Abstract
A primary argument against the badness of death (known as the Symmetry Argument) appeals to an alleged symmetry between prenatal and posthumous nonexistence. The Symmetry Argument has posed a serious threat to those who hold that death is bad because it deprives us of life’s goods that would have been available had we died later. Anthony Brueckner and John Martin Fischer develop an influential strategy to cope with the Symmetry Argument. In their attempt to break the symmetry, they claim that due to our preference of future experiential goods over past ones, posthumous nonexistence is bad for us, whereas prenatal nonexistence is not. Granting their presumption about our preference, however, it is questionable that prenatal nonexistence is not bad. This consideration does not necessarily indicate their defeat against the Symmetry Argument. I present a better response to the Symmetry Argument: the symmetry is broken, not because posthumous nonexistence is bad while prenatal nonexistence is not, but because (regardless as to whether prenatal nonexistence is bad) posthumous nonexistence is even worse.
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Notes
Lucretius 2007: 101, where he writes, “Look back again—how the endless ages of time come to pass before our birth are nothing to us. This is a looking glass Nature holds up for us in which we see the time to come after we finally die. What is it there that looks so fearsome? What’s so tragic? Isn’t it more peaceful than any sleep?” On the face of it, this remark hardly says anything about the evil (or badness) of death. Rather, it implicitly suggests that our attitude toward death is in fact irrational. For this reason, Lucretius’s statement might seem irrelevant to a discussion as to why death is bad. However, the preceding remark can be charitably interpreted as making an important point about the evil of death. For instance, one may argue that if Lucretius is right in thinking that our attitude toward posthumous nonexistence is wholly irrational, that is probably because posthumous nonexistence is not bad for us after all. For if posthumous nonexistence is indeed bad, the fear we have toward it should not be irrational.
Two strategies have been developed in objection to this claim. First, some writers have rejected it on the ground that one could not have existed substantially earlier than one’s actual origin. See, e.g., Nagel 1970: 79. Nagel’s view seems to be committed to two kinds of essentialist claims: (i) the particular gametes from which one is developed are essential to one’s identity, and (ii) the actual time at which one is conceived is essential to one’s identity. Many philosophers have rejected at least one of them. See, e.g., Parfit 1984:175, Brueckner and Fischer 1986: 214–15; 1993a: fn. 2, and Rosenbaum 1989: 360–63. Frederik Kaufman suggests a different approach for the same conclusion Nagel reached. See his 1996 and 1999. His view is that although one’s “thin” metaphysical self—the one stripped of one’s biographical history along with particular psychological states and characteristics—could have existed substantially earlier, one’s “thick” self that contains such history and characteristics could not, and only the thick self is pertinent in discussing the deprivation of death. I doubt that Kaufman’s approach is successful as I deny that the kind of biographical and psychological components Kaufman has in mind are the only elements that matter with respect to one’s survival. But I will not press this point further because it would be beyond the scope of this article. For further discussions, see Brueckner and Fischer 1998; Belshaw 2000; Fischer 2006; Johansson 2008. For the purpose of this article, I shall grant that one could indeed have existed substantially earlier than one’s actual origin. Another strategy for denying that one would have had more goods with an earlier origin is given by Fred Feldman, who has argued that there is no reason to suppose that an earlier birth will guarantee a longer life (1991: 221–24; 1992: 154–56). Some commentators, however, illustrated circumstances where an earlier origin does tend to ensure a longer life. For instance, suppose a gigantic asteroid is predicted to hit the surface of the Earth next week, which will cause the immediate extinction of humankind. In such a case, most of us would have lived longer had we been born significantly earlier (Kagan 2007). See also McMahan 2006: 216–17.
One might wonder how this argument might be relevant to a discussion on the evil of death, unless death is to be equated with posthumous nonexistence. However, within the framework of the deprivation account, it is safe to say that the badness of death, for the most part, consists in the badness of posthumous nonexistence. Though death is not identical to posthumous nonexistence, it gives rise to the subsequent nonexistence, thereby depriving us of possible goods. For this reason, I shall assume that explaining the badness of posthumous nonexistence amounts to explaining the badness of death.
It is important to note that in Brueckner and Fischer’s discussion of our asymmetrical attitudes toward past and future experience, it is presumed that evaluating the value of an experience is indexed to the time in which one is objectively placed. An experience can only be regarded as being in the future or in the past relative to a particular point of time. Hence, on this presumption, it is no wonder that the value of one single experience can be measured differently depending on the time of its evaluation. For instance, the prospect of undergoing a painful surgery may be dreadful, but once it is over, the same event in retrospect may not be too awful. This does not mean that the surgery has both a negative and a neutral value at the same time. A surgery taking place during a certain period of time p is regarded as being in the future relative to a time before p, but as being in the past relative to a time after p. Therefore, one may be indifferent to a painful surgery that he had yesterday because the surgery is objectively in the past, though it can of course be regarded as being in the future relative to a time before yesterday. Many thanks to an anonymous referee for urging me to clarify this point.
This claim, in turn, is based on the following presumption: as far as experiential goods are concerned, only future goods, and not past goods, matter to us. Some might raise a question on this presumption. Christopher Belshaw, for instance, argues that past pleasures are of value to us insofar as it provides us with positive aftereffects such as good memories (1993: 106–7). Brueckner and Fischer reply that Belshaw’s objection causes no trouble for their contention that past goods are of no value to us as such (1993b: 329–30). Another possible line of reasoning in response to Belshaw would be to argue that though it may not be true that past experiential goods are of no value to us at all, it would still be true that in general future experiential goods are of more value to us than past experiential goods; and this latter claim is sufficient to account for the asymmetry between prenatal and posthumous nonexistence. For instance, one might argue as follows: past goods are of less value to us than future goods; posthumous nonexistence deprives us of future goods while prenatal nonexistence deprives us of past goods; hence, the two kinds of nonexistence are asymmetrical. Though I believe that it would be more promising to base Brueckner and Fischer’s argument on the weaker presumption that the past goods are of less value to us, I will not question their own presumption (that past goods are of no value to us) in what follows. The main arguments that I will put forward in the remainder of this article will work, mutatis mutandis, on either presumption.
Here I will assume that some version of hedonism is true purely for simplicity’s sake. An analogous conclusion would follow even without this assumption.
This assumption may seem unrealistic, for people may take pleasure in learning a new language. However, the point that I am making through this example is hardly affected by this observation.
Though Brueckner and Fischer limit their discussion on the evil of death in terms of experiential goods, another line of thinking may be used to support the badness of prenatal nonexistence in terms of non-experiential goods. To illustrate this point, consider a variant of Parfit’s hospital case given by Jeff McMahan (2006: 219): one wakes up in a hospital in a state of temporary but not total amnesia; he then learns that he may be either (i) a terminal patient at the age of 40 or (ii) a terminal patient at the age of 60; it turns out that in either case, he has only about one month to live. Given that the quality of the remaining future is relatively similar in each life, we can plausibly suppose that he would prefer to be the 60-year-old patient. After all, the 60-year-old would likely have accomplished more, since he would have lived longer. This suggests that past achievements should matter to us, not because they contribute to the quality of our lives in the future, but because they make our lives as a whole more fertile and fulfilling. (To reinforce this observation, McMahan introduces the words of Harold Brodkey before he died from AIDS: “I like what I’ve written, the stories and two novels. If I had to give up what I’ve written in order to be clear of this disease, I wouldn’t do it” (2006: 219).) If this is correct, then we can see how prenatal nonexistence deprives us of non-experiential goods. Personal achievement in the past is a primary example of a non-experiential good. Suppose the aforementioned patient turned out to be the 40-year-old. He might as well say, “I wish I were the 60-year-old. Then I would have lived 20 more years in the past, during which I might have had more achievements. That means I would have led a more fulfilling life.” These words of lament seem reasonable. Prenatal nonexistence takes away past times that would have been ours had we had an earlier origin. During those past times, we might have produced some past achievement that would have made our lives better as a whole. In this sense, prenatal nonexistence deprives us of possible past non-experiential goods. Since we care about having had those goods, prenatal nonexistence is bad.
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Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Anthony Brueckner, Sungil Han, Luke Manning, and Jeff McMahan for helpful comments and discussions on the earlier versions of this article.
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Yi, H. Brueckner and Fischer on the Evil of Death. Philosophia 40, 295–303 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-011-9328-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-011-9328-3