The Human Predicament, page 11
The deprivation account
There is another response to the Epicurean argument—one that is available even to those who accept the Epicureans’
hedonism. According to this response, death is bad (for the being who dies) because it deprives that individual of the good that he or she would otherwise have had. This is the deprivation account of the badness of death, and it is compatible with different views about what has intrinsic value. For those who accept the hedonist view, what is bad about death is (obviously) not that it involves any intrinsically bad feelings, but instead that it deprives the person who dies of the future good feelings that he would otherwise have had if he had not died when he did.
For those who have more extensive views about what has intrinsic value, death can deprive one of other intrinsic goods. For example, desire-or preference-satisfaction views would count the fulfillment of desires or preferences as intrinsic goods. 7 On such a view, if one had a preference to complete one’s magnum opus, death would deprive one of an intrinsic good—the fulfillment of that preference—if one died before its completion. Of course, this is but one example. There are many other preferences that death prevents from being fulfilled—including the preference not to die! Death deprives us of the fulfillment of these desires and preferences.
The completion of important projects might also count as objective goods according to (at least some) so-called objective list theories. Thus, death before the completion of an important project might count as a deprivation of an intrinsic good according to such theories too.
Whichever view one takes of wellbeing, death is bad, according to the deprivation account, because it deprives the person who dies of the good that further life would have contained. Sometimes, however, a longer life would either have contained no good or it would have contained so much bad that any good would have been outweighed. In such circumstances, the deprivation account implies that death is not bad—or at least not bad all things considered.
This is not an implausible implication of the deprivation account. It is possible for the quality of life, irrespective of which view of wellbeing one has, to be (or to become) so bad that death is better than continued life. It is a further question whether suicide or euthanasia is the appropriate response to such circumstances—and I consider the suicide question in chapter 7. All we need recognize now is that death does not always deprive us of net good and that the deprivation account’s implication that death may actually be preferable in such circumstances does not appear to be a disadvantage of the account. It may even be an advantage.
Annihilation
However, while the deprivation account enjoys widespread support, we should not assume that there has to be only one reason why death is bad for the being who dies. It is entirely possible that death is bad for more than one reason. It could be that the badness of death is, at least sometimes, overdetermined.
One possibility we should consider is that death is bad in large part because it annihilates the being who dies. Death is bad not merely because it deprives one of the future good that one would otherwise have had, but also because it obliterates one. Put another way, we have an interest not only in the future goods we would have if we continued living, but also an interest in continued existence itself. Death can deprive us of the goods and also thwart the interest in continued existence.
This is not to say that the interest in continued existence is so powerful that it is always in one’s overall interest to continue living. My suggestion is compatible with thinking—and, indeed, I do think—that in some circumstances it is less bad to die than to continue living. Instead, the suggestion is only that, in dying, one loses not only whatever good that would otherwise have been in one’s future, but also one’s continued existence, in which one has an independent interest.
Despite this clarification, some people will be skeptical of my suggestion. They will argue that annihilation of a being is only bad if that person is deprived of good that he would otherwise have had. At the very most, they may concede that even when death is not bad all things considered, it may sometimes still be partly bad, but that would be the case only if the death deprived the being of some good despite its future being bad all things considered.
That is certainly one way in which a death that is, on balance, preferable may nonetheless be bad in some way.
However, my claim is more expansive than that. It is that there is a further explanation for why death is bad—and the further explanation is that one’s annihilation is an independent bad.
It is, of course, hard to prove this, but there are a number of considerations that support it. Even if some of these fail to convince, the weight of the considerations together makes the position, at the very least, plausible. I shall spell out some of these considerations, but I shall also show that the annihilation account has helpful applications and implications that count in its favor.
First, more can be said to explain why annihilation is a bad independent of any deprivation. Death brings a complete and irreversible end to the being from whose prudential perspective we are considering whether there is a deprivation. Annihilation of a being may not be the worst of fates for that being, but it certainly seems to involve a very significant loss—namely, loss of the self. Each individual, speaking in the first person, can say: “My death obliterates me. Not only am I deprived of future goods but I am also destroyed. This person, about whom I care so much, will cease to exist. My memories, values, beliefs, perspectives, hopes—my very self—will come to an end, and for all eternity.” (This concern about annihilation of a person need not be restricted to that person. Other people can also recognize the badness of that annihilation.)
I am not inventing this worry. Annihilation seems to play an important part in people’s concerns about death. If you ask people why they do not want to die, you will get that sort of answer at least as often as you will hear explanations about deprivation. People have very strong desires not to die, and death frustrates these desires.
Perhaps it will be suggested that this concern about the continued existence of the self is merely a deeply ingrained instinct with ancient evolutionary origins. Accordingly, it is pre-rational. The instinct—even though not the conscious rationalization of it—is no different from the least sophisticated life forms that also have a powerful self-preservation drive.
However, being pre-rational does not mean that it is ir rational. 8 Indeed, it seems strange that a prudential valuer would be concerned only about what he is deprived of and not also about the very existence of the being that would be deprived. To be a prudential valuer is to value things from the egoistic perspective. What’s good or bad for oneself— the ego—is one kind of egoistic consideration, but the very continued existence of the ego is another good, and its annihilation is another bad. 9
To say that the annihilation of the self or the ego is bad for the being that dies is not to commit to a metaphysically controversial view that there is some essential self that persists unaltered for the full duration of one’s life. Instead, the relevant sense of self is entirely compatible with the view that what counts (prudentially) is not personal identity (in the strict, numerical sense of “identity”), but rather psychological continuity or connectedness. 10 After all, annihilation irrevocably terminates the string of psychologically connected states that constitute one’s life, and that is something that a prudential valuer can regret.
Support for the badness of annihilation can also be drawn from Frances Kamm’s “Limbo Man,” 11 who prefers “putting off a fixed quantity of goods of life by going into a coma and returning to consciousness at a later point to have them,” 12 rather than having those goods immediately and then dying. In other words, Limbo Man has a choice between two life options. Both contain the same amount of good, and thus the choice between the options is not a choice between lesser and greater deprivation. The choice is instead whether to live the life uninterrupted or to instead delay the later goods by entering the limbo of a coma. The advantage of the latter choice is to delay the point of annihilation.
Now a preference for such limbo would not be reasonable under all circumstances. If, for example, the coma lasted a very long time and one would awake, like Rip van Winkle, to find one’s loved ones long deceased and be so utterly bewildered by the changed world that the goods one had delayed were now either impossible or eclipsed by the bad, then going into limbo might not be that attractive. However, we can simply stipulate that this is not the case. Perhaps one’s loved ones similarly go into limbo and one can readily adapt to the new world. Limbo might also hold no special attraction if the post-limbo life is so brief that soon after emerging from limbo, one is annihilated. Again, we can stipulate that this is not the case—that the portion of life delayed is significant. Under such circumstances, many people might share Limbo Man’s preference. Insofar as they do share the preference, this seems to be because they think that annihilation is a bad that one does best to delay.
Another, albeit much lesser, consideration in favor of taking annihilation to be part of the badness of death is that it is consistent with (but not the same as) judgments about the destruction of objects that lack prudential value but have value of another kind. If damaging an object of value is bad, then annihilating it—an extreme form of damage—is also bad. If damage to the Grand Canyon or the Mona Lisa, for example, would be bad, then their obliteration would also be bad.
This does not preclude the possibility that utterly destroying an item of value may be less bad, all things considered, than not doing so. Perhaps some art-hater has credibly threatened to burn down the entire Louvre unless the Mona Lisa is incinerated. It is also possible to think that it may sometimes be less bad to destroy an item of value than to damage it. (One possible explanation is that allowing it to persist in a damaged state would be a constant reminder of the loss of value, whereas its destruction would be a case of “out of sight, out of mind.”) However, such thoughts do not undermine my point that destruction is a kind of damage and thus if damage is bad, destruction is also bad—even if destruction is the lesser of two bads. Even when annihilating something of value is the least bad of the options, it is nonetheless something to regret.
Paintings do not have prudential value, and many people—I am among them—deny that they have intrinsic moral value, but (some) paintings can have some kind of value. Something of value is lost when they are annihilated. It would be surprising if that were the case but that nothing of value were lost when a person is annihilated. 13
The view that death is bad partly because of the annihilation it brings about is also supported by its implications.
For example, it implies that even when one’s future would have contained no good, death is nonetheless bad in an important way for the person who dies, 14 even though it is not bad all things considered. In such circumstances, death is the lesser of two evils rather than actually being not bad at all. This seems like the right implication for reasons I shall explain.
Some might find it hard to imagine a situation in which a death deprives somebody of no good. How difficult it is depends on what view of wellbeing one has. On a hedonistic view, it is actually remarkably easy to imagine such a situation. Consider a person with a terminal condition, who is so wracked by suffering that positive feelings are simply impossible. The negative experiences are so intense and overwhelming that positive experiences are unattainable. Imagine further that the only way to avoid these negative feelings, other than death, is to render the person insensate, in which case, positive experiences are impossible for another reason. In such cases, which are all too common, death (on the hedonistic view) deprives the being who dies of no intrinsic good.
Although it is common, in response to the death of such an unfortunate, to utter the platitude that his death was “a release,” if we really believed that this was all it was (that there was nothing bad about the death for the person), then it seems it would be reasonable to celebrate rather than to mourn the death. It is true that those bereaved have suffered a loss. They must live the rest of their lives without ever being able to interact with their beloved deceased family member or friend again. It might be argued that it is the loss to the bereaved that we (and they) mourn. However, since meaningful interactions would have been impossible even if the person had not died, given how badly off he was, it is hard to see how the person’s death would be a cause for mourning even for those bereaved—that is, unless the loss of the person himself counted for something. 15
Those resistant to the idea that annihilation can be bad in itself for the one who dies might retort that we mourn the dead (for their sake) because it is only when they die that it becomes clear that there is no hope of better prospects— no hope that his condition will be reversed and that he will have positive value in his future.
This might explain some cases, but not others. There are situations in which the situation is clearly hopeless.
Consider a person suffering from end-stage metastatic cancer or the final phases of a neurodegenerative disorder and whose end is imminent. Given the current state of medical knowledge and the present limits of the therapeutic arsenal, the chances of improvement, while not logically impossible, are actually so remote that hope is utterly and thoroughly misguided. It borders on hoping for imminent resurrection, in full health, of the recently deceased. Thus, the loss of hope cannot always explain why we should mourn those whose deaths deprived them of no good.
Perhaps what we are mourning after the death is the fact that the person became so badly ill that death deprived him of no good. However, mourning on that basis would also be implausibly timed. The peak of that mourning should have been while he was suffering and it became clear that death would deprive him of no good. That is when it was really bad. When the person who had been in that situation dies and is released from his suffering, the time for celebrating would have arrived—that is, unless the death, although preferable, nonetheless was a serious bad. That bad, I suggest, is the annihilation of the one who died. It is a bad feature of death even when death is the lesser of two evils. In other words, even when death is the least bad option, all things considered, there is still something lost.
Perhaps there is another explanation of our response to this case. Perhaps what we mourn is the loss of further consciousness. 16 If consciousness is viewed as a good independent of its contents, then even if the contents of consciousness are so appalling that it is less bad, all things considered, to lose consciousness permanently, the loss of consciousness may nonetheless be a bad and something to be mourned. This explanation is not at all implausible, but it is unclear how it differs from annihilation. The irreversible cessation of consciousness is annihilation of the conscious being. (Later I shall say more about different senses of “annihilation” and “death,” and how, under some interpretations, death and annihilation do not always occur at the same time.) There is a possible response to my arguments that death is bad not merely because of the goods of which it deprives the person who dies. This response is that the loss of the self is merely another deprivation brought about by death.
According to this response, death can deprive one of various goods and among those is one’s life itself. It would follow that the badness of annihilation could be accounted for by the deprivation account alone.
Such a (re-)interpretation would render the deprivation account sympathetic to my claim that death is bad at least in part because it involves the annihilation of the being who dies. Thus, even when continued life would not have deprived the person who dies of any other goods, it would still be bad because it involved the annihilation of the being who dies. That is to say, death would still be an evil, albeit the lesser of two evils. My view is that death is an evil and thus part of the human predicament. It really makes no difference to that view whether we see the loss of one’s life as the deprivation of an additional good or as a further loss over and above any deprivations it may cause. That further loss is the loss of the being who dies.
When is death bad for the person who dies?
As a response to the Epicurean argument, the deprivation account, even when augmented by the annihilation account, faces a number of difficulties. These difficulties also confront those who reject Epicurus’s hedonistic assumptions.
This is because Epicurus’s argument has, at least on some interpretations, a further feature—that in order for something to be bad for somebody, that being must actually exist (at the time at which the bad occurs). This claim, sometimes known as the “existence requirement” 17 may be read into Epicurus’s statement that “death … is nothing to us since so long as we exist death is not with us; but when death comes, then we do not exist.”
The (implicit) suggestion is that unless one exists, one cannot be deprived of anything—whether positive feelings or non-experiential goods. 18 Nor, it is said, can anything bad—whether bad feelings or any fates that need not have any experiential component—befall one if one does not exist. In other words, to be deprived or to have something bad happen to one, one must actually exist. Things can be bad only for those who exist.
The existence requirement is denied by many (but not all) of those rejecting the Epicurean argument, including many of those who accept the deprivation account of death’s badness. They deny that one must exist in order for something to be bad for one. More specifically, they deny that one must exist at the time at which death is bad for one who dies.
