In The Human Predicament, David Benatar develops and defends the annihilation view, according to which “death is bad in large part because it annihilates the being who dies.” In this paper, I make both a positive and negative argument against the annihilation view. My positive argument consists in showing that the annihilation view generates implausible consequences in cases where one can incur some other (intrinsic) bad to avoid the supposed (intrinsic) bad of annihilation. More precisely, Benatar’s view entails that would (...) be prudent for someone to incur a non-trivial amount of pain in order to avoid being annihilated, even in cases in which the additional life one would live would not be good at all for the person living it. Yet, it seems imprudent to incur any amount of pain to continue living a life that isn’t good for the person living it, so annihilation itself cannot be (intrinsically) bad. Avoiding the implausible consequences I identify requires denying that annihilation is itself bad. My negative argument consists in demonstrating that standard forms of deprivationism can avoid all three of the major problems that Benatar attributes to them without having to posit that annihilation itself is bad. (shrink)

Perhaps death’s badness is an illusion. Epicureans think so and argue that agents cannot be harmed by death when they’re alive nor when they’re dead. I argue that each version of Epicureanism faces a fatal dilemma: it is either committed to a demonstrably false view about the relationship between self-regarding reasons and well-being or it is involved in a merely verbal dispute with deprivationism. I first provide principled reason to think that any viable view about the badness of death must (...) allow that agents have self-regarding reason to avoid death if doing so would increase their total well-being. I then show that Epicurean views which do not preserve this link are subject to reductio arguments and so should be rejected. After that, I show that the Epicurean views which accommodate this desideratum are involved in a merely verbal dispute with deprivationism. (shrink)

If earlier-than-necessary death is bad because it deprives individuals of additional good life, then why isn't later-than-necessary conception bad for the same reason? Deprivationists have argued that prenatal non-existence is not bad because it is impossible to be conceived earlier, but postmortem non-existence is bad because it is possible to live longer. Call this the Impossibility Solution. In this paper, I demonstrate that the Impossibility Solution does not work by showing how it is possible to be conceived earlier in the (...) same senses it is possible to live longer. I then offer a solution to the Asymmetry Problem by suggesting a novel way to separate the badness of each type of non-existence from the type, and frequency, of attitudes we should have towards each type of non-existence. Even if both types of non-existence are equally bad, certain contingent facts about our postmortem non-existence provide reason for the badness of early deaths to be more frequently salient than the badness of late conceptions. (shrink)

Deprivationism cannot accommodate the common sense assumption that we should lament our death iff, and to the extent that, it is bad for us. Call this the Nothing Bad, Nothing to Lament Assumption. As such, either this assumption needs to be rejected or deprivationism does. I first argue that the Nothing Bad, Nothing to Lament Assumption is false. I then attempt to figure out which facts our attitudes concerning death should track. I suggest that each person should have two distinct (...) attitudes toward death: one determined by agent’s reasonable expectations about when she will die and one determined by the amount of metaphysically possible good one reasonably believes death precludes. (shrink)

Death is an undeniable fact of life. Whether it is a bad or feared thing is an important discussion that can be brought back to the ancient Greek philosophers. This article is primarily concerned with the discussion on what grounds Epicurus's thesis "death, is nothing to us; since when we exist, death is not yet present, and when death is present, then we do not exist," and to what extent satisfactory results are reached. Later, it tries to investigate how Lucretius, (...) who is regarded as the successor of Epicurus, derives the result of meaningless of fear of death from the symmetrical relationship between prenatal and post-mortem non-existences. Finally, it refers to the modern asymmetric approaches which argue that, contrary to Lucretius's claim, the relationship between these two periods of non-existence is not symmetrical, because there are serious differences between the later birth and the later death of people, given their deprivations. This article argues that death has a mystery that raises the anxiety that comes from the nature of death; however, it defends the idea that it makes a significant contribution to the meaning of life. (shrink)

Desire satisfaction theories of well-being and deprivationism about the badness of death face similar problems: desire satisfaction theories have trouble locating the time when the satisfaction of a future or past-directed desire benefits a person; deprivationism has trouble locating a time when death is bad for a person. I argue that desire satisfaction theorists and deprivation theorists can address their respective timing problems by accepting fusionism, the view that some events benefit or harm individuals only at fusions of moments in (...) time. Fusionism improves on existing solutions to the timing problem for deprivationism because it locates death’s badness at the same time as both the victim of death and death itself, and it accounts for all of the ways that death is bad for a person. Fusionism improves on existing solutions to the problem of temporally locating the benefit of future and past-directed desires because it respects several attractive principles, including the view that the intrinsic value of a time for someone is determined solely by states of affairs that obtain at that time and the view that intrinsically beneficial events benefit a person when they occur. (shrink)

Given that a person's death is bad for her,whenis it bad? I defendsubsequentism, the view that things that are bad in the relevant way are bad after they occur. Some have objected to this view on the grounds that it requires us to compare the amount of well-being the victim would have enjoyed, had she not died, with the amount she receives while dead; however, we cannot assign any level of well-being, not even zero, to a dead person. In the (...) population ethics literature, many philosophers have argued along similar lines that bringing someone into existence can neither harm nor benefit her. Working within the comparative framework (on which harms make us worse off), I respond by proposing a good sense in which we can say that dead people, and actual people at alternatives in which they do not exist, have a well-being level of zero. (shrink)