This is the seventh entry in a series on David Benatar's The Human Predicament (Oxford UP, 2017). We are still in Chapter 5 and will be here for some time. This entry covers pp. 98-102.
Recall the Issue
If one is a mortalist, but also holds that human life is objectively bad, then one might naturally view death as escape or release, and therefore as good, or at least as not bad. This is the view I would hold if I were a mortalist. I am not in fact a mortalist: I believe in God, (libertarian) freedom, and immortality. I also hold that no one can establish with certainty the existence of these three great Objects of human concern. People who think there are proofs hereabouts are engaged in metaphysical bluster. There are good arguments for the Kantian trio, but no proofs. So I might be wrong. If I am wrong, then I welcome death as release from this world of misery, malevolence, ignorance, and strife. The Grim Reaper is, in truth, a Benign Releaser.
Death, where is thy sting?
Either I move on in the hope of further moral and intellectual growth on a higher plane, or I become nothing, in which case nothing can matter to me. For in the second case there won't be any 'me.' The only nasty part is the transition, the dying; for broadly Epicurean reasons I do not consider the 'state' of being dead bad. It is not bad if I survive and it is not bad if I am annihilated.
We have seen, however, that Benatar holds that not only is life bad, but being dead is also bad. But then he faces the Epicurean challenge according to which death is nothing to us, and thus nothing bad. The Epicurean challenge comes in different forms. I judged in our last installment that he met the challenge in its hedonist variant. A little review can't hurt. The hedonist variant can be put like this (my formulation, not Benatar's):
Hedonism: Only conscious states are intrinsically either good or bad states.
Mortalism: No dead person is in a conscious state.
Therefore
No dead person is in an intrinsically bad state.
Hedonism is dubious if not untenable. The major is not obvious. Here is an example of my own. Consider the fact that there are painful conscious states. This is an intrinsically bad state of affairs. But it is not a conscious state. We now consider the deprivation response to the Epicurean challenge.
The Deprivation Response
On this response, death is bad for the one who dies because it deprives him of the intrinsic goods that he would otherwise have enjoyed. This response is consistent with different theories of the intrinsic good. Interesting, a hedonist could make this response. He could hold that what makes death bad is that it deprives the dead person of the pleasures that he otherwise would have enjoyed.
I don't think the deprivation response is compelling. Here are a couple of examples of my own.
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.
On the other hand, if the dead person is not, how can he be deprived of anything? Don't you have to be, to be deprived? If you are missing (nonexistent), how can you miss out? This strikes me as the crux of the matter to which we will come in later entries.
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.
So it is not clear to me that the deprivation response shows that being dead is bad for one who dies.
In our next episode we discuss annihilation! Stay tuned.
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