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Notes
Fischer 2009. All page references in the main text are to Our Stories unless otherwise noted.
See Feldman 1992, pp. 135–138 for a clear explanation of what is wrong with premise 2.
It could be argued that betrayals do prevent good things from happening—viz., they prevent the victim from having the intrinsic good of not being betrayed. (Thanks to two referees for suggesting this interpretation of the Nagel/Fischer view). This does not strike me as very much more plausible than the claim that pain is bad in virtue of preventing the victim from having the intrinsic good of not being in pain. The most straightforward interpretation of Fischer and Nagel has them endorsing the view that death causes intrinsically bad things to happen to its victim. In further support of this interpretation: if Nagel and Fischer merely intended to give examples of misfortunes that deprive their subjects of good things, much less controversial examples were available to them, such as my example of Derk and the tickets; such examples need not presuppose the falsity of hedonism, as Nagel’s and Fischer’s do.
For a similar argument in a different context see Sinnott-Armstrong 2009.
Posthumous events can make a difference to whether the desires the victim had while alive are fulfilled or not; so given a desire satisfactionist axiology, there need not be quite so big a difference between death and posthumous events. But the deprivation account is compatible with the falsity of desire satisfactionism.
References
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Bradley, B. Fischer on death and unexperienced evils. Philos Stud 158, 507–513 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9667-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9667-0