Is it rational to fear death?
What about deprivationist analogies that reference life-death comparisons, thereby overcoming the barrier of extrapolation from life-life cases to life-death cases? For instance, person p dies at 30. However, p was expected to have lived to the age of 80. Thus, p , in their death, is deprived of 50 pleasurable years of life, constituting a case of deprivational harm. However, this example involves an evaluative comparison with the abstract; the possible future pleasure of continued existence never existed, it only could have. It would be ridiculous to say that every single unfertilized egg is the subject of harm, simply because there was a possibility of them experiencing a pleasurable life. In short, if every unfulfilled pleasure is a harm, then there would be seemingly infinite harms occurring at every moment for every being, which is an absurd and nonsensical view. More fundamentally, who is the subject of harm in this example, and when does the harm occur? To Silverstein, the harm of death befalls the subject of death throughout their lives. Silverstein suggests that, if spatially distant events can be the object of grief, we must treat temporally distant events in the same way. 6 Therefore, a future event (such as one’s own death) can be grieved and must therefore constitute harm in the present. However, not only is this proposed ‘four-dimensionality’ theory unintuitive, but it also assumes that all objects of grief cause us harm, which is not the case; we can grieve impersonal things that cause us no harm, such as the extinction of a species. Grief is a metric of attachment, not personal harm. In this third and final way, life-death analogies fail to overcome the problem of the subject and therefore cannot prove post-mortem (or pre-mortem) harm. In conclusion, it has been shown that the main methodology of arguing for deprivationism (intuitive analogies) fails on three main counts. Firstly, they fail to distinguish between deprivational harm and extrinsic harm. Secondly, for cases that do distinguish between these two types of harm, they fail to extrapolate their conclusions onto death due to key differences concerning circumstantial alterations. And finally, life-death comparisons fail due to absurd implications. Therefore, deprivationism fails to prove post-mortem harm, meaning that the Epicurean notion still stands. We can therefore say that death does not harm the subject. Referring back to the definition of rational fear (one that informs a response that minimizes harm), it becomes clear that death cannot be rationally feared, as it does not harm the subject. In this way, it is irrational to fear death. Bibliography Baillie, J. (2020) ‘The recognition of nothingness’, Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition , [online] 177(9), pp.2585–2603. doi:https://doi.org/10.2307/45286568. Bradley, B. (2004) ‘When Is Death Bad for the One Who Dies?’ Noûs , [online] 38(1), pp.1–28. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3506153 Feldman, F. (1991) ‘Some Puzzles about the Evil of Death’, The Philosophical Review , 100(2), pp.205–227. doi:https://doi.org/10.2307/2185300 Feldman, F. (1994) Confrontations with the Reaper. Oxford doi:https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195089288.001.0001. Pitcher, G. (1984) ‘The Misfortunes of the Dead’, American Philosophical Quarterly , [online] 21(2), pp.183–188. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20014044 Rosenbaum, S.E. (1986) ‘How to Be Dead and Not Care: A Defense of Epicurus’, American Philosophical Quarterly , [online] 23(2), pp.217–225. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20014142.
6 Silverstein (1980).
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