Damascene Philosophy

QuestionsXVIII

Should we fear death?

Epicurus argued that death is nothing to us: when it comes, we are gone. Few have found the argument convincing, and fewer have refuted it.

Reading time
4 min
Difficulty
Introductory
Branch
Meaning
First posed
Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, c. 300 BCE; Lucretius, c. 50 BCE

The question

Everyone you know will die, and so will you. Most people find this frightening, and many spend their lives trying not to think about it. But what exactly is there to fear?

Epicurus, writing around 300 BCE, offered a remarkably simple argument. Good and bad consist in sensation: pleasure and pain. Death is the end of all sensation. So death cannot be bad for the one who dies. While we exist, he argued, death is not present, and when death is present, we no longer exist. Fearing death is like fearing a dentist's appointment that you are guaranteed not to attend.

His follower Lucretius added the symmetry argument. You did not exist for the infinite time before your birth, and that does not trouble you. The time after your death is a mirror image of it. So why should it trouble you?

“Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.”

Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, trans. R. D. Hicks

Why it matters

How we answer shapes how we live. If death is not bad for the one who dies, much of our anxiety is misplaced, and we can live more freely. If it is bad, we need to understand why, and what that says about how to use the time we have.

The question also matters for medicine and ethics: whether it is worse for a young person to die than an old one, whether life extension is a goal worth pursuing, and how to think about the deaths of others.

Key terms

  • Deprivation accountThe view that death is bad for the one who dies because it deprives them of the goods they would otherwise have had.
  • Symmetry argumentLucretius' argument that the endless time after our death is like the endless time before our birth, which we do not regret, so we should not fear death either.
  • HedonismIn ethics, the view that pleasure is the only thing good in itself and pain the only thing bad in itself.
  • ImmortalityLiving forever. Philosophers ask both whether it is possible and whether it would actually be desirable.
  • Existence requirementThe principle that something can be good or bad for a person only if that person exists at the time. Epicurus relied on it to argue that death is not bad for the one who dies.

The positions

Position I

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.

Position II

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.

Position III

Death gives life its meaning

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

Arguments and objections

Death is nothing to us

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?

Death harms by deprivation

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.

Death gives life its meaning

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.

Who argued what

  • Death is nothing to us Epicurus, Lucretius, Stephen Rosenbaum
  • Death harms by deprivation Thomas Nagel, Fred Feldman, Shelly Kagan
  • Death gives life its meaning Bernard Williams, Martin Heidegger, Seneca

Where you stand

If you could, would you choose to live forever?

Choose one to see how people answer.

Variations

The long sleep

Imagine you fall into a dreamless sleep for a thousand years and then wake. Would the sleep have been bad for you? If not, why is the same stretch of nothing worse when it has no end?

The future bias

Derek Parfit asked you to imagine waking in a hospital unsure whether you have already had a painful operation yesterday or will have a shorter one later today. Most people would prefer the longer pain to be in the past. We care asymmetrically about past and future, and this bias may explain why we fear post-mortal non-existence but not pre-natal non-existence.

Go deeper

The Stoic practice

The Stoics turned reflection on death into a daily exercise. Seneca advised his friend to prepare his mind each day as if he had come to the very end of life. Marcus Aurelius reminded himself repeatedly that he would soon be dead and forgotten, not to induce despair but to cut through vanity and focus on acting well now. See Stoicism.

Schools of thought: Epicureanism, Stoicism, Existentialism

Related ideas

Question

Does life have meaning without being given one?

If no one designed us for a purpose, is a human life meaningful anyway, or do we have to make meaning ourselves, or is the search itself the problem?

Question

Are you the same person you were at eight?

Almost every cell, belief and memory has changed. Something makes that child you. The question is what.

Thought experiment

Would you step into the teleporter?

It scans you, destroys your body, and builds a perfect copy on Mars a moment later. The copy wakes up remembering stepping in. Did you travel, or did you die?

Thought experiment

Could you upload your mind?

If every connection in your brain were scanned and run on a computer, would the program be you, a copy of you, or no one at all?

Thought experiment

Would you plug into the experience machine?

A machine can give you any experiences you want, indistinguishable from reality, for the rest of your life. Would you plug in?

Question

Should you only care about what you control?

The Stoics divided the world into what is up to you and what is not, and argued that peace comes from caring only about the first.

Further reading and sources

Open questions

  • If you will not be there to experience death, what exactly are you afraid of?
  • Is it worse to die young, and if so, why?
  • Would you choose to live forever if you could?

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