Death is an evil because it deprives us

The deprivation argument; the deprivation account of the evil of death

Thomas Nagel born 1937Consciousness is a subjective point of view that physics does not describe: our idea of nature must be widened.

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What it claims

Death is an evil for the one who dies, even if he feels nothing, and it is reasonable to fear it.

Why

A harm need not be felt: death deprives us of the goods of the life we would have had.

In short

"Death is an evil because it deprives us" is an argument by Thomas Nagel ("Death", Noûs, 1970 (reprinted in Mortal Questions, 1979)) on the question "Should we fear death?" (answer: an anxiety that enlightens). Its claim: Death is an evil for the one who dies, even if he feels nothing, and it is reasonable to fear it. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P4, P5). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 2 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

"Death", Noûs, 1970 (reprinted in Mortal Questions, 1979)

Valid with an implicit premise

Here, "anxiety" means this: death really is an evil, and it is reasonable to fear it. Nagel starts from an objection of Epicurus and his school: if death is the end of all sensation, it cannot do anything to us, since we do not feel it. Nagel answers that an evil does not have to be felt. A man betrayed by his friends without knowing it is wronged, even if he never finds out. An intelligent adult reduced by an accident to the state of a happy infant is to be pitied, even if he does not suffer. In the same way, death is not bad because of what one would experience in it (nothing), but because of what it takes from us: the rest of our life and all its goods. So what is reasonable is not fear of "the afterwards", it is regret for what is lost.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.

Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P4 and P5, the computer finds a world where death does deprive of future life, but where that life would have contained nothing good, or where one judges it pointless to fear an unavoidable evil: death would not be an evil to fear there.

Valid if one accepts the hidden premises. P1 and P2 say how death can be an evil without being felt (by deprivation). P3 says what it deprives us of (future life). P4 adds that this future life would have had value, and P5 that fearing an evil is reasonable. Without P4, the deprivation might take away nothing good (if the future life had no value). Without P5, we would have shown that death is an evil, not that fear is reasonable: one may judge that an unavoidable evil does not deserve to be feared. These are the two links its opponents discuss most.

Analogy. Someone is robbed of an inheritance without knowing it and dies without ever finding out. He felt nothing, and yet we say he was wronged. Nagel says the same of death: one can be wronged without feeling anything, because of what one loses. The difference, which can be objected to him, is that the thief exists, whereas no one "takes" our life from us.

Objections

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus 300 BC · attacks premise 2

Epicurus holds that all good and evil consist in sensation, and that death is the privation of all sensation. So it is nothing to us: when we are, death is not there; when it is there, we are no more. There is no one to whom the evil of death could happen, and fearing it is a worry without an object.

Nagel replies

see the argument

Thomas Nagel (he does not name Epicurus, but deals with this objection) 1970

For Nagel, the natural view is that discovering a betrayal makes us unhappy because it is bad to be betrayed, not that betrayal is bad because its discovery makes us unhappy.

Thomas Nagel (same text, second example) 1970

Nagel gives a second case: an intelligent adult, reduced by a brain injury to the state of a contented infant, is the subject of a misfortune, he is the one we pity, although he does not suffer from his condition.

The debate goes on (our summary) Both camps agree on one fact: the dead man feels nothing. They disagree on what makes an evil. An Epicurean can answer that in the betrayal example the betrayed man is still alive and may suffer from it, and that the contented infant also exists somewhere, whereas the dead man is no one any more. One can answer for Nagel that the adult has indeed disappeared, like the dead man, and that this is what we mourn. Nagel's text does not name Epicurus: the pairing is ours.

Where the debate stands (our summary)The debate is still open: most philosophers grant Nagel that an evil need not be felt, but many still ask "bad for whom?", since the dead man no longer exists.

Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, III (the symmetry argument) 55 BC · attacks premise 3

Lucretius asks us to look back: the eternity before our birth was nothing to us. Nature holds it up as the mirror of the time to come after our death. If the earlier nothingness does not frighten us, the later one should not either. Death deprives us no more than the time before our birth did.

Nagel replies

see the argument

Thomas Nagel 1970

On the side of death, Nagel says that the time after death is time in which the person, had he not died then, would be alive.

Thomas Nagel (same passage) 1970

On the side of birth, the same cannot be said: one cannot say that the time before birth is time in which the man would have lived had he been born earlier.

The debate goes on (our summary) Nagel says we could have died later, but could not have been born much earlier (we would no longer be the same person), hence the asymmetry. What the passage does not say: Nagel himself admits, further on in the same text, that something about the prospect of permanent nothingness is not captured by the analysis in terms of denied possibilities, and that Lucretius' argument still awaits a full answer. An Epicurean reader can conclude that the symmetry is not refuted, a Nagel reader that deprivation remains the best explanation.

Where the debate stands (our summary)The debate is still open: the asymmetry between past and future is one of the most discussed points in the philosophy of death, and Nagel himself does not treat it as settled.

Bernard Williams, "The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality" 1973 · attacks premise 4

Williams argues that an endless life would end up boring: by living on, a person would exhaust what interests him and would have no reason to go on. If so, having more life is not always a good, and death may even spare us an evil. The deprivation of future life would therefore not always be a loss. (Summary of the thesis, without a quotation: the text is not in our corpus.)

no reply

see the argument

We have not yet found a direct reply by Nagel in the texts.

The debate goes on (our summary) Williams writes three years after Nagel, who could not answer him in "Death". We found no direct answer from Nagel. Nagel can be defended thus: he does not claim an endless life would be a good, only that a life longer than the one we have is (he notes that dying at 24 is worse than at 82, and that dying at 82 remains terrible). Williams can be defended thus: the reply does not say how far this reasoning goes, and whether a longer life stays desirable as long as one wants it.

Where the debate stands (our summary)Open point: philosophers are divided on the value of a life that would last a very long time, and the answer changes the reach of P4.