Death (Thomas Nagel)

The Philosophical Problem of Death as an Evil

Introduction: The Question of Death's Nature

• Initial Thought Experiment: The syllogism from Kinsweather's logic: "Caius is a man. Men are mortal. Therefore, Caius is mortal." This seems correct for Caius, but the individual struggles to apply it to themselves, highlighting a personal disconnect from the abstract idea of mortality.

• Conspicuous Disagreement: There is no consensus on whether death is a bad thing:

  • Some perceive death as dreadful.

  • Others have no objection to death per se, only hoping it's not premature or painful.

• Perspective Clash: Those who find death dreadful consider the others blind to the obvious; conversely, the latter often view the former as confused.

Arguments for Death as a Loss

• Life as the Ultimate Possession: "One life is all one has," and its loss is considered the greatest possible loss.

• Deprivation of Subjective Experience: Death deprives the individual of certain fundamental goods that constitute human life, such as:

  • Perception

  • Desire

  • Activity

  • Thought

• Significance of Goods: These general goods are widely regarded as beneficial, even amidst misery, and their value is not diminished unless particular evils sufficiently outweigh them.

• Key Observations on Value of Life:

  1. The value of life and its contents is not tied to mere organic survival. For example, a person in a coma for $20$ years before death, without reawakening, does not experience the goods of life during that period.

  2. The quantity of goods is cumulative: more is generally better than less. Added quantities do not need to be temporarily continuous.

• Suspended Animation Analogy: The appeal of long-term suspended animation or freezing (followed by conscious life resumption) illustrates that value is placed on the continuation of life. A $300$-year dormant interval could be experienced as a sharp discontinuity, not a loss, if consciousness genuinely resumes.

Death as a Loss vs. The State of Being Dead

• Asymmetry of Good and Evil:

  • What is desirable in life are certain conditions or activities (e.g., "being alive," "doing certain things," "having certain experiences").

  • If death is an evil, it's the loss of life, rather than the state of being dead, nonexistent, or unconscious, that is objectionable.

• Timing of Benefit/Disadvantage:

  • Being alive is a good that can be attributed to a person at each point of their life. For example, Bach had more good than Schubert simply because he lived longer.

  • Death, however, is not an evil that Shakespeare has "received a larger portion" of than Prowse. It's difficult to pinpoint when a person suffers the disadvantage of death, as it's not an experience.

Refuting Common Objections to Death as an Evil

• Not Merely Long Periods of Non-existence:

  1. Temporary Suspension: Most people would not view temporary life suspension (e.g., freezing for later revival) as a misfortune if it preserves conscious lifespan. We would not pity those temporarily out of circulation.

  2. Pre-birth Non-existence: None of us existed before birth/conception, yet few regard this as a misfortune. This point will be addressed later in the discussion of temporal asymmetry.

• "Imagining What It's Like to Be Dead" Fallacy: The idea that fear of death stems from trying to imagine the logically impossible state of being dead is false.

  • It is just as impossible to imagine being totally unconscious as being dead, though one can imagine oneself from outside in either condition.

  • However, people generally aren't averse to unconsciousness as long as it doesn't significantly reduce total waking life. This suggests the aversion is to the loss of life, not the state itself.

• Core Argument for Death as Bad: To make sense of death being bad, it must be understood as a deprivation or loss of the good that life is. It is not bad due to any positive features it possesses, but due to the irreplaceable good it removes.

Serious Difficulties with the Deprivation Hypothesis

Three main problems arise when considering death as a misfortune due to deprivation:

Problem 1: Evil Without Positive Unpleasantness? (The "What You Don't Know Can't Hurt You" Objection)

• The Objection: Can something be bad for someone without them being aware of it or finding it positively unpleasant? This doubts the existence of evils that are merely deprivations, not dependent on someone minding the deprivation.

• Examples: A man is betrayed by friends or ridiculed behind his back, his wishes are ignored by his will's executor, or his literary fame is wrongly attributed post-mortem. According to this objection, these are not misfortunes if he experiences no suffering as a result.

• Critique: This severely restricts what counts as good or evil. It necessitates questioning the assumptions that lead to such drastic limitations on human value.

Problem 2: Assigning Misfortune to a Subject (The "When is Death a Misfortune?" Objection)

• The Difficulty: How can misfortune be assigned to a subject (the deceased)?

  • "Who is the subject?": So long as a person exists, they have not yet died. Once they have died, they no longer exist.

  • "When does he undergo it?": There seems to be no specific time when death is a misfortune for the individual.

Problem 3: Temporal Asymmetry (The Lucretian Objection)

• The Objection: There's an asymmetry between our attitudes toward post-mortem (after death) and pre-natal (before birth) non-existence. If pre-natal non-existence isn't bad, how can post-mortem non-existence be? Lucretius argued that since no one finds the eternity before their birth disturbing, fearing death (which is its mirror image) is irrational.

Addressing Problem 1: Recasting Goods and Evils Beyond Immediate Experience

• Beyond Simple Pleasures/Pains: Not all goods and evils are simple states possessed at a given time due to one's condition. Understanding something as a misfortune often requires knowing a person's history.

• Evils of Deterioration, Deprivation, Damage: These are complex and cannot be reduced to immediately felt sensations.

• Example: Life Wasted in "Cheerful Pursuit": A man who wastes his life in a cheerful pursuit (e.g., communicating with an asparagus plant) is still subject to misfortune, even if his experimental state is "relatively unimportant" or pleasant. This challenges the idea that all goods/evils must be immediately assignable states.

• Irreducibly Relational Goods and Evils: Many goods and evils are relational, involving a person and circumstances that may not coincide in space or time with that person.

  • A man's life includes events outside his body/mind boundaries.

  • What happens to him can include events outside the boundaries of his life (e.g., "misfortune of being deceived or despised or betrayed").

  • Deathbed Promise: Breaking a deathbed promise is an injury to the dead man, demonstrating that agency and harm can extend beyond physical existence.

• The Case of Brain Injury (Dementia):

  • Scenario: An intelligent adult suffers a brain injury, reducing them to a contented (yet mentally infantile) state. Their desires are met by a custodian.

  • Misfortune for Whom?: This is considered a severe misfortune primarily for the person himself, not merely for friends or society. It does not mean the contented infant is unfortunate; the misfortune belongs to the intelligent adult who was reduced to that state.

  • Pity and Identity: We pity the adult, even though the current state (contented infant) does not register the loss. There's even doubt if the original person still exists. If we didn't pity him as an infant, why pity him now? The key is considering the person he was and could have been.

  • Catastrophic Cancellation: This reduction is a "catastrophic catastrophe" because it cancels his natural adult development – a possible future good. This case shows that restricting goods/evils to non-relational properties at specific times ignores gross degeneration and other process-oriented features of life like success and failure.

• Subject of Good and Evil: A man is a subject of good and evil not just due to his capacity to suffer or enjoy, but because he has hopes and possibilities which may or may not be realized. If death is an evil, it must be understood in these terms.

Addressing Problem 2: Locating the Misfortune of Death (Revisited)

• The Corpse: A corpse is not a subject of pity; it's like an "article of furniture." The misfortune is for the man who has lost his life and the goods therein.

• Applying the Dementia Model: While the individual suffering the loss has a clear spatial and temporal location, the misfortune itself (the end of life) cannot be easily located in time or space.

  • It's the fact that his life is over and there will be no more of it that constitutes the misfortune, not his past or present condition.

• The Loser Must Have Existed: If there is a loss, someone must suffer it, and that person must have existed at a specific spatial and temporal location, even if the loss itself is diffuse.

  • Beethoven's Children: Beethoven having no children might be a cause of regret for him or a sad thing for the world, but it cannot be a misfortune for the children he never had because they never existed.

  • Not Being Born: While being born is fortunate, not being born is not a misfortune for the un-conceived, since good and ill can't be assigned to an embryo or gametes. This is relevant to ethical debates on abortion/contraception.

Addressing Problem 3: Solving the Temporal Asymmetry Problem (Lucretius's Refutation)

• Lucretius's Argument Reconsidered: While it is true that one doesn't exist before birth or after death, the situations are not mirror images.

• The Crucial Difference (Deprivation):

  • Time After Death: This is "time of which his death deprives him." Had he not died, he would have been alive. Death entails the loss of life its victim would have led had they not died. The loser is identifiable.

  • Time Before Birth: One could not have been born substantially earlier as the same person. Anyone born significantly earlier would have been someone else entirely. Therefore, the time prior to birth is not time he was prevented from living by his birth. His birth does not entail the loss of any life whatever to him.

• Direction of Time's Importance: Time's direction is crucial for assigning possibilities.

  • Distinct possible lives of a single person can diverge from a common beginning.

  • They cannot converge to a common conclusion from diverse beginnings. This would represent different individuals, not different lives of the same individual.

• Open-Ended Future: For an identifiable individual, countless possibilities for continued existence are imaginable. The non-realization of this possibility (continuation of a good) is what makes death a misfortune.

The Question of Natural Limits and Misfortune

• Non-Realization of Possibility: Is every non-realization of a possibility a misfortune? Or does it depend on what can be "naturally hoped for"?

• Keats vs. Tolstoy: Keats' death at $24$ is tragic because he was deprived of many years of life, which Tolstoy enjoyed until $82$. Keats' loss was greater, though this isn't a standard mathematical comparison of infinite quantities.

  • This doesn't mean Tolstoy's loss was insignificant, but perhaps we object more to evils that are added to the inevitable, rather than the inevitable itself.

• Normality and Misfortune: Does misfortune apply to limitations that are normal for a species?

  • Blindness is not a misfortune for a mole, as it's natural for its species.

  • Blindness would be a misfortune for a man if it were normal, but it is not.

• The Human Experience of an Open-Ended Future: Life familiarizes us with goods. If these goods are a function of duration, then the question remains whether death, regardless of when it occurs, deprives the victim of a relevant sense of possible continuation of life.

  • External View: From outside, humans have a natural lifespan (e.g., around $100$ years).

  • Internal View: A person's sense of their own existence defines an "essentially open-ended possible future," containing the usual goods and evils found tolerable in the past.

• Death as Abrupt Cancellation: In this internal view, death (however inevitable) becomes "an abrupt cancellation of indefinite extensive possible goods."

• Normality is Irrelevant: The fact that we all inevitably die in a few score years does not logically imply that it wouldn't be good to live longer. If there is no intrinsic limit to how much life it would be good to have, then "a bad end is in store for all of us."