Is death bad for the one who dies?

1 Introduction

Is death a harm for the one who dies? Instinctively, we may reply yes without second
thought; however, upon probing further this answer is problematic. For, if death is bad for
the one who dies, then surely that person must exist. But, by the time they have died,
they no longer exist to be harmed. Weve stumbled upon the Epicurean Argument, which
purports that death is in fact no harm at all for the one who dies. It can be roughly
summed up by an excerpt from Epicurus Letter to Monoeceus:

The most awful of evils is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not
come, and, when death is come, we are not. (Epicurus 2013)

The thesis that death is no misfortune for the dead is one that few philosophers are
prepared to readily concede. Perhaps the primary reason for this is that the Epicurean
Argument appears to force us to admit that we can never make a rational decision as to
whether or not it is ethical to kill someone . If value judgements only make sense when
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the subject of these judgements exists, then it follows that it is nonsensical to give death
a value, positive or negative, nor to compare death with life . Two examples will suffice to
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show that the consequences of this might be unsavoury: firstly, say you are a perfectly
happy person, and are guaranteed to live out the rest of your life in a state of happiness,
achieving all your hopes and dreams. The Epicurean Argument, at least as interpreted by
some philosophers , suggests that there is no way for you to rationally judge that you
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would rather live than die. Similarly, upon seeing a suffering animal who is doomed to a
short life of pain due to a terminal injury, there may be no rational reason for you to
euthanise it, since we cannot compare the pain it is experiencing with the undefined value
of pain in death.
Here I will argue in defence of the Epicurean Argument, and against the so-called
Harm Thesis (Blatti 2012, 317) that death is a harm to the one who dies. I shall do this
I say appears to force us because I will reject this idea in the Objections section below, but its
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worth noting that the Epicurean Argument might be interpreted this way, and has been by Olson
(Olson 2013) and Silverstein (Silverstein 1980).
The proposition here is that life and death are incommensurable. A defense of this is given by
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Visak (Visak 2001,144-159) and Narveson (Narveson 1967, 66-69). Its derivability from the
Epicurean Argument is clearly established by Silverstein (Silverstein 1980, 401-409), Hershenov
(Hershenov 2007, 174) and Olson (Olson 2013) and supported by Yoshizawa (Yoshizawa 2013,
86, 89).
See above.
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by arguing against the most widely accepted rebuttal to the Epicurean Argument (Smuts
2012, 198), known as the Deprivation Account. After this, I shall consider some potential
objections to my position, and conclude that they either fail or are unsubstantiated.

2 Preliminary

Before we can discuss the Epicurean Argument in detail, we must first clarify some terms.
The words death, being dead and dying can be confused with each other, but they only
refer to two states . Dying is, of course, something which takes place during someones
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life, but just before the end of it. Being dead is the state of non-existence which comes
after life, and is not so much a state at all as the abscence of one. Its characterised by the
lack of a subject which existed previously, and therefore the impossibility of any
subjective experience. Moreover, being dead is final and irreversible, unlike the state of
unconsciousness. Finally, we might define death as the first instant of ones being dead .
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Now we can clarify what the Epicurean Argument isnt. The Epicurean Argument
makes no judgement on whether or not dying can be harmful for the person who dies
(Yoshizawa 2013, 85). Dying is, of course, a state in which one exists, and therefore a
state that one can experience, and thus there is no misstep in attributing a positive or
negative value for the person suffering it. Moreover, the Epicurean Argument is not
concerned with justification for the fear of death. There is a similar argument, put forth
by Lucretius (Lucretius 1957, 121-129) which states it is irrational to fear death, as it is
irrational to fear anything which it is impossible to experience. While the Lucretian
argument is similar in nature to the Epicurean Argument, the question here is not
whether it is rational for a person to fear death, but rather whether or not death is bad for
that person .
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With those points in mind, we can give a formal account of the Epicurean
Argument, which Ive adapted from Rosenbaum (Rosenbaum 1986, 218):

1) An event can only be good or bad for a person P if P can experience the effects of
it (Experience Requirement)
These definitions are for the most part taken from Rosenbaum (Rosenbaum 1986, 218), but I
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differ from his account in that I do not distinguish between three separate states but only two.
What Rosenbaum calls death is a third state according to him, somewhere between dying and
being dead, which may or may not take place during life. It seems to me that this definition is
confused and could lead to the misleading idea that death is an event which the subject may be
able to experience, and thus a possible source of harm. However, death cannot be an event which
takes place during someones life, and therefore cannot be an object of experience, for otherwise
we would be referring to what both Rosenbaum and I call dying (the period before one no longer
exists). As such, what Rosenbaum calls death is better interpreted as the first instant that one is
dead, as I have defined it.
See above for a justification.
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It may be conceivable that humans can fear things which arent bad for them, due to the
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complexity of human desire, but while this might refute Lucretius, it would not have any bearing
on the soundness of the Epicurean Agument.
2) P cannot experience the effects of any event if P is dead (My definition of death)
3) The effects of any event cannot be experienced before an event takes place
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(Causality)
4) By (2) and (3): Ps being dead is not an event that P can experience.
5) By (1) and (4): Ps being dead can neither be good nor bad for P.

This argument is valid, but its soundness has been questioned. In the next section, I will
examine a standard counter-argument which aims to do this.


3 Deprivation Account & The Experience Requirement

The most popular response (Feldman 1991, 206) to the Epicurean Argument is that death
is bad for the person who dies because it deprives them of goods they would otherwise
have attained. This argument is widely known as the Deprivation Account. Versions of
this account have notably been put forward by Nagel, McMahan, and Feldman. These
accounts all rely on rejecting premise (1) in the Epicurean Argument, the Experience
Requirement, in order that death can be a harm regardless of whether or not there is
someone alive to experience this harm . Nagels account of the Deprivation Account, for
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example, is as follows: when someone dies, they are deprived of a life that they otherwise
would have had, if they had not died. If that person had hopes and desires which were
frustrated due to their death, then the harm they have been dealt as a result of that death
is proportional to the value of these desires. The harm that someones death does to that
person does not have to be experienced at any time, but is harm nonetheless (Nagel
1970). In order for the Deprivation Account to succeed, then, we must have a satisfactory
account for why we are justified in rejecting the Experience Requirement. Here I will
criticise some arguments against the Experience Requirement, before supplying my own
positive reasons for believing it.
Nagel argues that the Experience Requirement must be wrong, by showing through
examples that there are cases in which we attribute harm to someone, despite the fact
they may not experience this harm. Both Nagel (Nagel 1970, 76) and another proponent,
James Rachels (Rachels 1986, 46), describe a case of this similar to the following: Kara
has many friends at school, who all praise her and seem to vastly enjoy spending time
with her. However, unbeknownst to Kara, her friends are really just pretending to like her
as a joke, and secretly make fun of her behind her back. These people arent Karas real
friends, however their acting is so flawless that Kara will never find out. In this thought
experiment, it does indeed seem as though something bad is happening, and its true that
I take it that this account of causality is the common-sense notion, and is unlikely to strike the
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reader as contentious. Nonetheless, positive reasons to accept it have been shown by Max Black
(Black 1956).
Indeed, any attack on the Epicurean Argument must do this, unless it is willing to admit that it
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is possible to have experiences while dead, so my counterargument goes far beyond just the
Deprivation Account.
Kara has no experience of anything bad. All she experiences is the loving admiration of
her perceived friends.
We can reply to such a thought experiment with a counter-example which gives us
the opposite intuition . My friend Tom asks me what I think of his new shirt, and I refrain
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to tell him my true thoughts (that its dreadful). I do this, presumably, in order not to
harm him. However, according to Nagels account, my private thoughts harm Tom
regardless . However, the idea that my private thoughts about my friends attire could
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actually harm him seems intuitively implausible. So, how are we to best explain why my
thoughts dont harm my friend? It seems to me that the most reasonable explanation is
that its because my friend will never be able to experience my thoughts, and thus harm
lies in experience.
If this is the case, then we must explain why some people have the intuition that
Kara was harmed by her friends betrayal, while they have the opposite intuition in the
case of Toms shirt choice. I think this can be easily done. Firstly, we may think that
Nagels example depicts a bad state of affairs, but fail to understand the difference
between something being bad for someone, and it being objectively bad. The fact that
Karas friends have conspired against her may be construed as a bad state of affairs per se,
but given we have access to information Kara doesnt have access to, it may not be a good
experiment when it comes to testing our intuitions from Karas point of view. Secondly,
though the thought experiment tells us that there is no way Kara will ever find out about
her betrayal, we may intuitively feel that in any realistic scenario her friends have put her
at significant risk of experiencing a very bad state of affairs, and that this is enough to
react at this thought experiment simply due to the potential that this state of affairs could
be bad for Kara (Gombay 1978, 241), without ever actually being bad for her.
So, we have some reasons to reject Nagels objection to the Experience
Requirement. Furthermore, we have positive reasons to believe it. The Experience
Requirement is generally accepted in everyday life: we give people anaesthetic to prevent
them from experiencing the harm of surgery, we withold harmful thoughts and
information from those we wish to protect, and we would all reject the notion that a deaf
person could be harmed by a bad rendition of a symphony (Rosenbaum 1986, 219). The
one commonality between all these cases is the fact that none of them involve a harmful
experience. Another positive reason to believe that something can only be bad for
someone if it is subjectively experienced is that, without subjective experience, there can
Similar counter-examples are supplied by Gombay (Gombay 1978, 242) and Rosenbaum
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(Rosenbaum 1986, 219).
A potential objection could be that this example is that there is a set of possible events, some of
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which constitute harm only through experience, and some of which constitute harm regardless of
an experience. This line of argument would suggest that I have chosen Toms case from the former
subset, while Karas case is from the latter, and therefore these two examples are not in
competition and I have proved nothing. However, it would then be the objectors responsibility to
give us an account for what property an event must possess to fall in one subset or the other, and
do this without appealing to the notion of experience as a deciding factor.
be no prudential value at all . A world inhabited with only zombiesbeings which are
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cut off from all forms of experience, both sensory and mentalis one which fails to have
any moral evaluation as it seems impossible to harm or benefit anyone (Smuts 2012,
200). The reason that it could be morally defensible to kick a rock and not a person,
without appealing to some mystical notion of a soul or spirit, is that one has experience
and the other doesnt. I think its clear that we have good reasons to accept the
Experience Requirement, and few reasons to reject it. If this is true, then the Deprivation
Accountwhich depends on the falsity of the Experience Requirementis an
unconvincing reply to the Epicurean.


5 Objections

I will now evaluate three potential objections to my defense of the Epicurean Argument,
and show that they fail to refute my position. Jeff McMahan argues that the counter-
intutive consequences of the Epicurean Argument are reason enough to reject the
Experience Requirement, regardless of an argument to the contrary as I have supplied
(McMahan 1988, 39). However, I would dispute this line of reasoning on two grounds.
Firstly, I agree with Rosenbaum that is a mistake to engage in a philosophical debate with
the assumption that our own prereflective opinions must be correct (Rosenbaum 1986,
220), and would add that its a fallacy to reject an argument on these grounds. But I also
disagree that the Epicurean Argument leads to the conclusion that killing cannot be
morally wrong, as McMahan alleges. Ill sketch an acount of how this may be so: a life in
which a person, P, attains more pleasure is better for P than a life in which P attains less
pleasure. If we were to kill P, assuming her life will go on to be pleasureable, P will have
attained less pleasure than she would if she were to stay alive. Therefore, it is consistent
for a utilitarian to say that it is morally wrong to kill P. Such an account differs from the
Deprivation Account in that it doesnt suppose that Ps death will be bad for P, but rather
that P will have enjoyed less total pleasure if she is killed prematurely . We never
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compare life to death, so avoid the problem of incommensurability, and we are only
concerned with states under which P is a subject of experience, so dont violate the
Experience Requirement. The fact that the Epicurean Argument can coincide with our
moral intuitions may prompt more people to warm to the position, despite the fact that
any rejection of the argument on solely an emotive or intuitive basis is flawed. Killing can
be morally wrong, and death can be undesirible for the one who dies, but it certainly cant
be bad for her.
It is conceivable that someone might object to my account on the basis that they
think I am doing my friend Tom harm, even when Im only thinking of how ugly his shirt
is. Though I would contend that I have given adequate reasons to reject this account, even
if we were accept it there are good reasons to reject the Deprivation Account. The reason
See also the case of the anhedonic life as sketched by Roger Crisp in his defense of hedonism
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(Crisp 2006, 639).
This account is derived from Hershenov (Hershenov 2007) and Rosenbaum (Rosenbaum 1986).
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for this is that we can formulate an alternative Epicurean Argument which relies not on
the Experience Requirement, but on the Existence Requirement, namely that a person P
must at least exist in order for an event or state of affairs to be bad for P (McMahan 1988,
33). Sumner implicitly rejects the Existence Requirement in his version of the
Deprivation Account, by saying that all that is necessary is that there should have been a
subject at one point in time to attribute the loss of future life to (Sumner 1976, 160).
However, as Silverstein points out, he offers no defense of this position (Silverstein 1980,
407). The Deprivation Account, combined with a denial of the Existence Requirement,
argues that death can coherently is a loss for the person who dies during a period in
which we cannot attribute existence to the person who dies. But it is unclear how we can
attribute loss in a literal sense to a non-existent entity, and it is even more problematic to
attribute to that non-entity a positive state of harm, as in the proposition X is bad for P,
but P doesnt exist (Silverstein 1980, 407).
Finally, I accept that it is possible in all these cases to object to the causality premise
that I have assumed. In effect, this would involve arguing that someones death causes an
effect which is atemporal or retroactive. Indeed, atemporality is the basis of Silversteins
rejection of the Epicurean Argument (Silverstein 1980) and Grover thinks that death can
retroactively affect the lives of the living (Grover 1987). However, in defending this view
the Deprivation Account supporter would have to give us a strong case for adopting an
alternate theory of causality, given that there are cogent reasons (Black 1956) for
accepting the common-sense notion, especially in terms of every day experiences outside
the realms of quantum mechanics. Furthermore, if events can exist atemporally or have
retrospective effects, then it appears that there would be no difference between past and
future events, and therefore no way to discern between them, as we typically distinguish a
past event from a future one by virtue of whether or not its effects can be experienced
(Rosenbaum 1986, 223) .
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6 Conclusion

I have attempted to prove that, in line with the Epicurean Argument, death cannot be a
harm to the person who dies. Ive shown this by defending the Experience Requirement
that a person must experience the effects of an event for it to be good or bad for them
against Nagels thought experiments which purport to prove it wrong. Further, I have
supplied positive reasons for believing the Experience Requirement. In light of this, I have
argued, we have good reasons for rejecting the Deprivation Account, on the grounds that
it relies on our capacity to be harmed by events we will never experience the effects of. I
have examined three objections: 1) that the Epicurean Argument has consequences too
unsavoury; 2) that if we could reject the Experience Requirement then the Deprivation
Account would stand, and 3) that the effects of events may be able to precede their
causes, or stand in atemporal relationships to them. All three of these objections, I have
More detailed arguments for why we should reject Silverstein and Grovers versions of the
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Deprivation Account are made by Feit (Feit 2002, 360-361), Rosenbaum (Rosenbaum 1986,
222-223) and Green (Green 1982, 102-103).
shown, are, if not outwardly false, extremely problematic and in need of much more
justification than has been given. As such, acceptance of the Epicurean Argument is the
most rational position to take when considering the misfortunes of the dead.




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