to account for the continuation of life when determining if death is always evil are the main difficulties that the author cites.

Overall, this paper examined an essay by Thomas Nagel titled “Death.” In this work, the author evaluates the issue of dying and the perception that society has of this concept, which is usually negative. Death is a permanent state and a termination of a person’s existence. From the author’s perspective, the main difficulty with reviewing death as evil is the need to consider continuity of time when regarding the unused opportunities and possibilities. In most cases, the death of a young individual is perceived as tragic becuase of the many experiences that this person could have. In contrast to these, the death of an older adult is not viewed as such. Hence, difficulty in establishing clear criteria of when death is perceived as evil exists.

Nagel, T. (1970). Death. Noûs, 4 (1), 73-80.

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Bibliography

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Inconsistency of the Compatibilist
The Connection Between Human Life and Its Absurdity
Nielsen’s Free Will and Determinism: An Analysis and Critique
Research Philosophy: Importance and Types
The Art and Danger of the Question
Chapter VIII of Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations”
Xenophanes' Knowledge Theory in Fragment 10
Reasoning in Plato’s “Phaedo” Dialogue

1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology

Philosophy, One Thousand Words at a Time

The Death Penalty

Author: Benjamin S. Yost Category: Ethics , Social and Political Philosophy Word Count: 992

The death penalty—executing criminals, usually murderers—is more controversial than imprisonment because it inflicts a more significant injury, perhaps the most serious injury, and its effects are irreversible. [1]

Some advocates of the death penalty, or capital punishment , argue that it is justified because murder is so bad that death is the only appropriate response. Others defend capital punishment on the grounds that it has important benefits for society.

This essay surveys both types of arguments and critical responses.

The “death chamber” at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Huntsville Unit.

1. Deontological Justifications

Deontological defenses of capital punishment see execution as a morally “fitting” response to murderers’ horrible deeds. [2] There are two main varieties.

1.1. Retributivist Justifications

The idea that punishments should be equal in severity to their crimes underlies retributivist defenses of capital punishment. Retributivists argue that execution is justified because it matches the badness or wrongness of murder—i.e., it is a proportionate punishment for murder. [3]

How is proportionality established? “Eye for an eye” principles suggest that execution is proportional to murder because it involves the same kind of act (killing). [4] More sophisticated approaches begin with the idea that life is uniquely valuable: it is the precondition of everything else good for someone. Because being murdered prevents the victim from having any valuable experiences, murderers are punished too lightly if they can enjoy even the limited goods life in prison allows. [5]

1.2. Purgative Justifications

Some argue for a duty to purge exceptionally evil offenders from society by executing them. [6] On this view, the continued existence of such offenders morally stains society: by expending resources on them, society takes on responsibility for their violation of human dignity. Execution dissolves that responsibility. [7]

2. Consequentialist Justifications

Many defend the death penalty not as a response to criminals for their past evil deeds, but by arguing that executing murderers produces better overall social consequences than not doing so. [8] Two consequences are frequently discussed.

2.1. Deterrence

Common sense suggests that the fear of being executed prevents, or deters , potential murderers from killing. For deterrent justifications of capital punishment, the beneficial consequences of executions—innocent lives saved—outweigh the costs to the legal system and the executed person. [9]

2.2. Incapacitation

Deterrence is about reducing murder rates overall. Incapacitation aims at preventing specific offenders from reoffending: some murderers might be so dangerous, only death ensures they won’t kill again. [10]

3. Criticisms of Deontological Justifications

Let’s consider some objections to the above arguments.

“Eye for an eye” retributivism seems to mandate immoral punishments like raping rapists or torturing torturers.

Proportionality-based retributivism also faces challenges. Capital punishment is sometimes judged to be disproportionately harsh because murderers suffer from prison time, from knowing their execution date, and from losing their lives, whereas murder victims only lose their lives. [11] More often, critics argue that life in prison, the longest sentence possible, is just as proportionate as execution and less morally controversial. [12]

4. Criticisms of Consequentialist Justifications

Deterrence theorists presume that execution is more “persuasive” than imprisonment. But researchers have found no evidence of execution’s marginal deterrent effect—i.e., a deterrent impact on murder rates exceeding that of imprisonment . [13] It is not enough for proponents to show that execution deters murder. Execution must deter murder better than imprisonment for its costs to be justified. [14]

An objection to both theories is that they permit punishing people for actions they didn’t perform. [15] Most believe that only those guilty of criminal acts should be punished. But deterrence theories could allow executing the innocent: if executing an innocent person would prevent future murders and authorities could keep her innocence secret, the benefits would plausibly outweigh the costs and deterrence theories would support killing her. [16] And incapacitation theories punish offenders for what they might do in the future, rather than any wrongs actually committed. [17]

5. General Objections to Capital Punishment

Death penalty abolitionists raise a number of general objections to capital punishment.

5.1. The Right to Life

Abolitionists argue that execution violates murderers’ inviolable right to life.

Advocates respond that offenders forfeit their right to life by committing murder. And assertions of an absolute right to life have the implausible consequence of prohibiting killing in justified self-defense.

5.2. Dignity

Dignity arguments against capital punishment focus on whatever basic human capacity (e.g., rationality) imparts dignity , that in virtue of which persons are owed respect. Actions that violate dignity, like torture, are widely condemned. Abolitionists argue that because execution destroys the capacity for dignity, it violates dignity and is thus immoral.

Advocates question whether eliminating the condition of some valuable feature actually offends against that feature: e.g., killing people annihilates their ability to practice religion, yet it’s odd to characterize execution as violating religious freedom.

5.3. Procedural Problems

Capital punishment is often rejected on account of flaws in the legal procedures leading to death sentences. Some reject the death penalty in practice for these procedural reasons, even though they believe it is justified in theory .

5.3.1. Arbitrariness

In the U.S., capital juries may sentence a convicted murderer to life in prison, instead of execution, for almost any reason whatsoever. There is little consistency in who is sentenced to death and who is sent to prison, and so the death penalty is condemned as being intolerably arbitrary. [18]

5.3.2. Discrimination

One pattern in capital sentencing is that those who murder white people are more likely to be sentenced to death than those who murder black people (blacks who murder whites are the most likely to face execution). [19] It can seem deeply unfair, if not racist, for the likelihood of a death sentence to depend on racial factors. [20]

Death penalty advocates respond by insisting that what an individual murderer deserves is unaffected by how other murderers are treated. They add that arbitrariness and discrimination are reasons to reform , not abolish, sentencing procedures.

5.3.3. Irrevocability

If someone is wrongly executed—either because she is innocent, or subject to procedural injustice at trial—there is no way to right the wrong. Some abolitionists argue that because a just state is obliged to undo its serious mistakes, it mustn’t impose irrevocable punishments like the death penalty. [21], [22]

6. Conclusion

Retributivist justifications dominate contemporary politics, but have recently suffered some legislative defeats to proceduralist arguments. [23] Determining whether practical worries about capital punishment trump concerns about potentially treating murders too leniently is thus of great legal and moral significance.

[1] For a general introduction to the debates about what justifies punishments in general and what makes particular punishments appropriate, see Theories of Punishment by Travis Joseph Rodgers.

In the U.S., twenty-nine states, the federal government, and the military allow for the death penalty. State and federal death rows are populated solely by murderers and accomplices to murder. Some states and the federal government permit execution for treason and other crimes, but these laws have never been tested in court.

Fifty-five other countries permit capital punishment, while more than one hundred nations have abolished it or no longer use it. In countries with an active death penalty, death-eligible crimes include kidnapping, drug trafficking, treason, and sexual immorality. For detailed information on capital punishment by U.S. state and country , see the Death Penalty Information Center .

[2] Deontologists see murder as the only crime for which capital punishment is appropriate, because murder is uniquely bad, and so only murderers deserve death.

[3] Proportionality is sometimes called commensurability . Some retributivists claim that proportionate punishments are justified because they give wrongdoers what they deserve.

[4] The “eye for an eye” principle is called the lex talionis. The most famous lex talionis defense of the death penalty can be found in Immanuel Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals, vi: 332–333. For more on Kant’s view, see Yost (2010). For an introduction to Kant’s ethics see Deontology: Kantian Ethics by Andrew Chapman.

[5] Sorell (1993).

[6] The purgative rationale applies only to extraordinarily evil offenders, not to garden-variety first-degree murderers (Kramer 2011). That is, it applies only to people like Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooter, who in 2012 shot to death twenty six- and seven-year old students and six school staff.

[7] These purgative theorists regard executing evil offenders as morally obligatory , whereas retributivists typically consider it merely permissible .

[8] See Shane Gronholz’s Consequentialism for discussion of the ethical theory known as “consequentialism” that these arguments often depend on.

[9] John Stuart Mill defends capital punishment in these terms (1868).

[10] This rationale best applies to countries other than the U.S., which has invested in technologically advanced maximum-security prison divisions, where inmates are (inhumanely) restricted to solitary confinement and under constant supervision.

[11] Camus (1963).

[12] Bedau (2002); Finkelstein (2002). Critics of retributivism as a general theory of punishment often raise a related objection: it is hard to know how much punishment to assign to a given offense. Does armed robbery merit a year in jail? A year and a month? A year and one hundred days?

[13] State of the art research neither establishes nor disproves a marginal deterrent effect; see Nagin and Pepper (2012).

[14] Although the cost varies from state to state, the price for executing a murderer in the U.S. is always higher than keeping him in prison for life.

[15] Pure deterrence theories can be contrasted with two-level theories. Two-level theories of punishment endorse deterrence as the general justifying aim of punishment, but maintain that the determination of who and how much to punish is governed by retributive principles (see, e.g., Hart 1968). These views sidestep the innocence objection, but inherit the problems of deontological approaches.

[16] A related worry is that deterrence theories condone execution for crimes far less serious than murder: if executing one or two burglars would eliminate property crimes, deterrence rationales might allow such a punishment.

[17] See, e.g., Nadelhoffer, et al . (2012).

[18] See Justice Blackmun’s dissent in Callins v. Collins . For a more philosophical approach, see Nathanson (2001).

[19] Poor people are more likely to be executed than well-off people, though the research on this comparison is scant. But when we consider that litigating capital cases is difficult and time-consuming, and poor defendants must rely on overworked public defenders, many of whom have no experience with capital trials, the consequences seem clear. For harrowing stories of how bad lawyering leads to death sentences, see Bright (1994).

[20] Cholbi (2006).

[21] Yost (2019).

[22] The irrevocability of execution is, however, philosophically controversial. Davis argues that authorities can compensate a wrongly executed person by advancing her interests or values (1984). For example, the state could send her son to college or donate five million dollars to her favorite charity. Davis concludes that compensation of this sort counts as revoking the wrongful execution.

[23] For example, in 2018 the Washington Supreme Court struck down the death penalty , citing its arbitrary and discriminatory nature.

Callins v . Collins . 510 U.S. 1141. U.S. Supreme Court, 1994.

Bedau, Hugo (2002). “The Minimal Invasion Argument against the Death Penalty.” Criminal Justice Ethics 21 (2): 3-8.

Bright, Steven (1994). “Council for the Poor: the Death Penalty Not for the Worst Crime but for the Worst Lawyer.” Yale Law Journal 103 (7): 1835-83.

Camus, Albert (1963). “Reflections on the Guillotine.” Resistance, Rebellion, and Death. New York: Modern Library.

Cholbi, Michael (2006). “Race, Capital Punishment, and the Cost of Murder.” Philosophical Studies 127: 255-282.

Davis, Michael (1984). “Is the Death Penalty Irrevocable?” Social Theory and Practice 10 (2): 143-156.

Finkelstein, Claire (2002). “Death and Retribution.” Criminal Justice Ethics 21 (2): 12-21.

Hart, H.L.A. (1968). Punishment and Responsibility: Essays in Legal Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kramer, Matthew (2011). The Ethics of Capital Punishment: A Philosophical Investigation of Evil and Its Consequences. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mill, John Stuart (1868). “Speech in Favor of Capital Punishment.”

Nagin, Daniel, and John Pepper (2012). “Deterrence and the Death Penalty.” National Research Council. Washington, D.C.: The National Academies Press.

Nadelhoffer, Thomas, et al. (2012). “Neuroprediction, Violence, and the Law: Setting the Stage.” Neuroethics 5 (1): 67-99.

Nathanson, Stephen (2001). An Eye for an Eye : The Immorality of Punishing by Death. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Sorell, Tom (1993). “Aggravated Murder and Capital Punishment.” Journal of Applied Philosophy 10 (2): 201-213.

Yost, Benjamin S. (2010). “Kant’s Justification of the Death Penalty Reconsidered.” Kantian Review 15 (2): 1-27.

Yost, Benjamin S. (2019). Against Capital Punishment. New York: Oxford University Press.

For Further Reading

Hoag, Robert. “Capital Punishment.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy .

Related Essays

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About the Author

Benjamin S. Yost is Professor of Philosophy at Providence College and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at Cornell University. His specializations include the philosophy of punishment and Kant’s practical philosophy. His book Against Capital Punishment was published by Oxford University Press (2019), and he has a co-edited volume titled The Movement for Black Lives: Philosophical Perspectives forthcoming from Oxford. His papers appear in journals such as Utilitas, Journal of the American Philosophical Association, Kantian Review, and Continental Philosophy Review . www.benjaminsyost.net

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Journal of Practical Ethics

A journal of philosophy, applied to the real world.

The Death Penalty Debate: Four Problems and New Philosophical Perspectives

Masaki Ichinose

The University of Tokyo

This paper aims at bringing a new philosophical perspective to the current debate on the death penalty through a discussion of peculiar kinds of uncertainties that surround the death penalty. I focus on laying out the philosophical argument, with the aim of stimulating and restructuring the death penalty debate.

I will begin by describing views about punishment that argue in favour of either retaining the death penalty (‘retentionism’) or abolishing it (‘abolitionism’). I will then argue that we should not ignore the so-called “whom-question”, i.e. “To whom should we justify the system of punishment?” I identify three distinct chronological stages to address this problem, namely, “the Harm Stage”, “the Blame Stage”, and “the Danger Stage”.

I will also identify four problems arising from specific kinds of uncertainties present in current death penalty debates: (1) uncertainty in harm, (2) uncertainty in blame, (3) uncertainty in rights, and (4) uncertainty in causal consequences. In the course of examining these four problems, I will propose an ‘impossibilist’ position towards the death penalty, according to which the notion of the death penalty is inherently contradictory.

Finally, I will suggest that it may be possible to apply this philosophical perspective to the justice system more broadly, in particular to the maximalist approach to restorative justice.

1. To whom should punishment be justified?

What, exactly, are we doing when we justify a system of punishment? The process of justifying something is intrinsically connected with the process of persuading someone to accept it. When we justify a certain belief, our aim is to demonstrate reasonable grounds for people to believe it. Likewise, when we justify a system of taxation, we intend to demonstrate the necessity and fairness of the system to taxpayers.

What, then, are we justifying when we justify a system of punishment? To whom should we provide legitimate reasons for the system? It is easy to understand to whom we justify punishment when that punishment is administered by, for example, charging a fine. In this case, we persuade violators to pay the fine by bringing to their attention the harm that they have caused, harm which needs to be compensated. (Please note that I am only mentioning the primitive basis of the process of justification.) While we often generalise this process to include people in general or society as a whole, the process of justification would not work without convincing the people who are directly concerned (in this case, violators), at least theoretically, that this is a justified punishment, despite their subjective objections or psychological opposition. We could paraphrase this point per Scanlon’s ‘idea of a justification which it would be unreasonable to reject’ (1982, p.117). That is to say, in justifying the application of the system of punishment, we should satisfy the condition that each person concerned (especially the violator) is aware of having no grounds to reasonably reject the application of the system, even if they do in fact reject it from their personal, self-interested point of view.

In fact, if the violator is not theoretically persuaded at all in any sense—that is, if they cannot understand the justification as a justification—we must consider the possibility that they suffer some disorder or disability that affects their criminal responsibility.

We should also take into account the case of some extreme and fanatical terrorists. They might not understand the physical treatment inflicted on them in the name of punishment as a punishment at all. Rather, they might interpret their being physically harmed as an admirable result of their heroic behaviour. The notion of punishment is not easily applied to these cases, where the use of physical restraint is more like that applied to wild animals. Punishment can be successful only if those who are punished understand the event as punishment.

This line of argument entirely conforms to the traditional context in philosophy concerning the concept of a “person”, who is regarded as the moral and legal agent responsible for his or her actions, including crimes. John Locke, a 17th-century English philosopher, introduced and established this concept, basing it on ‘consciousness’. According to Locke, a person ‘is a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider it self as it self, the same thinking thing in different times and places; which it does only by that consciousness’ (1975, Book 2, Chapter 27, Section 9). This suggests that moral or legal punishments for the person should be accompanied by consciousnesses (in a Lockean sense) of the agent. In other words, when punishment is legally imposed on someone, the person to be punished must be conscious of the punishment as a punishment; that is, the person should understand the event as a justified imposition of some harm. 1

However, there is a problem here, which arises in particular for the death penalty but not for other kinds of punishment. The question that I raise here is ‘to whom do we justify the death penalty?’ People might say it should be justified to society, as the death penalty is one of the social institutions to which we consent, whether explicitly or tacitly. This is true. However, if my claims above about justification are correct, the justification of the death penalty must involve the condemned convict coming to understand the justification at least at a theoretical level. Otherwise, to be executed would not be considered a punishment but rather something akin to the extermination of a dangerous animal. The question I want to focus on in particular is this: should this justification be provided before administering capital punishment or whilst administering capital punishment?

2. ‘Impossibilism’

Generally, in order for the justification of punishment to work, it is necessary for convicts to understand that this is a punishment before it is carried out and that they cannot reasonably reject the justification, regardless of any personal objection they may have. However, that is not sufficient, because if they do not understand at the moment of execution that something harmful being inflicted is a punishment, then its being inflicted would simply result in mere physical harm rather than an institutional response based on theoretical justification. The justification for punishment must be, at least theoretically, accepted both before and during its application. 2 This requirement can be achieved with regard to many types of punishment, such as fines or imprisonment. However, the situation is radically different in the case of the death penalty, for in this case, when it is carried out, the convict, by definition, disappears. During and (in the absence of an afterlife) after the punishment, the convict cannot understand the nature and justification of the punishment. Can we say then that this is a punishment? This is a question which deserves further thought.

On the one hand, the death penalty, once executed, logically implies the nonexistence of the person punished; therefore, by definition, that person will not be conscious of being punished at the moment of execution. However, punishment must be accompanied by the convict’s consciousness or understanding of the significance of the punishment, as far as we accept the traditional concept of the person as a moral and legal agent upon whom punishment could be imposed. It may be suggested that everything leading up to the execution—being on death row, entering the execution chamber, being strapped down—is a kind of punishment that the convict is conscious of and is qualitatively different from mere incarceration. However, those phases are factors merely concomitant with the death penalty. The core essence of being executed lies in being killed or dying. Therefore, if the phases of anticipation were to occur but finally the convict were not killed, the death penalty would not have been carried out. The death penalty logically results in the convict’s not being conscious of being executed, and yet, for it to be a punishment, the death penalty requires the convict to be conscious of being executed. We could notate this in the form of conjunction in the following way in order to make my point as clear as possible:

~ PCE & PCE

(PCE: ‘the person is conscious of being executed under the name of punishment’)

If this is correct, then we must conclude that the concept of the death penalty is a manifest contradiction in terms. In other words, the death penalty should be regarded as conceptually impossible, even before we take part in longstanding debates between retentionism and abolitionism. This purely philosophical view of the death penalty could be called ‘impossibilism’ (i.e. the death penalty is conceptually impossible), and could be classified as a third possible view on the death penalty, distinct from retentionism and abolitionism. A naïve objection against this impossibilist view might counter that the death penalty is actually carried out in some countries so that it is not impossible but obviously possible. The impossibilist answer to this objection is that, based on a coherent sense of what it means for a punishment to be justified, that execution in such countries is not the death penalty but rather unjustified lethal physical violence .

I am not entirely certain whether the ‘impossibilist’ view would truly make sense in the light of the contemporary debates on the death penalty. These debates take place between two camps as I referred to above:

Retentionism (the death penalty should be retained): generally argued with reference to victims’ feelings and the deterrence effects expected by execution.

Abolitionism (the death penalty should be abolished): generally argued through appeals to the cruelty of execution, the possibility of misjudgements in the trial etc.

The grounds mentioned by both camps are, theoretically speaking, applicable to punishment in general in addition to the death penalty specifically. I will mention those two camps later again in a more detailed way in order to make a contrast between standard debates and my own view. However, my argument above for ‘impossibilism’, does suggest that there is an uncertainty specific to the death penalty as opposed to other types of punishment. I believe that this uncertainty must be considered when we discuss the death penalty, at least from a philosophical perspective. Otherwise we may lose sight of what we are attempting to achieve.

A related idea to the ‘impossibilism’ of the death penalty may emerge, if we accept the fact that the death penalty is mainly imposed on those convicted of homicide. This idea is related to the understanding of death proposed by Epicurus, who provides the following argument (Diogenes Laertius 1925, p. 650-1):

Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer.

We can call this Epicurean view ‘the harmlessness theory of death’ (HTD). If we accept HTD, it follows, quite surprisingly, that there is no direct victim in the case of homicide insofar as we define ‘victim’ to be a person who suffers harm as a result of a crime. For according to HTD, people who have been killed and are now dead suffer nothing—neither benefits nor harms—because, as they do not exist, they cannot be victims. If this is true, there is no victim in the case of homicide, and it must be unreasonable to impose what is supposed to be the ultimate punishment 3 —that is, the death penalty—on those offenders who have killed others.

This argument might sound utterly absurd, particularly if it is extended beyond offenders and victims to people in general, as one merit of the death penalty seems to lie in reducing people’s fear of death by homicide. However, although this argument from HTD might sound bizarre and counterintuitive, we should accept it at the theoretical level, to the extent that we find HTD valid. 4 Clearly, this argument, which is based on the nonexistence of victims, could logically lead to another impossibilist argument concerning the death penalty.

There are many points to be more carefully examined regarding both types of ‘impossibilism’, which I will skip here. However, I must stop to ponder a natural reaction. My question above, ‘To whom do we justify?’, which introduced ‘impossibilism’, might sound eccentric, because, roughly speaking, theoretical arguments of justification are usually deployed in a generalised way and do not need to acknowledge who those arguments are directed at. Yet, I believe that this normal attitude towards justification is not always correct. Instead, our behaviour, when justifying something, focuses primarily on theoretically persuading those who are unwilling to accept the item being justified. If nobody refuses to accept it, then it is completely unnecessary to provide its justification. For instance, to use a common sense example, nobody doubts the existence of the earth. Therefore, nobody takes it to be necessary to justify the existence of the earth. Alternatively, a justification for keeping coal-fired power generation, the continued use of which is not universally accepted due to global warming, is deemed necessary. In other words, justification is not a procedure lacking a particular addressee, but an activity that addresses the particular person in a definite way, at least at first. In fact, it seems to me that the reason that current debates on the death penalty become deadlocked is that crucial distinctions are not appropriately made. I think that such a situation originates from not clearly asking to whom we are addressing our arguments, or whom we are discussing. As far as I know, there have been very few arguments within the death penalty debate that take into account the homicide victim, despite the victim’s unique status in the issue. This is one example where the debate can be accused of ignoring the ‘whom-question’, so I will clarify this issue by adopting a strategy in which this ‘whom-question’ is addressed.

3. Three chronological stages

Following my strategy, I will first introduce a distinction between three chronological stages in the death penalty. In order to make my argument as simple as possible, I will assume that the death penalty is imposed on those who have been convicted of homicide, although I acknowledge there are other crimes which could result in the death penalty. In that sense, the three stages of the death penalty correspond to the three distinct phases arising from homicide.

The first stage takes place at the time of killing; the fact that someone was killed must be highlighted. However, precisely what happened? If we accept the HTD, we should suppose that nothing harmful happened in the case of homicide. Although counterintuitive, let’s see where this argument leads. However, first, I will acknowledge that we cannot cover all contexts concerning the justification of the death penalty by discussing whether or not killing harms the killed victim. Even if we accept for argument’s sake that homicide does not harm the victim, that is only part of the issue. Other people, particularly the bereaved families of those killed, are seriously harmed by homicide. More generally, society as a whole is harmed, as the fear of homicide becomes more widespread in society.

Moreover, our basic premise, HTD, is controversial. Whether HTD is convincing remains an unanswered question. There is still a very real possibility that those who were killed do suffer harm in a straightforward sense, which conforms to most people’s strong intuition. In any event, we can call this first stage, the ‘Harm Stage’, because harm is what is most salient in this phase, either harm to the victims or others in society at large. If a justification for the death penalty is to take this Harm Stage seriously, the overwhelming focus must be on the direct victims themselves, who actually suffer the harm. This is the central core of the issue, as well as the starting point of all further problems.

The second stage appears after the killing. After a homicide, it is common to blame and to feel anger towards the perpetrator or perpetrators, and this can be described as a natural, moral, or emotional reaction. However, it is not proven that blaming or feeling angry is indeed natural, as it has not been proven that such feelings would arise irrespective of our cultural understanding of the social significance of killing. The phenomenon of blaming and the prevalence of anger when a homicide is committed could be a culture-laden phenomenon rather than a natural emotion. Nevertheless, many people actually do blame perpetrators or feel anger towards them for killing someone, and this is one of the basic ideas used to justify a system of ‘retributive justice’. The core of retributive justice is that punishment should be imposed on the offenders themselves (rather than other people, such as the offenders’ family). This retributive impulse seems to be the most fundamental basis of the system of punishment, even though we often also rely on some consequentialist justification favor punishment (e.g. preventing someone from repeating an offence). In addition, offenders are the recipients of blame or anger from society, which suggests that blaming or expressing anger has a crucial function in retributive justice. I will call this second phase the ‘Blame Stage’, which extends to the period of the execution. Actually, the act of blaming seems to delineate what needs to be resolved in this phase. Attempting to justify the death penalty by acknowledging this Blame Stage (or retributive justification) in terms of proportionality is the most common strategy. That is to say, lex talionis applies here—‘an eye for an eye’. This is the justification that not only considers people in general, including victims who blame perpetrators, but also attempts to persuade perpetrators that this is retribution resulting from their own harmful behaviours.

The final stage in the process concerning the death penalty appears after the execution; in this stage, what matters most is how beneficial the execution is to society. Any system in our society must be considered in the light of its cost-effectiveness. This extends even to cultural or artistic institutions, although at first glance they seem to be far from producing any practical effects. In this context, benefits are interpreted quite broadly; creating intellectual satisfaction, for example, is counted as a benefit. Clearly, this is a utilitarian standpoint. We can apply this view to the system of punishment, or the death penalty, if it is accepted. That is, the death penalty may be justified if its benefits to society are higher than its costs. What, then, are the costs, and what are the benefits? Obviously, we must consider basic expenses, such as the maintenance and labour costs of the institution keeping the prisoner on death row. However, in the case of the death penalty, there is a special cost to be considered, namely, the emotional reaction of people in society in response to killing humans, even when officially sanctioned as a punishment. Some feel that it is cruel to kill a person, regardless of the reason.

On the other hand, what is the expected benefit of the death penalty? The ‘deterrent effect’ is usually mentioned as a benefit that the death penalty can bring about in the future. In that case, what needs to be shown if we are to draw analogies with the previous two stages? When people try to justify the death penalty by mentioning its deterrent effect, they seem to be comparing a society without the death penalty to one with the death penalty. Then they argue that citizens in a society with the death penalty are at less risk of being killed or seriously victimised than those in a society without the death penalty. In other words, the death penalty could reduce the danger of being killed or seriously victimised in the future. Therefore, we could call this third phase the ‘Danger Stage’. In this stage, we focus on the danger that might affect people in the future, including future generations. This is a radically different circumstance from those of the previous two stages in that the Danger Stage targets people who have nothing to do with a particular homicide.

4. Analogy from natural disasters

The three chronological stages that I have presented in relation to the death penalty are found in other types of punishment as well. Initially, any punishment must stem from some level of harm (including harm to the law), and this is a sine qua non for the issue of punishment to arise. Blaming and its retributive reaction must follow that harm, and subsequently some social deterrent is expected to result. However, we should carefully distinguish between the death penalty and other forms of punishment. With other forms of punishment, direct victims undoubtedly exist, and those convicted of harming such victims are aware they are being punished. In addition, rehabilitating perpetrators in order for them to return to society—one aspect of the deterrent effect—can work in principle. However, this aspect of deterrence cannot apply to the death penalty because executed criminals cannot be aware of being punished by definition, and the notion of rehabilitation does not make sense by definition. Only this quite obvious observation can clarify that there is a crucial, intrinsic difference or distinction between the death penalty and other forms of punishment. Theories about the death penalty must seriously consider this difference; we cannot rely on theories that treat the death penalty on a par with other forms of punishment.

Moreover, the three chronological stages that have been introduced above are fundamentally different from each other. In reality, the subjects or people that we discuss and on whom we focus are different from stage to stage. In this respect, one of my points in this article is to underline the crucial need to discuss the issues of the death penalty by drawing a clear distinction between those stages. I am not claiming that only one of those stages is important. I am aware that each stage has its own significance; therefore, we should consider all three. However, we should be conscious of the distinctions when discussing the death penalty.

To make my point more understandable, I will suggest an analogy with natural disasters. Specifically, I will use as an analogy the biggest earthquake in Japan in the past millennium—the quake of 11 March 2011 (hereafter the 2011 quake). Of course, at first glance, earthquakes are substantially different from homicides. However, there is a close similarity between the 2011 quake and homicides, because although most of the harm that occurred was due to the earthquake and tsunami, in fact people were also harmed and killed during the 2011 quake at least partially due to human errors, such as the failure of the government’s policy on tsunamis and nuclear power plants. Thus, it is quite easy in the case of the 2011 quake to distinguish between three aspects, all of which are different from each other.

(1) We must recognise victims who were killed in the tsunami or suffered hardship at shelters. 5 This is the core as well as the starting point of all problems. What matters here is rescuing victims, and expressing our condolences.

(2) Then we will consider victims and people in general who hold the government and the nuclear power company responsible for political and technical mistakes. What usually matters here is the issue of responsibility and compensation.

(3) Finally, we can consider people’s interests in improving preventive measures taken to reduce damages by tsunami and nuclear-plant-related accidents in the future. What matters in this context is the reduction of danger in the future by learning from the 2011 quake.

Nobody will fail to notice that these three aspects are three completely different issues, which can be seen in exactly the same manner in the case of the death penalty. Aspects (1), (2), and (3) correspond respectively to the Harm Stage, the Blame Stage, and the Danger Stage. Undoubtedly, none of these three aspects should be ignored and they actually appear in a mutually intertwined manner: the more successful the preventive measures are, the fewer victims will be produced by tsunami and nuclear-plant accidents in the future. Those aspects affect each other. Likewise, we must consider each of the three stages regarding the death penalty.

5. Initial harm

The arguments thus far provide the basic standpoint that I want to propose concerning the debates on the death penalty. I want to investigate the issue of the death penalty by sharply distinguishing between these three stages and by simultaneously considering them all equally. By following this strategy, I will demonstrate that there are intrinsic uncertainties, and four problems resulting from those uncertainties, in the system of the death penalty. In so doing I will raise a novel objection to the contemporary debate over the death penalty.

Roughly speaking, as I have previously mentioned, the death penalty debate continues to involve the two opposing views of abolitionism and retentionism (or perhaps, in the case of abolitionist countries, revivalism). It seems that the main arguments to support or justify each of the two traditional views (which I have briefly described in section 2 above) have already been exhausted. What matters in this context is whether the death penalty can be justified, and then whether—if it is justifiable—it should be justified in terms of retributivism or utilitarianism. That is the standard way of the debate on the death penalty. For example, when the retributive standpoint is used to justify the death penalty, the notion of proportionality as an element of fairness or social justice might be relevant, apart from the issue of whether proportionality should be measured cardinally or ordinally (see von Hirsch 1993, pp. 6-19). In other words, if one person has killed another, then that person too ought to be killed—that is, executed—in order to achieve fairness. However, as other scholars such as Tonry (1994) have argued, it is rather problematic to apply the notion of proportionality to the practice of punishment because it seems that there is no objective measure of offence, culpability, or responsibility. Rather, the notion of parsimony 6 is often mentioned in these contexts as a more practical and fairer principle than the notion of proportionality.

However, according to my argument above, such debates are inadequate if they are simply applied to the case of the death penalty. Proportionality between which two things is being discussed? Most likely, what is considered here is the proportionality between harm by homicide (where the measured value of offence might be the maximum) and harm by execution. However, I want to reconfirm the essential point. What specifically is the harm of homicide? Whom are we talking about when we discuss the harm of homicide? As I previously argued, citing Epicurus and his HTD, there is a metaphysical doubt about whether we should regard death as harmful. If a person simply disappears when he or she dies and death is completely harmless as HTD claims, then it seems that the retributive justification for the death penalty in terms of proportionality must be nonsense, for nothing at all happens that should trigger the process of crime and punishment. Of course, following HTD, the execution should be similarly regarded as nonsensical. However, if that is the case, the entire institutional procedure, from the perpetrator’s arrest to his or her execution, must be considered a tremendous waste of time, labour, and money.

Some may think that these kinds of arguments are merely empty philosophical abstractions. That may be. However, it is not the case that there is nothing plausible to be considered in these arguments. Consider the issue of euthanasia. Why do people sometimes wish to be euthanised? It is because people can be relieved of a painful situation by dying. That is to say, people wishing to be euthanised take death to be painless, i.e. harmless, in the same manner as HTD. This idea embedded in the case of euthanasia is so understandable that the issue of euthanasia is one of the most popular topics in ethics; however, if so, Epicurus’s HTD should not be taken as nonsensical, for HTD holds in the same way as the idea embedded in the case of euthanasia that when we die, we have neither pain nor any other feeling. What I intend to highlight here is that we must be acutely aware that there is a fundamental problem concerning the notion of harm by homicide, if we want to be philosophically sincere and consistent 7 .

In other words, I assert that the contemporary debate over the death penalty tends to lack proper consideration for the Harm Stage in which victims themselves essentially matter, although that stage must be the very starting point of all issues. We must understand this pivotal role of the Harm Stage before intelligently discussing the death penalty. Of course, in practice, we can discuss the death penalty in a significant and refined manner without investigating the Harm Stage. For example, according to Goldman, one of the plausible positions regarding the justification for punishment in general is a position that combines both retributivism and utilitarianism. Mentioning John Rawls and H. L. A. Hart, Goldman writes (1995, p. 31):

Some philosophers have thought that objections to these two theories of punishment could be overcome by making both retributive and utilitarian criteria necessary for the justification of punishment. Utilitarian criteria could be used to justify the institution, and retributive to justify specific acts within it.

Goldman argues, however, that this mixed position could result in a paradox regarding how severe the punishment to be imposed on the guilty should be, even though this position avoids punishing the innocent (ibid., p.36):

While the mixed theory can avoid punishment of the innocent, it is doubtful that it can avoid excessive punishment of the guilty if it is to have sufficient effect to make the social cost worthwhile.

This argument is useful in providing a moral and legal warning to society not to punish offenders more severely than they deserve, even if that punishment is more effective in deterring future crimes. I frankly admit that Goldman’s suggestion goes to the essence of the concept of justice. However, I must also say that if his argument is applied to the death penalty, then it has not yet touched the fundamental question that forms the basis of the whole issue: whose harm should we discuss? Is it appropriate not to discuss the Harm Stage? Alternatively, I am raising the following question: who is the victim of homicide? At the very least, I think we should admit that this very question is the crucial one constituting the first problem on the death penalty, the Uncertainty of Harm.

6. Feeling of being victimised

Next, I will examine another kind of uncertainty that is specific to the Blame Stage; the idea of retribution matters here. As far as the Japanese context for the death penalty is concerned, according to statistical surveys of public opinion, people tend to strongly support the death penalty in the case of particularly violent homicides in which they are probably feeling particularly victimised. If the death penalty were abolished, it seems that the abolition would be extremely unfair to victims of homicide, as the rights of victims (i.e. rights of life, liberty, property, and so on) would be denied by being killed, whereas those of perpetrators would be excessively protected. Obviously, the notion of retributive proportionality or equilibrium is the basis for this argument. To put it another way, this logic of retribution aims at justifying the death penalty in terms of its achieving equilibrium between the violated rights of victims and the deprived rights of perpetrators in the name of punishment. Is this logic perfectly acceptable? Emotionally speaking, I want to say yes. We Japanese might even say that perpetrators should gallantly and bravely kill themselves to take responsibility for their actions, as we have a history of the samurai who were expected to conduct hara-kiri when they did something shameful. However, theoretically speaking, we cannot accept this logic immediately, because there are too many doubtful points. Those doubts as a whole constitute the second problem concerning the death penalty.

First, we must ask, as well as in the previous section, on the issue of feeling victimised, whom are we discussing? Whose feelings and whose rights matter? Direct victims in the case of homicide do not exist by definition. Then a question arises: why can substitutes (prosecutors and others) or the bereaved family ask for the death penalty based on their feelings rather than the direct victim’s feeling? How are they qualified to ask for such a stringent punishment when they were not the ones killed? The crucial point to be noted here is that the bereaved family is not identical with the direct victim. Second, even if it is admitted that the notion of the victim’s emotional harm are relevant to sentencing (and at least in the sense of emotional harm the bereaved family’s suffering I would agree that this makes them certainly the principal victims even if not the direct victim), it must be asked: can we justify an institution based on a feeling? This question is a part of the traditional debate concerning the moral sense theory. We have repeatedly asked whether social institutions can be based on moral sense or human feeling, when such sense or feeling cannot help but be arbitrary because those, after all, are subjective. The question is still unanswered. Third, if the feelings of being victimised justify the death penalty, then could an accidental killing or involuntary manslaughter be included in crimes that deserve the death penalty? Actually, the feelings of the bereaved family in the case of accidental killing could be qualitatively the same as in the case of voluntary homicide. However, even countries which adopt the death penalty do not usually prescribe that execution is warranted for accidental killing. Fourth, I wonder whether the bereaved family who feel victimised always desire the execution of the killer. It could be that they consider resuming their daily lives more important than advocating the execution of the murderer who killed their family member. As a matter of practical fact, executions of perpetrators need have nothing to do with supporting bereaved families. Fifth, if we accept the logic in which the death penalty is justified by the bereaved family’s feeling of being victimised, how should we deal with cases where the person who was killed was alone in the world, with no family? If there is no bereaved family, then no one feels victimised. Is the death penalty unwarranted in this case? In any case, as these questions suggest, we should be aware that retributive justification based upon the feeling of being victimised is not as acceptable as we initially expected. Once again, there is uncertainty here. Uncertainty of blame leads to the second problem concerning the death penalty.

7. Violation and forfeiture

Of course, the retributive justification for the death penalty does not have to depend upon the feeling of being victimised alone, even if the primitive basis for it might lie in human emotion. The theoretical terminology of human rights themselves (rather than emotional feeling based on the notion of rights) could be used as justification: if a person violates another’s rights (to property, freedom, a healthy life, etc.), then that person must forfeit his or her own rights in proportion to the violated rights. This can be regarded as a formulation of the system of punishment established in the modern era that is theoretically based upon the social contract theory. The next remark of Goldman confirms this point (1995, p.33):

If we are asked which rights are forfeited in violating the rights of others, it is plausible to answer just those rights that one violates (or an equivalent set). One continues to enjoy rights only as long as one respects those rights in others: violation constitutes forfeiture . . . Since deprivation of those particular rights violated is often impracticable, we are justified in depriving a wrongdoer of some equivalent set, or in inflicting harm equivalent to that which would be suffered in losing those same rights.

However, the situation is not so simple, particularly in connection with the death penalty. In order to clarify this point, we have to reflect, albeit briefly, on how the concept of human rights has been historically established. I will trace the origin of the concept of human rights by referring to Fagan’s overall explanation. According to Fagan (2016, Section 2):

Human rights rest upon moral universalism and the belief in the existence of a truly universal moral community comprising all human beings . . . The origins of moral universalism within Europe are typically associated with the writings of Aristotle and the Stoics.

Followed by the remark:

Aristotle unambiguously expounds an argument in support of the existence of a natural moral order. This natural order ought to provide the basis for all truly rational systems of justice . . . The Stoics thereby posited the existence of a universal moral community effected through our shared relationship with god. The belief in the existence of a universal moral community was maintained in Europe by Christianity over the ensuing centuries.

This classical idea was linked during the 17th and 18th centuries to the concept of ‘natural law’ including the notion of ‘natural rights’ that each human being possesses independently of society or policy. ‘The quintessential exponent of this position was John Locke . . . Locke argued that natural rights flowed from natural law. Natural law originated from God’ (ibid.). Fagan continues (ibid.):

Analyses of the historical predecessors of the contemporary theory of human rights typically accord a high degree of importance to Locke’s contribution. Certainly, Locke provided the precedent of establishing legitimate political authority upon a rights foundation. This is an undeniably essential component of human rights.

Although, of course, we should take post-Lockean improvement including Kantian ideas into account to fully understand contemporary concepts of human rights, we cannot deny that Locke’s philosophy ought to be considered first.

As is well known, Locke’s argument focuses on property rights. He put forth the idea that property rights were based on our labour. Thus, his theory is called ‘the labour theory of property rights’. Let me quote the famous passage I have in mind (Locke 1960, Second Treatise, Section 27):

Though the Earth, and all inferior Creatures be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Works of his Hands, we may say, are properly his.

This idea could cover any kind of human rights such as those for living a healthy life, liberty, and property, because human rights are supposed to be owned by us. For example, H. L.A. Hart once argued that legal rights are nothing but legal powers to require others to meet correlative obligations, and then pointed out that; ‘we also speak of the person who has the correlative right as possessing it or even owning it’ (Hart 1982, p.185). If this is the case, we can make property rights representative of all human rights.

However, if we follow Locke’s theory (and many countries, including Japan, still do), then it logically follows that what we cannot gain by our labour by definition cannot be objects of human rights. How does Locke’s idea apply to our life itself (rather than simply living a healthy life)? Are we able to acquire our life itself by our labour? No, we cannot. We can realise a healthy life by making an effort to be moderate, but we cannot create our lives. We are creatures or animals; therefore, our lives are not something that we ourselves made by our labour. Locke uses the concept of power (as Hart does) when he discusses various aspects of property rights. Among those, we should pay particular attention to the following (Locke 1960, Second Treatise, Section 23):

For a Man, not having the Power of his own life, cannot, by Compact, or his own Consent, enslave himself to any one, nor put himself under the Absolute, Arbitrary Power of another, to take away his Life, when he pleases.

Locke also wri tes (1960, Section 24):

No Man can, by agreement, pass over to another that which he hath not in himself, a Power over his own life.

Obviously, Locke assumes that we have no property rights over our own lives or bodies themselves, or more precisely, no property rights in controlling and destroying our own lives as a whole; therefore, we cannot alienate those rights to others. We cannot alienate or forfeit what we do not have. If this is the case and we presuppose the formulation of the system of punishment introduced above in terms of violation and forfeiture, what would result? The answer is clear. Our lives themselves are conceptually beyond the terminology of human rights, and thus, if the death penalty is defined as a punishment requiring the forfeiture of the perpetrator’s right to life, the death penalty should be regarded as conceptually contradictory or impossible. We cannot lose tails, as we do not have tails. Likewise, we cannot own our lives (i.e. we have no property rights in our life itself), so we cannot lose our lives, at least in such a sense as forfeiture of human rights. This is the third route to an ‘impossibilist’ view of the death penalty. This argument depends heavily on Locke’s original theory. Nevertheless, as long as we have to consider Locke’s classical view seriously in order to discuss the relation between punishment and human rights, we must be aware that we could be involved in theoretical uncertainty in justifying the death penalty through the notion of human rights in a retributivist flavour, as the argument thus far suggests. This is the very puzzle that I want to propose as the third problem concerning the death penalty debates.

Moreover, we must acknowledge that retributive ideas in the Blame Stage usually include a kind of evaluation of the psychological state of the agent’s behaviour at the time of the crime as a matter of legal fact. In other words, rationality, freedom, or mens rea are usually needed for agents to be judged guilty. However, from a strictly philosophical perspective, we should say that it is far from easy in principle to confirm those states in the past. Indeed, this psychological trend seems to cause controversy in court proceedings, as seen, for example, in the American context known as ‘battered-woman syndrome’. If a woman who has been routinely battered by her partner suddenly fights back and kills her partner, American courts often find her not guilty. People wonder whether such an evaluation concerning battered women could be correctly made without arbitrariness. Additionally, philosophical debates on free will and the development of the brain sciences must be considered. Some philosophers assert that we have no free will because our personality and actions are intrinsically governed by external factors, such as our environments or biological conditions, which are definitely beyond our control. This philosophical standpoint is often called ‘hard incompatibilism’ (see Strawson 2008). In this respect, my analogy to a natural disaster could be seen as appropriate, as our actions might be taken to be just natural phenomena at the end of the day. 8 Furthermore, brain sciences often provide shocking data to suggest that our will may be controlled by brain phenomena occurring prior to our consciousness, as shown by Benjamin Libet. In view of such contemporary arguments, we have little choice but to say that we cannot be perfectly certain whether a given perpetrator who committed homicide is truly guilty, as long as we adopt the present standard for judging the psychological states of offenders in court. To sum up, the third problem for the death penalty is the difficulty in knowing whether someone has property in their life itself as well as uncertainty about the mental state of the accused, this is the Uncertainty of Rights Violation.

8. The deterrent effect

Finally, I will examine some problems in the Danger Stage. What matters in this context is the utilitarian justification for the death penalty; I will focus on what is called the ‘deterrent effect’. Firstly, I would like to say that the death penalty undoubtedly has some deterrent effect. This is obvious if we imagine a society where violators of any laws, including minor infractions such as a parking ticket or public urination, must be sentenced to death. I believe that the number of all crimes would dramatically reduce in that society, although it would constitute a horrible dystopia. The argument for the deterrent effect of the death penalty probably arises from the same line of ‘common sense’ thinking. For example, Pojman says, ‘there is some non-statistical evidence based on common sense that gives credence to the hypothesis that the threat of the death penalty deters and that it does so better than long prison sentences’ (Pojman 1998, pp. 38-39). Specifically, this deterrent effect presupposes the utility calculus that a human being conducts, whether consciously or unconsciously, in terms of ‘weighing the subjective severity of perceived censure and the subjective probability of perceived censure against the magnitude of the desire to commit the offence and the subjective probability of fulfilling this desire by offending’ (Beyleveld 1979, p. 219). Therefore, if we presuppose the basic similarity of human conditions, it may be plausible to state the following about the deterrent effect of punishment: ‘this can be known a priori on the basis of an analysis of human action’ (ibid., p. 215). However, in fact, the death penalty in many countries is restricted to especially heinous crimes, such as consecutive homicides (although some countries apply the death penalty to a wider range of crimes), which suggests that we must conduct empirical studies, case by case, if we want to confirm the deterrent effect of the death penalty. Therefore, the question to be asked regarding the deterrent effect is not whether the death penalty is actually effective, but rather how effective it is in restricted categories of crimes. What matters is the degree.

There are many statistical surveys concerning this issue. In particular, an economic investigation by Ehrlich is often mentioned as a typical example. After examining detailed statistical data and taking into account various factors, such as race, heredity, education, and cultural patterns, Ehrlich suggest s (1975, p. 414):

An additional execution per year over the period in question [i.e., 1935-1969] may have resulted, on average, in 7 or 8 fewer murders.

Of course, this estimate includes too many factors and presumptions to be perfectly correct. Ehrlich himself is aware of this and thus says (ibid.):

It should be emphasized that the expected tradeoffs computed in the preceding illustration mainly serve a methodological purpose since their validity is conditional upon that of the entire set of assumptions underlying the econometric investigation … however … the tradeoffs between executions and murders implied by these elasticities are not negligible, especially when evaluated at relatively low levels of executions and relatively high level[s] of murder.

Ehrlich’s study drew considerable criticism, most of which pointed out deficiencies in his statistical methodology. Therefore, at this moment, we should say that we are able to infer nothing definite from Ehrlich’s study, although we must value the study as pioneering work.

Van den Haag proposes an interesting argument based upon uncertainty specific to the deterrent effect of the death penalty. He assumes two cases, namely, case (1), in which the death penalty exists, and case (2), in which the death penalty does not exist. In each case there is risk or uncertainty. On the one hand, in case (1), if there is no deterrent effect, the life of a murderer is lost in vain, whereas if there is a deterrent effect, the lives of some murderers and innocent victims will be saved in the future. On the other hand, in case (2), if there is no deterrent effect, the life of a convicted murderer is saved, whereas if there is a deterrent effect, the lives of some innocent victims will be lost in the future (Van den Haag 1995, pp. 133-134). Conway and Pojman explain this argument using the following table, ‘The Best Bet Argument’, which I have modified slightly, having DP stand for the death penalty, and DE the deterrent effect:

Following this table, Conway assumes (after Van den Haag’s suggestion that the life of a convicted murderer is not valued more highly than that of the unknown victims) numerical values about each case (each numerical number stands for not a number of people but a hypothetical value for a person to be saved or killed) :

a murderer saved +5

a murderer executed -5

an innocent saved +10

an innocent murdered -10

Moreover, he assumes that for each execution, only two innocent lives are spared (i.e. he assumes the deterrent effect to be almost the minimum). Then, consequently, executing convicted murderers turns out to be a good bet (Conway 1995, pp. 265-266; Pojman 1998, pp. 40-41).

9. Negative causation and where to give priority

Van den Haag’s ‘Best Bet Argument’ sounds quite interesting. However, Conway has already proposed a fundamental challenge to this argument: it mistakenly regards the actual death of convicted murderers as being on a par with the possible death of innocent victims in the future (Conway 1995, pp. 269-270). This is confusing or possibly a rhetorical sleight of hand. I think that Conway’s reaction to Van den Haag’s argument is a reasonable one.

As I approach my conclusion, I will propose two problems with Van den Haag’s argument. First, I want to acknowledge that any arguments, including Van den Haag’s, supporting the death penalty in terms of its deterrent effect seem to presuppose a causal relationship between the existence of the death penalty and people not killing others. For example, Pojman writes, ‘the repeated announcement and regular exercise of capital punishment may have deep causal influence’ (1998, p. 48). However, epistemologically speaking, that presupposition is extremely hard to confirm, because the effect of this causal relationship is not a positive, but rather a negative event, which is the event of not killing others. This has something to do with the philosophical problem of how to understand negative properties. By negative properties we mean that, for example, my room is not full of seawater; my room does not consist of paper; my room is not melting us, etc. Such descriptions by negative properties can be made almost endlessly. In other words, one identical event described by a positive property (e.g., this room is well lit) can be re-described in infinite ways in terms of negative properties. Take the example that I am now at my computer in Tokyo, writing a paper. This event can also be described as ‘I am not eating’, ‘I am not sleeping’, ‘I am not killing others’ (!), etc. The positive event, ‘I am writing a paper now’, can be understood through a causal relationship. The event was most likely caused by my intention to do so, which was caused by my sense of duty as a professor, etc. How, then, could we understand the negative description of my action, ‘I am not killing others’? Was this caused by the existence of the death penalty in Japan?

Perhaps I was completely unaware of the existence of the death penalty in Japan when I wrote a paper without killing others. Could the death penalty be its cause? Could the negative event ‘I am not killing others’ be an effect of the death penalty? It is hard to say so.

This problem is the same as the problem of ‘causation by absence’ or ‘omission-involving causation’. Generally, causation by absence is usually examined in the form of answering a question about whether nothingness can cause something. For example, David Lewis discusses a question about how a void (understood as being entirely empty or nothing at all, differing from a vacuum) is regarded as a cause of something (Lewis 2004). He says, ‘If you were cast into a void, it would cause you to die in just a few minutes. It would suck the air from your lungs. It would boil your blood. It would drain the warmth from your body. And it would inflate enclosures in your body until they burst’ (ibid., p.277). However, the problem is that the void is nothing. ‘When the void sucks away the air, it does not exert an attractive force on the air’ (ibid.). Furthermore, another, perhaps harder problem would arise. We can say, ‘If I defended you from being cast into a void, you would not die’. Namely, my omission to defend you would cause you to die. However, should only my omission matter? What of your brother’s omission to defend you? Or the Prime Minister of the UK’s omission to defend you? Are not all of those qualified to be the cause of your death, as least as long as we adopt a common-sense counterfactual analysis of causation? As this argument suggests, in the context of the current debate on this problem, the most troublesome phase is that ‘too many’ absences can be supposed to cause a particular effect. I quote Menzies, who says (2004, p.145):

I am writing this essay at my computer. If, however, there were nerve gas in the air, or I were attacked with flamethrowers, or struck by a meteor shower, I would not be writing the essay. But it is counterintuitive to say that the absence of nerve gas, flamethrower attack, and meteor strike are causes of my writing the essay.

This example takes the issue of absence as a cause, but simultaneously his example refers to the case of effect as absence (not writing the essay). As this shows, the current debate on the problem of causation by absence could extend to the case of effect as absence. In any case, what matters is a possibility that ‘too many’ absences can cause something, and something can cause ‘too many’ absences (Menzies calls this problem ‘the problem of profligate causation’ (ibid., pp.142-145). Then the deterrent effect of the death penalty is definitely classified as a case of absence as effect rather than cause. In other words, the absence of homicide (as effect) matters, whereas in this case execution (as cause) is presupposed to exist. It seems that the current debate on causation by absence is highly likely to contribute to discussing the problem of the deterrent effect.

Of course, someone may counter my argument by saying that what matters in this context is a statistical correlation between the number of executions and the number of homicides, which could be confirmed in an empirical way. I admit that the statistical correlation plays a crucial role here, even though we must simultaneously acknowledge that what is called ‘randomized controlled trial’, the most reliable, statistical methodology to confirm causal relations, is unfeasible due to the nature of the problem. Actually, this kind of correlation is too rough to predict the causal relationship between those, although the causation really matters. Causes of a reduction or increase in the number of homicides can be interpreted or estimated in various ways, considering confounding factors, such as education, economic situation, urban planning, and so on. Therefore, in principle, there always remains the possibility that the apparent correlation between the death penalty and the reduction of homicides is merely accidental. For example, there may be another, common cause, that brings about both people’s tendency to support the death penalty and the reduction of homicides 9 . We should recognise that there is intrinsic uncertainty here. These difficulties concerning causal relations give rise to a fourth problem related to the death penalty debates – the Uncertainty of Causal Consequences.

Incidentally, let me now return to my distinction of the three stages regarding the death penalty. Obviously, the issue of the deterrent effect belongs primarily to the Danger Stage. Yet it is vital to consider the Harm Stage. How can the deterrent effect affect the Harm Stage? I must say that the retentionist’s argument, in terms of the deterrent effect of the death penalty, completely dismisses this essential point. We need only recall the analogy of the 2011 quake in Japan. ‘Retentionism’ based upon the deterrent effect corresponds to aspect (3), where the improvement of the preventive system matters. This is important, of course, but cannot be a priority. Priority lies in the issues of how to deal with the actual harm that the victims have already suffered (specifically referring to the bereaved family or others in the case of homicide and the death penalty). Without consideration of how to cope with the harm, even if the theory seriously considers the innocent victims in the future, the retentionists’ theory can hardly be persuasive.

It is true that the retentionists’ theory based on the deterrent effect appropriately considers the person harmed in the process of punishment. For example, Walker considers such a phase in the process of punishment as one of the possible objections against retentionism based on the deterrent effect by saying: ‘if the benefit excludes the person harmed this too is nowadays regarded by many people as morally unacceptable’ (Walker 1980, p. 65). However, as the context clearly shows, by ‘the person harmed’ he means the person punished. He does not mention the initial harm suffered by victims. This problem is concerned with my previous claim; that is, we have to consider the ‘whom-question’ when we discuss the justification of punishment. Whom are we discussing? Whose benefit do we consider? In the face of victims before our eyes, can we emphasise only the improvement of preventive systems for the future? Evidently, actual victims are the first to be helped, although obviously it is not at all bad to simultaneously consider the preventive system in the future. It is necessary for us to respect basic human rights and the human dignity of perpetrators and innocent people in the future; however, that respect must be in conjunction with our first taking care of actual victims. We ought not to get our priorities wrong.

10. Prospects

I have indicated that the debates on the death penalty are inevitably surrounded by four problems over specific kinds of uncertainties: uncertainty concerning the victim of homicide, uncertainty in justifying the death penalty from the feeling of being victimised, uncertainty in justifying the death penalty on the basis of human rights, and uncertainty over negative causation. In the course of examining these problems, I have proposed the option of developing an ‘impossibilist’ position about the death penalty, which I am convinced, deserves further investigation. However, being surrounded by theoretical problems and uncertainties might be more or less true of any social institution. My aim is only to suggest how the death penalty should be understood as involving uncertainties from a philosophical perspective. Most likely, if there is something practical that I can suggest based on my argument, then what we might call a ‘Harm-Centred System’ may be introduced as a relatively promising option instead of, or in tandem with, the death penalty. What I mean by this is a system in which we establish as a priority redressing actual harm with regard to legal justice, where ‘actual harm’ only implies what the bereaved family suffer from, as the direct victims have already disappeared in the case of homicide. In other words, I think that something akin to the maximalist approach to restorative justice 10 or some hybrid of the traditional justice system and the restorative justice system should be seriously considered, although we cannot expect perfect solutions exempt from all of the above four problems. It is certainly worth considering whether some element of restorative justice can play a significant role in the best theory of punishment.

In any case, my argument is at most a philosophical attempt to address problems. How to apply it to the practice of the legal system is a question to be tackled in a future project.

Bazemore, G. and Walgrave, L. 1999 (1). ‘Introduction: Restorative Justice and the International Juvenile Justice Crisis’. In Restorative Juvenile Justice: Repairing the Harm of Youth Crime , eds. G. Bazemore and L. Walgrave, Criminal Justice Press, 1-13.

———. 1999 (2). ‘Restorative Juvenile Justice: In Search of Fundamentals and an Outline for System Reform’. In Restorative Juvenile Justice: Repairing the Harm of Youth Crime , eds. G. Bazemore and L. Walgrave, Criminal Justice Press, 45-74.

Beyleveld, D. 1979. ‘Identifying, Explaining and Predicting Deterrence’. British Journal of Criminology 19:3, 205–224.

Calvert, B. 1993. ‘Locke on Punishment and the Death Penalty’. Philosophy 68:264,, 211–229.

Collins, J., N. Hall, and L. A. Paul. 2004. Causation and Counterfactuals. MIT Press.

Conway, D. A. 1995 (originally 1974). ‘Capital Punishment and Deterrence: Some Considerations in Dialogue Form’. In Punishment: A Philosophy and Public Affairs Reader , eds. J. Simmons, M. Cohen, J. Cohen, and C. R. Beitz. Princeton University Press, 261–273.

Diogenes Laertius. 1925. Lives of Eminent Philosophers. Vol. 2. Trans. R. D. Hicks. Loeb Classical Library. William Heinemann Ltd.

Ehrlich, I. 1975. ‘The Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment: A Question of Life and Death’. American Economic Review 65:3, 397–417.

Fagan, A. 2016. ‘Human Rights’. In Chase B. Wrenn, The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ISSN 2161-0002. Available from http://www.iep.utm.edu/hum-rts/#H2 [Accessed 12 June 2017]

Fischer, J. M., ed. 1993. The Metaphysics of Death . Stanford University Press.

Goldman, A. H. 1995 (originally 1979). ‘The Paradox of Punishment’. In Punishment: A Philosophy and Public Affairs Reader , eds. J. Simmons, M. Cohen, J. Cohen, and C. R. Beitz. Princeton University Press, 30–46.

Hart, H. L. A. 1982. Essays on Bentham: Jurisprudence and Political Theory . Oxford University Press.

Ichinose, M. 2013. ‘Hybrid Nature of Causation’. In T. Uehiro, Ethics for the Future of Life: Proceedings of the 2012 Uehiro-Carnegie-Oxford Ethics Conference , the Oxford Uehiro Center for Practical Ethics, University of Oxford, 60-80.

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Menzies, P. 2004. ‘Difference-Making in Context’. In J. Collins, N. Hall, and L. A. Paul, Causation and Counterfactuals . MIT Press, 139–180.

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1. Strangely, few Locke scholars have seriously tried to understand the Lockean meaning of punishment, which is developed in his Second Treatise ,(Locke 1960), in the light of his theory of personal identity based upon ‘consciousness’, which is discussed in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding . Taking into account the fact that ‘person’ appears as the key word in both works of Locke, we must bridge the gap between his two works by rethinking the universal significance of ‘person’ in his arguments. There were, however, some controversies concerning how Locke evaluates the death penalty. See Calvert (1993) and Simmons (1994).

2. There is an additional question about whether justification is needed after the execution when the convict is no longer around, in addition to ‘before’ and ‘during’. According to my understanding of justification, the process of justification must begin with making each person concerned understand what there is no reason to reject, but that is just a starting, necessary point. Justification must go beyond the initial phase to acquiring general consent from society. In this sense, justification seems to be needed even ‘after’ the execution. Actually, if there is no need for justification after the execution, that sounds less like punishment based on a system of justice than merely physical disposal.

3. Is it true that the death penalty is the ultimate punishment? Can we not suppose that the death penalty is less harmful than a life sentence or very lengthy incarceration? However, this view regarding the death penalty as less harmful than a lifelong sentence could lead to a paradox. If this order of severity as punishment is valid, it may be possible to reduce the lifelong sentence (due to an amnesty, some consideration on the prisoner’s rehabilitation, or something like that) to the death penalty. If this is the case, prisoners given the lifelong sentence will not make an effort at all to rehabilitate themselves, due to fear of the sentence being reduced to the death penalty. In addition, if a person is likely to be sentenced to death, the person might try to commit a more heinous crime, perhaps even in the court in order to be given a more severe sentence, i.e. a life sentence in prison. That is a paradox drawn from human nature.

4. On the current debates on ‘HTD’ of Epicurus, see Fischer (1993). Of course, there are lots of objections against the Epicurean view. The most typical objection is that death deprives people of their chance to enjoy life, and therefore death is harmful. However, it seems to me that “whom-question” must be raised again here. To whom is the deprivation of this chance harmful? In any case, the metaphysics of death is a popular topic in contemporary philosophy, which should involve not only metaphysical issues but also ethical and epistemological problems.

5. In fact, the hardships suffered by those forced to flee to shelters constituted the main problem resulting from the nuclear power plants accident. In general, radiation exposure is the most well-known problemarising from nuclear power plant accidents, but it is not always the case. In particular in the case of the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident in Japan, the overestimation of the danger of radiation exposure, and evacuation activities resulting from that overestimation, caused the biggest and the most serious problems including many of the deaths. We always have to take the risk-tradeoff into account. Radiation exposure is just one risk, and is not the only risk to be considered. See Ichinose (2016).

6. The notion of parsimony was newly offered to avoid a fundamental drawback of the standard retributive system, whether based on cardinal or ordinal proportionality: the standard system tends to inflict excessive, cruel punishment, as its criterion of measuring wrongness is not exempt from being arbitrary. In contrast, the newly offered system could hold inflicted punishment ‘as minimally as possible, consistent with the vague limits of cardinal desert’ (Walen 2015) in terms of introducing an idea of parsimony. The notion of parsimony could make the retributive system of punishment more reasonable and humane while retaining the idea of retribution.

7. Roger Crisp kindly pointed out that it is worth considering an institutional justification according to which punishment wouldn’t have to be tailored to a particular case. In this view, it is sufficient that death is generally bad for both victims and perpetrators. I do not deny the practical persuasiveness of this view. However, from a more philosophical point of view, we should propose a question ‘how can we know that death is generally bad for victims of homicide?’ Following HTD, which is certainly one possible philosophical view, death is not bad at all, regardless of whether we talk about general issues or particular cases, as an agent to whom something is bad or not disappears by dying by definition. Of course, as long as we exclusively focus upon harm which the bereaved family or the society in general suffer, the institutional justification could make good sense, although in that case the issue of direct victims killed would remain untouched.

8. Additionally, my analogy with natural disasters, particularly the case of the 2011 quake, could be re-confirmed to be appropriate in the sense of presenting a similar kind of uncertainty to the case of the death penalty. The danger of constant exposure to low doses of radiation for long periods involves some uncertainty, as far as we now know. Fortunately, however, the dose of radiation to which the people of Fukushima were exposed as a result of the 2011 quake, internally and externally, was low enough for us to be certain, based upon past epidemiological research, that no health problems will arise in the future. Regarding radiation exposure, everything depends upon the level of dose. The smaller the dose, the less dangerous it is.

9. On negative causation and the possibility of common cause, see Ichinose (2013). In particular, my argument on negative causation concerning the death penalty rests on my argument of Ichinose (2013).

10. According to Bazemore and Walgrave, ‘restorative justice is every action that is primarily oriented towards doing justice by repairing the harm that has been caused by a crime (Bazemore and Walgrave 1999 (2), p.48). Restorative justice, that is to say, is a justice system that mainly aims at restoring or repairing the harm of offences rather than punishing offenders as the retributive justice system does. Initially, restorative justice has been carried out by holding ‘a face-to-face meeting between the parties with a stake in the particular offense’ (ibid.) like victim, offenders, or victimised communities. However, this type of justice system works only in a complementary way to the traditional system of retributive justice. Then, the maximalist approach to restorative justice was proposed, which seeks to develop ‘restorative justice as a fully-fledged alternative’(Bazemore and Walgrave 1999 (1). Introduction. P.8) to retributive justice. This approach ‘will need to include the use of coercion and a formalization of both procedures and the relationship between communities and society’ (ibid., p.9.)

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Reflections on Death in Philosophical/Existential Context
Death, thus, is an existential tragic/dramatic phenomenon, which has preoccupied philosophy and the arts from the beginning and has been always treated as problematic. ... The central argument of this essay has been that death has always been and remains at the centre of life. Philosophically and existentially the meaning of death is ...
Death (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
This article considers several questions concerning the philosophy of death. First, it discusses what it is to be alive. This topic arises because to die is roughly to lose one's life. The second topic is the nature of death, and how it bears on the persistence of organisms and persons. The third topic is the harm thesis, the claim that death ...
How death shapes life, according to a Harvard philosopher
Death is standing. It's standing in the way liquid stands still in a container. Sometimes cooking instructions tell you to boil a mixture and then let it stand, while you complete another part of the recipe. That's the way death is in the poem: standing, waiting for you to get farther along with whatever you are doing.
Death
In Philosophy, Science and Method: Essays in Honor of Ernest Nagel. Edited by Sidney Morgenbesser, Patrick Suppes and Morton White. New York: St. Matrin's Press, 1969. pp. 473-505. Feldman, Fred. "The Enigma of Death." In Confrontations with the Reaper: A Philosophical Study of Nature and Value of Death. Oxford: Oxford University Press ...
Afterlife (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Afterlife. First published Mon Dec 26, 2005; substantive revision Mon Feb 27, 2023. One of the points where there is a significant, long-lasting intersection of the interests of many philosophers with the interests of many people of all kinds and conditions concerns the nature and significance of death. How should we understand the mortality of ...
The Definition of Death
1. The Current Mainstream View: The Whole-Brain Approach. According to the whole-brain standard, human death is the irreversible cessation of functioning of the entire brain, including the brainstem. This standard is generally associated with an organismic definition of death (as explained below).
Introduction: Philosophy of Death
Abstract. This chapter discusses the theme of this book, which is the philosophical aspect of death. The book answers questions about what death is and why it matters that help define the growing interdisciplinary subfield of philosophy of death. It analyzes the views of ancient Greek philosophers including Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and ...
The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death
Jens Johansson is Associate Professor of Practical Philosophy at Uppsala University. He has published a number of essays on the philosophy of death, personal identity, and related issues, and co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death (2013; with Ben Bradley and Fred Feldman).
The Metaphysics and Ethics of Death: New Essays
This volume is the first to bring together both original essays that address the fundamental questions of the metaphysics of death, as well as original essays that explore the relationship between those questions and some of the issues in bioethics in which they play a central role. The chapters in section I examine some of the classical ...
PDF Death and Mortality in Contemporary Philosophy
Death and Mortality in Contemporary Philosophy. This book contributes to current bioethical debates by providing a critical analysis of the philosophy of human death. Bernard N. Schumacher discusses contemporary philosophical perspec- tives on death, creating a dialogue between phenomenology, existentialism, and analytic philosophy.
What the Stoics Understood About Death (And Can Teach Us)
In the world of philosophy, the model of someone dying well, without an ounce of fear, was Socrates. Imprisoned on trumped- up charges for corrupting the youth of Athens, Socrates was detained for thirty days before facing his death sentence of drinking hemlock poison. At the time of his death in 399 BC, Socrates was around seventy years old.
Philosophy
Philosophy Essays from Aeon. World-leading thinkers explore life's big questions and the history of ideas from Socrates to Simone de Beauvoir, political philosophy to philosophy of mind, the Western canon and the non-Western world.
Introduction: Death and Dying in Comparative Philosophical ...
Abstract. This introductory chapter previews the content and conclusions of The Comparison Project's 2015-2017 programming cycle on death and dying. First, it explicates each of the 12 content essays on death and dying, especially with respect to the focus of the series—how traditional theologies of death and rituals of dying are affected ...
The Concept of Death in Philosophy and Experience
2016. This essay examines three approaches to the concept of death: an existential approach by Heidegger, a pragmatic evaluation by Nagel, and an experiential account by Philip Gould, who was not a professional philosopher but who wrote a detailed description of the time before his death from cancer. I compare and contrast the different ...
[PDF] The Philosophy of Death
Philosophy, Medicine. Perspectives in biology and medicine. 2016. TLDR. This essay rebuts the AMA's case for physician-assisted suicide and physician-facilitated euthanasia, by drawing upon recent work in the philosophy of death that is concerned with the notion of harm and the harmfulness of death. Expand.
Death (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy/Spring 2010 Edition)
This event might be understood in three ways. First, it might be the ending of the dying process—the loss of the very last trace of life. Call this 'denouement death'. Second, it might be the point in the dying process when extinction is assured, no matter what is done to stop it. Call this moment 'threshold death'.
Heidegger's ideas about death
His death is the possibility of no-longer-being-able-to-be- there" ( Heidegger, 2014, p. 323). In Heidegger's view, death in active life and death "at work" are biological phenomena, and he does not object to them. However, death is the end of life, and Existence constantly communicates with it during its existence.
The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death
He has published papers on the metaphysical and ethical dimensions of death, and he is the editor of The Metaphysics of Death (Stanford University Press, 1993). His collection Our Stories (Oxford University Press, 2007) includes papers on death, immortality, and the meaning of life.
The Philosophy of Death: Is it Rational to Fear Death?
Death is what motivates us towards achieving our goals, which helps us to appreciate our loved ones and which concludes our story. It is our marching towards death that forces us to consider how we ought to live and, contrastingly, how we ought to die. For Socrates and Plato the purpose of philosophy is obvious: it is preparation for death.
Heidegger on Death: A Critical Theological Essay
George Pattison, Heidegger on Death: A Critical Theological Essay, Ashgate, 2013, 170pp., $34.95 (pbk), ISBN 9781409466957. Reviewed by . ... Entschlossenheit as "resolutely running ahead (toward death)" contributes to the mistaken portrayal of Heideggerian philosophy as a philosophy of death, and of being-towards-death as a practice of life ...
Philosophy: "Death" Essay by Thomas Nagel
Overall, this paper examined an essay by Thomas Nagel titled "Death.". In this work, the author evaluates the issue of dying and the perception that society has of this concept, which is usually negative. Death is a permanent state and a termination of a person's existence. From the author's perspective, the main difficulty with ...
The Death Penalty
This essay surveys both types of arguments and critical responses. The "death chamber" at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Huntsville Unit. 1. Deontological Justifications. Deontological defenses of capital punishment see execution as a morally "fitting" response to murderers' horrible deeds. [2] There are two main varieties. 1.1.
The Death Penalty Debate: Four Problems and New Philosophical
1. Strangely, few Locke scholars have seriously tried to understand the Lockean meaning of punishment, which is developed in his Second Treatise,(Locke 1960), in the light of his theory of personal identity based upon 'consciousness', which is discussed in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding.Taking into account the fact that 'person' appears as the key word in both works of Locke ...

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Introduction: Death and Dying in Comparative Philosophical Perspective

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The Concept of Death in Philosophy and Experience

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2. Misfortune

Bibliography

1.1 The Permanence of Death

1.2 Death and What We Are

1.3 Death and Existence

1.4 Criteria for Death

2.1 Comparativism

2.2 Welfare

3.1 The Main Defense

3.2 The Symmetry Argument

3.3 Epicurean Challenges: Death Cannot Affect Us

3.4 Epicurean Challenges: Death Is Harmless

3.5 Further Objections to the Harm Theses

Bifurcated Comparativism

Temporal Relativism

Actualist Comparativism

Moot Preclusion

4.1 The Epicurean Presumption

4.2 Eternalism

4.3 Subsequentism

4.4 Concurrentism

4.5 Priorism

4.6 Indefinitism

4.7 Summing Up

5.1 Only Premature Death Is a Misfortune

5.2 Immortality Is a Misfortune

6. Can Death's Harmfulness be Reduced

15 Immortality

1. Introduction

2. Various Kinds of Immortality

3. Three Challenges to the Appeal of Immortality

4. The Identity Challenge

5. The Recognizability Challenge

5.1 Borders and Content

5.2 Human Lives Are Fraught

5.3 Our Lives Are Narratives

5.4 Infinity Is Fundamentally Different

6. The Attractiveness Challenge

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