Debate: Is death bad for the one who dies?

Death is nothing to us

Death cannot harm the one who dies, because there is no one left to be harmed. Fear of death is irrational.

Best argument

For something to be bad for you, you must exist to suffer it. After death you do not exist. And the symmetry with pre-natal non-existence shows that we do not actually find non-existence itself frightening. Accepting this, Epicurus argued, removes the greatest source of human anxiety and lets us enjoy life.

Strongest objection

Things can be bad for us without our experiencing them. If your friends secretly mock you, or your life's work is destroyed after your death, many would say you have been harmed even though you never know. And death deprives you of all the good things you would otherwise have had.

The reply

Epicureans insist that harm requires a subject who suffers the harm at some time, and ask when exactly the dead person is harmed: before death, when they are alive and fine, or after, when they do not exist?

Defended by

Epicurus, Lucretius, Stephen Rosenbaum

Death harms by deprivation

Death is bad for the person who dies because it deprives them of the goods their life would otherwise have contained.

Best argument

Thomas Nagel argued in 1970 that a person can be harmed by losing goods they would have had, even if they never experience the loss. Death is bad because it closes off a future that would have been good. This explains why the death of a young person seems worse than that of an old one: there is more to lose.

Strongest objection

The timing problem: when is the person harmed? And the symmetry problem: by the same logic, being born later than you could have been deprived you of goods too, yet no one mourns their late birth.

The reply

Fred Feldman and others answer that the harm is timeless, a comparison between two whole lives, the one you had and the one you would have had. Frederik Kaufman suggests that you could not have been born much earlier and still been you, but you could have died later, which breaks the symmetry.

Defended by

Thomas Nagel, Fred Feldman, Shelly Kagan

Death gives life its meaning

Death may be bad in some ways, but mortality is what makes our choices matter. Immortality would be worse.

Best argument

Bernard Williams argued that an endless life would eventually become unbearably boring, as the character Elina Makropulos found after more than three centuries. Martin Heidegger held that facing death authentically is what lets us take ownership of our lives. Finitude gives urgency and shape to what we do.

Strongest objection

This shows only that immortality might be undesirable, not that dying at 30 or 80 is not a harm. And many find it hard to believe that they would run out of worthwhile things to do in a few centuries.

Defended by

Bernard Williams, Martin Heidegger, Seneca

Where you stand

If you could, would you choose to live forever?

Choose one to see how people answer.

For the full background, variations and open questions, read the entry: Should we fear death?.