8/12/2019 Is Death Harmful

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Is death harmful? This is a key question asked in the philosophy of death. A general consensus

seems to be a qualified yes. The reasons provided are rather diverse, and covering all of them

would require multiple posts. The reason Im interested in for this post is a rather nave one:

We are harmed by death because we are deprived of a good future. I qualified the view with

good because I imagine most people would think that some potential futures are worthavoiding.

A general overview of this thesis (call it the nave depravation account or NDA) goes something

like this

NDA: A person P is harmed by death just if Ps death deprives P of a good future.

A good future can be a future consisting of fulfilled desires, rewarding social interactions, or

whatever one wishes to define as good. The view is rather malleable with respect to the

interpretation of what good future means (a point that can be argued over if one already

accepts NDA).

The problem I see with NDA is that it presupposes a particular ownership thesis about the

relationship between a subject and her future. We are deprived of a future that we were

somehow entitled to by virtue of owning it, and that is why we are harmed by death. A good

future was taken from a person when he died, and that is lamentable; this seems to sum up

the ownership thesis (OT).

The OT suffers from what I take to be an obvious defect. You cant be deprived of something

you dont own. If somebody dies at a particular time, that person, prior to that time, does not

own any future that he can somehow be deprived of, because the time at which that future is

supposed to obtain is a time when that person does not exist. Imagine that persons temporal

existence as a length of measuring tape. That measuring tape has a beginning point and an end

point; but that measuring tape isnt somehow deprived of length because it is only 6 units

long rather than 10. In the same sense, a person isnt deprived of a future by dying, because

that person doesnt have a futureafter the time he died.

Galen Strawson sums up this objection rather well:

My future life or experience doesnt belong to me in such a way that its something that can

be taken away from me. It cant be thought of as possession in that way. To think that its

something that can be taken away from me is like thinking that life could be deprived of life,

or that something is taken away from an existing piece of string by the fact that it isnt longer

than it is. Its just a mistake, like thinking that Paris is the capital of Argentina.

8/12/2019 Is Death Harmful

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If I understand Strawson correctly, it seems like he's articulating a trivial truth. If a person's life

ends at time T1, any time after that has no bearing on whether that person was harmed, since

those times are times when that person doesn't exist; so he or she couldn't really be deprived

of any sort of future experience, since that person is dead when that time occurs.

If the