Herewith, a rumination on death with Epicurus as presiding shade. The following two propositions are both logically inconsistent and yet very plausible:
1. Being dead is not an evil for anyone at any time.
2. Being dead at a young age is an evil for some.
Obviously, the limbs of the dyad cannot both be true. Each entails the negation of the other. And yet each limb lays serious claim to our acceptance.
(1) is rendered credible by Epicurean reasoning along the following lines. It is reasonably maintained that bodily death is annihilation of the self or person. Now in the absence of a person, there is nothing to possess properties, experiential or not, such as being conscious, being dead, being nonexistent, etc. We are assuming that a person's corpse cannot be the subject of the putative state of being dead. When I am dead and thus nonexistent my corpse will continue to exist for a time. (Assuming my end doesn't come in the form of 'vaporization.') But I am not my corpse. My being dead is not my corpse's being dead, for it is not dead: only what was once alive can properly be said to be dead, and my corpse is never alive. I am dead, if I am, not my corpse. So my corpse cannot be the subject of the putative state of my being dead. And anyway my being dead will obtain at future times when my corpse will not exist. So for this reason too my corpse cannot be the subject of the putative state of my being dead.
There is, then, no subject of being dead if death is annihilation. Since there is no subject, there is, strictly speaking, no state of my being dead. A state is a state of something in the state, and in this case nothing is in the state. It follows that the 'state' of my being dead cannot be an evil state. There is no such state, so it can't be evil -- or good, or anything. It furthermore follows that being dead cannot rationally be feared -- or looked forward to either. 'I'll be glad when I'm dead 'makes as little sense given the cogency of the Epicurean reasoning as 'I'll be sad when I'm dead' or Warren Zevon's 'I'll sleep when I'm dead.'
Support for (2) has its source in a widely-accepted intuition. Suppose a happy, healthy, well-situated 20 year old full of life and promise dies suddenly and painlessly in a freak accident. Almost all will agree that in cases like this being dead (which we distinguish from both the process and the event of dying) is an evil, and therefore neither good nor axiologically neutral. It is an evil for the person who is dead whether or not it is an evil for anyone else. It is an evil because it deprives him of all the intrinsic goods he would have enjoyed had he not met an untimely end.
It is not quite the same for the 90 year old. One cannot be deprived of the impossible (as a matter of conceptual necessity), and the older one gets the closer the approach to the nomologically impossible. (I assume that there is some age -- 150? -- at which it become nomologically impossible for what could reasonably count as a human being to continue to live.) So one cannot employ the same reasoning in the two cases. If we say that the being dead of the 20 year old is bad because it deprives him of future goods, we cannot give the same reason for the badness ( if it is badness) of the being dead of the 90 year old. Someone who lives a life that is on balance happy and healthy and productive and then dies of natural causes at 90 or 100 is arguably not deprived of anything by his being dead.
The problem, then, is that (1) and (2) cannot both be true, yet each is plausible.
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