NOTE-1294: Death

Contribution

A survey of the metaphysics of death and of whether, and when, death and what follows it can harm the one who dies. Luper sets out each position’s premises and takes sides: for a compositional account of life, for the loss-of-life account of death, against subsequentism and against Williams on immortality.

Key insight

Whether death and posthumous events can harm us turns on what welfare is. If only experiences are good or bad for us, Epicurus wins. If the fulfilment of desires counts, a desire I have now can be thwarted by what happens after I die, and I am worse off now. “desire fulfillment need have not experiential upshot” (§3.1).

Assumptions

• Comparativism as the frame for harm: an event is overall bad for us if it makes our lifetime welfare lower than it otherwise would be (§3.2). The entry is neutral on what the intrinsic goods are.
• The Epicurean presumption (§4): what never makes us worse off at some time is not bad for us. Much of the timing debate depends on it; atemporalism rejects it.
• What we are is left open between animalism, personism and mindism (§2.5); several results depend on it.

Key results

• Life and death (§§1–2).
  • The compositional account: an object is alive if and only if it is composed of things that can engage in self-modifying activities integrated under information some of them carry (§1.3).
  • The loss of life account: to die is to lose the capacity for those activities. Frozen embryos are viable though not vital, so alive (§2.2). Life can in principle be restored, not just revived (§2.4).
  • Terminators hold that a person ceases to exist at death; anti-terminators that one can persist as a corpse (§2.6).
  • “Mortal” should mean that one’s life will end (§2.8).
• Epicurus reconstructed (§3.1) in nine steps. The key premises are intrinsic hedonism, that death is not an experience and causes none, and extrinsic instrumentalism (something is extrinsically bad only by making us have intrinsic evils). Two repairs defeat it: preferentialism, on which a thwarted desire is bad for us whether or not we notice; and Nagel’s point that things can be bad by precluding goods.
• Deprivationism (§3.2). Dying at a time is bad for us when our lifetime welfare would have been higher had we not died then, and good when it would have been lower (the two Hilda cases).
• The timing puzzle (§4).
  • Concurrentism: a bad death harms while one dies. Lamont: deprivation harm occurs at the “ensuring event”.
  • Priorism (§4.2): “Suppose that, as George Pitcher (1984) suggested, a desire that you have now may be thwarted by your death, even though you will die several months from now.” Then it may be now that your death makes you worse off. “It may harm you retroactively.”
  • Subsequentism (Feit, Bradley): harm while dead. Luper objects that a corpse, or a person who no longer exists, has no welfare level, not even zero.
  • Indefinitism (Nagel; Grey’s blurry stretch) and atemporalism: that death is overall bad for Sam is a timeless truth (Feldman; Johansson’s term).
• Harmless preclusion and symmetry (§5). Lacking genius makes life worse without harming; why is death different? Lucretius: we do not mind our prenatal nonexistence. Replies: Parfit’s bias toward the future; our forward-looking pursuits (Kamm: we do not want our lives to be all over with); Nagel’s essential-origins reply and Kaufman’s defence of it for persons.
• Posthumous harm (§6).
  • Aristotle reports the popular belief; Nagel calls breaking a deathbed promise “an injury to the dead man” (§6).
  • Doubts: it seems to need backward causation (Partridge: the dead can be wronged, not harmed); and, if welfare is intrinsic and the person no longer exists, nothing after death can change it (§6.1). Taylor denies both wrong and harm.
  • Grover and Velleman: later events change the value or meaning of a life (§6.2).
  • Pitcher (§6.2), with Feinberg, Luper and Scarre, takes the preferentialist route. Posthumous events “harm us by being responsible for truths that thwart our desires”. Slander after my death makes it true that my reputation is damaged. That harms me at the times I desired it untarnished, while I was alive. Likewise my desire that my child have a happy upbringing is thwarted, and I am worse off now, if she falls ill after I die. The posthumous event harms only indirectly.
  • Against it: Velleman holds well-being is “a fact intrinsic to the present”; Partridge, Vorobej and Suits that a desire one no longer has cannot be thwarted, or need not be cared about. Parfit replies that some desires are not conditional on their own persistence.
• Immortality (§7). Nagel: death is always bad, since experience is itself a great good. Luper: implausible, since sedation through surgery is good for us. Williams: immortality would be tedious; his categorical desires are not conditional on staying alive, like a father’s desire that his daughter have a good start. Luper sides with Williams’s critics: a gradually changing but continuous life could stay desirable.
• Thanatizing (§8). Conditionalizing every desire on one’s surviving (“should I live on, let my project succeed”) would not protect us: death also precludes having desires, so the strategy costs as much as it saves (Luper 2013). It is prudent only to avoid goals no lifetime can reach.

Claims

id	claim	strength	support
C1	Epicurus’s argument needs intrinsic hedonism and extrinsic instrumentalism, and fails without either	strong as a reconstruction; the premises’ falsity is argued, not proved	§3.1
C2	Death can be bad for the one who dies by depriving them of goods	moderate: the standard view, defended against the timing puzzle	§§3.2, 4
C3	It makes no sense to speak of the welfare of a person while dead, so subsequentism fails	moderate: Luper’s argument	§4.3
C4	On a preferentialist view (Pitcher), posthumous events can harm the living person by thwarting desires held while alive, without backward causation	reported view; contested in the entry itself	§§4.2, 6.2
C5	Immortality need not be undesirable if desires and character change gradually and continuously	moderate: Luper’s argument against Williams	§7.2
C6	Giving up all desires death could thwart would be as bad for us as the harm avoided	moderate: Luper’s own argument	§8

Concepts

• harm thesis: death is at least sometimes bad for the one who dies.
• deprivationism / comparativism: death harms by precluding goods; something harms when it makes one’s lifetime welfare lower than it would otherwise be.
• priorism: death, or a posthumous event, can make one worse off before it occurs, by thwarting desires one has then.
• posthumous harm: harm from events after one’s death; on Pitcher’s account, harm to the living person.
• preferentialism: desire fulfilment is intrinsically good for us, and thwarted desire bad, with or without experience of it.
• categorical desire (Williams): a desire not conditional on one’s remaining alive.
• thanatizing: replacing desires death could thwart with versions conditional on one’s survival.

Connections

• Pitcher 1984 (LIT-1740), unread. The entry gives his priorism and his account of posthumous harm, two paragraphs in all.
• Scheffler (NOTE-1294-scheffler). Scheffler’s “nonexperientialist” dimension of valuing is the entry’s rejection of intrinsic hedonism, argued from reactions rather than from welfare. The entry does not cite him. Scheffler’s people do not thanatize: their projects reach past their deaths.
• Parfit (THEORY-464). Cited for the bias toward the future, for persons as psychologically continuous, and for desires not conditional on their own persistence.

Bearing on the record

• The legacy question (QUESTION-301). The question’s second reading is Pitcher’s: acting for one’s legacy can be self-interested in the ordinary sense, with no extended self. The entry confirms the mechanism. A desire about one’s reputation or one’s child after one’s death is thwarted, on preferentialism, by what happens then, and the harm falls on the living person. These are inferences from the entry.
  • It is self-interest only on a desire-based theory of welfare. On hedonism there is no posthumous harm (§6.1), and acting for one’s legacy cannot serve oneself. So Pitcher’s reading of legacy is as strong as preferentialism.
  • It meets the triviality objection at the level of welfare. If the fulfilment of any suitably conditioned desire is part of my good, then whatever I act for is my good, and legacy is self-interested by definition. The entry says the conditions on such desires are “controversial” and sets them aside (§3.1). That is CLAIM-492’s worry moved from the self’s extent to the theory of welfare.
  • It does not reach Scheffler’s case. Pitcher’s examples are desires about oneself (reputation) or one’s own (one’s child). Scheffler’s infertility scenario concerns strangers who will never exist. A desire that humanity go on is thwarted by extinction on the same logic, but calling its frustration a harm to me is the triviality worry again.
• The owner’s thesis (CLAIM-491). Pitcher offers the thesis an alternative it does not need: legacy as self-interest of an ordinary, unextended person whose desires reach past death. The thesis and Pitcher can both be true, but either makes the other unnecessary for legacy.
• A dated note should be added to QUESTION-301, not to the claim. Proposed text below.
• No THEORY filed. No ML instruction.

Limitations

• An encyclopedia entry, and an argumentative one: Luper takes sides (§§1.3, 4.3, 7.1, 7.2, 8) and is himself among the preferentialists he reports (§6.2).
• Pitcher at second hand, briefly. No ante-mortem/post-mortem distinction, no quotation from Pitcher, and no page reference.
• Supplements not read (“On Mortality”; the senescence supplement).
• A wrong citation. The bibliography gives Pitcher 1984 twice, as APQ 21(2): 217–225, reprinted in Fischer 1993, 119–134. Those are the pages given for Rosenbaum 1986 in the same list. The LIT, from PhilPapers and Crossref, has APQ 21(2): 183–188 and Fischer pp. 157–168.
• A dangling reference. §4.2 asks the reader to “Recall the earlier case” of an infection whose symptoms come later; no such case appears earlier in the entry.
• Typos:
  • “desire fulfillment need have not experiential upshot” (§3.1);
  • “it brings us have pain” (§4.2); “Does a person’s death makes her” (§4.3);
  • “Christopher Belsaw” for Belshaw (§2.2); “life-functionists” (§1.3); “mindist typically suggest” (§2.5); “according which” (§1.3);
  • “had that that event” (§5.1); “jacpot” (§5.1);
  • “the deaths of some persons is” and “we find it that it is” (§7.2); “(1093, p. 85)” for 1973 (§7.2); “other, theorists” (§6.1);
  • the contents list has “Harm Thesis” and “Lucretius and the Symmetry Argument” where the headings read “Harm Theses” and “The Symmetry Argument” (§5);
  • in the bibliography, “Aing” for “Aging” (Alic and Partridge), and Feldman 2000 carries the link “Feldman 1991 available from the author”.

Open questions

• What does Pitcher’s own paper say about the ante-mortem person, and does it treat desires for others’ good after one’s death (a child, a people, humanity) as it treats desires about oneself?
• Which restriction on desires (Parfit’s unconditional desires, Williams’s categorical ones) would make legacy concern self-interested without making every concern so?