philo of life and death

Thomas Nagel

• View: Death is bad for the one who dies because it deprives them of life’s intrinsic goods.
  
  

• Core Idea: What’s good in life is experience — consciousness, love, understanding, pleasure. Death removes all of it.
  
  

• Example: If someone dies young, we view it as tragic because of what could have been experienced.
  
  

• Argument:
  
  

  1. Life is valuable because of the goods it contains.
     
     

  2. Death ends our access to those goods.
     
     

  3. Therefore, death is bad as a privation of possible goods.
     
     

• Objection (Epicurus): “There’s no subject to be harmed.” Nagel replies: we can compare possible worlds — one where the person lives longer and flourishes, and one where they die earlier — and say the latter is worse for them.
  
  

Philosophical Significance: Introduces comparative harm — death’s badness doesn’t require experience, only loss relative to what could have been.

Shelly Kagan

• View: Death is bad in virtue of deprivation, even though we can’t say when it’s bad.
  
  

• Core Idea: Death’s badness can exist without a subject experiencing it — temporal location isn’t essential to evaluation.
  
  

• Key Contribution: Defends deprivationism against timing and “subject” objections.
  
  

Objection Considered: If death harms, when does the harm occur — before, during, or after death? Kagan argues that harm doesn’t need a specific temporal location to be real.

Epicurus (and Lucretius)

• View: “Death is nothing to us.”
  
  

• Core Idea: When we exist, death is not; when death exists, we are not.
  
  

• Argument:
  
  

  1. Harm requires a subject who experiences it.
     
     

  2. The dead don’t exist to experience harm.
     
     

  3. Therefore, death isn’t bad for the one who dies.
     
     

• Lucretius’s Extension (Symmetry Argument): We don’t fear our nonexistence before birth — so why fear it after?
  
  

• Objection (Nagel): Absence can still be a harm by deprivation; nonexistence doesn’t equal moral neutrality.
  
  

Don Marquis

• View: Killing is wrong because it deprives a being of its valuable future experiences.
  
  

• Application: Abortion is prima facie wrong since it deprives a fetus of a “future like ours.”
  
  

• Key Claims:
  
  

  • What makes killing wrong is deprivation of a valuable future.
    
    

  • Fetuses have such potential futures.
    
    

  • Thus, abortion deprives them of that good.
    
    

• Objections:
  
  

  • Not all potential lives have equal moral status.
    
    

  • Doesn’t account for bodily autonomy (Thomson).
    
    

  • Assumes the fetus’s future belongs to it in a morally relevant way.
    
    

Judith Jarvis Thomson

Abortion and Moral Permissibility

• View: Even if the fetus has a right to life, abortion can still be morally permissible.
  
  

• Famous Analogy: The Violinist — you wake up connected to a famous unconscious violinist who depends on your body to live. Are you obligated to stay attached for nine months?
  
  

• Argument:
  
  

  • A right to life ≠ a right to use someone else’s body.
    
    

  • Abortion may be unjust killing only if the fetus has a right to that bodily support.
    
    

• Significance: Separates moral status from moral obligation.

David Benatar

Antinatalism

• View: It’s always wrong to bring new people into existence.
  
  

• Core Argument (Asymmetry):
  
  

Scenario	Harm	Benefit
Existence	Presence of pain (bad)	Presence of pleasure (good)
Nonexistence	Absence of pain (good)	Absence of pleasure (not bad)

• Implication: Creating life always introduces harm; non-creation avoids harm without losing any real good.
  
  

• Supporting Ideas:
  
  

  • Life inevitably includes suffering.
    
    

  • We underestimate harm and overvalue existence due to optimism bias.
    
    

• Objections:
  
  

  • Nonexistence can’t have moral value.
    
    

  • Pleasure might outweigh pain.
    
    

  • Asymmetry describes intuition, not metaphysics.
    
    

Philosophical Weight: Forces confrontation with existential pessimism; connects with Schopenhauer and deprivation debates.

Anca Gheaus

Special Goods of Parenthood

• View: Life and procreation can have special, irreducible goods not captured by harm/benefit calculus.
  
  

• Argument: Even if life involves harm, it contains relational and creative goods unique to being alive (e.g., love, meaning).
  
  

Counter to Benatar: Not all harms outweigh goods; the value of existence may be incomparable rather than calculable.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Pessimism and the Will

• View: Life is inherently full of suffering; existence is a mistake.
  
  

• Argument:
  
  

  • The “Will-to-Live” drives endless desire.
    
    

  • Desire → striving → temporary satisfaction → renewed suffering.
    
    

  • Nonexistence is preferable to the endless cycle of want.
    
    

• Influence: Benatar modernizes this worldview into secular antinatalism.
  
  

Objections: Romanticizes suffering; underestimates joy and creativity.

Julian Savulescu

Procreative Beneficence

• View: We have a moral obligation to select the best possible child (via genetic testing or selection).
  
  

• Core Idea: If technology can reduce suffering or enhance well-being, choosing not to use it is morally irresponsible.
  
  

Critique: Risks utilitarian eugenics; ignores autonomy and unpredictability of life’s value.

Victor Kumar

Moral Status and Nonidentity

• View: Challenges the idea that creating a life can “harm” that person if their existence is worth living.
  
  

• Key Claim: Nonidentity makes procreation morally complex; harm claims often collapse into impersonal ethics (what kind of world is better, not who’s harmed).

Stoics (Seneca, Epictetus)

• View: Death is neither good nor bad; it’s natural and outside our control.
  
  

• Ethical Focus: Virtue and reason matter more than duration of life.
  
  

• Application: Freedom from fear of death = freedom to live rationally and well.