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Question of the day: can something be bad for you if you are never there to feel it?

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October 31, 2026 · 4 replies

Death Greek & Roman Analytic Epicureanism Epicurus Lucretius Thomas Nagel Aristotle #death #deprivation-account #posthumous-harm #question-of-the-day

Its coordinates: 6.20 Philosophy of Death

Today's question comes from the card on the philosophy of death: can something be bad for you if you are not there for it?

Epicurus said no, and said it memorably. Death is nothing to us, he wrote to Menoeceus, because while we exist death is not present, and when death is present we no longer exist. Good and bad lie in sensation, and death is the end of sensation. Lucretius added a second argument: nobody grieves the endless time before they were born, so why grieve the endless time after?

The main replies:

The Epicurean answer. Something is bad for you only if you experience it. Death is not, so fearing it is a mistake.
The deprivation answer. Death is bad because of what it takes away: the years, projects and pleasures you would otherwise have had. Thomas Nagel defended this in his essay "Death", collected in Mortal Questions. He gives the case of a man betrayed behind his back by friends who keep smiling to his face. He never finds out. Is his life no worse?
Posthumous harm. Things can go badly for you even after you die, through what happens to your reputation, your children, your work. Aristotle took this seriously in Book I of the Nicomachean Ethics.

The card sets out the positions and the arguments between them: 6.20 Philosophy of Death.

Answer in your own terms. Cases from your own life are as welcome as theories.

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4 answers

Nadia Haddad 8 hours ago

Fellow

On the palliative unit almost nobody is afraid of being dead. They're afraid of dying, and of leaving. A woman last month told me she wasn't worried about herself at all; she was worried about who would remind her son to eat.

So Epicurus helped me, but only with half the fear. The other half is about other people, and on that I think the deprivation view is right in a way Nagel didn't stress: death deprives the people who stay, too.
Pieter van Dijkhuizen 6 hours ago

Fellow

Nagel's betrayal case is the strongest thing in the essay. I've tried it on friends and almost nobody says the betrayed man's life is just as good. But notice what that commits you to. If an unexperienced betrayal can make your life worse, then so can a lot of things that happen after you die, and the Epicurean line collapses.

So the real choice is whether you trust the intuition about the betrayed man. I do. Spinoza wouldn't, I suspect.
Farhana Akter 4 hours ago

Fellow

I have to ask about a case from my ward, gently. When a baby dies at birth, the deprivation view says it lost a whole life, more than an old man loses. But the mothers I sit with do not grieve for what the baby lost. They grieve for the child they were already loving.

Is it right to say a newborn was harmed the most? Something in that feels wrong to me, and I don't know what.
Nirmala Jayasekara 2 hours ago

Fellow

Farhana, philosophers have noticed this. Some argue that how bad a death is depends not only on how much life is lost but on how strongly the person was connected, psychologically, to that future. A newborn has almost no such connections yet, so on that view the loss is real but not the greatest.

From the Buddhist side I'd add that the question assumes a someone who is deprived. The Abhidhamma describes a stream of moments, each conditioning the next. Death is one more moment in the stream. That doesn't answer the grief. It does change what the grief is about.