A piece of glass is fragile in that it is disposed to shatter if suitably struck. But there is no inevitability in any fragile object's ever breaking. There is no necessity that the disposition be realized. A chocolate bar is disposed to melt in certain circumstances. It has this disposition at every time at which it exists. But it might never be realized: the bar might cease to exist, not by melting, but by being eaten.
Mortality is different. To be mortal is not to be dead, or moribund, but to be liable to die, apt to die, disposed to die. In his last book, Mortality, Christopher Hitchens, dying of cancer, says that we are all dying. That is not true. What is true is that we are all disposed to die. Every animal, even in the full bloom of heath and fitness, bears within itself this disposition. Its realization, however, is inevitable.
These points are relevant to the evaluation of the Epicurean argument which some dismiss as a sophism: when death is, I am not; when I am, death is not. So death, where is thy sting? The argument seems to ignore the fact that the disposition to die is when I am and at every moment I am, and that therein lies the 'sting.'
. . . happiness (eudaimonia), according to Epicurus, is not simply a neutral or privative condition but rather a form of pleasure in its own right — what Epicurus called catastematic or (following Cicero’s Latin translation) “static” as opposed to “kinetic” pleasure. Although the precise nature of this distinction is debated, kinetic pleasures seem to be of the non-necessary kind (see below), such as those resulting from agreeable odors or sounds, rather than deriving from replenishment, as in the case of hunger or thirst. The philosophical school known as the Cyrenaics advocated increasing desires and seeking ever new ways of gratifying them.
Epicurus objected that such pleasures are necessarily accompanied by distress, for they depend upon a lack that is painful (Plato had demonstrated the problematic nature of this kind of pleasure; see Gorgias 496C–497A, Philebus 31E–32D, 46A–50C). In addition, augmenting desires tends to intensify rather than reduce the mental agitation (a distressful state of mind) that Epicurean philosophy sought to eliminate. Catastematic pleasure, on the contrary, is (or is taken in) a state rather than a process: it is the pleasure that accompanies well-being as such. The Cyrenaics and others, such as Cicero, maintained, in turn, that this condition is not pleasurable but rather neutral — neither pleasurable nor painful.
Death viewed objectively seems normal, natural, and 'acceptable.' And not evil. Is it evil that the leaves of deciduous trees fall off and die in the autumn? There are more where they came from. It is nature's way. Everything in nature goes the way of the leaves of autumn. If this is not evil, why is it evil when we fall from the Arbor Vitae? Are we not just bits of nature's fauna? Very special bits, no doubt, but wholly natural nonetheless.
Viewed subjectively, however, the matter looks decidedly different. Gaze at someone you love at a moment when your 'reasons' for loving the person are most in evidence. Then give unblinkered thought to the proposition that the dearly beloved child or spouse will die and become nothing, that the marvellous depth of interiority that has revealed itself as unique to your love will be annihilated, utterly blotted out forever, and soon.
Now turn your thought back on yourself and try to confront in all honesty and without evasion your upcoming annihilation as a subject of experience and not as just another object among objects. Focus on yourself as a subject for whom there is a world, and not as an object in the world. Entertain with existential clarity the thought that you will not play the transcendental spectator at your demise and cremation.
The horror of nonexistence from which Epicurus wanted to free us comes into view only when we view death subjectively: I as subject, not me as object, or as 'one.' No doubt one dies. But it is not possible that one die unless it is is possible that I die or you die, where 'you' is singular. Viewing myself objectively, I am at a distance from myself and thus in evasion of the fact I as subject will become nothing.
That the self as subject should be annihilated ought to strike one as the exact opposite of normal, natural, and acceptable. It should strike one as a calamity beyond compare. For there are no more where the dearly beloved came from. The dearly beloved, whether self or other, is unique, and not just in the 0ne-of-kind sense. For there is no kind whose instantiation is the dearly beloved.
Which view is true? Can either be dismissed? Can they be 'mediated' by some dialectical hocus-pocus? These are further questions.
But now it is time for a hard ride as Sol peeps his ancient head over the Superstition ridge line.
This is the tenth installment in a series on David Benatar's The Human Predicament (Oxford UP, 2017). We are still in the very rich Chapter 5, "Death." Herewith, commentary on pp. 123-128. My answer to the title question is No, but our author has very effectively shown that the Epicurean argument is not compelling, and perhaps even that it is more reasonably rejected than accepted.
It may smack of sophistry, but the Epicurean argument is one of the great arguments of philosophy, forcing us as it does to think hard about ultimates. That's what philosophy is: thinking as hard as we can, and as honestly as we can, at the very margins of intelligibility, about great questions that tax our paltry minds to their limits. It is sobering to realize that not even the greats got very far in this enterprise. How far, then, can we lesser lights expect to get? But it is noble to strive, and as St Augustine says,
Maximae res, cum parvis quaeruntur, magnos eos solent efficere.
Matters of the greatest importance, when they are investigated by little men, tend to make those men great. (Augustine, Contra Academicos 1. 2. 6.)
So much for the sermon. Now let's get to work.
The Epicurean argument proceeds from two premises, both of them highly plausible:
1) Mortalism: Death ends a person's existence.
2) Existence Requirement: For something to be bad for somebody, he must exist at the time it is bad for him.
Given these assumptions, how can being dead be bad for the one who dies? When we are, death is not; When death is, we are not. Death is therefore nothing to us, and nothing to fear.
If being dead cannot be bad for the deceased, it cannot be good either. But surely we sometimes without sarcasm or malice say of a person who has died, 'He's better off dead.' What we say makes sense, and it is sometimes true. Suppose Jack is in excruciating pain from a terminal illness and then dies. It is true of him after he dies that he is better off dead than he would have been had he lived longer and suffered more.
But how is this possible if Jack no longer exists? How can it be true of him that he is better off at a time when he no longer exists? The puzzle is generated by the conjunction of (1) and (2). If both are true, then it cannot be true of Jack that he is better off dead. But it is either obvious or extremely plausible that he is better off dead. Given that Benatar, as a metaphysical naturalist, assumes the truth of (1), it is off the table.
Now which is more credible, that Jack is better off dead, or that (2) is true? The former according to Benatar. (p. 123) So while the Epicurean cannot be decisively refuted, there are good reasons to hold that a person who is dead and therefore no longer existent can be the subject of goods and bad. This strikes me as a reasonable position to hold. Whether or not we can make sense of how something could be good or bad for a person at a time when he doesn't exist, it is evident, if not quite self-evident, that Jack is better off dead.
How Bad is Painless Murder?
Here is a another consideration that casts doubt on the Epicurean view.
To be murdered is bad, but how bad is painless murder? If one is an Epicurean, it seems one would have to 'dial down' one's assessment of the evil of murder. What follows is my example, but it is based on Benatar's discussion. Suppose Henry the hermit, about whom no one cares except Henry, is murdered while in a deep sleep by an injection that he doesn't even feel. Suppose Henry has no enemies and does not fear for his life.
If our Epicurean holds that conscious states alone are either intrinsically good or intrinsically bad, then it would seem that there is nothing bad about Henry's being murdered. If it is held that there are non-experiential goods and bads, then it would presumably be bad for Henry at the moment of his being murdered, but only then.
These counterintuitive consequences may not refute the Epicurean, but Benatar is on solid ground with his claim that death is part of the human predicament. (127)
Many find the Epicurean reasoning about death sophistical. Among those who do, we encounter some strange bedfellows. To compress the famous reasoning into a trio of sentences:
When we are, death is not. When death is, we are not. Therefore, death is nothing to us, and nothing to fear.
The distinguished German Thomist, Josef Pieper, in his Death and Immortality (Herder and Herder, 1969, orig. publ. in 1968 under the title Tod und Unsterblichkeit) speaks of
. . . a deception which men have long employed, particularly in classical antiquity, in the attempt to overcome the fear of death. I refer to the sophism of not encountering death, which Epicurus seems to have been the first to formulate; "Death is nothing to us; for as long as we are, death is not here; and when death is here, we no longer are. Therefore it is nothing to the living or the dead." [In footnote 13, p. 134, Pieper reports, "Ernst Bloch, too, has recently repeated the old sophism. Das Prinzip der Hoffnung, Frankfurt a. M., 1969, p. 1391] The same argument, or variations of it, has been repeated many times since, from Lucretius and Cicero to Montaigne and Ernst Bloch; but the idea has not thereby become more credible. (p. 29)
Why does Pieper consider the Epicurean philosopheme to be a sophism?
What Epicurus attempts to do is to quarantine death, restricting it to the future period when when we will be dead and presumably nonexistent. Or perhaps we can say that Epicurus is engaged in an illicit compartmentalization: there is being alive and there is being dead and the two compartments are insulated from each other. Thus when we are alive we are wholly alive and death is nothing to us. And when we are dead, death is also nothing to us because we no longer exist.
I read Pieper as maintaining that this is a false separation: death is not wholly other than life; it is a part of life. We are not wholly alive when we are alive. Rather, we are dying at every moment. Compare Benatar for whom death is part of life in that "death [being dead] is an evil and thus part of the human predicament." (The Human Predicament, p. 110) Part of what makes the human predicament bad is that death awaits us all as a matter of nomological necessity. Now Pieper would never say that the human condition is bad or evil, believing as he does that the world is the creation of an all-good God; but the two thinkers seem agreed on the following precise point: death cannot be assigned to the future in such a way that it is nothing to us here and now.
For Pieper, the image of death as Grim Reaper, although apt in one way, is misleading in another, suggesting as it does that death is wholly external to us, attacking us from without and cutting us down. Of course it is true that our lives are threatened from without by diseases, natural disasters, wild animals, and other humans. To this extent death is like a scythe wielded from without that cuts us down. But it is not as if we would continue to live indefinitely if not attacked from without. Death does not kill a man the way his murderer kills him. What images such as that of the Grim Reaper hide, according to Pieper, is the fact
. . . that we ourselves, in living our life away, are on the way to death; that death ripens like a fruit within us; that we begin to die as soon as we are born; that this mortal life moves towards its end from within, and that death is the foregone conclusion of our life here. (28)
If so, then death cannot be pushed off into the future where it will be nothing to us. It is something to us now in that we are now, all of us, dying. While alive we are yet mortal: subject to death. But not in the sense that it is possible that we die, or probable, but in the sense that it is necessary. To be mortal is to be potentially dead, and living is the gradual actualization of this potentiality. Death would be nothing to us while we are alive if we were non-mortal until death overtakes us. But this is not the case: we are mortal while we are alive. We don't go from being wholly alive to wholly dead; we go from being potentially dead to actually dead.
The Epicurean therapeutics is supposed to allay our fear of being dead, and to some extent it does, on the assumption that we are wholly mortal. But it does nothing to allay our anxiety over being mortal. Being mortal, and knowing that I am, I know what is coming, my personal obliteration.
Why do some find the Existence Requirement self-evident? Could it be because of a (tacit) commitment to presentism?
Here again is the Existence Requirement:
(ER) In order for something to be bad for somebody, that person must exist at the time it is bad for him. (D. Benatar, The Human Predicament, 111,115)
Assuming mortalism, after death a person no longer exists. It is easy to see that mortalism in conjunction with the Existence Requirement entails that being dead is not bad for the person who dies. (of course it might be bad for others, but this is not the issue.) Our Czech colleague Vlastimil V., though he is not a mortalist, accepts this line of reasoning. For he finds (ER) to be well-nigh self-evident. Vlastimil's view, then, is that if one is a mortalist, then then one ought to hold that the dead are not in a bad way; they are not, for example, deprived of the goods they would have had had they been alive.
Initially, I thought along the same lines. But now it seems less clear to me. For now I suspect that a tacit or explicit commitment to the questionable doctrine of presentism is what is driving the sense that (ER) is self-evident. Let's think about this.
At a first approximation, presentism is the ontological thesis that only present items exist. But 'present' has several senses, so we'd better say that on presentism, only temporally present items exist. If so, then what is wholly past does not exist, and likewise for what is wholly future. But let's not worry about future items. And to avoid questions about so-called abstract objects, which either exist at all times or else timelessly, let us restrict ourselves to concreta. So for present purposes, pun intended,
P. Presentism is the ontological thesis that, for concrete items, only temporally present items exist.
Note that 'exist' in (P) cannot be present-tensed on pain of siring the tautology, Only what exists now exists now. The idea is rather that only what exists now exists simpliciter.
Consider Tom Petty who died recently. On mortalism, he no longer exists. On presentism, what no longer exists (i.e., what existed but does not now exist) does not exist at all. So on presentism, Petty does not exist at all. If so, dead Petty cannot be subject to harms or deprivations.
It is beginning to look as if presentism is what is driving the Existence Requirement. For if presentism is true it is impossible that a person be subject to a harm or deprivation at a time at which he does not presently exist. For a time at which he does not presently exist is a time at which he does not exist at all. And if he does not exist at all, then he cannot be subject to harm or deprivation.
What if presentism is false? One way for it to be false is if the 'growing block' theory is true. We could also call it past-and-presentism. On this theory past and present items exist, but no future items exist.
On the 'growing block' theory, dead Petty exists. (This is obviously not a present-tensed use of 'exists.') He does not exist at present, but he exists in the sense that he belongs to the actual world. Once actual, always actual. Is this wholly clear? No, but it is tolerably clear and plausible. After all, we are making singular reference to Petty, a concrete actual individual, as we speak, and this is a good reason to hold that he exists, not at present of course, but simpliciter.
But what does this mean? It is not easy to explain. But if we don't have a notion of existence simpliciter, then we won't be able to make any of of the following substantive (non-tautological) claims:
A. Presentism: Only what exists now exists simpliciter.
B. Past-and-Presentism: Only what exists now and what did exist exists simpliciter.
C. Futurism: Only what exists in the future exists simpliciter.
D. Eternalism: All past, present, and future items exist simpliciter.
We understand these theories, more or less despite the questions they raise; we understand how the theories differ, and we understand that (C) is absurd. So we have an understanding of existence simpliciter. Perhaps we could say that x exists simpliciter just in case x is actual as opposed to merely possible.
I consider (B) preferable to (A).
We don't want to say that a dead man becomes nothing after death since he remains a particular, completely determinate, dead man distinct from others. If the dead become nothing after death then all the dead would be the same. If your dead father and your dead mother are both nothing, then there is nothing to distinguish them. I am assuming the reality of the past. The assumption is not obvious. An anti-realist about the past might say that the past exists only in memory and thus not in reality. But that strains credulity unless you bring God into the picture and put him to work, as presentist Alan Rhoda does in Presentism, Truthmakers, and God.
Nor do we want to say that a person who dies goes from being actual to being merely possible. There is clearly a distinction between an actual past individual and a merely possible past individual. Schopenhauer is an actual past individual; his only son Willy is a merely possible past individual.
Now suppose that something like the 'growing block' theory is true. Then one would have reason to reject the Existence Requirement. One would have reason to reject the claim that a thing can be a subject of harm/deprivation only when it exists (present tense). One could hold that Petty is deprived of musical pleasure on the strength of his having existed. Having existed, he exists simpliciter. Existing simpliciter, he is available to be the subject of harms, deprivations, awards, posthumous fame, and what all else.
Summary
If I am on the right track, one who subscribes to the Existence Requirement must also subscribe to presentism. But presentism is by no means self-evident. (ER) inherits this lack of self-evidence. This supports my earlier claim that the following aporetic triad is rationally insoluble:
1) Mortalism: Death ends a person's existence.
2) Existence Requirement: For something to be bad for somebody, he must exist at the time it is bad for him.
3) Badness of Death: Being dead is bad for the one who dies.
The Epicurean denies (3) and accepts (1) and (2). Benatar denies (2) and accepts (1) and (3). I say we have no rationally compelling reason to go either way.
Herewith, the eighth installment in a series on David Benatar's The Human Predicament (Oxford UP, 2017). We are still in the juicy and technically rich Chapter 5 entitled "Death." This entry covers pp. 102-118. People who dismiss this book unread are missing out on a lot of good philosophy. You are no philosopher if you refuse to examine arguments the conclusions of which adversely affect your doxastic complacency.
Epicurus, you will recall, is the presiding shade. His core idea, presented very simply, is that death can be nothing to us since when we are, it is not, and when it is, we are not. How then can death be bad for the person who dies? But for Benatar, being dead is bad, objectively bad, and for all. So our man faces an Epicurean challenge. I concluded a few entries back that he met the challenge in its Hedonist Variant.
If the only intrinsic goods and bads are conscious or experiential states, then being dead can't be bad since the dead don't experience anything. But there are intrinsic goods and bads that are not experiential. If so, then being dead can be bad in virtue of depriving the decedent of goods that would otherwise have accrued to him. A good or a bad can accrue to one even if it cannot be experienced by the one to whom it accrues.* That, roughly, is the Deprivation Response to the Epicurean challenge.
Benatar supplements it with the Annihilation Response: death is bad for the person who dies because it annihilates or obliterates him, whether or not it deprives him of future goods that he would otherwise have had. (102-103) One has an interest not only in future goods, but also an "independent interest" in continued existence.
The Existence Requirement
One fairly intuitive objection to the Deprivation Response, even when supplemented by the Annihilation Response, runs as follows. How can a person be deprived of anything, whether positive feelings or non-experiential goods, if he does not exist at the time the deprivation occurs? The Existence Requirement, then, is this:
ER. In order for something to be bad or good for somebody, that being must actually exist at the time at which the bad occurs. (111, 115)
It is not enough for the person to exist; the person must exist at the time at which the bad occurs. But when a person is dead, he is no more, so when is the badness of death upon him? Not when he is dead, given the truth of (ER). Recoiling from "Subsequentism," some have adopted "Priorism," the view that death is bad before the person dies. But how can being dead be bad for me if I am alive and kicking? Benatar goes on to consider three other unlikely views. But brevity is the soul of blog, and so I will ignore this discussion and jump to what I consider the heart of the matter.
The Aporetics of Being Dead
I lay it down that a philosophical problem is in canonical form when it is expressed as an aporetic polyad. When the problem before us is poured into the mold of an inconsistent triad, it fairly jumps out at us:
1) Mortalism: Death ends a person's existence.
2) Existence Requirement: For something to be bad for somebody, he must exist at the time it is bad for him.
3) Badness of Death: Being dead is bad for the one who dies.
The limbs of the triad are collectively inconsistent: they cannot (logically) all be true. Any two of the above propositions, taken together, entail the negation of the remaining one. For example, the conjunction of (1) and (2) entails the negation of (3). And yet each of the propositions makes a strong claim on our acceptance.
How do we solve this bad boy? Given that logically inconsistent propositions cannot all be true. we need to reject one of the propositions. Which one?
The Epicurean denies (3) and accepts (1) and (2). Benatar denies (2) and accepts (1) and (3). Benatar
. . . see[s] no reason why we should treat the existence requirement as a requirement. To insist that the badness of death must be analyzed in exactly the same way as other bad things that do not have the distinctive feature of death is to be insensitive to a complexity in the way the world is. (115)
Now is there any way to decide rationally between the two positions? I don't see a way.
I was initially inclined to hold that the Existence Requirement holds across the board, even for the 'state' of being dead. To put it rhetorically, how can it be bad for me to be dead when there is no 'me' at the times I am dead? It seems self-evident! Epicurus vindicatus est. But what is the source of the self-evidence?
The source seems to be the assumption that the 'state' of being dead and the state of having a broken leg are states in exactly the same sense of the term. If they are, then (ER) follows. But Benatar has brought me to see that it is not obvious that being dead is a state like any other.
The bad of a broken leg is had by me only at times at which I exist. This makes it natural to think that the bad of being dead, if a bad it is, is had by me only when I exist, which implies that being dead is not bad. But death is very different from other bad things. (115) Perhaps we can say that the bad of death is sui generis. If so, then we ought not expect it to satisfy the Existence Requirement.
We seem to be at an impasse. On the one hand we have the strong intuition that death is bad for the one who dies in that it (a) deprives the person of the goods he would otherwise have enjoyed or had non-experientially, and (b) annihilates the person. This is part of the explanation why Epicurean reasoning smacks of sophistry to so many. On he other hand, The Existence Requirement obtrudes itself upon the mind with no little force and vivacity. Our Czech colleague Vlastimil V finds it self-evident.
Benatar, however, thinks it merely "clever" to adopt the Existence Requirement, but "wise" to recognize that death is different from other bad things. (115-116) The wise course is to "respond to difference with difference and to complexity with nuance." (116)
Given my aporetic bent, I am inclined to say that the triad is rationally insoluble. I see no compelling reason to take either the side of Benatar or that of Epicurus.
What say you, Vlastimil?
________________
*The following example, mine, not Benatar's, might show this to be the case. A philosopher is holed up, totally incommunicado, in a hermitage at a remote monastery in the high desert of New Mexico. While there, the Schopenhauer Gesellschaft awards him its coveted Pessimist of the Year Award which brings with it a subtantial emolument. Unfortunately, our philosopher dies at the very instant the award is made. Not only does he not become aware of the award; he cannot become aware of it. And yet something good happened to him. Therefore, not everything good that happens to one need be something of which one is aware or even can be aware. And the same goes for the the bad.
Vlastimil asks, "In which sense exactly IS it bad FOR the young person to BE deprived AT the time he NO longer exists? It's a nice sentence to say but I just don't know what it is supposed to mean."
We are assuming mortalism, the view that the body's death is the death of the person in toto. When physical death supervenes, the person will cease to exist even if his body continues to exist for a while as a corpse.
The question is: Is it bad to be dead for the person who is dead? (Typically, it will be bad for others, but that is not the question.) And let's be clear that we are speaking of the 'state' of being dead, and not the process of dying, or the hora mortis, the time of transition from dying to being dead. I grant that the process is bad, and that the hora mortis is as well. (The hora mortis is where the true horror mortis resides.)
How then can being dead be bad? If death is the utter annihilation of the subject of experience, then, after death, there will be nothing left of me to experience anything and indeed nothing to be in a state whether I experience it or not. Clearly, a state is a state of a thing in that state. No thing, no state.
It seems reasonable to conclude that being dead cannot be bad. Of course it is not good either. It is axiologically indeterminate, to coin a phrase.
But now consider a person, call him Morty, well-situated, full of promise, who dies young. Dying young, he is deprived of all the goods he would have had had he not died young. Suppose these goods outweigh the future bads of which he will also be deprived. Don't we think that, on balance, it is bad for such a person to be dead?
Now when is it bad for him to dead? Not before he dies, obviously, and not at the time of transition, but after he dies. So, when he no longer exists, he is in the 'state' of being dead, a state made bad by his being in a 'state' of deprivation. Does this makes sense? Vlastimil says No.
Vlastimil is assuming that
(V) Nothing can have a property unless it exists at the time it has the property.
So Morty can't be deprived unless he exists at the time he is deprived. But Morty does not exist at the time at which he is said to be deprived; hence Morty is not deprived.
But isn't it true that Morty is dead? I should think so. So Morty has the property of being dead at times at which he does not exist. If so, it is false that nothing can have a property unless it exists at the time it has the property. But then Morty can be deprived and be in a bad way at times at which he does not exist.
It seems that what is true is not (V) but
(V*) Nothing can have a property unless it exists at the times it has it, or existed at earlier times.
(V*) preserves our anti-Meinongian intuition that a thing cannot have properties unless it exists. It is just that a thing that did exist can have properties at times at which it no longer exists.
Above I said that a state is a state of a thing in that state: no thing, no state. But now it appears that, while this is true, we should add the codicil: a thing can be in a state when it does not exist provided there were earlier times at which it did exist.
I don't deny that this way of looking at the matter raises problems of its own. Before Morty came to be he was, arguably, nothing at all, not even a possibility. (There was, before he came to be, the possibility that someone having his properties come to be, but no possibility that he, that very individual, come to be. He did not pre-exist his coming to be as a merely possible individual.) After he passed away, however, he did not revert to being nothing at all. After all, he was, and his name, so to speak, remains inscribed on the Roster of the Actual.
There is singular reference to wholly past individuals in the way there is no singular reference to wholly future individuals. Pace Meinong, however, there is no reference to the nonexistent. So past individuals, though not present, in some sense are. This seems to show that presentism cannot be true. I mean the view that only what exists in the temporal present exists, full stop. When a man dies he does not go from actual to merely possible; he remains actual, though no longer present.
Compare a merely possible past individual such as Schopenhauer's only son Will Schopenhauer with Schopenhauer. The latter has a rather higher ontological status than the former. The latter, though no longer present, once was present and remains actual. The former never was present and never was actual.
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.
This is the sixth in a series on David Benatar's The Human Predicament (Oxford UP, 2017). We are now in Chapter 5. I will need to proceed slowly through this rich and detailed chapter. There is a lot to learn from it. The entry covers pp. 92-101.
Does Death Release Us From the Human Predicament?
Logically prior questions: Is the human condition a predicament? And what does this mean?
Benatar holds that the human condition is a predicament. I agree. But it depends on what exactly a predicament is. I would define a predicament as an unsatisfactory state of affairs that calls for some sort of solution or amelioration or redemption or salvation or escape. I would add, however, that the solution cannot be easy or trivial, but also not impossible. Thus I do not build insolubility into my definition of 'predicament.' Call mine the weak sense of 'predicament.' This seems at first to accord with Benatar's understanding of the term. He tells us that "Real predicaments . . . are those in which there is no easy solution." (94, emphasis added.) 'No easy solution' conversationally implies that there might be a hard solution.
But he also speaks of 'the intractability of real predicaments, of which the human predicament may well be the paradigmatic example." (94) If our predicament is intractable, then it is insoluble. I suspect that this is what Benatar really holds. Call this the strong sense of 'predicament.' Accordingly, he holds, not that our predicament is difficult of solution, but that it is insoluble, and thus that a solution is impossible.
If so, then death, which he takes to be total annihilation of the person, is no solution and "only deepens the predicament." (94) This is a curiously counter-intuitive claim. If life is as objectively bad as Benatar says it is, then one might naturally see death not as a Grim Reaper, but as a Benign Releaser. One might think that if life is bad, then death must be at least instrumentally good insofar as it puts an end to suffering. Benatar's view, however, is that "death is no deliverance from the human predicament, but a further feature of it." (96)
How is that for a deeply pessimistic view? We are caught in an existential vise, squeezed between life which is bad and death which is also bad. Everyone alive will die. While alive we are in a bad way. When dead we are also in a bad way. There is no escape for those who have had the misfortune of being born. So being born is bad twice over: because life is bad and being dead is as well.
Benatar versus Silenus
Some confuse Benatar's attitude toward death with that of Silenus.
Silenus holds that death is not an evil. Death is not an evil because it removes us from a condition which on balance is not good, a condition which on balance is worse than nonexistence. This, the wisdom of Silenus, if wisdom it is, is reported by Sophocles (Oedipus at Colonus, ll. 1244 ff.) and quoted by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, section 3:
There is an ancient story that King Midas hunted in the forest a long time for the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, without capturing him. When Silenus at last fell into his hands, the king asked what was the best and most desirable of all things for man. Fixed and immovable, the demigod said not a word, till at last, urged by the king, he gave a shrill laugh and broke out into these words: "O wretched ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is -- to die soon."
Benatar agrees with the first sentence, but not the second. For if dying and being dead are bad, then there is nothing good about dying sooner rather than later.
But Is Death Bad?
To be precise, the question is whether death is bad for the person who dies. If your child dies, then that is bad for you; the question, however, is whether it is bad for the child. And note that by 'death' we mean the 'state' of being dead, not the process of dying. There is no question but that dying, with its miseries and indignities, is bad for many. The real question, however, is whether you are in a bad way after you have finished dying. And to reiterate the obvious, Benatar is a mortalist who assumes that physical death is the annihilation of the person.
The Epicurean Challenge in its Hedonistic Form
Benatar maintains that death does not release us from the objectively bad human predicament because "death is an evil [a bad thing] and thus part of the human predicament." (110) Death is no escape, but part of the problem. But then he faces the arguments of Epicurus and his followers according to which death is not bad. If Epicurus and Co. are right, then, even if life is objectively bad for all, there is a Way Out, there is a solution to our predicament. The first Epicureasn argument to consider invokes a hedonistic premise.
When I am dead I won't be conscious of anything: I won't sense or feel anything. I won't feel pleasure or pain or be aware of being dead. So how can being dead be bad? This assumes that conscious states alone, or what Benatar calls "feelings," are intrinsically good or bad. The argument, which is close to what the historical Epicurus maintains, is this:
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.
The soundness of the argument may be doubted since the hedonistic premise is not self-evident. It implies that nothing is bad for a person of which he is not aware. Suppose your spouse cheats on you but you never find out. Intuitively, you have been wronged even if you remain forever in the dark about it and thus never have any negative feelings about it. Benatar:
It seems that your spouse's dalliances are bad for you even though they do not lead to any bad feelings in you. If that is so, then perhaps death can be bad for the person who dies even though it leads to no bad feelings. (99)
The hedonist might respond by saying that one could become aware of one's spouse's infidelity and come to feel negatively about it but one could not come to feel negatively about being dead. Or the hedonist might just insist on his premise. But suppose you do become aware of your spouse's infidelity and come to feel negatively about it. Do you have negative feelings because it is bad to be betrayed? Or is it bad to be betrayed because of the negative feelings?
Intuitively, what makes the betrayal bad is not the negative feeling elicited when and if the betrayal is discovered. The betrayal is intrinsically bad in and of itself. What justified the bad feelings is the underlying fact of the betrayal which is bad in itself whether or not it causes bad feeling when discovered.
If this is right, then hedonism is not the correct account of good/bad. If so, "negative feelings are not the the only things that are intrinsically bad." (100) And if this is right, then the Epicurean argument in its hedonist form is no refutation of Benatar. I think we should agree that the argument in its hedonist form is not compelling.
Robert Blake is back in the news, which fact justifies, as if justification is needed, a re-post from 18 May 2011.
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Epicurus (circa 341-271 B.C.) wrote the following to a disciple:
I understand from you that your natural disposition is too much inclined toward sexual passion. Follow your inclinations as you will provided only that you neither violate the laws, disturb well-established customs, harm any one of your neighbors, injure your own body, nor waste your possessions. That you be not checked by some one of these provisos is impossible; for a man never gets any good from sexual passion, and he is fortunate if he does not receive harm. (Italics added, Letters, Principal Doctrines, Vatican Sayings, trans. R. M. Geer, Macmillan, 1987, pp. 69-70)
Had Bill Clinton heeded this advice, kept his penis in harness, and his paws off the overweight intern, he might have left office with an impressive legacy indeed. But instead he will schlep down the centuries tied to Monica like Abelard to Heloise -- except for the fact that he got off a lot easier than poor Abelard.
Closer to home is the case of Robert Blake whose lust led him into a tender trap that turned deadly. He was very lucky to be acquitted of the murder of Bonnie Lee Bakeley. Then there was the case of the dentist whose extramural activities provoked his dentist wife to run him down with the family Mercedes. The Bard had it right: "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned."
Most recently, Dominique Strauss-Kahn has secured himself a place in the annals of libertinage while wrecking his career. Ah, those sophisticated Frenchmen.
This litany of woe can be lengthened ad libitum. My motive is not Schadenfreude, but a humble desire to learn from the mistakes of others. Better that they rather than I should pay my tuition in the school of Hard Knocks. Heed me, muchachos, there is no more delusive power on the face of the earth than sex. Or as a Turkish proverb has it, Erkegin sheytani kadindir, "Man's devil is woman." And conversely.
It would be pleasant to think that when one is dead one will be wholly out of harm's way. But is that true? Here is some Epicurean reasoning:
1. Death is annihilation. (Materialist assumption) 2. A harm is a harm to someone or something: for there to be a harm, there must be a subject of harm. (Conceptual truth) 3. Nothing is a subject of a harm at a time at which it does not exist. (Plausible principle) Therefore 4. No dead person is a subject of harm. Therefore 5. Death (being dead) cannot be a harm to one who is dead.
Assuming that (1) is accepted, the only way of resisting this argument is by rejecting (3). And it must be admitted that (3), though plausible, can be reasonably rejected. Suppose I promise a dying man that I will take good care of his young and healthy dog after he dies. But I renege on my promise in order to save myself the hassle by having the dog euthanized. Epicurus in hand, I reason, "There is no harm to my friend since he no longer exists, and there is no harm to the dog because its transition to nonexistence will be quick and painless. Caring for the mangy mutt, however, is a harm to me for years to come."
Thomas Nagel would disagree and call my reneging "an injury to the dead man." ("Death" in Mortal Questions, Cambridge UP, 1979, p. 6) For Nagel, "There are goods and evils which are irreducibly relational; they are features of the relations between a person, with spatial and temporal boundaries of the usual sort, and circumstances which may not coincide with him either in space or in time." (p. 6)
Failing to do what I promised a man I would do after his demise is such an evil to the man. Being dead is a circumstance that does not temporally coincide with the life span of the one who will die. In general, a thing can have properties at times at which it does not exist provided it once existed. Frege's posthumous fame is a property he now possesses even though he no longer exists.
A Nagelian rejection of (3) is respectable and plausible as a means of turning aside the Epicurean argument. But it is scarcely compelling. For the Epicurean can simply insist that there are no relational harms. After all, there is something metaphysically murky about maintaining that a person who is nothing is yet the subject of a harm or injury simply on the strength of his having once existed. If you are now nothing, then you are now nothing: why should your once having been something be relevant?
So it looks like a stand-off, an aporetic impasse. The considerations for and against (3) seem to cancel each other.
One consideration in favor of (3) is presentism, the doctrine that the present time and its contents alone exist. If the present alone exists, then past individuals do not exist at all. If so, they cannot be subject to harms. A consideration contrary to (3) is our strong intuition that harms and injuries can indeed be inflicted upon the dead. The dead, if nonexistent, do not have desires, but we are strongly inclined to say that they have interests, interests subject to violation. (The literary executor who burns the manuscripts entrusted to him; the agent of Stalin who deletes references to Trotsky from historical documents, etc.)
But suppose the dead are subject to harms. If so, then they are presumably also subject to missing out on various goods that they would have enjoyed had they lived longer. 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.
This suggests that, contra Epicurus, one can rationally fear being dead. What one rationally fears when one fears one's being dead is a future state of affairs in which one cannot enjoy goods that one would have enjoyed had one lived longer.
This makes sense but is also raises thorny questions. One concerns the oddness of this state of affairs. Not only does it involve a counterfactual; who or what is the subject of this future state of affairs? There won't be one!
A second question concerns whether or not states of affairs can be said to be good or bad if they do not involve living beings. If I understand Philippa Foot, her view is that good and bad are grounded in living organisms and in nothing else where, roughly, goodness is proper functioning, and evil a natural defect or lack of proper functioning. If so, there cannot be any good or bad states of affairs whose subject is a dead animal.
Here is one way to construe the Epicurean argument:
A. No person P can rationally fear any state S such that, in S, P isn't having any experiences. B. A dead person is in a state, being dead, such that he is not having any experiences. Ergo C. No person P can rationally fear being dead.
A correspondent suggests that this is indeed the Epicurean argument, but goes on to question (A).
I too question (A). Suppose a man makes sure that his wife and children will be provided for should he die by doing such things as eliminating debts, taking out a life insurance policy, etc. He rationally fears a future state in which he won't be having any experiences, namely, the state in which his wife and children survive his demise but lack the wherewithal to live in the style to which they have become accustomed.
It thus appears that (A) is false. If so, the above argument is unsound. But is the above argument the only or best construal of the Epicurean reasoning?
I take the major premise to be, not (A), but
A*. No person P can rationally fear any state S of P such that, in S, P isn't having any experiences.
Now isn't (A*) self-evidently true?
Why then do so many find the Epicurean reasoning sophistical? To Philip Larkin in "Aubade" it is "specious stuff":
This is a special way of being afraid No trick dispels. Religion used to try, That vast moth-eaten musical brocade Created to pretend we never die, And specious stuff that says No rational being Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing That this is what we fear — no sight, no sound, No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, Nothing to love or link with, The anaesthetic from which none come round.
This is good poetry but bad philosophy. Larkin seems not to grasp that the question is not whether we fear "The anaesthetic from which none come round," but whether it is rational to fear it.
UPDATE (2 December):
Daniel M. writes,
(A*) isn't self-evident to me. Suppose you're told there's a 1/10 chance you'll die in your sleep tonight. Supposing you desire to keep living, wouldn't you fear ending up in the state of death tonight? And given your desires, wouldn't the fear be rational?
BV: I would say that the object of your rational fear is not being dead, but the transition to being dead which I described in my original post as ego loss, the sensation of your self irrevocably dissolving. The hour of death is a living dying, not a being dead. It is that living dying, or conscious dying, that reasonably horrifies us, and for which there is no Epicurean, but there is a Christian, cure. (See my original post.)
D. M. goes on to point that there are intrinsic and extrinsic aspects to one's being dead that affect the overall Epicurean argument. Discussing them would require a separate post.
There is dying, there is being dead, and there is the momentary transition from the one to the other.
While we rightly fear the suffering and indignity of dying, especially if the process is drawn out over weeks or months, it is the anticipation of the moment of death that some of us find horrifying. This horror is something like Heideggerian Angst which, unlike fear (Furcht), has no definite object. Fear has a definite object; in this case the dying process. Anxiety is directed -- but at the unknown, at nothing in particular.
For what horrifies some of us is the prospect of sliding into the state of nonbeing, both the sliding and the state. Can Epicurus help?
If the Epicurean reasoning works for the state of being dead, it cannot work for the transition from dying to being dead. Epicurus reasoned: When I am, death is not; when death is; I am not. So what is there to fear? If death is the utter annihilation of the subject of experience, then, after death, there will be nothing left of me to experience anything and indeed nothing to be in a state whether I experience it or not. Clearly, a state is a state of a thing in that state. No thing, no state.
This reasoning strikes me as cogent. On the assumption that physical death is the annihilation of the person or self, then surely it is irrational to fear the state one will be in when one no longer exists. Again, no thing, no state; hence no state of fear or horror or bliss or anything. Of course, coming to see rationally that one's fear is irrational may do little or nothing to alleviate the fear. But it may help if one is committed to living rationally. I'm a believer in the limited value of 'logotherapy' or self-help via the application of reason to one's life.
I suffer from acrophobia, but it hasn't kept me away from high places and precipitous drop-offs on backpacking trips. On one trip into the Grand Canyon I had to take myself in hand to get up the courage to cross the Colorado River on a high, narrow, and swaying suspension bridge. I simply reasoned the thing out and marched briskly across staring straight ahead and not looking down. But then I am a philosopher, one who works at incorporating rationality into his daily life.
Why then do so many find the Epicurean reasoning sophistical? To Philip Larkin in "Aubade" it is "specious stuff":
This is a special way of being afraid No trick dispels. Religion used to try, That vast moth-eaten musical brocade Created to pretend we never die, And specious stuff that says No rational being Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing That this is what we fear — no sight, no sound, No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, Nothing to love or link with, The anaesthetic from which none come round.
It seems clear that our boozy poet has failed to grasp the Epicurean reasoning.
Still, there is the moment of death, the moment in which the self helplessly dissolves, knowing that it is dissolving. My claim is that it is this loss of control, this ego loss, that horrifies us. Ever since the sense of 'I' developed in us we have been keeping it together, maintaining our self-identity in and through the crap storm of experience. But at the moment of dying, we can no longer hold on, keep it together. We will want to cling to the familiar, and not let go. This I suggest is what horrifies us about dying. And for this horror the reasoning of Epicurus is no anodyne.
So I grant that there is something quick and specious about the Epicurean cure. If one is rational, it has the power to assuage the fear of being dead, but not the fear of dying, the fear of ego loss.
I consider it salutary to cultivate this fear of dying. It is the sovereign cure to the illusions and idolatries of worldliness. But the cultivation is hard to accomplish, and I confess to rarely feeling the horror of dying. It is hard to feel because our natural tendency is to view everything without exception objectively, as an object. The flow of intentionality is ever outward toward objects, so much so that thinkers such as John-Paul Sartre have denied that there is any subject of experience, any source of the stream of intentionality. (See his The Transcendence of the Ego.)
Everyone knows that one will die; the trick, however is not just to think, but to appreciate, the thought that I will die, this unique subjective unity of consciousness and self-consciousness. This is a thought that is not at home in the Discursive Framework, but straddles the boundary between the Sayable and the Unsayable. My irreducible ipseity and haecceity of which I am somehow aware resists conceptualization. Metaphysics, just as much as physics, misses the true source of the horror of death. For if metaphysics transforms the I or ego into a soul substance, then it transforms it into an object. (Cf. the Boethian objectifying view of the person as an individual substance of a rational nature.) An immaterial object is still an object. As long as I think of myself from the outside, objectively, from a third-person point of view, it is difficult to appreciate that it is I, the first person, this subjective center and source of acts who will slide into nonbeing.
Now we come to "that vast moth-eaten musical brocade," religion, "created to pretend we never die." Although this is poetic exuberance and drunken braggadocio, there is a bit of truth that can be squeezed out of Larkin's effusion. The religious belief in immortality can hide from us the horror and the reality of death. It depends on how 'platonizing' the religion is.
Christianity, however, despite its undeniable affinities with Platonism (as well appreciated by Joseph Ratzinger, the pope 'emeritus,' in Introduction to Christianity), resolutely denies our natural immortality as against what is standardly taken to be the Platonic view. On Christianity we die utterly, and if there is any hope for our continuance, that hope is hope in the grace of God.
Is there then any cure for the horror of death? In my healthy present, my horror is that of anticipation of the horror to come. The real horror, the horror mortis, will be upon us at the hora mortis, the hour of death, when we feel ourselves sliding into the abyss.
In extremis, there is only one cure left, that of the trust of the little child mentioned at Matthew 18:3. One must let oneself go hoping and trusting that one will get oneself back. Absent that, you are stuck with the horror.
Nothing would be more foolish and futile than to take the advice of a different drunken poet, and "Rage, rage against the dying of the light." The dim light of the ego must die to rise again as spirit. In fact, it is the ego in us that 'proves' in a back-handed sort of way that we are spiritual beings. Only a spiritual being can say 'I' and saying it and thinking it isolate himself, distancing himself from his Source and from other finite selves even unto the ultimate Luciferian conceit that one is self-sufficient.
When we are, death is not; when death is, we are not.
Some say people hold to religion because of its comforts. A superficial way of thinking given religion's moral demands and the fears it inspires. It was precisely such fears for which Epicurean materialism was prescribed as anodyne.
Materialism has its comforts too. Will you then say that people believe it because it is comforting?
Materialism has its comforts but it also renders human life meaningless. That goes on the debit side of the balance sheet.
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.
Epicurus (circa 341-271 B.C.) wrote the following to a disciple:
I understand from you that your natural disposition is too much inclined toward sexual passion. Follow your inclinations as you will provided only that you neither violate the laws, disturb well-established customs, harm any one of your neighbors, injure your own body, nor waste your possessions. That you be not checked by some one of these provisos is impossible; for a man never gets any good from sexual passion, and he is fortunate if he does not receive harm. (Italics added, Letters, Principal Doctrines, Vatican Sayings, trans. R. M. Geer, Macmillan, 1987, pp. 69-70)
Had Bill Clinton heeded this advice, kept his penis in harness, and his paws off the overweight intern, he might have left office with an impressive legacy indeed. But instead he will schlep down the centuries tied to Monica like Abelard to Heloise -- except for the fact that he got off a lot easier than poor Abelard.
Closer to home is the case of Robert Blake whose lust led him into a tender trap that turned deadly. He was very lucky to be acquitted of the murder of Bonnie Lee Bakeley. Then there was the case of the dentist whose extramural activities provoked his dentist wife to run him down with the family Mercedes. The Bard had it right: "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned."
Most recently, Dominique Strauss-Kahn has secured himself a place in the annals of libertinage while wrecking his career. Ah, those sophisticated Frenchmen.
This litany of woe can be lengthened ad libitum. My motive is not Schadenfreude, but a humble desire to learn from the mistakes of others. Better that they rather than I should pay my tuition in the school of Hard Knocks. Heed me, muchachos, there is no more delusive power on the face of the earth than sex. Or as a Turkish proverb has it, Erkegin sheytani kadindir, "Man's devil is woman." And conversely.
1. Death is annihilation. (Materialist assumption) 2. A harm is a harm to someone or something: for there to be a harm, there must be a subject of harm. (Conceptual truth) 3. Nothing is a subject of a harm at a time at which it does not exist. (Plausible principle) Therefore 4. No dead person is a subject of harm. Therefore 5. Death (being dead) cannot be a harm to one who is dead.
Assuming that (1) is accepted, the only way of resisting this argument is by rejecting (3). And it must be admitted that (3), though plausible, can be reasonably rejected. Suppose I promise a dying man that I will take good care of his young and healthy dog. But I renege on my promise in order to save myself the hassle by having the dog euthanized. Epicurus in hand, I reason, "There is no harm to my friend since he doesn't exist, and there is no harm to the dog because its transition to nonexistence will be quick and painless. Caring for the dog, however, is a harm to me. Sure, I will break my promise, but on consequentialist grounds, what's wrong with that?"
Thomas Nagel would disagree and call my reneging "an injury to the dead man." ("Death" in Mortal Questions, Cambridge UP, 1979, p. 6) For Nagel, "There are goods and evils which are irreducibly relational; they are features of the relations between a person, with spatial and temporal boundaries of the usual sort, and circumstances which may not coincide with him either in space or in time." (p. 6) Death is such an evil. Being dead is a circumstance that does not temporally coincide with the decedent. In other words, a thing can have properties at times at which it does not exist provided it once existed. (Few if any would claim that a thing can have properties at times at which it does not exist if it never existed. And so it is not an evil for Schopenhauer's never- existent son 'Will' that he never existed.)
A Nagelian rejection of (3) is respectable and plausible as a means of turning aside the Epicurean argument. But it is scarcely compelling. For the Epicurean can simply insist that there are no relational harms. After all, there is something metaphysically murky about maintaining that a person who is nothing is yet the subject of a harm or injury simply on the strength of his having once existed. If you are now nothing, then you are now nothing: why should your once having been be relevant?
So it looks like a stand-off, an aporetic impasse. The considerations for and against (3) seem to cancel each other.
One consideration in favor of (3) is presentism, the doctrine that the present time and its contents alone exist. If the present alone exists, then past individuals do not exist at all. If so, they cannot be subject to harms. A consideration contrary to (3) is our strong intuition that harms and injuries can indeed be inflicted upon the dead. The dead may not have desires, but we are strongly inclined to say that they have interests, interests subject to violation. (The literary executor who burns the manuscripts entrusted to him; the agent of Stalin who deletes references to Trotsky from historical documents, etc.)
Are there nonexistent objects in the sense in which Meinong thought there are? One reason to think so derives from the problem of reference to the dead. The problem can be displayed as an aporetic tetrad:
1. A dead person no longer exists. 2. What no longer exists does not exist at all. 3. What does not exist at all cannot be referred to or enter as a constituent into a state of affairs. 4. Some dead persons can be referred to and can enter as constituents into states of affairs. (For example, 'John Lennon' in 'John Lennon is dead' refers to John Lennon, who is a constituent of the state of affairs, John Lennon's being dead.)
Despite the plausibility of each member, the above quartet is logically inconsistent. The first three propositions entail the negation of the fourth. Indeed, any three entail the negation of the remaining one. Now (1) and (4) count as data due to their obviousness. They are 'datanic' as opposed to 'theoretical' like the other two. Therefore, to relieve the logical tension we must either reject (2) or reject (3).
To reject (2) is to reject Presentism according to which only temporally present items exist. One could hold that both past and present items (tenselessly) exist, or that past, present, and future items (tenselessly) exist. Such anti-presentist theories break the two-way link between existence and temporal presentness: what is temporally present exists, but what exists need not be temporally present.
But another option is to reject (3). One could adopt the view of Alexius von Meinong according to which there are items that stand jenseits von Sein und Nichtsein, "beyond being and nonbeing." These items have no being whatsoever. Meinong's examples include the golden mountain (a possible object) and the round square (an impossible object). His doctrine was misunderstood by Russell and generations of those influenced by him. The doctrine is not that nonexistent objects have a mode of being weaker than existence, but that they have no being whatsoever. And yet they are not nothing! They are not nothing inasmuch as we can refer to them and predicate properties of them. They are definite items of thought possessing Sosein but no Sein, but are not mere accusatives of thought. A strange view, admittedly, and I do not accept it. (See my A Paradigm Theory of Existence, Kluwer 2002, pp. 38-42.) But distinguished philosophers have and do: Butchvarov, Castaneda, T. Parsons, Routley/Sylvan, et al.)
So Meinongianism is a theoretical option. The Meinongian line gives us a way to answer Epicurus. For Epicurus death is not an evil because when we are, death is not, and when death is, we are not. The point is that at no time is there a subject possessing the property of being dead. When I am alive, I am not dead. And when I am dead, I do not exist. It is not just that when I am dead I no longer presently exist, but that I do not exist at all. (Presentism seems part and parcel of the Epicurean position.) And because I do not exist at all when I am dead, I cannot have properties. (Anti-Meinongianism is also part and parcel of the Epicurean position: existence is a necessary condition of property-possession.) But then I cannot, when dead, have the property of being dead, in which case there is no state of affairs of my being dead. And that gives us a deep ontological reason for denying that death is an evil: if there is no state of affairs of my being dead, then there is nothing to possess the property of being evil. (Note that it is not the property of being dead that is evil, or me the individual, but the putative state of affairs of my being dead.)
As I read Epicurus, his position on death, namely, that being dead is not an evil for the one who is dead, requires both Presentism and Anti-Meinongianism. If that is right, then one can answer Epicurus either by rejecting Presentism or by accepting Meinongianism.
Anti-Presentism breaks the two-way link between existence and temporal presentness, while Meinongianism breaks the two-way link between existence and property-possession. The anti-presentist faces the challenge of giving a coherent account of tenseless existence, while the Meinongian owes us an explanation of how there can be items which actually have properties while having no being whatsoever. Epicureanism maintains both links but flies in the face of the powerful intuition that death is an evil.
A good solution eludes us. And so once again we end up in good old Platonic fashion up against the wall of an aporia.
A reader suggests that the "Epicurean argument leads to nihilism. Why live if death is not an evil to you? (assuming there is no one to grieve you)."
In Letter to Menoeceus, Epicurus makes the point that death is ". . . of no concern to us; for while we exist death is not present, and when death is present we no longer exist. It is therefore nothing either to the living or the dead since it is not present to the living, and the dead no longer are." (125)
If this is the Epicurean argument, then I do not see how it leads to nihilism, if 'leads to' means 'entails' and if nihilism is the view that life is not worth the trouble. The Epicurean point is not that death is good but that it is axiologically neutral: neither good nor bad. This follows from his assumption that ". . . all good and evil lie in sensation and sensation ends with death." If being dead were good, then I think one could reasonably infer nihilism. For if being dead were good, then being alive would be either bad or neutral, both of which are forms of nihilism.
But the Epicurean view is that being dead is value-neutral whence it follows that being alive is either good or bad, and only one of these is nihilism. Therefore, the Epicurean position does not entail nihilism.
It is worth noting that the historical Epicurus had a therapeutic end in view: he wanted to relieve us of our fear of death. This soteriological motive is at the back of his claim that death is nothing to us. Because it is nothing to us, we have nothing to fear from it. So if you accused him of nihilism he would probably respond with au contraire or rather the Greek equivalent. He would probably say that his purpose is a life-affirming one. His aim is to make men happy by removing from them the fear of death.
To clear Epicurus of the charge of nihilism is of course not to pronounce his position probative.
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