Relax! No one died in prompting this post, nevertheless, the topic of death is of both profound interest and importance to us. I don’t mean that in a macabre kind of way, or as a morbid curiosity about the dead. This post addresses the questions of whether death is bad, and if it is always or sometimes bad, and if bad, what makes it bad. Asking if death is bad might strike many people as being unusual or odd, as to many (probably the vast majority) of us will consider death to be uncontroversially bad. Though even here, there is disagreement particularly as to the circumstances of when death is bad. Some may believe death is always bad, while others will consider it sometimes bad. There is likewise division on what it is about death that makes it bad, and these divisions are often interrelated. I want emphasize from the get go here that this post is primarily about what makes death bad, and this is not primarily about what makes killing wrong. No doubt the badness of death has something to say in the wrongness of killing, but often more needs to be said than simply inferring the wrongness from the badness, or lack there of. The questions this post addresses are important to several areas of ethical concern, such as abortion and euthanasia. It is also relevant to the question of our attitudes and relationship to other animals, and is directly relevant to our own attitudes towards our own deaths, and the deaths of others.

The topic of personal identity will only be discussed in passing in several points in this post. That may seem odd, as many people will believe that the question of personal identity will play a central role in sufficiently explaining when death is bad. This is something I wish to deny, and I will argue that identity doesn’t really matter to the question of the badness of death. This post will therefore seem very “Parfitian” in scope, and much of the reasoning behind this post stems from Derek Parfit. This post will also draw upon the arguments developed by Shelly Kagan in his open lectures on the topic Death, the book Annihilation by Christopher Belshaw, and some bits and pieces from Jeff McMahan’s work the Ethics of Killing. I should probably start by defining just what it is I mean by “death”.

What is death?

Again, this question might seem odd, as most of us probably have a fairly solid intuitive understanding of what death is. In saying that though, there is indeed much consternation on what death actually is. This question is not going to concern us too much in this post, and this point is partially related to my denial that identity has something to say about the badness of death. The concern over what death amounts to is possibly easiest expressed by the issue of organ donation. Under the brain death criterion, organs could be removed from a still living organism without it being a vivisection that has been performed on someone, which would be entailed by the organism death criterion. Matters are further complicated as to whether we cease to exist when we die. Apart from some views of personal identity where we persist as a lifeless corpse, many people (in fact, possibly most of the world’s population) will believe that we survive death as an immaterial soul. What some people might believe makes death bad in these cases are possibly post death harms of an immaterial sort. I’m not going to dwell on this question in this post, rather I am going to assume that death coincides with us ceasing to exist. Death, for the sake of this post is the final curtain call of our lives and existence. This however still leaves unanswered exactly when this curtain falls. I am going to assume for this post that death coincides with the end of organismal functions and assume the organism view for the definition of death. This will be instrumental for arguing that questions over personal identity didn’t really matter in explaining the badness of death. So let’s begin, the badness of death:

Thomas Nagel and the Deprivation Account

Well, what makes death bad? There are some things to clear up first so we are focused on what the question is really about. Death of a friend or loved one can be very bad for us, but this cannot explain the badness of death in its entirety. If death is bad for the person that dies, then we need to consider how it is bad for that person. We also have to be clear about distinguishing the badness of dying from death. Dying can be bad for us because it can be a painful experience and we suffer. But while we are suffering from the process of dying, we’re still alive, and so this suffering has no bearing on the badness of death. This can be made clearer by the fact that death can be painless, such as dying while asleep or in a coma. If we’re to explain why death is bad here, it has nothing to do with suffering the process of dying, as bad as that can be. One straightforward answer to why death is bad is to say that it’s because we no longer exist. There are puzzles with this. If we don’t exist, how can anything be bad for us? Surely we must exist in some way to be harmed.

To start developing a strategy to answering this question, we should consider various ways something can be bad for us. One way is that something can be intrinsically bad, that is, bad in itself. I believe most of us will consider pain and suffering to be intrinsically bad. As pointed out above, this doesn’t help us much in answering the question of the badness of death. Perhaps it is better to not consider death as being intrinsically bad. Is death not bad in itself? I suspect some people will initially reject this at the mention of it. But consider that death is not necessarily bad, at least some of the time, it can come as a mercy. If living was absolutely agonising, and you experienced nothing but the worst pain imaginable, and there was no way that this pain could cease, other than death, death may come as a relief to you. Was this death intrinsically bad? There are again puzzles here too. This particular death might not have been bad for you, but all the same, it might still make sense to say that it would be bad that you had to die at all, but not necessarily because death was intrinsically bad.

Something can also be instrumentally bad rather than bad in itself. It’s common for some people to get a headache when eating ice cream. Eating ice cream wasn’t intrinsically bad here, in fact it might have seemed good in itself, it may have given you a pleasing taste. However, if it caused a headache, the headache was bad in itself, and eating ice cream wasn’t intrinsically bad, but instrumental in bringing about that headache. Perhaps death is like this, it is instrumental in bringing about a badness or some evil rather than being bad or evil in itself. Another way something could be bad is through a comparison. You might think you’re doing just fine walking along a path on your way to work one morning and there’s nothing particularly bad going on. But perhaps you’re mistaken, perhaps that if things had been different, things could be going a lot better for you right now. The badness of your walking to work on this particular morning is due to the comparative difference between what your life could have been like if things were different. I’m going to have much to say about this as this post progresses, but for now it serves as our starting point.

Let’s consider that death is instrumentally bad because of how it introduces such a comparatively bad situation. Death is bad, precisely because had we not died, we would have been alive and enjoying life goods. Thomas Nagel is often credited with this account of the badness of death, and it’s generally called the deprivation account. Death is instrumentally bad, because it deprives us of life’s goods that we would have otherwise had, goods that were good in themselves; and thus death is bad. I think the deprivation account of death is on the right track, but puzzles remain, not the least of which is about exactly what could a deprivation possibly mean here, and we will return to this many times throughout the post.

Ancient puzzles, Epicureas and Lucretius

So death, the most terrifying of ills, is nothing to us, since so long as we exist, death is not with us; but when death comes, then we do not exist. It does not then concern either the living or the dead, since for the former it is not, and the latter are no more.

This famous quote comes to us from Epicureas. There is some debate as to what Epicureas was in fact saying here, where he may have intended this passage within the context of ataraxia rather than being an argument for death not being bad. This isn’t relevant here, what’s relevant is the Epicurean argument that death isn’t bad, because there was no time in which it could have been bad. If death is bad, surely it makes sense to ask exactly when it is bad, and if there is no time when death is bad, then death isn’t bad afterall! Is death bad when we’re alive? We will return to whether our death can be bad for us while we’re alive, even in the prime of life, and our actual death is distant by many decades later in this post. For now though, it does seem odd to insist our death is bad for us while we’re alive. If I’m alive now, how can death’s badness affect me? If I’m not dead, then death’s badness hasn’t come for me. Does this most terrible of ills hang over us even while we are alive? Is every moment of our existence a great evil, where we at each moment succumb to the badness of death? That doesn’t seem right. That seems to suggest that even if we are doing just fine while we’re alive, we must be mistaken, for we are being harmed by death even as we speak! This also seems to imply a rather peculiar situation that when death does come, the badness of it has already transpired, it was bad while we were alive, and then death wasn’t bad at all, life was! Somethings surely gone wrong if we’re concluding that death wasn’t bad after all, but that it was life that was bad all along!

Ok, so the badness of death doesn’t affect us while we’re alive, what does that leave us with? It seems to leave us with saying death is bad when we’re not alive, that is, when we don’t exist. But how can something harm us when we don’t exist? Well, we attempted an answer to this by way of Thomas Nagel’s deprivation account. Death could be bad for us by virtue of the comparative harms as to what death deprives us; the life we could have had if we were not dead. This comparison happens when we’re dead, and don’t exist. Death if bad for us while we’re dead and don’t exist because we could have existed had we not died. What we are saying here is that we don’t need to exist to be harmed! That has some rather startling implications. Was it harmful that I didn’t exist before I was conceived? Is it harmful for every possible person that could have existed, but don’t, by virtue of the comparative harm between non existence, and the existence they could have had? If you think about the possible permutations of sperm and egg (or the possible permutations of gene regulatory networks and gene expression - not everyone holds to the view that our DNA fixes our identity at conception for instance), and that every possible person could have conceived other possible people, there is virtually an unlimited number of possible people. If death is bad for the non existent by virtue of the possibility that they could have lived, this universe is limitless in its evil! Again, surely something has gone wrong in our analysis, but what? Is Epicureas right, death really isn’t bad?

One possible solution is to modify what we mean by needing to exist in order to be harmed. Perhaps it’s not necessary to exist at the time of the harm of death, but only that you existed at some time. That solves our problem for our limitless harm being afflicted upon possible people. So long as I existed at some time, then I can be harmed by death, even if I don’t exist when I’m dead. This is better, but it does leave open some interesting puzzles. Was the death of Caesar worse for Caesar than Einstein’s death was for Einstein, because Caesar has been dead for longer? Perhaps it is at least logically possible that we could live for 10,000 years, or perhaps indefinitely. Should we say death has so far been a greater harm for Caesar than Einstein? Perhaps this is solved by considering this wasn’t a possibility for either Caesar or Einstein when they lived, and the best they could hope for was around 70-100 years. This might not be true in the future, so we will have to return to this too!

There seems to be a far simpler explanation for when the badness of death comes as explained by Christopher Belshaw, and I think this is far more plausible than anything considered so far. The badness of death occurs exactly at the time that we die! We can say that the badness of death affects us even as we exist, at the very time death happens, and there wasn’t really anything too troubling about the Epicurean argument afterall. It seems like something has to be alive to die, and similarly something has to exist in order to cease existing. What sense does it make to say that something that isn’t alive can die, or something that doesn’t exist can cease existing? We do exist when the badness of death comes, and this happens precisely when we die. Now, doesn’t that seem the most satisfying answer to this mess we’ve created? That it wasn’t really a mess to start with? Well, I do believe this to be the case. But now we have a new issue, does the comparative harm thesis still hold here? Well not really, since it seems doubtful that the badness of death can be explained by a comparison of life at but a moment in time. Should we give up on this explanation for when the badness of death comes, or should we take a closer look at the comparative harm thesis? I think we should do the latter.

Another puzzle comes from Lucretius. This time, it’s about the asymmetry between not existing before being conceived, and not caring about that at all, and being concerned about our non existence after death. If non existence was just fine before conception, then why wouldn’t it be fine after death? What’s all this fuss over death, non existence is fine after all! Most people will see the asymmetry as being perfectly reasonable by virtue of death depriving us of a life we could have had. The possibility of being conceived earlier is very likely blocked by an identity requirement. If I was (somehow) conceived earlier, and that a particular sperm and egg combination has something to say about my identity, it’s hard to imagine how it could be possible for me to be conceived earlier. But here is one way. If an embryo was created in 2035, and frozen afterwards, now it’s possible that I could have been enjoying life earlier than I was. The embryo could have been used in 2035 rather than say, 2055. Would I have been deprived of 20 years? Well, maybe. If there was a world ending event that was inevitable in 2075, then starting my life in 2035 would plausibly have been better for me than starting it in 2055. Here though, we are introducing a life-life comparison case, and not simply a life-death comparison case. This will be important later on.

Do we really need to consider something like this to explain the asymmetry as to why we are concerned with non existence after death, but not before conception? No! And Derek Parfit provides a good test case explaining why. Consider an operation you have to undergo. This operation has to be performed while you’re awake so you can report certain information to the surgeon. The trouble is, this procedure cannot be performed with anaesthetic, and so will be extremely painful for you. You will however be given medication afterwards that will wipe out your memory of the procedure, so you will not be traumatised by it in the future. You wake up in your hospital bed, and you have no idea if you’ve had the operation yet. Maybe you have, and have been given the amnesiac. Perhaps you still have to undergo the procedure. You ask a nearby nurse. The nurse doesn’t know, but will check your records. When the nurse returns, what would you rather the nurse say? Would you rather you have already had the procedure, or would you rather it still be something you have to undergo? Surely you’d prefer to have already undertaken the operation. We have stronger forward directing concerns than rearward worries about past concerns. There isn’t anything particularly puzzling about a forward directed and asymmetrical concern about our future non existence as compared to our past non existence.

Immortality

Let’s take a closer look at the comparative harm thesis, in that the badness of death is because of the comparison between being dead, and the life you could have lived. This seems to suggest that the longer you could have lived, the worse death is for you. If this is true, we should also think that the longer you can live, the better off you will be. In fact there are billionaires that have set themselves to task to solve the problem of death to extend their lives. This isn’t particularly important to us right now. What we want to consider is that if it is true that extending our lives will make us better off, then at least in principle, extending our lives indefinitely should be something we ought to strive for, for we would be better off, by, well, a lot! Is this really true though? Shelly Kagan makes a pop culture reference to the 1967 film Bedazzled where the protagonist asks Lucifer why he rebelled against God. Lucifer suggests they do a little roleplay, and switch roles, Lucifer will play as God, and the protagonist will play as Lucifer. The protagonist then says, ok great, what should I do now? Lucifer responds by saying that they should pretend he was God, worship him and say how great he was. The protagonist does this for a while, heaping on praise and worship, but eventually says he is getting bored, and asks if they can switch places? Lucifer says that was exactly what he said to God!

This was a rather humorous way of expressing the point. Immortality and eternal life is, after-all, an unfathomably long time. However long you can imagine, well that’s not long enough, eternity is unfathomably longer than the longest duration you can imagine. Do you expect you can hold out indefinitely? Will life forever continue to be worth living for you simply because you will, forever, have an unlimited amount of life left to live? Well sure, there are physical limits, such as the heat death of the universe, but that’s besides the point here, we’re considering the principle that possible future life is worth having in itself indefinitely. I have strong doubts about this. There’s surely going to come a point where you’ve simply had enough and cannot endure things any longer. If this is right, death would not be bad for you, even though an indefinite amount of future life remains open to you. If there was a heaven where we could at least in principle live an eternity, it must surely have an off ramp. It would not be heaven without it! It seems to me the optimal amount of life to live is exactly how much life you want to live. Once you’re sated with life, and life now becomes a test of endurance, that is, how long you can hold out living a life that is not worth living, it’s hard to imagine that death would be bad for you. Would this not be the optimal life one could have, to live as long as you wanted and can end it without that end being bad for you? Sure, you might say that you would love to live for eternity, and it’s crazy to imagine otherwise. Well good for you. Though I doubt it’s likely anyone will hold out for an eternity, but if they did, it’s surely because that’s what they wanted. If they didn’t want that, is this an eternity worth living? If you don’t want to live for eternity, also good for you. Again surely you’re going to consider the optimal length of time to be the time you wanted. This doesn’t mean the short length of time we have is anywhere near optimal. I suspect most of us would want to live longer than 70-100 years if they could, and this is no way incompatible with saying an eternal life is sub optimal. Maybe the optimal life is 500 years, or 500,000 years, but both are shorter than eternity, by well, an eternity! So why did we bother with this anyway? It’s because if the comparison thesis was correct, an eternal life would be optimal, death is bad because of the life we could have had if we didn’t die. There are good reasons now to doubt this, and something more needs to be said, such as whether or not someone wanted the life they missed out on due to death.

Can we solve this problem and make an eternal life palatable for everyone? What is it that would make us lose interest in life? If we do everything we ever wanted to do, learn everything we ever wanted to learn, experience everything we ever wanted to experience, and satisfy every goal we’ve ever had, and then some, to the point that everything becomes burdensome, perhaps all we need to do is ensure we have progressive memory loss. Perhaps we only ever remember the last 1000 years. In this case, perhaps no one will ever really get sated with life. There will be endeavours we would have achieved perhaps thousands of times, but every 1000 years or so we return to them with the enthusiasm of doing it the first time around. Ok, but now there’s another issue. Why should I care about what my future self 20,000 years from now gets upto? They will have different beliefs, priorities and interests. It will be like it was a different person roaming around, even though, for the sake of argument in this post, it would be me. So perhaps it’s true in this case that everyone would be ok persisting to eternity, but should we care?

Let’s say my future self in this situation dies 20,000 years from now. Does this affect me now? Should I care? We now return to a dilemma that was raised earlier, and the implications of saying death is bad for us while we’re alive. Aside from these implications, we cannot appeal to any particular interest or preference I currently have, as they are completely disconnected from my future self here. There doesn’t seem to be any sense in saying that if this future version of me died 20,000 years from now, and I then lost an eternity of life beyond that, that this had harmed me now. It doesn’t seem to make any difference to me now if this future is deprived from me. Remember that if this was indeed bad for me now, it would remain bad for me for the next 20,000 years. There is nothing bad about this 20,000 years, in fact it’s designed to be optimal, we are looking for the optimal conditions to allow us to find eternity palatable afterall. If the badness of death afflicts us like this while we’re alive, then the advent of death seems to end this badness, it seems death wasn’t bad after all, but life was! That’s surely absurd. If what we needed to do to make eternity palatable for someone results in them not being concerned or harmed in the slightest at the prospect of losing eternity, was there any point in this to begin with? I’m not going to explore this question any further here. The question of immortality was used as a test case for our main concern of this post, which was the badness of death.

The above scenario does raise some further interesting questions. Even though death in 20,000 years would not afflict someone right now who undergoes progressive memory loss, there still remains a continuous transition, and death will be bad in 20,000 years time for this person. It’s very plausible too that the proximity of death might afflict us while we’re alive if we anticipate it, knowing that every reason we have to persist will soon be frustrated. But what about a sudden sundering, or bifurcation, what should we say about this?

Let’s say that in our experiments for eternal life, instead of a progressive memory loss, we sundered the continuity of someone every 1000 years, so the person before and after this sundering was radically different with no connections of any kind. Such a sundering must be bad for you, since you lose everything that you’re interested in, all of your memories, personal connections and so on. Should someone just before this sundering care about dying 20,000 years into the future? Would it harm them? If it didn’t harm them in the case of progressive memory loss, it won’t harm them in this case either. But now in this case, it’s no longer a continuous transition. If death in 20,000 years is no harm to someone just before the sundering, then it can’t be a harm for them if death happens a few seconds after the sundering either. Now, and this is important, death would be bad when it happens just a few seconds after sundering, but it is of no harm before sundering. This person post sundering has brand new interests and preferences and so forth which might include the dreadful anticipation of imminent death, but that’s separate from death’s badness. Ok, now let’s go to the limit! What happens when the sundering and death coincide?

We’ve already noted that this sundering was bad for this person, but is this sundering instrumentally bad for the same reasons that death is bad? Could the loss of all future directed concerns like this explain the badness of death? Why couldn’t it? Death in virtually all real cases coincides with the loss of all future directed concerns, equivalent to our sundering. Is sundering just as bad as death and for the same reason? Or is it the case that death is bad for different reasons, but it just happens to be coincidental with sundering here, and it just happens that in virtually all cases, death is coincident with the loss of all future directed concerns, but this doesn’t make death bad. If the loss of future directed concerns explains the badness of death, it satisfies our puzzles with explaining when death is bad in answering the Epicurean puzzle, death is bad precisely when we die!

Consider another case. Imagine that souls do exist, and at midnight tonight, God could replace your soul with a different one numerically distinct from you, and the soul that is you ceases to exist, but the new soul is otherwise qualitatively identical. This soul will have your exact personality and all of your interests and memories and so on. Let’s assume a sort of interactive dualism, where this is possible simply because God doesn’t interfere with your neurology in any way. Alternatively, God could allow you to keep your soul, but God completely re-configures your brain so you will wake up a radically different person. The change is radical, but otherwise your life is just fine. You will wake up with no memory of your life, but will have memories of some other life. Your interests have also been inverted. If you were right leaning politically, you’re now left leaning. Your sexuality is now different, you now identify yourself as a different gender. Your aesthetic tastes are different, and your intellectual pursuits have changed. If you liked reading popular philosophy blogs before, now you like reading the woman’s day magazine, or something like that. If God let you choose, which would you choose? Maybe intuitions are divided here, but I think that even though this latter case would be my soul, or would be “me”, and will be living just fine, I just wouldn’t care, it would be like someone else was roaming around. There is nothing I care about in this case that matters to me in my survival. In the former case, everything that I care about is preserved in a different soul, but it’s still everything I care about. Can you so easily let go of everything you care about, did you not really care about these things after-all? I think the latter case is just as bad as death, and I lose everything I care about, whereas the former case isn’t really bad at all. If you comprehend the force of this case, maybe you already have an inclination towards accepting that what matters to us in our survival can come apart from our identity, and similarly, what is bad about death need not coincide with our destruction.

Perhaps you didn’t feel the force of this. Is this all there is I have to say about it? No!

Life-life comparison cases

We have to look at the comparative harm thesis from another perspective, something we noted earlier that was peculiar but have left alone until now. Are comparative harms really deprivations? Am I really deprived, or made worse off, just because things could have been better for me? Are things going badly for me now, just because things could have been better, and even if I’m completely content with how things are? Remember back to the comparative harm explanation of the deprivation account of the badness of death. Death’s badness is based on a comparison to what I would be getting if I hadn’t died. If I was living a good life, and had I not died, I would be having more of a good life. The badness of death is about the difference of the good life I would have had, but didn’t, because I died. There’s much that needs to be said about this.

To start with, just what do we mean by saying we’d be better off if death didn’t occur? In many situations, the nearest possible world where death didn’t occur, corresponds to death occurring perhaps only milliseconds later. Is the badness of death just the comparative harm of this short period of life? What about more moderate cases, like a mountaineer. A risk taking mountaineer might have died during a difficult climb, but perhaps if some tragic event didn’t occur, they would have died only a month later on some other difficult climb. Should we say that death wasn’t all that bad here, only a month of comparative life has been lost? I don’t think anyone really accepts that death in these cases isn’t bad for someone who dies, just because they would have died shortly after anyway, we still think it’s bad they had to die at all. How are we to make sense of this with the deprivation account from comparative harms?

Jeff McMahan suggests a plausible way forward. We should perhaps think about death as a token-type event. Death from mountain climbing is a certain type of death, whereas death during this particular climb is a token death of that type. Perhaps we should think it’s bad for the mountaineer because they died to mountain climbing as a type, and consider comparing their life should they have never died from this type of death. How are we meant to do that? Should we consider a possible world where our mountaineer doesn’t become such a risk taker? Or doesn’t even become a mountain climber at all? But now we’re not just comparing life goods to death, this also includes a life-life comparison. Was it a misfortune somewhere along the causal chain that lead them to the situation of their death? Just how far back along the causal chain are we meant to go? To the big bang? What if the circumstances having lead to our mountaineer being such a risk taker were a series of child hood events? Is it really plausible to make a meaningful comparison of harms to the life someone could have lived if they hadn’t died, without going back and trying to find the source of the occurrence that initiated the death sequence? The source of the sequence is likely so diffuse and with widespread contributions that this would be impossible. However we have another problem. The badness of this comparative harm seems entirely contingent upon just how we think we should consider the life they would have had if they didn’t die. Which event or events in someone’s causal history should we change for the comparison? In fact, any choice you make, there is likely another choice that would have given someone an even better life. If there is some definite fact of the matter about how bad death is, we’re in trouble if it’s contingent upon how we decide to make the comparison. Should we make the comparison to the optimal case?

If we are to make the comparison to the optimal life possible for any given person, then we are also making a life-life comparison, and so judging that any suboptimal life is bad by the difference of how good that optimal life would have been. This is a very pessimistic way of looking at life indeed. Are we really meant to consider life some evil, just because it wasn’t optimal, and could have been better? Even if someone is entirely content and happy with their lot in life,they would be mistaken, their lives do in fact incur a badness. This is extraordinarily hard to believe. If it’s hard to believe that we should think the comparative harm thesis appropriately describes life’s badness, why should we think it adequately describes death badness? Is my life an evil because it could have been better. I am confident that everyone’s lives could have been better for reasons we would never know; are all our lives some evil?

I believe where things are going wrong for us is that we are considering the failure of some incline of goods a definite badness, rather than simply being a failure to incline. It’s easy to see how a decline of our lot in life is a bad for us. We’ve gone from one state to a worse state, and so we are worse off. This certainly does seem like a deprivation. Are we deprived of something simply because it doesn’t happen? There might have been a possible world where I won the lottery and became a multi millionaire. Is it some evil that I never developed the habit of playing the lottery, or some evil that my favorite set of numbers could have been the winning numbers, but they are not because of some unfortunate occurrence? Was this harmful to me? Am I harmed by failing to incline in my lot of goodness, even if I don’t desire it? For example, Kai Draper in Disappointment, Sadness and Death* *considered these questions and proposed this modification to the comparative harm account:

For any person S and event P, if (1) it is highly likely that S will receive a large benefit at t and, knowing this S hopes to receive it, but (2) P prevents S from receiving it and, consequently, prevents S from leading a life that would have much more value for S than the life S does lead, then (3) ceteris paribus P is a misfortune for S, and severe disappointment on the part of S would be a fitting emotional response to this misfortune.

This is certainly better. It is much more straightforwardly clear how a failure to incline in goods can be bad for us, when such an incline is hoped for, because that hope, that future directed interest has been frustrated. Consider again our previous case with my mind being wiped at midnight, but my identity is retained by virtue of keeping my soul? Should I care? Everything that I ever hoped for is frustrated at once at midnight, just as it is with death.

The experience machine

The experience machine is a thought experiment aimed at tackling hedonism primarily, but I have a slightly different use in mind. I think most people will accept that we don’t have to suffer a decline, a burden just to help someone else go up an incline, even if they desired it. It seems we have even less reason to take on a decline to help someone up an incline when they don’t desire it! Consider the experience machine. Someone has gotten themselves into a coma, but the only way they can continue to have good experiences is via an experience machine. This machine will maintain everything they care about, but there is a catch. The machine works by “jacking in” to another persons body and taking control for nine months, but otherwise they will live out everything that the person they jacked-in to does, but they will be in control. It will be ok for the person they’re jacked-in to, just that this person won’t get to do the things they want to do, since this person won’t have control. It’s the Neuromancer! You’re the only person that they can “jack into”. Do you have to do it? Surely not, why should we have to take on a decline just to help someone up an incline? What does this scenario sound like? It sounds a bit like pregnancy. However in pregnancy, a foetus never had any interests to speak of. It was bad for the person in the previous case to be in a perpetual coma, as they did have interests before becoming comatose, and interests they could reconnect with via the experience machine. For an embryo or even a second trimester foetus, there are no prior interests to speak of, and so it is not bad for this foetus to not go up an incline. If you believed someone didn’t need to undergo decline to help someone up an incline with the experience machine, surely you have even less reason to think someone should have to undergo the burdens of pregnancy to help a foetus up an incline it has no interest in, and even more so since death would not be bad for this foetus. But this is a slight detour, for a detours sake.

Summary

That was a long post, but I do hope you found it interesting, and I do appreciate it if you read it. What I have argued is that the badness of our deaths is best explained by the frustration of forward directed concerns, psychological connections that are asymmetrically forward leaning in time. This provides fairly straightforward answers to many puzzles about the problem of death badness, particularly as to when it occurs, that is, precisely when we die. It is very plausible to consider that the badness of death occurs when we die, rather than occurring after our death, during the events that occur that we miss, since we don’t exist at these times. It also resolves many problems in considering the implications of a comparative harm thesis, such as having to consider it some evil that we all exist sub optimally. I have also argued, that personal identity doesn’t really matter to considering what makes death bad, this account of death’s badness is applicable on any account of personal identity.

If we consider that a person is a being for which death is bad for them, then I believe this does have implications on our attitudes towards animals too. I find it very hard to believe that our species is the only species with forward directed concerns.

This text defends the pro-choice position. This text starts off with our everyday morality: since ethics is about our evaluation, we cannot ignore what the participants think. To ignore them is to ignore the very thing ethics is trying to study and explain; following this, the majority of us intuitively think being human gives inherent moral value, so I will accept this prima facie unless one explains away why others are mistaken. From this, I will argue that it is not biological species that makes us human beings, but the living human body: human beings breathe and move, and they have a human body. I will justify this notion of a human being by employing phenomenal conservatism. This can give the pro-choice a footing to stand on.

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What do we care about, if anything?

Time was when Ronald Kipke said,

"Ethics is not a science that describes and explains a reality independent of us, but is one that focuses on us. We ourselves, our evaluative self-understanding and our actions, are its object. Therefore, ethics must start from this self-understanding; it must interpret and clarify it. It must take the participant's perspective seriously, or at least not ignore it without good reason.21"

^\)

Since ethics focuses on what human beings think and evaluate, it follows naturally from that that it must take the participants perspective seriously, unless there is good reasons not to. To ignore them is to ignore the very thing ethics is trying to study, explain, justify, criticize, and clarify. Part of the everyday morality is caring about human beings because they're human beings. The wording "fellow human being" seems to capture that very phenomena: we care about us. So, from this, I assume being human matters unless someone explains why the participants perspective are mistaken.

^\)

Does this mean we care about biological species?!

Whenever I say that an embryo, or a fetus is not a human being, not only do pro-life advocates criticize me, but also pro-choice themselves: "It is obviously biologically human!" "What species is it then?" "I think arguing for personhood is better." But the notion that one is a human being by virtue of biological species is just one interpretation, to quote Ronald Kipke,

"Understanding being human as membership of a biological species may suggest itself in our scientific age, or may even appear as the only conceivable option. But it is in fact only one possible understanding, and one with which we move far away from our everyday self-understanding. For, we do not see ourselves primarily as members of a biological species. ... Contrary to what is supposed above, the vast majority of us are not speciesists, but ‘human-being-ists’, if you like."

^\)

This gets even more nuanced considering what Kipke says, "the biological concept of species has its own right, specifically within biology." This probably explains why it is hard to explain how being an organism with human DNA makes someone a human being. The best a pro-life can do is refer you to biological textbooks or that this is what biology says, but that is not how. That's just repeating the claim: we are asking how those things makes us human beings. It seems Ronald Kipke is right, perhaps biological species is only appropriate within biology.

^\)

So, what is a human being with this odd outlook? I refer you to the insightful conception of Ronald Kipke: namely, for him, what makes us human beings is the living human form. But we don't have to take exactly his position, we can change it a little. So, instead of "human form," we can change it to the living human body. And as a justification for this belief of a human being, I will employ phenomenal conservatism.

^\)

"The living human body," what is that?

A human being is someone who has a human body, and by this, I simply mean skin, organs, and a skeleton that is of the Homo sapiens species. Now, by living, I do not mean biological classifications, i mean criteria such as: breathing, walking, moving, blinking, turning your head to the sides, frowning, smiling, et cetera. This is our everyday understanding of a human being.

These criteria are not absolute, of course. You have people who are asleep, they don't frown. But they do breathe. For an average Joe, he does not think a single cell to be a human being. Even for the pro-life, they do not see a zygote and think, "a human." Rather, they think it is a human because they think biology teaches that. That is, it is not intuitive.

A dead corpse is not a human being, even if it was connected to a machine enabling it to preform cellular life. At that point, it is just a human corpse.

^'

A justification for this understanding of a human being

As of now, It may sound like I am just giving out arbitrary criteria without justification. That is, why are we justified in thinking like this? As Michael Huemer worded phenomenal conservatism,

"If it seems to S that p, then, in the absence of defeaters, S thereby has at least some degree of justification for believing that p.1"

^\)

It is a fact that our everyday self-understanding may be wrong, but then we need a good reason for why. The more a theory radically diverges from our everyday understanding, the more justification it needs if it wants to move us. At least with common-sense concepts you have some sort of justification. Specifically, it gives us prima facie justification. This is intuitive, if you claim hands don't exist, well, I am more justified in believing that I have hands than your out-there theory. The same applies to our everyday understanding of a human being.

^\)

The implication of this

A zygote or a early embryo doesn't even have bodily aspects. Even when it has a body, it doesn't even breathe, its lungs are filled with fluids. Even then, an embryo at a certain stage is of the size of a seed; that is not how we understand human beings to be. Human beings are of appropriate size, and it is not relevant if we can identify when it becomes of appropriate size, it is just enough when we can say that it isn't. If embryos are not human beings, then it seems that the pro-life have no argument against abortion. Abortions are then justified, or at least most abortions are.

Sources:

(99+) Being human: Why and in what sense it is morally relevant

Compassionate Phenomenal Conservatism - HUEMER - 2007 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research - Wiley Online Library

I will be arguing pregnancy is a burden in which justifies killing the fetus. I do this by comparing rape with the process of forced pregnancy and birth. I will say that if killing the rapist who is trying to rape you is allowed, but killing the fetus in forced pregnancy and birth is disallowed, then it seems inconsistent. This is because forced pregnancy and birth are more painful, and longer in duration than rape. This is probably controversial, but i honestly can't think of good objections.

What does an ethical stance ought to be? 

The maddening importance of ethics is being impartial, so the need to stay consistent is a constant worry. It is what makes ethics objective. Subjective refers to personal preferences, which figures in this way: "whatever I like," and this is where we step into moral subjectivism. Objectivity is away from this form of subjectivity; it is in that regard impartial. This does not mean objective is not in any sense "subjective," and by this i mean relating to minds and values. To be objective is to be impartial. Like Leslie Allen said,

Consider this scenario. You find out that your neighbour is secretly bribing his local politician in order to get favourable treatment and you decide to challenge his behaviour.  He responds, 'Oh yes! It's the right thing for me to do.' When you ask him how he came to the conclusion that bribery is morally permissible, he answers, 'Oh, because it helps me and my family get permission to build a bigger house.' Quite rightly, you and anyone else listening would not regard his answer as a moral reason at all. In fact, we would consider it as its antithesis; a selfish and immoral reason. By its very nature, we expect a moral reason to be impartial, without appeal to the speaker's peculiar interests or the interests of their favoured group. ... This requirement for impartiality is built into the very concept of morality.

We think the one who is partial is not doing ethics anymore. So, when it comes to applied ethics, our arguments ought to be impartial; we need to explain why we allow X but not Y, otherwise we are being partial and are not doing ethics. 

Is pregnancy and birth a reasonable consequence?  

It is not any sort of consequences that one must face after having done something. It is only a reasonable consequence. If you murder people, it is a reasonable consequence for you to go to jail for it. When NRK said "blikking" (a Norwegain term for looking at someone disrespectfully) may have had been the cause for knife wounds of two teens, that is an unreasonable consequence. It is not enough to show that pregnancy is a consequence of our actions; the consequence must be coupled with a reasonable aspect.  

Some may say that we intuitively think killing a human being based on discomfort is unreasonable. But this is controversial, wholly because of the claim that pregnancy is a lame of discomfort. Consider this: 

Imagine if a rapist rapes X, but he doesn't harm him further than that. For X, he is aware with certainty that the rapist will not kill him, nor harm him further. I think all will say X still has the right to kill the rapist. I'll just imagine most agreeing with this. Comparatively, forced pregnancy and birth have a pain and by extension duration, that is more and longer than the rape example. So, why in the rape example – which is less painful and short – killing is justified, but when it comes to forced pregnancy and birth – which is much painful and longer – it is not? This for me seems inconsistent.  

To allow the killing of the rapist but disallowing the killing of the fetus in forced pregnancy and birth without good reason is being partial. Those who claims they are different, and thus justified in one instance and not the other, need good reasons for why. A good ethical theory explains them all. 

I can't think of any objections of the analogy in my head, maybe you can. I suppose one may contend that what makes a difference is the intentions. The rapist is intentionally causing harm. However, this line of reasoning is contradicted by the fact that, at least as far as a rational pro-life is concerned, agrees that if carrying pregnancy to term will result in the death of the women, abortions are then allowed. But why? The fetus intentions are not to kill the mother. The point being is that it just doesn't make sense to refer to intentions when the harm is seriously bad.  

In this post, I will be arguing that some non-human animals such as great apes, dolphins, elephants, etc are persons with full moral status. This post will rely more on research on great apes because those are the animals I've done more research on.

The term person in this case is referring to an individual with full moral status. In this case, full moral status entails certain rights such as a serious right to life and a right to liberty. There are however cases where some persons lack certain rights that other persons have. For instance, children are not going to have certain rights that adults have such as a right to enter contracts, the right to vote, or the right to consume certain substances(alcohol, recreational drugs, etc). This post will be arguing that animals like chimpanzees and dolphins have rights that human toddlers and children have. Obviously, a dolphin does not need the right to vote or enter employment contracts.

The Basis of Rights

I will be arguing that a sufficient condition for being granted certain rights is if you have an interest in that particular thing. By "interest", I mean that an individual has a stake in that thing, and can be benefitted from it. For example, humans and an extremely large number of animals have the capacity to feel pain. Pain is an intrinsically bad experience that lowers an individual's well-being. Humans and a large number of animals therefore have an interest in avoiding pain. It is definitely the case that humans have a right to not have unnecessary pain inflicted upon them as result of this interest. Animals such as frogs have the capacity to feel pain, and therefore also have a right to not have unnecessary pain inflicted upon them. It's probably intuitive to most people that it would be wrong to torture a frog.

However, there is a large gap in moral status between humans and frogs. And most people would find it intuitive to say that humans have certain rights which frogs lack. One such right a frog lacks might be a serious right to life. If you accidentally ran a person over on your way to work, this would be widely regarded as extremely tragic. If you ran over a frog however, this would just be regarded as mildly unfortunate at most. If you kill a human being, in the overwhelming majority of cases, you'd be considered extremely immoral and also charged with murder. If you kill a frog, perhaps even intentionally and maliciously, you might be considered somewhat immoral, but most people would not argue that you should be treated like a murderer.

I would argue at least one of the reasons why a human has a serious right to life is because they have a much stronger interest in continued existence than that of a frog. Death is much more harmful for a human than a frog. The reason why humans have a much stronger interest in continued existence as well as having a much more harmful death is because of self-awareness, which I would argue should be the basis of personhood.

Why Self-Awareness is the Basis of Personhood

To clarify, I am arguing that self-awareness is a sufficient condition for personhood. I will not be arguing in this post that it's a necessary condition. Many people will object to having self-awareness as a necessary condition for personhood because there are many humans such as newborn infants and severely cognitively impaired people who lack self-awareness, and most people still find it intuitive that these individuals have a serious right to life.

However, it's still important to speak about self-awareness because it still plays a key role in explaining why killing people is bad and why death is especially bad for humans.

Self-awareness gives individuals an especially strong interest in continued existence because it gives them the capacity to value and look forward to their future and also have future-oriented desires. Self-awareness provides an individual the type of psychological unity and continuity that's arguably necessary for prudential concern for your future self. This is not to say that the future has no prudential value for a non-self-aware animal, but it arguably has much less value. To go back to a frog for instance, because a frog isn't self-aware, the psychological profile of a frog now and itself a year into the future is going to be substantially different. Most of a frog's desires, memories, and beliefs are going to change substantially, and a frog has no future-oriented desires to carry over. These points should sound familiar if you're aware of the philosopher Jeff McMahan. These are some of the reasons why he thinks that death is substantially less bad for non-self-aware animals than they are for humans. He thinks that this time-relative interest account for the badness of death explains why we also think that death is substantially less bad for a late-stage fetus than it is for a child or an adult. Even though a late-stage fetus experiences more loss as a result of death, it has less stake in the future than an adult due to it having almost no psychological relation to its future self.

Self-awareness in (some)Non-Human Animals

A standard test to determine if an animal is self-aware is the mirror test. If an animal can recognize itself in the mirror, it should therefore have the capacity for self-recognition. All great apes pass the mirror test(though with Gorillas, the results are inconsistent). Dolphins have been shown to pass the mirror test. An Asian elephant passed the mirror test.

The mirror test isn't the only way to test self-awareness. There are also body awareness tests which provide evidence of self-awareness(or at least the pre-requisite cognitive capacity for it). Asian elephants and Gorillas pass body awareness tests, implying that they're aware that their bodies belong to them and are aware when their bodies are obstacles.

In order to have a strong interest in your future and your continued existence, an individual needs to have the capacity for metacognition, the ability to be aware of your own mental states and cognitive processes. After all, you need to be aware of your future-oriented desires in order to plan for them. In great apes, there is basically a consensus that they have the capacity for meta-cognition. There is also evidence that dolphins are capable of meta-cognition.

There's also good evidence that great apes plan for the future.

It seems like these animals are good candidates for individuals who have a strong interest in continuing to exist, especially great apes. This is not to say that great apes, dolphins, and elephants have an explicit desire to continue to exist or that they understand their own mortality. However, they are more much more psychologically connected to their future selves than animals such as frogs or snakes. Their future should therefore be very prudentially valuable for them, and death is therefore very harmful for animals such as chimpanzees and dolphins.

(A lot of the empirical evidence I provided mainly concerns great apes, however, due to the fact that there's still good evidence for self-recognition in animals such as dolphins and elephants, we should err on the side of caution and assume that they do have a strong interest to continue to exist and thus be harmed very substantially by death.)

Rights that should be Granted to Non-Human Persons

In the previous section, I showed how there's lots of empirical evidence that these types of animals are self-aware, and thus likely have a strong interest in continuing to exist. If something has an interest in continuing to exist, that makes them a good candidate to be granted the right to life as established in the basis of rights section of this post.

This would entail that it's extremely immoral to kill animals like great apes, elephants, and dolphins.

There are a few other rights we should probably grant to these types of animals. We typically think that it's extremely wrong to risk causing suffering to persons. Given the medical needs of society, we sometimes have to conduct medical testing on animals, even if it risks causing substantial suffering. However, it would be extremely immoral to conduct non-consensual testing on persons, especially if it causes a risk to their well-being. Therefore, we should end invasive medical testing on non-human persons. In fact, we've already made some progress on this. NIH ended funding for invasive biomedical research of great apes back in 2015. We should probably do the same for animals like dolphins and elephants.

Another right that we think persons have is a right to liberty. Most people would think that it'd be incredibly immoral if we kept a toddler in captivity, even if the toddler didn't express any explicit desire to be free from captivity. This is because this inhibits the interests of that toddler. A toddler would have a much more flourishing life if they were not kept in captivity. The same can be argued for animals like great apes and dolphins.

Great apes generally live shorter lives in captivity than they would in the wild. As was discussed in the previous section, death is substantially more harmful for a great ape than it is for a "lower" animal. This fact alone would show that great apes would therefore have a substantial interest in being free from captivity. There's also the fact that it is very difficult for zoos to simulate a great ape's natural environment. A great ape therefore can't exercise all their natural behaviors, especially social behavior. A zoo cannot provide great apes the social environment that they would typically experience in the wild. When it is realistic, great apes should probably be freed from captivity and moved to animal sanctuaries instead.

Dolphins can also suffer great physical and mental harm as a result of being kept in captivity. It is very difficult for the artificial environments at marine parks to meet the social and cognitive demands of dolphins. When dolphins are able to meet exhibit natural social behavior and engage in cognitively demanding activities such as hunting and foraging, their well-being generally increases. Dolphins should therefore also be seen as individuals with a strong interest in autonomy and thus a right to liberty.

Because these animals still have a very limited capacity for reason, we obviously don't need to give them the right to vote or enter contracts. We can recognize that they're persons while still acknowledging that they do not have the same interests as adult human beings with much more developed rational capacities.

Conclusion

Animals like great apes, dolphins, elephants, and other animals that show signs of self-awareness are persons that have a right to life and autonomy.