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5 answers

Accepted answer

  1. Khady Faye

    ✓ Accepted answer Fellow

    Aoife, you have the Epicurean argument right. Here's the deprivation reply, from Nagel's essay "Death" (it's in his collection Mortal Questions).

    Nagel attacks the hidden premise: that something can only be bad for you if you experience it. He gives cases where that fails. Someone betrayed behind their back by all their friends, who never finds out, has still been harmed. A person whose reputation is destroyed after they die has been wronged. If harms can go unexperienced, the Epicurean argument loses its main step.

    Then the positive account: death is bad for the one who dies because of what it takes away, the goods of the life they would have had. It is bad as a loss, not as a feeling. That gives you exactly the result you wanted. A death at twenty deprives someone of far more than a death at ninety, so it's worse, and the Epicurean view can't register that difference.

    The standard problems:

    1. When is the harm? If the person no longer exists, at what time are they worse off? Philosophers have given every answer: before death, at death, after, timelessly.
    2. Lucretius's mirror. You also missed out on goods by not being born earlier, yet nobody mourns that. If deprivation is the harm, why the asymmetry?
    Neither is fatal, but they're why the debate is still alive.

Other answers

  1. Tomasz Wójcik

    Fellow

    On Khady's first problem, a small logical point. The "when?" question assumes every harm must be located at a time. But "being worse off than you would have been" is a comparison between two whole lives, and comparisons between whole lives don't obviously need a date. The deprivation theorist can say the harm is timeless in the way that "my life went worse than it might have" is timeless. Whether that's a solution or a dodge is the debate.

    Helpful · 1
  2. Omar Farouk

    Fellow

    From the bedside and from Islamic belief, both. For many of my patients the question changes shape, as you say it does for you, Aoife: death is a passage, so the badness of an early death isn't the loss of all future goods. But I notice the deprivation idea survives even inside faith. Families still say "he didn't see his daughter married". They believe he lives on, and they still mourn what this life was owed. I think that shows the deprivation account is tracking something real.

    Helpful · 2
  3. Aoife Brennan

    Fellow

    Omar, that's exactly what I feel. My grandmother believed completely in heaven and she still grieved my uncle who died at thirty as having been robbed. So the deprivation account seems compatible with survival. Khady, the mirror problem is the one I'll be thinking about tonight.

    Helpful · 3
  4. Elin Lindqvist

    Fellow

    On the mirror: Parfit argued that our bias toward the future is a brute feature of how we care about time, not something reason requires. If that's right, Lucretius is correct that the two stretches of non-existence are alike, and our different attitudes to them are just how we're built. In intensive care I'm not sure that helps anyone, but it's honest.