Your death might be the worst thing ever to happen to you (but maybe you shouldn't care)

Canadian Journal of Philosophy 46 (1):18-37 (2016)
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Abstract

Deprivationism cannot accommodate the common sense assumption that we should lament our death iff, and to the extent that, it is bad for us. Call this the Nothing Bad, Nothing to Lament Assumption. As such, either this assumption needs to be rejected or deprivationism does. I first argue that the Nothing Bad, Nothing to Lament Assumption is false. I then attempt to figure out which facts our attitudes concerning death should track. I suggest that each person should have two distinct attitudes toward death: one determined by agent’s reasonable expectations about when she will die and one determined by the amount of metaphysically possible good one reasonably believes death precludes.

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Travis Timmerman
Seton Hall University

Citations of this work

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The harm of medical disorder as harm in the damage sense.David G. Limbaugh - 2019 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 40 (1):1-19.
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References found in this work

What we owe to each other.Thomas Scanlon - 1998 - Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
What We Owe to Each Other.Thomas Scanlon - 2002 - Mind 111 (442):323-354.
Problems of the Self.Bernard Williams - 1973 - Cambridge [Eng.]: Cambridge University Press.
Well-being and death.Ben Bradley - 2009 - New York: Oxford University Press.

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