Is Death Always Evil? Evaluating Nagel's Deprivation Argument

Nagel's Deprivation Argument Against Death

Thomas Nagel argues that the most serious difficulty with the view that death is always an evil is determining whether death is always a misfortune given the human limitation of mortality. He raises the question of how possible a possibility must be — in this case, continued life — in order for it to be considered a misfortune. Because humans have a standard lifespan of no more than 100 years, 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 of all 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, is by its nature bad.

The philosophy of death has long grappled with whether mortality constitutes a harm to the one who dies, and Nagel's deprivation account is one of the most influential modern positions in that debate. What follows is a critical examination of that position, organized around three distinct objections.

Is Life Necessarily a Good? The First Objection

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 fails to establish that life is necessarily a good beyond 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 were chronically depressed or in pain, would death — which brings the corresponding deprivation of that 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 that 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. In this view, death's villainous status would depend heavily on one's experiences while living — on what, exactly, one is losing or being deprived of.

Furthermore, I am not convinced that the cessation of pleasurable things is necessarily bad. For example, ending a cocaine addiction is probably better than continuing to use, even though it ends the person's experience of that particular pleasure. This raises further questions about what qualifies and quantifies "good" in life, questions that Nagel does not fully resolve. The philosophy of well-being offers several competing frameworks — hedonism, desire satisfaction, and objective list theories — each of which would yield a different verdict on whether death is always harmful.

Temporal Asymmetry and the Problem of Free Will

Second, I am not convinced that Nagel properly dismisses 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 earlier, for example, would have either made one a different person or caused one not to live at all. Therefore, while one can be completely undisturbed by the "eternity preceding his own birth" (p. 79), the death that follows one's life is of legitimate concern. The problem here is twofold.

The first problem is the assumption of free will 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 in the same way as the time before one's birth.