Switch to: References

Add citations

You must login to add citations.
  1. Responding to the Timing Argument.Karl Ekendahl - 2021 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 103 (4):753-771.
    According to the Timing Argument, death is not bad for the individual who dies, because there is no time at which it could be bad for her. Defenders of the badness of death have objected to this influential argument, typically by arguing that there are times at which death is bad for its victim. In this paper, I argue that a number of these writers have been concerned with quite different formulations of the Timing Argument. Further, and more importantly, I (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • (1 other version)Does Abortion Harm the Fetus?Karl Ekendahl & Jens Johansson - 2022 - Utilitas 34 (2):154-166.
    A central claim in abortion ethics is what might be called the Harm Claim – the claim that abortion harms the fetus. In this article, we put forward a simple and straightforward reason to reject the Harm Claim. Rather than invoking controversial assumptions about personal identity, or some nonstandard account of harm, as many other critics of the Harm Claim have done, we suggest that the aborted fetus cannot be harmed for the simple reason that it does not occupy any (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • A Simple Analysis of Harm.Jens Johansson & Olle Risberg - 2022 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 9:509-536.
    In this paper, we present and defend an analysis of harm that we call the Negative Influence on Well-Being Account (NIWA). We argue that NIWA has a number of significant advantages compared to its two main rivals, the Counterfactual Comparative Account (CCA) and the Causal Account (CA), and that it also helps explain why those views go wrong. In addition, we defend NIWA against a class of likely objections, and consider its implications for several questions about harm and its role (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  • Death and Decline.Aaron Thieme - 2022 - Philosophical Quarterly 73 (1):248-257.
    In this paper, I investigate backward-looking accounts of death's badness. I begin by reviewing deprivationism—the standard, forward-looking account of death's badness. On deprivationism, death is bad for its victims when it deprives them of a good future. This account famously faces two problems—Lucretius’s symmetry problem and the preemption problem. This motivates turning to backward-looking accounts of death's badness on which death is bad for its victim (in a respect) when it involves a decline from a good life. I distinguish three (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • (1 other version)Does Abortion Harm the Fetus?Karl Ekendahl & Jens Johansson - 2021 - Utilitas:1-13.
    A central claim in abortion ethics is what might be called the Harm Claim – the claim that abortion harms the fetus. In this article, we put forward a simple and straightforward reason to reject the Harm Claim. Rather than invoking controversial assumptions about personal identity, or some nonstandard account of harm, as many other critics of the Harm Claim have done, we suggest that the aborted fetus cannot be harmed for the simple reason that it does not occupy any (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Causal Accounts of Harming.Erik Carlson, Jens Johansson & Olle Risberg - 2021 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 103 (2):420-445.
    A popular view of harming is the causal account (CA), on which harming is causing harm. CA has several attractive features. In particular, it appears well equipped to deal with the most important problems for its main competitor, the counterfactual comparative account (CCA). However, we argue that, despite its advantages, CA is ultimately an unacceptable theory of harming. Indeed, while CA avoids several counterexamples to CCA, it is vulnerable to close variants of some of the problems that beset CCA.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  • Death, Deprivation and the Afterlife.Anna Brinkerhoff - 2021 - Philosophia 50 (1):19-34.
    Most people believe that death is bad for the one who dies. Much attention has been paid to the Epicurean puzzle about death that the rests on a tension between that belief and another—that death is the end of one’s existence. But there is nearby puzzle about death that philosophers have largely left untouched. This puzzle rests on a tension between the belief that death is bad for the one who dies and the belief that that death is not the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Dissolving Death’s Time-of-Harm Problem.Travis Timmerman - 2022 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 100 (2):405-418.
    Most philosophers in the death literature believe that death can be bad for the person who dies. The most popular view of death’s badness—namely, deprivationism—holds that death is bad for the person who dies because, and to the extent that, it deprives them of the net good that they would have accrued, had their actual death not occurred. Deprivationists thus face the challenge of locating the time that death is bad for a person. This is known as the Timing Problem, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Good to die.Rainer Ebert - 2013 - Diacritica 27:139-156.
    Among those who reject the Epicurean claim that death is not bad for the one who dies, it is popularly held that death is bad for the one who dies, when it is bad for the one who dies, because it deprives the one who dies of the good things that otherwise would have fallen into her life. This view is known as the deprivation account of the value of death, and Fred Feldman is one of its most prominent defenders. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Døden som et onde.Carl Tollef Solberg - 2019 - Norsk Filosofisk Tidsskrift 54 (3):167-186.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • To Be or Never to Have Been: Anti-Natalism and a Life Worth Living.Aaron Smuts - 2013 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 17 (4):711-729.
    David Benatar argues that being brought into existence is always a net harm and never a benefit. I disagree. I argue that if you bring someone into existence who lives a life worth living (LWL), then you have not all things considered wronged her. Lives are worth living if they are high in various objective goods and low in objective bads. These lives constitute a net benefit. In contrast, lives worth avoiding (LWA) constitute a net harm. Lives worth avoiding are (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • Meeting the Epicurean challenge: a reply to Christensen.Bruce P. Blackshaw & Daniel Rodger - 2019 - Journal of Medical Ethics 45 (7):478-479.
    In ’Abortion and deprivation: a reply to Marquis’, Anna Christensen contends that Don Marquis’ influential ’future like ours’ argument for the immorality of abortion faces a significant challenge from the Epicurean claim that human beings cannot be harmed by their death. If deprivation requires a subject, then abortion cannot deprive a fetus of a future of value, as no individual exists to be deprived once death has occurred. However, the Epicurean account also implies that the wrongness of murder is also (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • A dilemma for Epicureanism.Travis Timmerman - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (1):241-257.
    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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   16 citations  
  • Building a Postwork Utopia: Technological Unemployment, Life Extension and the Future of Human Flourishing.John Danaher - 2017 - In Lagrandeur Kevin & Hughes James (eds.), Surviving the Machine Age. Palgrave-MacMillan. pp. 63-82.
    Populations in developed societies are rapidly aging: fertility rates are at all-time lows while life expectancy creeps ever higher. This is triggering a social crisis in which shrinking youth populations are required to pay for the care and retirements of an aging majority. Some people argue that by investing in the right kinds of lifespan extension technology – the kind that extends the healthy and productive phases of life – we can avoid this crisis (thereby securing a ‘longevity dividend’). This (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • How A-theoretic deprivationists should respond to Lucretius.Natalja Deng - 2015 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1 (3):417-432.
    What, if anything, makes death bad for the deceased themselves? Deprivationists hold that death is bad for the deceased iff it deprives them of intrinsic goods they would have enjoyed had they lived longer. This view faces the problem that birth too seems to deprive one of goods one would have enjoyed had one been born earlier, so that it too should be bad for one. There are two main approaches to the problem. In this paper, I explore the second (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • Death, Badness, and Well-Being at a Time.Karl Ekendahl - forthcoming - Journal of Value Inquiry:1-18.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Death and existential value: In defence of Epicurus.Marcus Willaschek - 2022 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 106 (2):475-492.
    This paper offers a partial defence of the Epicurean claim that death is not bad for the one who dies. Unlike Epicurus and his present-day advocates, this defence relies not on a hedonistic or empiricist conception of value but on the concept of ‘existential’ value. Existential value is agent-relative value for which it is constitutive that it can be truly self-ascribed in the first person and present tense. From this definition, it follows that death (post-mortem non-existence), while perhaps bad in (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Accounting for the Harm of Death.Duncan Purves - 2014 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 97 (1):89-112.
    I defend a theory of the way in which death is a harm to the person who dies that fits into a larger, unified account of harm ; and includes an account of the time of death's harmfulness, one that avoids the implications that death is a timeless harm and that people have levels of welfare at times at which they do not exist.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   18 citations  
  • A Life Worth Living.Aaron Smuts - manuscript
    Theories of well-being tell us what makes a life good for the one who lives it. But there is more to what makes a life worth living than just well-being. We care about the worth of our lives, and we are right to do so. I defend an objective list theory of the worth of a life: The most worthwhile lives are those high in various objective goods. These principally include welfare and meaning. By distinguishing between worth and welfare, we (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Epicureanism and euthanasia.Jeremy W. Skrzypek - forthcoming - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics:1-14.
    If Epicurean arguments for the harmlessness of death are successful, then they also successfully undermine a common justification for physician-assisted suicide, euthanasia, and the termination of hopeless pregnancies that I call the ‘Mercy Intuition', according to which, by ending the life of a suffering loved one for whom there is little to no chance of recovery, one is relieving that person of her suffering, and thus providing a great benefit to her. For, if death is not a harm to the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark