Death, Badness, and the Impossibility of Experience

Some have argued (following Epicurus) that death cannot be a bad thing for an individual who dies. They contend that nothing can be a bad for an individual unless the individual is able to experience it as bad. I argue against this Epicurean view, offering examples of things that an individual cannot experience as bad but are nevertheless bad for the individual. Further, I argue that death is relevantly similar.     

Epicurean Wills,Empty Hopes,and the Problem of Post Mortem Concern

Many Epicurean arguments for the claim that death is nothing to us depend on the ‘Experience Constraint’: the claim that something can only be good or bad for us if we experience it. However, Epicurus’ commitment to the Experience Constraint makes his attitude to will-writing puzzling. How can someone who accepts the Experience Constraint be motivated to bring about post mortem outcomes?

We might think that an Epicurean will-writer could be pleased by the thought of his/her loved ones being provided for after his/her death. Warren has argued that this does not dissolve the puzzle, since it involves a hope which the Epicurean should take to be empty just as the fear of death is empty. However, if it is a necessary condition of an emotion’s being empty that it involve accepting a claim which is not only false but also harmful it is not clear that this hope is indeed ‘empty’: there is a crucial disanalogy between fearing death and hoping for the prosperity of one’s children here. And if emptiness does not require harmfuless, an Epicurean has no need to rid themselves of the emotion.     

Epicurus,Death, and the Wrongness of Killing

This article questions the assumption, held by several philosophers, that the Epicurean argument for death's being “nothing to us” must be fallacious since its acceptance would undermine the principle that killing is (in general) wrong. Two possible strategies are considered, which the Epicurean-sympathizer might deploy in order to show that the non-badness of death (for the person who dies) is compatible with killing's being wrong. One of these is unsuccessful; the other is more promising. It involves arguing that the wrongness of killing is a “basic moral certainty” and hence requires no underpinning by the judgement that death is bad. Problems for this proposal, and possible responses to those problems, are considered. Though the strategy is not decisive, it is deemed to be one that the Epicurean could plausibly adopt.     

I’m Only Kidding: On Racist and Ethnic Jokes

Toward the end of his book Jokes, perhaps the best known philosophical treatment of the subject, Ted Cohen includes a notorious joke about a group of young Black men who are deterred from committing a gang rape by being thrown a basketball. This is a joke that perplexes Cohen and that he admits plays into stereotypes that presuppose the mindless obsession of Black youths with basketball as well as their unbridled sexuality. He agrees that the joke is morally bad and that it would be a better world without it. But he denies that its evil compromises its alleged funniness. He writes: “Wish that there were no mean jokes. Try remaking the world so that such jokes will have no place, will not arise. But do not deny that they are funny. That denial is a pretense that will help nothing.” In this paper, I want to challenge the claim that the moral defectiveness of a joke, especially a racist joke, cannot ever compromise its capacity to be funny.     

LESS GOOD BUT NOT BAD: IN DEFENSE OF EPICUREANISM ABOUT DEATH

In this article I defend innocuousism– a weak form of Epicureanism about the putative badness of death. I argue that if we assume both mental statism about wellbeing and that death is an experiential blank, it follows that death is not bad for the one who dies. I defend innocuousism against the deprivation account of the badness of death. I argue that something is extrinsically bad if and only if it leads to states that are intrinsically bad. On my view, sometimes dying may be less good than living, but it is never bad to die.     

Should a school honor a student's DNR order? A lawyer responds: a student's right to forgo CPR.

...Instead of and certainly before advising the school or S.A. to go into court, I would urge them to try to resolve the question where it arises -- in the classroom, not the courtroom. And I would ask school officials to try to place themselves in S.A.'s shoes, and to imagine how she feels about her situation; and to ask themselves how they will feel if they administer CPR against her and her parents' wishes. Is there no way that they can do more than nothing, but less than CPR? Which image would we prefer to attach to S.A.'s case, that of some lawyers giving a press conference on the courthouse steps or of a story about a school that made it possible for one of its students to spend her precious time with her friends, classmates, and teachers, as they learn together that death does not need to separate the living from the dying?     

Brueckner and Fischer on the Evil of Death

A primary argument against the badness of death (known as the Symmetry Argument) appeals to an alleged symmetry between prenatal and posthumous nonexistence. The Symmetry Argument has posed a serious threat to those who hold that death is bad because it deprives us of life’s goods that would have been available had we died later. Anthony Brueckner and John Martin Fischer develop an influential strategy to cope with the Symmetry Argument. In their attempt to break the symmetry, they claim that due to our preference of future experiential goods over past ones, posthumous nonexistence is bad for us, whereas prenatal nonexistence is not. Granting their presumption about our preference, however, it is questionable that prenatal nonexistence is not bad. This consideration does not necessarily indicate their defeat against the Symmetry Argument. I present a better response to the Symmetry Argument: the symmetry is broken, not because posthumous nonexistence is bad while prenatal nonexistence is not, but because (regardless as to whether prenatal nonexistence is bad) posthumous nonexistence is even worse.     

Skepticism: Impractical,therefore implausible

The truth of skepticism would be depressing and impractical. Our beliefs would be groundless, we would know nothing (or almost nothing) about the world around us, and epistemic success would likely be impossible. But do these negative consequences have any bearing on the truth of skepticism? According to many scholars, they do not. The impractical consequences of skepticism are typically regarded as orthogonal to its truth. For this reason, pragmatic resolutions to skepticism are regularly dismissed. I will argue, however, that skepticism is implausible because it is impractical. In particular, skepticism is implausible because it goes against the point of epistemic evaluation.     

Experience with Euthanasia is Associated with Fearlessness about Death in Veterinary Students

Veterinarians have an increased risk for suicide compared with the general population, yet there is little consensus regarding why this might be. We hypothesized that veterinarians become relatively fearless about death due to their repeated exposure to euthanasia. Accordingly, we predicted that there would be a positive relationship between experience with euthanasia and fearlessness about death, due to emotional habituation to the process of euthanasia. In a sample of 130 veterinary students, results conformed to expectation and indicated that the relationship with fearlessness about death was specific to euthanasia and did not generalize to experience with surgery or necropsy.     

The Lucretian Puzzle and the Nature of Time

If a person’s death is bad for him for the reason that he would have otherwise been intrinsically better off, as the Deprivation Approach says, does it not follow that his prenatal nonexistence is bad for him as well? Recently, it has been suggested that the “A-theory” of time can be used to support a negative answer to this question. In this paper, I raise some problems for this approach.     

All my toys are dead: Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie (2015)

Abstract

Making films can be a lifeline, an aid to going on living when (we feel) the world around us has disappeared. Looking, showing that there’s a “there there,” recording the present moment and thereby preserving it, can, for a time, make us not feel the nothingness within us. But the rescue that comes from making a film is always provisional. Why? Because every film has an end. Because if there are no more films to make, if there is nothing that deserves to be looked at (the worst case scenario), going on living will have exhausted itself, and taking one’s own life (if indeed there was a life to take) may seem the only option. Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie – a film recording the slow death of her mother in her Brussels apartment – is this worst case scenario. A moving record of the psychic devastation that comes about when we, slowly but surely, lose the one object worth looking at. Panic, depression, hopelessness, and a fierce determination to go where the disappeared object went. To this last home where nothing no longer moves.     

The Benefits of Coming into Existence

This paper argues that we can benefit or harm people by creating them, but only in the sense that we can create things that are good or bad for them. What we cannot do is to confer comparative benefits and harms to people by creating them or failing to create them. You are not better off (or worse off) created than you would have been had you not been created, for nothing has value for you if you do not exist, not even neutral value.     

Effect of Beliefs About Future Weather Conditions on Restaurant Tipping

Research has shown that favorable weather is associated with increased tipping and that beliefs that weather is favorable can produce higher tips. In the current study, the possibility that beliefs about future weather conditions would affect tipping was experimentally examined. A server in a midscale restaurant wrote on the back of customers' checks either nothing, that the weather would be good the next day, or that the weather would not be so good the next day. Compared to writing nothing ( M = 18.73%) or giving an unfavorable forecast ( M = 18.18%), giving a favorable forecast ( M = 22.21%) resulted in significantly higher tip percentages. The power of beliefs, irrespective of their veridicality, regarding the state of atmospheric conditions in affecting human response is discussed.     

It would be bad if compatibilism were true; therefore,it isn't

I want to suggest that it would be bad if compatibilism were true, and that this gives us good reason to think that it isn't. This is, you might think, an outlandish argument, and the considerable burden of this paper is to convince you otherwise. There are two key elements at stake in this argument. The first is that it would be - in a distinctive sense to be explained - bad if compatibilism were true. The thought here is that compatibilism ultimately presents us with a picture on which, in principle, powerful manipulators can effectively guarantee that finite moral agents should become blameworthy. To my mind, this isn't just false - though I think that it is - it is also such that it would be bad (unfortunate, undesirable…) if it were true. The second is that the fact that it would be - in this sense - bad if true gives us reason to think that it isn't. It may be bad that there is no afterlife. But that, in itself, hardly gives us reason to think that there is an afterlife. That is true, but - as others before me have suggested - when the object of the relevant badness is morality itself, the inference seems secure. A more general aim of the paper is to investigate the nature of this very form of argument in itself, and I compare my argument (inter alia) to a recent argument from Sayre–McCord against the possibility of genuine moral dilemmas.     

Collective Responsibility

The basic bearer of responsibility is individuals, because that isall there are – nothing else can literally be the bearer of fullresponsibility. Claims about group responsibility therefore needanalysis. This would be impossible if all actions must be understoodas ones that could be performed whether or not anyone else exists.Individuals often act by virtue of membership in certain groups;often such membership bears a causal role in our behavior, andsometimes people act deliberately in order to promote the prospectsof members of a given group. Nevertheless, it is rational to awardproportionally to individual contributions to those actions andindividual shares in the production of the consequences of thoseactions.     

Tracking Track Records: John WorrallRelying on Meta-induction?

From a reliabilist point of view, our inferential practices make us into instruments for determining the truth value of hypotheses where, like all instruments, reliability is a central virtue. I apply this perspective to second-order inductions, the inductive assessments of inductive practices. Such assessments are extremely common, for example whenever we test the reliability of our instruments or our informants. Nevertheless, the inductive assessment of induction has had a bad name ever since David Hume maintained that any attempt to justify induction by means of an inductive argument must beg the question. I will consider how the inductive justification of induction fares from the reliabilist point of view. I will also consider two other well-known arguments that can be construed as inductive assessments of induction. One is the miracle argument, according to which the truth of scientific theories should be inferred as the best explanation of their predictive success; the other is the disaster argument, according to which we should infer that all present and future theories are false on the grounds that all past theories have been found to be false.
'And here it is constantly supposed, that there is a connexion between the present fact and that which is inferred from it. Were there nothing to bind them together, the inference would be entirely precarious.' (David Hume, Enquiry IV)     

On the Reality and Causal Efficacy of Familiar Objects

What caused the event we report by saying “the window shattered”? Was it the baseball, which crashed into the window? Causal exclusionists say: many, many microparticles collectively caused that event—microparticles located where common sense supposes the baseball was. Unitary large objects such as baseballs cause nothing; indeed, by Alexander’s dictum, there are no such objects. This paper argues that the false claim about causal efficacy is instead the one that attributes it to the many microparticles. Causation obtains just where there is an “invariance”, a true generalization to the effect that had things been different with the putative cause, things would have been correspondingly different with the putative effect. But “correspondingly” here requires a rough metric. There must be a fact as to which alternative group events, involving many microparticles, would have departed less from the putative cause of the shattering, and which would have departed more. Surprisingly, there is no such fact.     

Harvesting the living?: separating "brain death" and organ transplantation

The chronic shortage of transplantable organs has reached critical proportions. In the wake of this crisis, some bioethicists have argued that there is sufficient public support to expand organ recovery through use of neocortical criteria of death or even pre-mortem organ retrieval. I present a typology of ways in which data gathered from the public can be misread or selectively used by bioethicists in service of an ideological or policy agenda, resulting in bad policy and bad ethics. Such risks should lead us to look at alternatives for increasing organ supplies short of expanding or abandoning the dead donor rule. The chronic problem of organ scarcity should prompt bioethicists to engage in constructive dialogue about the relation of the social sciences and bioethics, to examine the social malleability of the definition of death, and to revisit the question of the priority of organ transplants in the overall package of healthcare benefits provided to most, but not all, citizens.     

IS METAPHYSICAL NIHILISM INTERESTING?

Suppose nothing exists. Then it is true that nothing exists. What makes that true? Nothing! So it seems that if nothing existed, then the principle that every truth is made true by something (the truthmaker principle) would be false. So if it is possible that nothing exists, a claim often called ‘metaphysical nihilism’, then the truthmaker principle is not necessary. This paper explores various ways to resolve this conflict without restricting metaphysical nihilism in such a way that it would become trivial and uninteresting.     

Modal Objectivity1

It is widely agreed that the intelligibility of modal metaphysics has been vindicated. Quine's arguments to the contrary supposedly confused analyticity with metaphysical necessity, and rigid with non‐rigid designators.² But even if modal metaphysics is intelligible, it could be misconceived. It could be that metaphysical necessity is not absolute necessity – the strictest real (non‐epistemic, non‐deontic) notion of necessity – and that no proposition of traditional metaphysical interest is necessary in every real sense. If there were nothing otherwise “uniquely metaphysically significant” about metaphysical necessity, then paradigmatic metaphysical necessities would be necessary in one sense of “necessary”, not necessary in another, and that would be it. The question of whether they were necessary simpliciter would be like the question of whether the Parallel Postulate is true simpliciter – understood as a pure mathematical conjecture, rather than as a hypothesis about physical spacetime. In a sense, the latter question has no objective answer. In this article, I argue that paradigmatic questions of modal metaphysics are like the Parallel Postulate question. I then discuss the deflationary ramifications of this argument. I conclude with an alternative conception of the space of possibility. According to this conception, there is no objective boundary between possibility and impossibility. Along the way, I sketch an analogy between modal metaphysics and set theory.