!!!Is death bad for the one who dies? !1 Introduction !Is death a harm for the one who dies? Instinctively, we may reply yes without second thought; however, upon probing further this answer is problematic. For, if death is bad for the one who dies, then surely that person must exist. But, by the time they have died, they no longer exist to be harmed. We’ve stumbled upon the Epicurean Argument, which purports that death is in fact no harm at all for the one who dies. It can be roughly summed up by an excerpt from Epicurus’ ‘Letter to Monoeceus’: !

“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.” (Epicurus 2013) !

The thesis that death is no misfortune for the dead is one that few philosophers are prepared to readily concede. Perhaps the primary reason for this is that the Epicurean Argument appears to force us to admit that we can never make a rational decision as to whether or not it is ethical to kill someone . If value judgements only make sense when 1

the subject of these judgements exists, then it follows that it is nonsensical to give death a value, positive or negative, nor to compare death with life . Two examples will suffice to 2

show that the consequences of this might be unsavoury: firstly, say you are a perfectly happy person, and are guaranteed to live out the rest of your life in a state of happiness, achieving all your hopes and dreams. The Epicurean Argument, at least as interpreted by some philosophers , suggests that there is no way for you to rationally judge that you 3

would rather live than die. Similarly, upon seeing a suffering animal who is doomed to a short life of pain due to a terminal injury, there may be no rational reason for you to euthanise it, since we cannot compare the pain it is experiencing with the undefined value of pain in death.

Here I will argue in defence of the Epicurean Argument, and against the so-called Harm Thesis (Blatti 2012, 317) that death is a harm to the one who dies. I shall do this

I say ‘appears to force us’ because I will reject this idea in the ‘Objections’ section below, but it’s 1

worth noting that the Epicurean Argument might be interpreted this way, and has been by Olson (Olson 2013) and Silverstein (Silverstein 1980).

The proposition here is that life and death are incommensurable. A defense of this is given by 2

Visak (Visak 2001,144-159) and Narveson (Narveson 1967, 66-69). It’s derivability from the Epicurean Argument is clearly established by Silverstein (Silverstein 1980, 401-409), Hershenov (Hershenov 2007, 174) and Olson (Olson 2013) and supported by Yoshizawa (Yoshizawa 2013, 86, 89).

See above.3

by arguing against the most widely accepted rebuttal to the Epicurean Argument (Smuts 2012, 198), known as the Deprivation Account. After this, I shall consider some potential objections to my position, and conclude that they either fail or are unsubstantiated. !2 Preliminary !Before we can discuss the Epicurean Argument in detail, we must first clarify some terms. The words ‘death’, ‘being dead’ and ‘dying’ can be confused with each other, but they only refer to two states . Dying is, of course, something which takes place during someone’s 4

life, but just before the end of it. Being dead is the state of non-existence which comes after life, and is not so much a state at all as the abscence of one. It’s characterised by the lack of a subject which existed previously, and therefore the impossibility of any subjective experience. Moreover, being dead is final and irreversible, unlike the state of unconsciousness. Finally, we might define ‘death’ as the first instant of one’s being dead . 5

Now we can clarify what the Epicurean Argument isn’t. The Epicurean Argument makes no judgement on whether or not dying can be harmful for the person who dies (Yoshizawa 2013, 85). Dying is, of course, a state in which one exists, and therefore a state that one can experience, and thus there is no misstep in attributing a positive or negative value for the person suffering it. Moreover, the Epicurean Argument is not concerned with justification for the fear of death. There is a similar argument, put forth by Lucretius (Lucretius 1957, 121-129) which states it is irrational to fear death, as it is irrational to fear anything which it is impossible to experience. While the Lucretian argument is similar in nature to the Epicurean Argument, the question here is not whether it is rational for a person to fear death, but rather whether or not death is bad for that person . 6

With those points in mind, we can give a formal account of the Epicurean Argument, which I’ve adapted from Rosenbaum (Rosenbaum 1986, 218): !

1) An event can only be good or bad for a person P if P can experience the effects of it (Experience Requirement)

These definitions are for the most part taken from Rosenbaum (Rosenbaum 1986, 218), but I 4

differ from his account in that I do not distinguish between three separate states but only two. What Rosenbaum calls ‘death’ is a third state according to him, somewhere between dying and being dead, which may or may not take place during life. It seems to me that this definition is confused and could lead to the misleading idea that death is an event which the subject may be able to experience, and thus a possible source of harm. However, death cannot be an event which takes place during someone’s life, and therefore cannot be an object of experience, for otherwise we would be referring to what both Rosenbaum and I call ‘dying’ (the period before one no longer exists). As such, what Rosenbaum calls ‘death’ is better interpreted as the first instant that one is dead, as I have defined it.

See above for a justification.5

It may be conceivable that humans can fear things which aren’t bad for them, due to the 6

complexity of human desire, but while this might refute Lucretius, it would not have any bearing on the soundness of the Epicurean Agument.

2) P cannot experience the effects of any event if P is dead (My definition of death) 3) The effects of any event cannot be experienced before an event takes place 7

(Causality) 4) By (2) and (3): P’s being dead is not an event that P can experience. 5) By (1) and (4): P’s being dead can neither be good nor bad for P. !

This argument is valid, but its soundness has been questioned. In the next section, I will examine a standard counter-argument which aims to do this. !!3 Deprivation Account & The Experience Requirement !The most popular response (Feldman 1991, 206) to the Epicurean Argument is that death is bad for the person who dies because it deprives them of goods they would otherwise have attained. This argument is widely known as the Deprivation Account. Versions of this account have notably been put forward by Nagel, McMahan, and Feldman. These accounts all rely on rejecting premise (1) in the Epicurean Argument, the Experience Requirement, in order that death can be a harm regardless of whether or not there is someone alive to experience this harm . Nagel’s account of the Deprivation Account, for 8

example, is as follows: when someone dies, they are deprived of a life that they otherwise would have had, if they had not died. If that person had hopes and desires which were frustrated due to their death, then the harm they have been dealt as a result of that death is proportional to the value of these desires. The harm that someone’s death does to that person does not have to be experienced at any time, but is harm nonetheless (Nagel 1970). In order for the Deprivation Account to succeed, then, we must have a satisfactory account for why we are justified in rejecting the Experience Requirement. Here I will criticise some arguments against the Experience Requirement, before supplying my own positive reasons for believing it.

Nagel argues that the Experience Requirement must be wrong, by showing through examples that there are cases in which we attribute harm to someone, despite the fact they may not experience this harm. Both Nagel (Nagel 1970, 76) and another proponent, James Rachels (Rachels 1986, 46), describe a case of this similar to the following: Kara has many friends at school, who all praise her and seem to vastly enjoy spending time with her. However, unbeknownst to Kara, her friends are really just pretending to like her as a joke, and secretly make fun of her behind her back. These people aren’t Kara’s real friends, however their acting is so flawless that Kara will never find out. In this thought experiment, it does indeed seem as though something bad is happening, and it’s true that

I take it that this account of causality is the common-sense notion, and is unlikely to strike the 7

reader as contentious. Nonetheless, positive reasons to accept it have been shown by Max Black (Black 1956).

Indeed, any attack on the Epicurean Argument must do this, unless it is willing to admit that it 8

is possible to have experiences while dead, so my counterargument goes far beyond just the Deprivation Account.

Kara has no experience of anything bad. All she experiences is the loving admiration of her perceived friends.

We can reply to such a thought experiment with a counter-example which gives us the opposite intuition . My friend Tom asks me what I think of his new shirt, and I refrain 9

to tell him my true thoughts (that it’s dreadful). I do this, presumably, in order not to harm him. However, according to Nagel’s account, my private thoughts harm Tom regardless . However, the idea that my private thoughts about my friend’s attire could 10

actually harm him seems intuitively implausible. So, how are we to best explain why my thoughts don’t harm my friend? It seems to me that the most reasonable explanation is that it’s because my friend will never be able to experience my thoughts, and thus harm lies in experience.

If this is the case, then we must explain why some people have the intuition that Kara was harmed by her friends’ betrayal, while they have the opposite intuition in the case of Tom’s shirt choice. I think this can be easily done. Firstly, we may think that Nagel’s example depicts a bad state of affairs, but fail to understand the difference between something being bad for someone, and it being objectively bad. The fact that Kara’s friends have conspired against her may be construed as a bad state of affairs per se, but given we have access to information Kara doesn’t have access to, it may not be a good experiment when it comes to testing our intuitions from Kara’s point of view. Secondly, though the thought experiment tells us that there is no way Kara will ever find out about her betrayal, we may intuitively feel that in any realistic scenario her friends have put her at significant risk of experiencing a very bad state of affairs, and that this is enough to react at this thought experiment simply due to the potential that this state of affairs could be bad for Kara (Gombay 1978, 241), without ever actually being bad for her.

So, we have some reasons to reject Nagel’s objection to the Experience Requirement. Furthermore, we have positive reasons to believe it. The Experience Requirement is generally accepted in everyday life: we give people anaesthetic to prevent them from experiencing the harm of surgery, we withold harmful thoughts and information from those we wish to protect, and we would all reject the notion that a deaf person could be harmed by a bad rendition of a symphony (Rosenbaum 1986, 219). The one commonality between all these cases is the fact that none of them involve a harmful experience. Another positive reason to believe that something can only be bad for someone if it is subjectively experienced is that, without subjective experience, there can

Similar counter-examples are supplied by Gombay (Gombay 1978, 242) and Rosenbaum 9

(Rosenbaum 1986, 219).

A potential objection could be that this example is that there is a set of possible events, some of 10

which constitute harm only through experience, and some of which constitute harm regardless of an experience. This line of argument would suggest that I have chosen Tom’s case from the former subset, while Kara’s case is from the latter, and therefore these two examples are not in competition and I have proved nothing. However, it would then be the objector’s responsibility to give us an account for what property an event must possess to fall in one subset or the other, and do this without appealing to the notion of experience as a deciding factor.

be no prudential value at all . A world inhabited with only ‘zombies’—beings which are 11

cut off from all forms of experience, both sensory and mental—is one which fails to have any moral evaluation as it seems impossible to harm or benefit anyone (Smuts 2012, 200). The reason that it could be morally defensible to kick a rock and not a person, without appealing to some mystical notion of a soul or spirit, is that one has experience and the other doesn’t. I think it’s clear that we have good reasons to accept the Experience Requirement, and few reasons to reject it. If this is true, then the Deprivation Account—which depends on the falsity of the Experience Requirement—is an unconvincing reply to the Epicurean. !!5 Objections !I will now evaluate three potential objections to my defense of the Epicurean Argument, and show that they fail to refute my position. Jeff McMahan argues that the counter-intutive consequences of the Epicurean Argument are reason enough to reject the Experience Requirement, regardless of an argument to the contrary as I have supplied (McMahan 1988, 39). However, I would dispute this line of reasoning on two grounds. Firstly, I agree with Rosenbaum that is a mistake to engage in a philosophical debate with the assumption that our own prereflective opinions must be correct (Rosenbaum 1986, 220), and would add that it’s a fallacy to reject an argument on these grounds. But I also disagree that the Epicurean Argument leads to the conclusion that killing cannot be morally wrong, as McMahan alleges. I’ll sketch an acount of how this may be so: a life in which a person, P, attains more pleasure is better for P than a life in which P attains less pleasure. If we were to kill P, assuming her life will go on to be pleasureable, P will have attained less pleasure than she would if she were to stay alive. Therefore, it is consistent for a utilitarian to say that it is morally wrong to kill P. Such an account differs from the Deprivation Account in that it doesn’t suppose that P’s death will be bad for P, but rather that P will have enjoyed less total pleasure if she is killed prematurely . We never 12

compare life to death, so avoid the problem of incommensurability, and we are only concerned with states under which P is a subject of experience, so don’t violate the Experience Requirement. The fact that the Epicurean Argument can coincide with our moral intuitions may prompt more people to warm to the position, despite the fact that any rejection of the argument on solely an emotive or intuitive basis is flawed. Killing can be morally wrong, and death can be undesirible for the one who dies, but it certainly can’t be bad for her.

It is conceivable that someone might object to my account on the basis that they think I am doing my friend Tom harm, even when I’m only thinking of how ugly his shirt is. Though I would contend that I have given adequate reasons to reject this account, even if we were accept it there are good reasons to reject the Deprivation Account. The reason

See also the case of the ‘anhedonic life’ as sketched by Roger Crisp in his defense of hedonism 11

(Crisp 2006, 639).

This account is derived from Hershenov (Hershenov 2007) and Rosenbaum (Rosenbaum 1986).12

for this is that we can formulate an alternative Epicurean Argument which relies not on the Experience Requirement, but on the Existence Requirement, namely that a person P must at least exist in order for an event or state of affairs to be bad for P (McMahan 1988, 33). Sumner implicitly rejects the Existence Requirement in his version of the Deprivation Account, by saying that all that is necessary is that there should have been a subject at one point in time to attribute the loss of future life to (Sumner 1976, 160). However, as Silverstein points out, he offers no defense of this position (Silverstein 1980, 407). The Deprivation Account, combined with a denial of the Existence Requirement, argues that death can coherently is a loss for the person who dies during a period in which we cannot attribute existence to the person who dies. But it is unclear how we can attribute loss in a literal sense to a non-existent entity, and it is even more problematic to attribute to that non-entity a positive state of harm, as in the proposition “X is bad for P, but P doesn’t exist” (Silverstein 1980, 407).

Finally, I accept that it is possible in all these cases to object to the causality premise that I have assumed. In effect, this would involve arguing that someone’s death causes an effect which is atemporal or retroactive. Indeed, atemporality is the basis of Silverstein’s rejection of the Epicurean Argument (Silverstein 1980) and Grover thinks that death can retroactively affect the lives of the living (Grover 1987). However, in defending this view the Deprivation Account supporter would have to give us a strong case for adopting an alternate theory of causality, given that there are cogent reasons (Black 1956) for accepting the common-sense notion, especially in terms of every day experiences outside the realms of quantum mechanics. Furthermore, if events can exist atemporally or have retrospective effects, then it appears that there would be no difference between past and future events, and therefore no way to discern between them, as we typically distinguish a past event from a future one by virtue of whether or not its effects can be experienced (Rosenbaum 1986, 223) . 13

!!6 Conclusion !I have attempted to prove that, in line with the Epicurean Argument, death cannot be a harm to the person who dies. I’ve shown this by defending the Experience Requirement—that a person must experience the effects of an event for it to be good or bad for them—against Nagel’s thought experiments which purport to prove it wrong. Further, I have supplied positive reasons for believing the Experience Requirement. In light of this, I have argued, we have good reasons for rejecting the Deprivation Account, on the grounds that it relies on our capacity to be harmed by events we will never experience the effects of. I have examined three objections: 1) that the Epicurean Argument has consequences too unsavoury; 2) that if we could reject the Experience Requirement then the Deprivation Account would stand, and 3) that the effects of events may be able to precede their causes, or stand in atemporal relationships to them. All three of these objections, I have

More detailed arguments for why we should reject Silverstein and Grover’s versions of the 13

Deprivation Account are made by Feit (Feit 2002, 360-361), Rosenbaum (Rosenbaum 1986, 222-223) and Green (Green 1982, 102-103).

shown, are, if not outwardly false, extremely problematic and in need of much more justification than has been given. As such, acceptance of the Epicurean Argument is the most rational position to take when considering the misfortunes of the dead. !! !!References !Black, Max. 1956. “Why Cannot an Effect Precede its Cause?” Analysis 16, no. 3: 49-58. Blatti, Stephan. 2012. “Death’s Distinctive Harm.” American Philosophical Quarterly 49, no.

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