Is Death Evil?

So is death evil or not?  What is my answer?  The answer depends on metaphysics.

1. If we are natural beings only, nothing but complex physical systems, continuous with the rest of nature and susceptible in principle of complete explanation by physics and biology, then I cannot see how death in general could be accounted evil.  The premature death of some is perhaps evil on the ground that death deprives the decedent of what he might otherwise have enjoyed.  The happy and healthy 20 year old who is cut down by a stray bullet arguably suffers a loss, not one that he can experience, but a loss nonetheless.  (One can suffer a loss merely by being the subject of it without actually experiencing it.)  There is of course a residual technical puzzle about how a person who no longer exists can be the subject of loss, but for present purposes I won't worry further about this.

My main point is that it cannot be maintained on naturalistic principles that death in general is evil for humans.  For suppose a person lives a productive life of 90 or so years, a life which on balance has been satisfying to the person and enriching to those who have come in contact with him.  What is evil about the death of such a person?  And if death is not evil for such a person, then the philosophical question whether death in general is evil must be answered in the negative.  Here are some further considerations:

a.  It is a conceptual truth that one cannot be deprived of the impossible.  Now healthy productive living after a certain age is nomologically impossible.  So a person who dies at a ripe old age of 90 or 100 is not being deprived of anything by dying.  (Adjust the numbers upwards if you care to.)  At the point at which further living become nomologically impossible, one cannot be said to be deprived by death of a good.  Of course, the old person may want  to live on a another year or decade, but that is irrelevant.

b. Death removes from the decedent  the goods of life but also removes the evils, which are not inconsiderable.  I will spare the reader a litany of the miseries and horrors of this life.  If he opens his eyes he will quickly become apprised of them.  (But don't generalize from your own favorable experience: readers of this blog are members of an elite cadre of well-placed and fortunate individuals.)

c.  Even if being dead involves a loss for the decedent after a long and satisfying life, there cannot on naturalistic principles be any experiencing of this loss by the decedent, so how big a deal could it be?  Suppose your will stipulates that on your death $100, 000 of your estate shall go to Oxfam. Your executrix blows the whole wad at Nordstrom's.  It is arguable though not perfectly clear that you have been violated -- but you'll be able to 'live' with it, right?  Others can say that you were wronged.  But what could that be to you who no longer exists?

On this naturalistic way of thinking, then, death cannot in general be an evil for humans.  At most, the premature death of some individuals is evil.  But even this is not clear because of the problem of 'the subject of loss/deprivation.' 

But how do you know that naturalism is true?  That you believe it with great conviction cuts no ice.  As Nietzsche says, in his typically exaggerated and febrile way, "Convictions are the greatest enemies of truth."  Can you prove naturalism?  If you try, you will soon entangle yourself in a thicket of thorny metaphysical questions from which you will not escape unbloodied. You cannot prove it.  I guarantee it.

2.  How then could death be evil?  Here is one way.  Suppose there is the possibility of personal survival of bodily death (with divine assistance) and the possibility of further intellectual, moral, and spiritual development in fellowship with others who have survived and in fellowship with God.  Now if some such version of theism is true, and if one dies and becomes nothing -- the possibility of survival not having been realized either because the person in question refuses the divine offer or is judged unworthy of it -- then one will have been deprived of a great good.  One will have missed out on the beatitude for which we have been created.  So death (annihilation) would be a very great evil on this scheme, an incomparably greater evil than the evil of death on a naturalistic scheme, assuming it could be said to be evil on a naturalistic scheme.  (You will have noticed that 'the problem of the subject' arises on both schemes.) 

As I see it, death is evil because it deprives us of what some of us feel is our 'birthright' as spiritual beings: continued intellectual, moral, and spiritual progress.  We cannot quite believe that we are nothing more than complex physical systems no more worthy of continuance than trees and swamps and clouds.  We feel it to be absurd that the progress we have made individually but also collectively will be simply obliterated, that our questions will go unanswered, our hopes dashed, that the thirsting after justice will go unslaked.  We are not reconciled to the notion that there will be no redemption, that there will be no answer to or recompense for the terrible crimes that have been inflicted on the innocent.  As easy as it is to be reconciled to the death of others viewed objectively, it is difficult to be reconciled to the utter annihilation of those we love.  If death is annihilation, then this life is absurd, a big seductive joke, and we are the butt of it.

Think of the great questions that have tormented the best minds for millenia.  Does it not strike you as a perfectly absurd arrangement that one day these questions will just cease with the last human being and go unanswered forever?  All that painstaking inquiry and no answer, not even the answer that the questions posed were meaningless and unanswerable!

There is a certain sort of secular humanist who fools himself with dreams of human progress toward a 'better world' in which a sort of secular redemption will be achieved.  But this is pure illusion and pure evasion.  It is nothing but feel-good claptrap.  On a naturalistic scheme there can be no redemption for the billions who have been the victims of terrible injustice.  Be a naturalist if you must, but don't fool yourself with humanistic fantasies.  There is no secular substitute for the redemption that only God could bring about.  Be an honest naturalist, a nihilist naturalist.

But of course what I have just said in exfoliation of the sense some of us have of being more than complex physical systems, a sense of having a higher destiny, proves nothing and can be easily rebutted: Death is not an evil because none of what some feel is their birthright as imago Dei is really possible.  It is just pious claptrap born of dissatisfaction with the way things are.  One may feel that it is 'a rotten deal' and 'a bad arrangement' that one must die and be annihilated just when one is starting to make real progress toward understanding and enlightenment and happiness.  But that feeling is just a quirk of some (malcontent) natures: it doesn't prove anything.

3.  So once again we end up in good old Platonic fashion, aporetically, at an impasse.  There is simply no solution to the problem of whether death is evil without a solution to the underlying metaphysical question in philosophical anthropology:  What is man?  (The fourth of Kant's famous questions after: What can I know? What ought I do?  What can I hope for?)  And to the question What is man? there is no answer that can withstand the scrutiny of, and receive the endorsement of, all able practioners.

That is not to say that there is no correct answer.  It is to say that, even if there is, one cannot know it to be correct.  And if one cannot know it to be correct, then it is not an answer in any serious sense of the term.

So I arrive once again at the following long-held conviction.  In the final analysis one must DECIDE what one will believe and how one will live.  There is no evading one's doxastic and practical freedom and responsibility.  When it comes to the ultimate questions one must decide what is true and how one will live.  No one can help you, not even God.  For supposing God, or a divine emmisary, to appear to you right now, you would still have to decide that  it was indeed God or a being from God who was appearing to you; and you would still have to decide whether or not to credit his revelation.  What if the divine intermediary told you to murder your innocent son?  What would you say?  If you were rational your would say, "Get the hell out of here; by commanding me to do what is plainly immoral you prove that you are an illusion."  Or maybe you would decide to accept the veridicality of the experience.  Either way you would be deciding.  (See Abraham and Isaac category and Doxastic Voluntarism category)

The decision as to what to believe and how to live is of course not whimsical or thoughtless or quick or light-hearted.  It must be made with all due doxastic vigilance and fear and trembling, but there is no getting around the need for decision.  But what if you refuse to decide and simply acquiesce in something imposed from without?  Then that too is a decision on your part.