Goin’ up to the spirit in the sky
That’s where I’m gonna go when I die
When I die and they lay me to rest
I’m gonna go to the place that’s the best.
— Norman Greenbaum, “Spirit in the Sky”.
Abstract
Since at least the time of Epicurus, philosophers have debated whether (and how) death could be bad for the one who has died, since (it is typically assumed) death is a permanent experiential blank. But a different (and hitherto unexplored) puzzle about death’s badness arises when we consider the death of a person who is paradise-bound. The first purpose of this paper is to develop this puzzle. The second purpose of this paper is to suggest and evaluate several potential attempts to solve the puzzle. After rejecting two seemingly attractive suggestions, I argue that there are two types of solution to the puzzle that can succeed. The first type of solution simply denies that death can be bad for the paradise-bound. I argue that the main worry for this type of solution, namely that it gives up (with respect to the paradise-bound) the common-sense view about death’s badness, is only a prima facie worry. The second type of solution maintains that death can be bad for the paradise-bound because it can deprive her of certain goods, which allows those who are attracted to this type of solution to adopt the deprivation account of death’s badness. I consider three views of the relation between the paradise-bound and paradise that are consistent with the deprivation account, connecting my discussion of paradise with the extant literature on death’s badness.
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Notes
I use the locution ‘paradise-bound’ both adjectivally and as a noun, always describing or referring to the person who we are assuming is headed for paradise.
The former statistic is from Winseman (2004), and the latter is from The Harris Poll 97, December 16, 2013, http://www.harrisinteractive.com/NewsRoom/HarrisPolls, retrieved September 24, 2014. It may well be that belief in heaven is on the decline in the United States, but it remains the majority view there. An additional complication is that the latter survey included additional options that might be thought to be rival conceptions of life after death (such as reincarnation and the survival of the soul after death), none of which accept the assumption that death is a permanent experiential blank.
Indeed, the discussion is limited to suggestions that some philosophers and theologians will find antecedently plausible; my aim is not to suggest merely logically possible ways of solving the puzzle.
This is, perhaps, a good point to highlight the distinction between death and dying. Dying is the process that leads to death and ends right at the moment of death; death is the state of being dead, which begins when one ceases to be alive. Dying can be, and too often is, extremely painful, and thus a bad state of affairs for the one who is dying; however, death cannot be painful, since one no longer exists to suffer any pain.
I am not alone in taking the belief that death can be bad for the one who has died to be a common-sense belief. According to Harry Silverstein, for example, “The common-sense view is that a person’s death is one of the greatest evils that can befall him” (1980, p. 401).
As stated here, this assumption is quite general. Perhaps death is a permanent experiential blank for those who are not paradise-bound, or perhaps every person is paradise-bound. I do not take a stand on these issues here. The puzzle arises from the mere assumption that someone is paradise-bound.
I do not take these assumptions to be particularly controversial in, for example, Christianity, Judaism, or Islam, but I grant that these assumptions are not ubiquitous.
Following McDannell and Lang (1990), Walls distinguishes between the “theocentric” view of heaven and the “anthropocentric” view of heaven. According to “the most extreme” version of the theocentric view, “heaven is a timeless experience of contemplating the infinitely fascinating reality of God in all of his aspects” (2002, p. 7). For simplicity’s sake, I am going to maintain the assumption that existence in paradise is a temporal one, but I do not think that the puzzle described in this paper depends on this assumption (since, presumably, it will still be better to have entered timeless paradise than to have remained in one’s temporal existence). Furthermore, I do not think the extreme version of the theocentric view is widely accepted, nor it should it be, given the widely held doctrine of the resurrection of the body. For more on this doctrine, and for the claim that it is widely held, see Merricks (2009).
This is not to say that rationality demands taking one's own life, for there might always be overriding reason not to take one's own life.
Some might object to the way that I have compared various amounts of goods in this context, since the paradise-bound will receive an infinite number of goods (and here I am talking about the goods of paradise) whether she dies earlier or later. When comparing two infinite sets, we might ask (in order to gauge the magnitude of the two infinite sets) whether the elements of the sets can be put into a one-to-one correspondence with each other, and (plausibly) it will turn out in the case of the paradise-bound that the goods received in paradise after an earlier death can be put into a one-to-one correspondence with the goods received in paradise after a later death. Even if these two sets of goods are infinite to the same magnitude, however, there is a clear sense in which it would be better for the paradise-bound to have started receiving the goods of paradise earlier than she would if she died later. For the person in paradise, it will always be the case that her earlier death secured for her more goods of paradise than she would have received had she died later. In other words, the goods of paradise will endlessly be “tacked on” to goods already received, so we can always ask about a certain time how many goods a person has received up to that point; for the person in paradise who died later, she will always have received fewer goods than if she had died and entered paradise sooner. Thanks to Zac Bachman and Jonah Nagashima for discussion on this point.
Presumably all evil pursuits will be off-limits, but, presumably, it would be better for a person not to pursue any evil anyway.
See Matthew 22:30, Mark 12:25, and Luke 20:35.
I mean for this distinction to be an intuitive one, though, to some degree, I am fine with the distinction being a purely stipulative one.
Alternatively, on some religious views, proselytization is a good that is not accessible after death.
This is a solution to the puzzle insofar as it countenances abandoning (with respect to the paradise-bound) the common-sense belief that death can be bad for the one who has died. The solution discussed in the next section allows for the retention of that common-sense belief and so, perhaps, is more aptly called a solution.
In fact, many people do give up what I have been calling the common-sense belief with respect to the paradise-bound, and this is often mentioned at funerals of those who are believed to be in paradise.
As we will see in the next section, Aquinas also apparently thought that death could be bad for one entering purgatory.
Note that in the passage Aquinas quotes (2 Corinthians 5:8), St. Paul claims that the paradise-bound are willing to be absent from the body (that is, to have died), which I take to imply that being absent from the body is the object of the wills of the paradise-bound, not merely that the paradise-bound are fine with being absent from the body. Elsewhere (Philippians 1:21), St. Paul says that, for the paradise-bound, to die is gain. In these passages, it sounds like the common-sense view about death’s badness is left behind.
What is the evidence that justifies abandoning the common-sense belief in this case? Well, presumably it can involve, inter alia, any or all of the following: the testimony of others, the fact that others have given up the belief in the past, and perhaps a coherence of the new belief that death cannot be bad, now that one is paradise-bound, with the rest of one’s beliefs about reality.
Furthermore, it might be the pro tanto badness of death that is being mourned at funerals of those taken to be paradise-bound, and this practice would be consistent with the denial that death can be overall bad for the paradise-bound. Thanks to John Fischer for this suggestion.
Most of those who are committed to the doctrine are in the Catholic tradition, but, for a Protestant take on the doctrine, see Walls (2011).
The language of “satisfaction” for sins is common (and can be seen in the passage from the Second Council of Lyons), but others prefer the notion of “sanctification.” For a recent discussion of these various “models” (as they are often called), see Barnard (2007) and Judisch (2009). Both models (if they are distinct models) are consistent with the claims I make in this section.
This latter point, according to Walls, is one of the favorable factors (for the doctrine of purgatory) around the time that the doctrine caught on: “The important point of emphasis is that guilt (culpa) can be pardoned or remitted through contrition and confession, but the debt of punishment (poena) remains, and can only be satisfied by undergoing the penance levied by the Church. If the penance is not satisfactorily completed in this life, due either to negligence or untimely death, then the punishment must be undergone in purgatory” (2011, p. 21, emphasis added).
On some conceptions of purgatory, “purgatorial fire” is not so severe, and it might not be the case that such theories of purgatory satisfy BPC. Such views might still allow for a solution to the puzzle about death's badness by maintaining that death might deprive one of opportunities to minimize one’s time in purgatory and thereby secure a quicker entrance to paradise. For the sake of simplicity, I will set aside this type of conception of purgatory here and focus on theories that satisfy BPC, but what I say here may well apply, mutatis mutandis, to certain theories of purgatory that do not satisfy BPC. Thanks to Jonah Nagashima for raising this point.
See, for example, Aquinas’s Summa theologica, Appendix 1, Question 2, Article 1.
To support his theory of purgatory, More appeals to the biblical story of king Hezekiah:
First, it seems very probable that when the good king Hezekiah wept at the warning of his death given him by the prophet Isaiah, it was for no reason other than fear of purgatory…Now he considered the seriousness of his offense to be such that he thought and esteemed the mere loss of this present life to be far too little to be a just and fitting punishment for it, and therefore he fell into a great dread of far worse punishment afterward. Being a good, faithful king, he could not lack a sure hope of receiving through his repentance such forgiveness as would preserve him from hell. But with his time being so short that we would have no opportunity to do penance for his transgression, he therefore feared that the rest of his rightful punishment would be carried out in purgatory. And therefore he wept bitterly and longed to live longer, that his satisfaction done there in the world in prayer and other good, virtuous deeds might gradually eliminate and cancel out all the punishment that would otherwise be coming to him here among us. (2002, pp. 138–139.)
It is worth noting that More not only reveals that his theory of purgatory satisfies BPC but also that he took Hezekiah to be able to eliminate the punishments he would experience in purgatory through prayer and other good done in this life.
It is hard to see, given van Inwagen’s later view (1990), how a human organism could exist as a corpse, since organisms are essentially living things. Zimmerman makes this point: “My corpse is not even a candidate for being me [on van Inwagen's view], since it does not participate in a Life” (1999, p. 206). For this reason, materialists about human persons might be better off adopting the view I consider next, suggested by Zimmerman (1999) and defended by Merricks (2009). My aim here, however, is not to object to any particular account of the metaphysics of human persons; rather, I want to consider the prospects of some such accounts for solving the puzzle about death’s badness.
As I have already noted, Zimmerman (1999) suggests a view like this for materialists about human persons. Although not himself a materialist, Zimmerman thinks that his suggestion provides dualists, like himself, with a way of explaining how the immaterial soul can be united with one and the same body before death and upon the resurrection of that (very same) body. For our purposes, though, we need not consider Zimmerman’s dualist picture, since presumably the immaterial soul would, upon the death of the body, be present with God in paradise, and we have already considered views of this type.
Some might balk at using ‘paradise’ to refer to what I will call inferior levels of paradise, since paradise is typically taken to be something like the best state or place to be in, and there will be superior states/places. Although I feel the force of this concern, I will continue using ‘paradise’ to refer to each of these levels, but note that, in keeping with one of our assumptions about paradise, each level of paradise, even the inferior ones, must be such that to be there is better for a person than to be in this life.
There will be a plethora of ways to spell out what the levels of paradise are and how one goes about getting to one level rather than another. For example, a Kantian may say that the goods of paradise are proportionate to one’s good deeds in this life. For another example, Aquinas claimed that one person might be happier than another in paradise (since, following Augustine, he took the promise of “many mansions” as signifying varying degrees of merit in paradise; see Book V, Article II of Aquinas’s Treatise on Happiness), though everyone will be as happy as they are capable of being. Still another example is that, on some religious traditions, a separate (and better) level of paradise is reserved for saints and/or martyrs. What I say about this type of position’s ability to account for death’s badness for the paradise-bound can be applied, mutatis mutandis, to any of the plethora of ways of spelling out the position.
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Zac Bachman, Dave Beglin, Marcia Cyr, Matt Flummer, Meredith McFadden, Jonah Nagashima, and the audience at the Henry Janssen Memorial Conference at San Diego State University for helpful discussion of earlier drafts of this paper. I am especially grateful to John Fischer for encouraging me to write the paper and for helpful discussion throughout the process.
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Cyr, T.W. A puzzle about death’s badness: Can death be bad for the paradise-bound?. Int J Philos Relig 80, 145–162 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-016-9574-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-016-9574-1