Death by Thomas Nagel

Philosophy

Nagel says that the most serious difficulty with the view that death is always an evil is determining whether death is (always) misfortunate given the human limitation of mortality. He raises a question of how possible a possibility (in this case, continued life) must be in order for it to be considered a misfortune. Because humans have a standard lifespan of no more than 100 years (and an upper limit not much higher than that), Nagel questions whether a person who dies close to that limit (age 82 in his example) has suffered a misfortune (given that he could not possibly have lived much longer). He concludes that even though death is inevitable, it would still be good to live longer. He thinks that the 82-year-old has been deprived of some life, and all of the goods with which life has acquainted him, so death must be a misfortune because it presents "an abrupt cancellation of indefinitely extensive possible goods" (p. 80). Therefore, he concludes that death, regardless of when it happens, by its nature, is bad.

I do not necessarily agree that death is always an evil for several reasons. First, Nagel explicitly says that "life is a good and death is the corresponding deprivation or loss." However, he failed to really establish that life is (necessarily) a good aside from listing things like perception and thought as "goods." To determine this, questions of psychological states and lived experiences seem to need to be addressed. For example, if someone where chronically depressed or in pain, would death, which brings corresponding deprivation (in this case of pain or depression) be evil? Nagel speaks of potential as part of his argument for death's evil, so he might say that people have the potential to enjoy life and death still deprives them of that potential. However, if someone has enjoyed their life little and suffered much, that potential does not negate the lived experience of the person and death might be the only end to their pain. If one views life as both good and bad, then death would negate both good and bad. It would seem, in this view, death's villainous status would depend a lot on experiences while living (answering the question "what exactly is one losing or being deprived of?"). Further, I am not convinced that cessation of pleasurable things (i.e., those things which give life "good" status) is bad either. For example, ending one's cocaine addiction is probably a better than continuing to use, even though it ends his or her experience of pleasure. This raises other questions, such as what qualifies and quantifies good in life.

Second, I am not convinced that he properly dismissed Lucretius' problem of temporal asymmetry. Nagel argues that while it is not possible to have lived before one's birth, it would be possible to live after one's death (if death had not occurred). Being born early, for example, would have either made one a different person or caused him/her to not live at all. Therefore, while one can be completely undisturbed by the "eternity preceding his own birth" (p. 79), the death that follows his life is of concern. The problem here is twofold. First is the assumption of freewill and non-determinism in Nagel's argument. While I do not stand to make the argument for determinism here, it should suffice to say that if there is only the illusion of free-will, then death has deprived us of nothing in Nagel's view (because there is not even the possibility of continued life) and, thus, would not be evil. If we do not have an infinite amount of life that death steals from us (but rather a finite amount already determined), then it would be necessary to regard the time after one's death the same way as the time before one's birth.

The second problem is that of time and duration of life (and death). It would seem that humans have a finite capacity to care of about time (and life). For example, while it imaginable to live (or what to live) for an addition 50 or 100 years, it seems unimaginable to live (or want to live) for another 4.5 billion. Yes, people say "I want to live forever," but the statement has little meaning (since humans do not have the cognitive ability to understand infinity). We cannot, therefore, conclude that death after 4.5 billion years would be necessarily bad (as there is no point of reference). We simply would not know what circumstances would be like after living 4.5 billion years. We would not know, for example, that we would even still experience pleasure and pain. Nagel is using our own lifespan as a point of reference to make his claim that death is bad, but once one goes beyond those limits too far, it would be hard to even fathom what "life" would be. Such an unbounded timeframe of life would seem to have huge implications on how life (and death) is valued (i.e., what makes life "good") if for no other reason than the fact that everything (e.g., our biology, our experiences of the world) is intricately tied to our lifespan.