death and life essay

5 moving, beautiful essays about death and dying

by Sarah Kliff

It is never easy to contemplate the end-of-life, whether its own our experience or that of a loved one.

This has made a recent swath of beautiful essays a surprise. In different publications over the past few weeks, I’ve stumbled upon writers who were contemplating final days. These are, no doubt, hard stories to read. I had to take breaks as I read about Paul Kalanithi’s experience facing metastatic lung cancer while parenting a toddler, and was devastated as I followed Liz Lopatto’s contemplations on how to give her ailing cat the best death possible. But I also learned so much from reading these essays, too, about what it means to have a good death versus a difficult end from those forced to grapple with the issue. These are four stories that have stood out to me recently, alongside one essay from a few years ago that sticks with me today.

My Own Life | Oliver Sacks

As recently as last month, popular author and neurologist Oliver Sacks was in great health, even swimming a mile every day. Then, everything changed: the 81-year-old was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer. In a beautiful op-ed , published in late February in the New York Times, he describes his state of mind and how he’ll face his final moments. What I liked about this essay is how Sacks describes how his world view shifts as he sees his time on earth getting shorter, and how he thinks about the value of his time.

Before I go | Paul Kalanithi

Kalanthi began noticing symptoms — “weight loss, fevers, night sweats, unremitting back pain, cough” — during his sixth year of residency as a neurologist at Stanford. A CT scan revealed metastatic lung cancer. Kalanthi writes about his daughter, Cady and how he “probably won’t live long enough for her to have a memory of me.” Much of his essay focuses on an interesting discussion of time, how it’s become a double-edged sword. Each day, he sees his daughter grow older, a joy. But every day is also one that brings him closer to his likely death from cancer.

As I lay dying | Laurie Becklund

Becklund’s essay was published posthumonously after her death on February 8 of this year. One of the unique issues she grapples with is how to discuss her terminal diagnosis with others and the challenge of not becoming defined by a disease. “Who would ever sign another book contract with a dying woman?” she writes. “Or remember Laurie Becklund, valedictorian, Fulbright scholar, former Times staff writer who exposed the Salvadoran death squads and helped The Times win a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the 1992 L.A. riots? More important, and more honest, who would ever again look at me just as Laurie?”

Everything I know about a good death I learned from my cat | Liz Lopatto

Dorothy Parker was Lopatto’s cat, a stray adopted from a local vet. And Dorothy Parker, known mostly as Dottie, died peacefully when she passed away earlier this month. Lopatto’s essay is, in part, about what she learned about end-of-life care for humans from her cat. But perhaps more than that, it’s also about the limitations of how much her experience caring for a pet can transfer to caring for another person.

Yes, Lopatto’s essay is about a cat rather than a human being. No, it does not make it any easier to read. She describes in searing detail about the experience of caring for another being at the end of life. “Dottie used to weigh almost 20 pounds; she now weighs six,” Lopatto writes. “My vet is right about Dottie being close to death, that it’s probably a matter of weeks rather than months.”

Letting Go | Atul Gawande

“Letting Go” is a beautiful, difficult true story of death. You know from the very first sentence — “Sara Thomas Monopoli was pregnant with her first child when her doctors learned that she was going to die” — that it is going to be tragic. This story has long been one of my favorite pieces of health care journalism because it grapples so starkly with the difficult realities of end-of-life care.

In the story, Monopoli is diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, a surprise for a non-smoking young woman. It’s a devastating death sentence: doctors know that lung cancer that advanced is terminal. Gawande knew this too — Monpoli was his patient. But actually discussing this fact with a young patient with a newborn baby seemed impossible.

"Having any sort of discussion where you begin to say, 'look you probably only have a few months to live. How do we make the best of that time without giving up on the options that you have?' That was a conversation I wasn't ready to have," Gawande recounts of the case in a new Frontline documentary .

What’s tragic about Monopoli’s case was, of course, her death at an early age, in her 30s. But the tragedy that Gawande hones in on — the type of tragedy we talk about much less — is how terribly Monopoli’s last days played out.

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May 3, 2023

Contemplating Mortality: Powerful Essays on Death and Inspiring Perspectives

The prospect of death may be unsettling, but it also holds a deep fascination for many of us. If you're curious to explore the many facets of mortality, from the scientific to the spiritual, our article is the perfect place to start. With expert guidance and a wealth of inspiration, we'll help you write an essay that engages and enlightens readers on one of life's most enduring mysteries!

Death is a universal human experience that we all must face at some point in our lives. While it can be difficult to contemplate mortality, reflecting on death and loss can offer inspiring perspectives on the nature of life and the importance of living in the present moment. In this collection of powerful essays about death, we explore profound writings that delve into the human experience of coping with death, grief, acceptance, and philosophical reflections on mortality.

Through these essays, readers can gain insight into different perspectives on death and how we can cope with it. From personal accounts of loss to philosophical reflections on the meaning of life, these essays offer a diverse range of perspectives that will inspire and challenge readers to contemplate their mortality.

The Inevitable: Coping with Mortality and Grief

Mortality is a reality that we all have to face, and it is something that we cannot avoid. While we may all wish to live forever, the truth is that we will all eventually pass away. In this article, we will explore different aspects of coping with mortality and grief, including understanding the grieving process, dealing with the fear of death, finding meaning in life, and seeking support.

Understanding the Grieving Process

Grief is a natural and normal response to loss. It is a process that we all go through when we lose someone or something important to us. The grieving process can be different for each person and can take different amounts of time. Some common stages of grief include denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. It is important to remember that there is no right or wrong way to grieve and that it is a personal process.

Denial is often the first stage of grief. It is a natural response to shock and disbelief. During this stage, we may refuse to believe that our loved one has passed away or that we are facing our mortality.

Anger is a common stage of grief. It can manifest as feelings of frustration, resentment, and even rage. It is important to allow yourself to feel angry and to express your emotions healthily.

Bargaining is often the stage of grief where we try to make deals with a higher power or the universe in an attempt to avoid our grief or loss. We may make promises or ask for help in exchange for something else.

Depression is a natural response to loss. It is important to allow yourself to feel sad and to seek support from others.

Acceptance is often the final stage of grief. It is when we come to terms with our loss and begin to move forward with our lives.

Dealing with the Fear of Death

The fear of death is a natural response to the realization of our mortality. It is important to acknowledge and accept our fear of death but also to not let it control our lives. Here are some ways to deal with the fear of death:

Accepting Mortality

Accepting our mortality is an important step in dealing with the fear of death. We must understand that death is a natural part of life and that it is something that we cannot avoid.

Finding Meaning in Life

Finding meaning in life can help us cope with the fear of death. It is important to pursue activities and goals that are meaningful and fulfilling to us.

Seeking Support

Seeking support from friends, family, or a therapist can help us cope with the fear of death. Talking about our fears and feelings can help us process them and move forward.

Finding meaning in life is important in coping with mortality and grief. It can help us find purpose and fulfillment, even in difficult times. Here are some ways to find meaning in life:

Pursuing Passions

Pursuing our passions and interests can help us find meaning and purpose in life. It is important to do things that we enjoy and that give us a sense of accomplishment.

Helping Others

Helping others can give us a sense of purpose and fulfillment. It can also help us feel connected to others and make a positive impact on the world.

Making Connections

Making connections with others is important in finding meaning in life. It is important to build relationships and connections with people who share our values and interests.

Seeking support is crucial when coping with mortality and grief. Here are some ways to seek support:

Talking to Friends and Family

Talking to friends and family members can provide us with a sense of comfort and support. It is important to express our feelings and emotions to those we trust.

Joining a Support Group

Joining a support group can help us connect with others who are going through similar experiences. It can provide us with a safe space to share our feelings and find support.

Seeking Professional Help

Seeking help from a therapist or counselor can help cope with grief and mortality. A mental health professional can provide us with the tools and support we need to process our emotions and move forward.

Coping with mortality and grief is a natural part of life. It is important to understand that grief is a personal process that may take time to work through. Finding meaning in life, dealing with the fear of death, and seeking support are all important ways to cope with mortality and grief. Remember to take care of yourself, allow yourself to feel your emotions, and seek support when needed.

The Ethics of Death: A Philosophical Exploration

Death is an inevitable part of life, and it is something that we will all experience at some point. It is a topic that has fascinated philosophers for centuries, and it continues to be debated to this day. In this article, we will explore the ethics of death from a philosophical perspective, considering questions such as what it means to die, the morality of assisted suicide, and the meaning of life in the face of death.

Death is a topic that elicits a wide range of emotions, from fear and sadness to acceptance and peace. Philosophers have long been interested in exploring the ethical implications of death, and in this article, we will delve into some of the most pressing questions in this field.

What does it mean to die?

The concept of death is a complex one, and there are many different ways to approach it from a philosophical perspective. One question that arises is what it means to die. Is death simply the cessation of bodily functions, or is there something more to it than that? Many philosophers argue that death represents the end of consciousness and the self, which raises questions about the nature of the soul and the afterlife.

The morality of assisted suicide

Assisted suicide is a controversial topic, and it raises several ethical concerns. On the one hand, some argue that individuals have the right to end their own lives if they are suffering from a terminal illness or unbearable pain. On the other hand, others argue that assisting someone in taking their own life is morally wrong and violates the sanctity of life. We will explore these arguments and consider the ethical implications of assisted suicide.

The meaning of life in the face of death

The inevitability of death raises important questions about the meaning of life. If our time on earth is finite, what is the purpose of our existence? Is there a higher meaning to life, or is it simply a product of biological processes? Many philosophers have grappled with these questions, and we will explore some of the most influential theories in this field.

The role of death in shaping our lives

While death is often seen as a negative force, it can also have a positive impact on our lives. The knowledge that our time on earth is limited can motivate us to live life to the fullest and to prioritize the things that truly matter. We will explore the role of death in shaping our values, goals, and priorities, and consider how we can use this knowledge to live more fulfilling lives.

The ethics of mourning

The process of mourning is an important part of the human experience, and it raises several ethical questions. How should we respond to the death of others, and what is our ethical responsibility to those who are grieving? We will explore these questions and consider how we can support those who are mourning while also respecting their autonomy and individual experiences.

The ethics of immortality

The idea of immortality has long been a fascination for humanity, but it raises important ethical questions. If we were able to live forever, what would be the implications for our sense of self, our relationships with others, and our moral responsibilities? We will explore the ethical implications of immortality and consider how it might challenge our understanding of what it means to be human.

The ethics of death in different cultural contexts

Death is a universal human experience, but how it is understood and experienced varies across different cultures. We will explore how different cultures approach death, mourning, and the afterlife, and consider the ethical implications of these differences.

Death is a complex and multifaceted topic, and it raises important questions about the nature of life, morality, and human experience. By exploring the ethics of death from a philosophical perspective, we can gain a deeper understanding of these questions and how they shape our lives.

The Ripple Effect of Loss: How Death Impacts Relationships

Losing a loved one is one of the most challenging experiences one can go through in life. It is a universal experience that touches people of all ages, cultures, and backgrounds. The grief that follows the death of someone close can be overwhelming and can take a significant toll on an individual's mental and physical health. However, it is not only the individual who experiences the grief but also the people around them. In this article, we will discuss the ripple effect of loss and how death impacts relationships.

Understanding Grief and Loss

Grief is the natural response to loss, and it can manifest in many different ways. The process of grieving is unique to each individual and can be affected by many factors, such as culture, religion, and personal beliefs. Grief can be intense and can impact all areas of life, including relationships, work, and physical health.

The Impact of Loss on Relationships

Death can impact relationships in many ways, and the effects can be long-lasting. Below are some of how loss can affect relationships:

1. Changes in Roles and Responsibilities

When someone dies, the roles and responsibilities within a family or social circle can shift dramatically. For example, a spouse who has lost their partner may have to take on responsibilities they never had before, such as managing finances or taking care of children. This can be a difficult adjustment, and it can put a strain on the relationship.

2. Changes in Communication

Grief can make it challenging to communicate with others effectively. Some people may withdraw and isolate themselves, while others may become angry and lash out. It is essential to understand that everyone grieves differently, and there is no right or wrong way to do it. However, these changes in communication can impact relationships, and it may take time to adjust to new ways of interacting with others.

3. Changes in Emotional Connection

When someone dies, the emotional connection between individuals can change. For example, a parent who has lost a child may find it challenging to connect with other parents who still have their children. This can lead to feelings of isolation and disconnection, and it can strain relationships.

4. Changes in Social Support

Social support is critical when dealing with grief and loss. However, it is not uncommon for people to feel unsupported during this time. Friends and family may not know what to say or do, or they may simply be too overwhelmed with their grief to offer support. This lack of social support can impact relationships and make it challenging to cope with grief.

Coping with Loss and Its Impact on Relationships

Coping with grief and loss is a long and difficult process, but it is possible to find ways to manage the impact on relationships. Below are some strategies that can help:

1. Communication

Effective communication is essential when dealing with grief and loss. It is essential to talk about how you feel and what you need from others. This can help to reduce misunderstandings and make it easier to navigate changes in relationships.

2. Seek Support

It is important to seek support from friends, family, or a professional if you are struggling to cope with grief and loss. Having someone to talk to can help to alleviate feelings of isolation and provide a safe space to process emotions.

3. Self-Care

Self-care is critical when dealing with grief and loss. It is essential to take care of your physical and emotional well-being. This can include things like exercise, eating well, and engaging in activities that you enjoy.

4. Allow for Flexibility

It is essential to allow for flexibility in relationships when dealing with grief and loss. People may not be able to provide the same level of support they once did or may need more support than they did before. Being open to changes in roles and responsibilities can help to reduce strain on relationships.

5. Find Meaning

Finding meaning in the loss can be a powerful way to cope with grief and loss. This can involve creating a memorial, participating in a support group, or volunteering for a cause that is meaningful to you.

The impact of loss is not limited to the individual who experiences it but extends to those around them as well. Relationships can be greatly impacted by the death of a loved one, and it is important to be aware of the changes that may occur. Coping with loss and its impact on relationships involves effective communication, seeking support, self-care, flexibility, and finding meaning.

What Lies Beyond Reflections on the Mystery of Death

Death is an inevitable part of life, and yet it remains one of the greatest mysteries that we face as humans. What happens when we die? Is there an afterlife? These are questions that have puzzled us for centuries, and they continue to do so today. In this article, we will explore the various perspectives on death and what lies beyond.

Understanding Death

Before we can delve into what lies beyond, we must first understand what death is. Death is defined as the permanent cessation of all biological functions that sustain a living organism. This can occur as a result of illness, injury, or simply old age. Death is a natural process that occurs to all living things, but it is also a process that is often accompanied by fear and uncertainty.

The Physical Process of Death

When a person dies, their body undergoes several physical changes. The heart stops beating, and the body begins to cool and stiffen. This is known as rigor mortis, and it typically sets in within 2-6 hours after death. The body also begins to break down, and this can lead to a release of gases that cause bloating and discoloration.

The Psychological Experience of Death

In addition to the physical changes that occur during and after death, there is also a psychological experience that accompanies it. Many people report feeling a sense of detachment from their physical body, as well as a sense of peace and calm. Others report seeing bright lights or visions of loved ones who have already passed on.

Perspectives on What Lies Beyond

There are many different perspectives on what lies beyond death. Some people believe in an afterlife, while others believe in reincarnation or simply that death is the end of consciousness. Let's explore some of these perspectives in more detail.

One of the most common beliefs about what lies beyond death is the idea of an afterlife. This can take many forms, depending on one's religious or spiritual beliefs. For example, many Christians believe in heaven and hell, where people go after they die depending on their actions during life. Muslims believe in paradise and hellfire, while Hindus believe in reincarnation.

Reincarnation

Reincarnation is the belief that after we die, our consciousness is reborn into a new body. This can be based on karma, meaning that the quality of one's past actions will determine the quality of their next life. Some people believe that we can choose the circumstances of our next life based on our desires and attachments in this life.

End of Consciousness

The idea that death is simply the end of consciousness is a common belief among atheists and materialists. This view holds that the brain is responsible for creating consciousness, and when the brain dies, consciousness ceases to exist. While this view may be comforting to some, others find it unsettling.

Death is a complex and mysterious phenomenon that continues to fascinate us. While we may never fully understand what lies beyond death, it's important to remember that everyone has their own beliefs and perspectives on the matter. Whether you believe in an afterlife, reincarnation, or simply the end of consciousness, it's important to find ways to cope with the loss of a loved one and to find peace with your mortality.

Final Words

In conclusion, these powerful essays on death offer inspiring perspectives and deep insights into the human experience of coping with mortality, grief, and loss. From personal accounts to philosophical reflections, these essays provide a diverse range of perspectives that encourage readers to contemplate their mortality and the meaning of life.

By reading and reflecting on these essays, readers can gain a better understanding of how death shapes our lives and relationships, and how we can learn to accept and cope with this inevitable part of the human experience.

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• Death And Dying

8 Popular Essays About Death, Grief & the Afterlife

Updated 05/4/2022

Published 07/19/2021

Joe Oliveto, BA in English

Contributing writer

Cake values integrity and transparency. We follow a strict editorial process to provide you with the best content possible. We also may earn commission from purchases made through affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. Learn more in our affiliate disclosure .

Death is a strange topic for many reasons, one of which is the simple fact that different people can have vastly different opinions about discussing it.

Jump ahead to these sections: 

Essays or articles about the death of a loved one, essays or articles about dealing with grief, essays or articles about the afterlife or near-death experiences.

Some fear death so greatly they don’t want to talk about it at all. However, because death is a universal human experience, there are also those who believe firmly in addressing it directly. This may be more common now than ever before due to the rise of the death positive movement and mindset.

You might believe there’s something to be gained from talking and learning about death. If so, reading essays about death, grief, and even near-death experiences can potentially help you begin addressing your own death anxiety. This list of essays and articles is a good place to start. The essays here cover losing a loved one, dealing with grief, near-death experiences, and even what someone goes through when they know they’re dying.

Losing a close loved one is never an easy experience. However, these essays on the topic can help someone find some meaning or peace in their grief.

1. ‘I’m Sorry I Didn’t Respond to Your Email, My Husband Coughed to Death Two Years Ago’ by Rachel Ward

Rachel Ward’s essay about coping with the death of her husband isn’t like many essays about death. It’s very informal, packed with sarcastic humor, and uses an FAQ format. However, it earns a spot on this list due to the powerful way it describes the process of slowly finding joy in life again after losing a close loved one.

Ward’s experience is also interesting because in the years after her husband’s death, many new people came into her life unaware that she was a widow. Thus, she often had to tell these new people a story that’s painful but unavoidable. This is a common aspect of losing a loved one that not many discussions address.

2. ‘Everything I know about a good death I learned from my cat’ by Elizabeth Lopatto

Not all great essays about death need to be about human deaths! In this essay, author Elizabeth Lopatto explains how watching her beloved cat slowly die of leukemia and coordinating with her vet throughout the process helped her better understand what a “good death” looks like.

For instance, she explains how her vet provided a degree of treatment but never gave her false hope (for instance, by claiming her cat was going to beat her illness). They also worked together to make sure her cat was as comfortable as possible during the last stages of her life instead of prolonging her suffering with unnecessary treatments.

Lopatto compares this to the experiences of many people near death. Sometimes they struggle with knowing how to accept death because well-meaning doctors have given them the impression that more treatments may prolong or even save their lives, when the likelihood of them being effective is slimmer than patients may realize.

Instead, Lopatto argues that it’s important for loved ones and doctors to have honest and open conversations about death when someone’s passing is likely near. This can make it easier to prioritize their final wishes instead of filling their last days with hospital visits, uncomfortable treatments, and limited opportunities to enjoy themselves.

3. ‘The terrorist inside my husband’s brain’ by Susan Schneider Williams

This article, which Susan Schneider Williams wrote after the death of her husband Robin Willians, covers many of the topics that numerous essays about the death of a loved one cover, such as coping with life when you no longer have support from someone who offered so much of it. 

However, it discusses living with someone coping with a difficult illness that you don’t fully understand, as well. The article also explains that the best way to honor loved ones who pass away after a long struggle is to work towards better understanding the illnesses that affected them. 

4. ‘Before I Go’ by Paul Kalanithi

“Before I Go” is a unique essay in that it’s about the death of a loved one, written by the dying loved one. Its author, Paul Kalanithi, writes about how a terminal cancer diagnosis has changed the meaning of time for him.

Kalanithi describes believing he will die when his daughter is so young that she will likely never have any memories of him. As such, each new day brings mixed feelings. On the one hand, each day gives him a new opportunity to see his daughter grow, which brings him joy. On the other hand, he must struggle with knowing that every new day brings him closer to the day when he’ll have to leave her life.

Coping with grief can be immensely challenging. That said, as the stories in these essays illustrate, it is possible to manage grief in a positive and optimistic way.

5. Untitled by Sheryl Sandberg

This piece by Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s current CEO, isn’t a traditional essay or article. It’s actually a long Facebook post. However, many find it’s one of the best essays about death and grief anyone has published in recent years.

She posted it on the last day of sheloshim for her husband, a period of 30 days involving intense mourning in Judaism. In the post, Sandberg describes in very honest terms how much she learned from those 30 days of mourning, admitting that she sometimes still experiences hopelessness, but has resolved to move forward in life productively and with dignity.

She explains how she wanted her life to be “Option A,” the one she had planned with her husband. However, because that’s no longer an option, she’s decided the best way to honor her husband’s memory is to do her absolute best with “Option B.”

This metaphor actually became the title of her next book. Option B , which Sandberg co-authored with Adam Grant, a psychologist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, is already one of the most beloved books about death , grief, and being resilient in the face of major life changes. It may strongly appeal to anyone who also appreciates essays about death as well.

6. ‘My Own Life’ by Oliver Sacks

Grief doesn’t merely involve grieving those we’ve lost. It can take the form of the grief someone feels when they know they’re going to die.

Renowned physician and author Oliver Sacks learned he had terminal cancer in 2015. In this essay, he openly admits that he fears his death. However, he also describes how knowing he is going to die soon provides a sense of clarity about what matters most. Instead of wallowing in his grief and fear, he writes about planning to make the very most of the limited time he still has.

Belief in (or at least hope for) an afterlife has been common throughout humanity for decades. Additionally, some people who have been clinically dead report actually having gone to the afterlife and experiencing it themselves.

Whether you want the comfort that comes from learning that the afterlife may indeed exist, or you simply find the topic of near-death experiences interesting, these are a couple of short articles worth checking out.

7. ‘My Experience in a Coma’ by Eben Alexander

“My Experience in a Coma” is a shortened version of the narrative Dr. Eben Alexander shared in his book, Proof of Heaven . Alexander’s near-death experience is unique, as he’s a medical doctor who believes that his experience is (as the name of his book suggests) proof that an afterlife exists. He explains how at the time he had this experience, he was clinically braindead, and therefore should not have been able to consciously experience anything.

Alexander describes the afterlife in much the same way many others who’ve had near-death experiences describe it. He describes starting out in an “unresponsive realm” before a spinning white light that brought with it a musical melody transported him to a valley of abundant plant life, crystal pools, and angelic choirs. He states he continued to move from one realm to another, each realm higher than the last, before reaching the realm where the infinite love of God (which he says is not the “god” of any particular religion) overwhelmed him.

8. “One Man's Tale of Dying—And Then Waking Up” by Paul Perry

The author of this essay recounts what he considers to be one of the strongest near-death experience stories he’s heard out of the many he’s researched and written about over the years. The story involves Dr. Rajiv Parti, who claims his near-death experience changed his views on life dramatically.

Parti was highly materialistic before his near-death experience. During it, he claims to have been given a new perspective, realizing that life is about more than what his wealth can purchase. He returned from the experience with a permanently changed outlook.

This is common among those who claim to have had near-death experiences. Often, these experiences leave them kinder, more understanding, more spiritual, and less materialistic.

This short article is a basic introduction to Parti’s story. He describes it himself in greater detail in the book Dying to Wake Up , which he co-wrote with Paul Perry, the author of the article.

Essays About Death: Discussing a Difficult Topic

It’s completely natural and understandable to have reservations about discussing death. However, because death is unavoidable, talking about it and reading essays and books about death instead of avoiding the topic altogether is something that benefits many people. Sometimes, the only way to cope with something frightening is to address it.

Categories:

• Coping With Grief

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Montaigne on Death and the Art of Living

By maria popova.

In one of his 107 such exploratory essays, titled “That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die,” Montaigne turns to mortality — the subject of one of this year’s best psychology and philosophy books — and points to the understanding of death as a prerequisite for the understanding of life, for the very art of living .

Montaigne examines our conflicted relationship with dying:

Now, of all the benefits that virtue confers upon us, the contempt of death is one of the greatest, as the means that accommodates human life with a soft and easy tranquillity, and gives us a pure and pleasant taste of living, without which all other pleasure would be extinct. […] The end of our race is death; ’tis the necessary object of our aim, which, if it fright us, how is it possible to advance a step without a fit of ague? The remedy the vulgar use is not to think on’t; but from what brutish stupidity can they derive so gross a blindness? They must bridle the ass by the tail: ‘Qui capite ipse suo instituit vestigia retro,’ [‘Who in his folly seeks to advance backwards’ — Lucretius, iv. 474] ’tis no wonder if he be often trapped in the pitfall. They affright people with the very mention of death, and many cross themselves, as it were the name of the devil. And because the making a man’s will is in reference to dying, not a man will be persuaded to take a pen in hand to that purpose, till the physician has passed sentence upon and totally given him over, and then betwixt and terror, God knows in how fit a condition of understanding he is to do it. The Romans, by reason that this poor syllable death sounded so harshly to their ears and seemed so ominous, found out a way to soften and spin it out by a periphrasis, and instead of pronouncing such a one is dead, said, ‘Such a one has lived,’ or ‘Such a one has ceased to live’ … provided there was any mention of life in the case, though past, it carried yet some sound of consolation. … I make account to live, at least, as many more. In the meantime, to trouble a man’s self with the thought of a thing so far off were folly. But what? Young and old die upon the same terms; no one departs out of life otherwise than if he had but just before entered into it; neither is any man so old and decrepit, who, having heard of Methuselah, does not think he has yet twenty good years to come. Fool that thou art! who has assured unto thee the term of life? Thou dependest upon physicians’ tales: rather consult effects and experience. According to the common course of things, ’tis long since that thou hast lived by extraordinary favour; thou hast already outlived the ordinary term of life. And that it is so, reckon up thy acquaintance, how many more have died before they arrived at thy age than have attained unto it; and of those who have ennobled their lives by their renown, take but an account, and I dare lay a wager thou wilt find more who have died before than after five-and-thirty years of age. … How many several ways has death to surprise us?

Rather than indulging the fear of death, Montaigne calls for dissipating it by facing it head-on, with awareness and attention — an approach common in Eastern spirituality:

[L]et us learn bravely to stand our ground, and fight him. And to begin to deprive him of the greatest advantage he has over us, let us take a way quite contrary to the common course. Let us disarm him of his novelty and strangeness, let us converse and be familiar with him, and have nothing so frequent in our thoughts as death. Upon all occasions represent him to our imagination in his every shape; at the stumbling of a horse, at the falling of a tile, at the least prick with a pin, let us presently consider, and say to ourselves, ‘Well, and what if it had been death itself?’ and, thereupon, let us encourage and fortify ourselves. Let us evermore, amidst our jollity and feasting, set the remembrance of our frail condition before our eyes, never suffering ourselves to be so far transported with our delights, but that we have some intervals of reflecting upon, and considering how many several ways this jollity of ours tends to death, and with how many dangers it threatens it. The Egyptians were wont to do after this manner, who in the height of their feasting and mirth, caused a dried skeleton of a man to be brought into the room to serve for a memento to their guests: ‘Omnem crede diem tibi diluxisse supremum Grata superveniet, quae non sperabitur, hora.’ ‘Think each day when past is thy last; the next day, as unexpected, will be the more welcome.’ — [Hor., Ep., i. 4, 13.] Where death waits for us is uncertain; let us look for him everywhere. The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; he who has learned to die has unlearned to serve. There is nothing evil in life for him who rightly comprehends that the privation of life is no evil: to know, how to die delivers us from all subjection and constraint. Paulus Emilius answered him whom the miserable King of Macedon, his prisoner, sent to entreat him that he would not lead him in his triumph, ‘Let him make that request to himself.’ — [ Plutarch, Life of Paulus Aemilius, c. 17; Cicero, Tusc., v. 40. ] In truth, in all things, if nature do not help a little, it is very hard for art and industry to perform anything to purpose. I am in my own nature not melancholic, but meditative; and there is nothing I have more continually entertained myself withal than imaginations of death, even in the most wanton time of my age.

One of Montaigne’s most timeless and timeliest points strikes at the heart of our present productivity-culture, reminding us that the whole of life is contained in our inner life , not in the checklist of our accomplishments:

We should always, as near as we can, be booted and spurred, and ready to go, and, above all things, take care, at that time, to have no business with any one but one’s self: — ‘Quid brevi fortes jaculamur avo Multa?’ [‘Why for so short a life tease ourselves with so many projects?’ — Hor., Od., ii. 16, 17.]

He presages the “real artists ship” mantra Steve Job made famous five centuries later:

A man must design nothing that will require so much time to the finishing, or, at least, with no such passionate desire to see it brought to perfection. We are born to action: ‘Quum moriar, medium solvar et inter opus.’ [‘When I shall die, let it be doing that I had designed.’ — Ovid, Amor., ii. 10, 36.] I would always have a man to be doing, and, as much as in him lies, to extend and spin out the offices of life; and then let death take me planting my cabbages, indifferent to him, and still less of my gardens not being finished.

The essence of his argument is the idea that learning to die is essential for learning to live:

If I were a writer of books, I would compile a register, with a comment, of the various deaths of men: he who should teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live. […] Peradventure, some one may object, that the pain and terror of dying so infinitely exceed all manner of imagination, that the best fencer will be quite out of his play when it comes to the push. Let them say what they will: to premeditate is doubtless a very great advantage; and besides, is it nothing to go so far, at least, without disturbance or alteration? Moreover, Nature herself assists and encourages us: if the death be sudden and violent, we have not leisure to fear; if otherwise, I perceive that as I engage further in my disease, I naturally enter into a certain loathing and disdain of life. I find I have much more ado to digest this resolution of dying, when I am well in health, than when languishing of a fever; and by how much I have less to do with the commodities of life, by reason that I begin to lose the use and pleasure of them, by so much I look upon death with less terror. Which makes me hope, that the further I remove from the first, and the nearer I approach to the latter, I shall the more easily exchange the one for the other.

With a philosophical lens fringing on quantum physics, Montaigne reminds us of the fundamental bias of the arrow of time as we experience it:

Not only the argument of reason invites us to it — for why should we fear to lose a thing, which being lost, cannot be lamented? — but, also, seeing we are threatened by so many sorts of death, is it not infinitely worse eternally to fear them all, than once to undergo one of them? … What a ridiculous thing it is to trouble ourselves about taking the only step that is to deliver us from all trouble! As our birth brought us the birth of all things, so in our death is the death of all things included. And therefore to lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago. … Long life, and short, are by death made all one; for there is no long, nor short, to things that are no more.

He returns — poignantly, poetically — to the meaning of life :

All the whole time you live, you purloin from life and live at the expense of life itself. The perpetual work of your life is but to lay the foundation of death. You are in death, whilst you are in life, because you still are after death, when you are no more alive; or, if you had rather have it so, you are dead after life, but dying all the while you live; and death handles the dying much more rudely than the dead, and more sensibly and essentially. If you have made your profit of life, you have had enough of it; go your way satisfied.

Half a millennium before Carl Sagan, Montaigne channels the sentiment at the heart of Pale Blue Dot :

Life in itself is neither good nor evil; it is the scene of good or evil as you make it.’ And, if you have lived a day, you have seen all: one day is equal and like to all other days. There is no other light, no other shade; this very sun, this moon, these very stars, this very order and disposition of things, is the same your ancestors enjoyed, and that shall also entertain your posterity.

He paints death as the ultimate equalizer:

Give place to others, as others have given place to you. Equality is the soul of equity. Who can complain of being comprehended in the same destiny, wherein all are involved?

The heart of Montaigne’s case falls somewhere between John Cage’s Zen philosophy and the canine state of being-in-the-moment :

Wherever your life ends, it is all there. The utility of living consists not in the length of days, but in the use of time; a man may have lived long, and yet lived but a little. Make use of time while it is present with you. It depends upon your will, and not upon the number of days, to have a sufficient length of life.

He concludes with an admonition about the solipsistic superficiality of death’s ritualization:

I believe, in truth, that it is those terrible ceremonies and preparations wherewith we set it out, that more terrify us than the thing itself; a new, quite contrary way of living; the cries of mothers, wives, and children; the visits of astounded and afflicted friends; the attendance of pale and blubbering servants; a dark room, set round with burning tapers; our beds environed with physicians and divines; in sum, nothing but ghostliness and horror round about us; we seem dead and buried already. … Happy is the death that deprives us of leisure for preparing such ceremonials.

Michel de Montaigne: The Complete Essays is now in the public domain and is available as a free download in multiple formats from Project Gutenberg .

Public domain illustrations via Flickr Commons

— Published December 12, 2012 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/12/12/montaigne-on-death-and-the-art-of-living/ —

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How Do You View Death?

Does thinking about your own mortality make you appreciate life? Or does the thought fill you with dread?

By Nicole Daniels

Note to Teachers: We don’t often take on the subject of death, but with the world experiencing a devastating pandemic, we thought this article might help students think about their own understanding of mortality.

This past year has been filled with death: More than 300,000 people in the United States and 1.6 million worldwide have died from the coronavirus.

Has the pandemic changed your understanding of death and dying? Have you had to grieve the death of a loved one? Has it made you consider your own mortality more? Has it made you appreciate the impermanence of life? Or have the staggering numbers made you feel numb?

In “ What Is Death? ,” Dr. BJ Miller writes about how the coronavirus pandemic has transformed our understanding of mortality and offers several frameworks for thinking about death:

This year has awakened us to the fact that we die. We’ve always known it to be true in a technical sense, but a pandemic demands that we internalize this understanding. It’s one thing to acknowledge the deaths of others, and another to accept our own. It’s not just emotionally taxing; it is difficult even to conceive. To do this means to imagine it, reckon with it and, most important, personalize it. Your life. Your death. Covid-19’s daily death and hospitalization tallies read like ticker tape or the weather report. This week, the death toll passed 300,000 in the United States. Worldwide, it’s more than 1.6 million. The cumulative effect is shock fatigue or numbness, but instead of turning away, we need to fold death into our lives. We really have only two choices: to share life with death or to be robbed by death. Fight, flight or freeze. This is how we animals are wired to respond to anything that threatens our existence. We haven’t evolved — morally or socially — to deal with a health care system with technological powers that verge on godly. Dying is no longer so intuitive as it once was, nor is death necessarily the great equalizer. Modern medicine can subvert nature’s course in many ways, at least for a while. But you have to have access to health care for health care to work. And eventually, whether because of this virus or something else, whether you’re young or old, rich or poor, death still comes. What is death? I’ve thought a lot about the question, though it took me many years of practicing medicine even to realize that I needed to ask it. Like almost anyone, I figured death was a simple fact, a singular event. A noun. Obnoxious, but clearer in its borders than just about anything else. The End. In fact, no matter how many times I’ve sidled up to it, or how many words I’ve tried on, I still can’t say what it is. If we strip away the poetry and appliqué our culture uses to try to make sense of death — all the sanctity and style we impose on the wild, holy trip of a life that begins, rises and falls apart — we are left with a husk of a body. No pulse, no brain waves, no inspiration, no explanation. Death is defined by what it lacks.

The essay continues:

Beyond fear and isolation, maybe this is what the pandemic holds for us: the understanding that living in the face of death can set off a cascade of realization and appreciation. Death is the force that shows you what you love and urges you to revel in that love while the clock ticks. Reveling in love is one sure way to see through and beyond yourself to the wider world, where immortality lives. A pretty brilliant system, really, showing you who you are (limited) and all that you’re a part of (vast). As a connecting force, love makes a person much more resistant to obliteration. You might have to loosen your need to know what lies ahead. Rather than spend so much energy keeping pain at bay, you might want to suspend your judgment and let your body do what a body does. If the past, present and future come together, as we sense they must, then death is a process of becoming. So, once more, what is death? If you’re reading this, you still have time to respond. Since there’s no known right answer, you can’t get it wrong. You can even make your life the answer to the question.

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What the Stoics Understood About Death (And Can Teach Us)

David fideler on what awareness of mortality does to a life.

“Wherever I turn, I see signs of my old age,” Seneca wrote to Lucilius. Seneca had just arrived at his villa outside of Rome, where he was having a conversation with his property manager about the high cost of maintaining the disintegrating old building. But Seneca then explained, “My estate manager told me it was not his fault: he was doing everything possible, but the country home was old. And this villa was built under my supervision! What will my future look like if stonework of my own age is already crumbling?”

At that time, Seneca was in his late sixties, and he was starting to feel the aches and pains of old age. But he also found old age to be pleasurable. However, the older you get, the more challenging things become. Extreme old age, he said, is like a lasting illness you never recover from; and when the body really declines, it’s like a ship that starts springing leaks, one after another.

Where I currently live, in Sarajevo, I see extremely old people, who are quite close to death, on an almost daily basis. It seems that some of my neighbors—​thin, frail, and bent over, often walking with a cane at a snail’s pace over the old stone streets—​could drop over and expire at any moment. That said, seeing extremely elderly people out and about is an inspiring and heartfelt experience for me. First of all, it’s lovely to see people who have lived for so long, often against challenging odds, and it’s impossible to see them without feeling a great sense of tenderness for them. Second, they are a timely reminder of my own mortality. It’s also very different from what I remember seeing in the United States.

Unlike many other countries, the United States has accomplished a world-​class disappearing act when it comes to keeping older adults (and any other reminders of death) out of sight and out of mind. With its shiny glass and steel buildings, shopping malls, and spread-​out suburbs, the American landscape has been sterilized and artificially “cleaned up” in such a way that extremely old people are rarely seen on public display. But here in a historic European city with ancient stone buildings that go back centuries, and well-​established neighborhoods with cobblestone streets, extremely old people, hobbling along, are a happy part of daily life. They remind me that life is not without extreme struggle. And when people die, which can happen at any age, the local religious communities post death notices, with photos of the deceased, in local neighborhoods all over town. It’s another nice custom that reminds us of being mortal.

A Stoic wants to live well—​and living well means dying well, too. A Stoic lives well through having a good character, and death is the final test of it. While every death will be a bit different, the Roman Stoics believed that a good death would be characterized by mental tranquility, a lack of complaining, and gratitude for the life we’ve been given. In other words, as the final act of living, a good death is characterized by acceptance and gratitude. Also, having a real philosophy of life, and having worked on developing a sound character, allows a person to die without any feelings of regret.

Seneca frequently thought and wrote about death. Some of this must have been due to his poor health. Because he suffered from tuberculosis and asthma from a young age, he must have sensed the certainty and nearness of his own death throughout his entire life. In Letter 54 he describes, in graphic detail, a recent asthma attack that nearly killed him. But much earlier, probably in his twenties, he was so sick, and so near death, that he thought about ending his own life, to finally stop the suffering. He didn’t follow through on that, fortunately, out of love for his father. As he writes,

I often felt the urge to end my life, but the old age of my dear father held me back. For while I thought that I could die bravely, I knew he could not bear the loss bravely. And so I commanded myself to live. Sometimes it’s an act of courage just to keep living.

For a Stoic (and for other ancient philosophers, too), memento mori —​contemplating our inevitable death—​was an essential philosophical exercise, and one that comes with unexpected benefits. As an anticipation of future adversity, memento mori allows us to prepare for death, and helps remove our fears of death. It also encourages us to take our current lives more seriously, because we realize they’re limited. As I’ve discovered in a practical sense, reflecting on my own death—​and the inevitable death of those dear to me—​has had a totally unexpected and powerful benefit: feeling a more profound sense of gratitude for the time we still have together.

The Latin phrase memento mori literally means “remember that you have to die.” Over the centuries, scholars often would keep a symbolic memento mori image in their study, like a skull, as a reminder of their own mortality.

In the world of philosophy, the model of someone dying well, without an ounce of fear, was Socrates. Imprisoned on trumped-​up charges for corrupting the youth of Athens, Socrates was detained for thirty days before facing his death sentence of drinking hemlock poison. At the time of his death in 399 BC, Socrates was around seventy years old. If he had wished, he could have very easily escaped prison, with his friends’ help, and then set up life elsewhere in Greece. But it would have gone against everything he believed in. Also, escaping would have permanently damaged his reputation. Since one of Socrates’s main goals was to improve society, that implied he should follow society’s laws, even if he had been treated unjustly.

This allowed Socrates thirty final days to meet with his friends and his students to continue their philosophical discussions. He had challenged the morality of those who called for his death with a very memorable line: “If you kill me,” he said, “you will not harm me so much as yourselves.”  This thought was much appreciated by the later Stoics, since, in their view, nothing can harm the character of a wise person. During his last meeting with his students, right before his death, Socrates discussed and questioned the possibility of an afterlife. He also said, memorably, that “philosophy is a preparation for death,” which was probably the real beginning of the memento mori tradition (at least for philosophers). When his final conversation was complete, Socrates drank the hemlock, and he peacefully passed away, surrounded by his students.

According to Seneca, the philosopher Epicurus said, “Rehearse for death,” which is a practice Seneca himself greatly encouraged. For Seneca and the other Roman Stoics, death was “the master fear,” and once someone learns how to overcome it, little else remains fearful either.

The Stoic philosopher Epictetus told his students that when you kiss your child goodnight, you should remind yourself that your child could die tomorrow. While it is literally true that your child could die tomorrow, many modern readers recoil at the idea of even contemplating such a thought. However, that might be a measure of their reluctance to accept the inevitability of death, or a way of repressing the fact that death can arrive unexpectedly, at any moment. As someone who personally uses this practice, I can tell you that it’s perfectly harmless, once you get past any initial discomfort. The huge benefit it brings is the greater sense of gratitude you experience with your loved ones. When you perform this practice, you consciously realize that someday, which nobody can predict, will be your last time together—​so you experience much greater gratitude for the time you spend together now. As Seneca wisely recommended, let us greedily enjoy our friends and our loved ones now, while we still have them.

What is it like emotionally to contemplate your own death or the death of a close family member? I’ve been experimenting with this for some time now and can report only positive results. That’s because, when I think of the mortality of a loved one and the fact that all of our time together is by definition limited, it improves the quality of my life. It makes me feel a much deeper sense of appreciation for all the time we are together. If you don’t remember that your time is limited and finite, you are much more likely to take things for granted.

I most often remember death when I’m with my son, Benjamin, seven and a half as I write. That’s a delightful age because he’s very playful and now capable of having fun conversations. We’re also starting to talk about philosophical things.

Of course, it’s impossible for most children of his age to grasp the gravity or finality of death, because most of them have never had any firsthand experience of losing a loved one. Children live in a kind of psychological Golden Age, in which all their needs seem magically provided for. Since they live in a protected sphere, most haven’t yet been exposed to the more challenging aspects of life.

Because of that, I’ve been trying to teach Benjamin a little bit about death and the fact that daddy, mommy, and he will someday die. This effort is a bit of basic Stoic training for a kid, and I’m curious if it might be possible to increase his appreciation for the limited time we have together, even at such a young age? At the very least, I hope it will greatly reduce the level of shock he experiences when someone close to him does die, because he’ll be expecting it.

The other day, we were driving home after feasting on some fast food, and Benjamin spoke to me about God for the first time in his life. With a boyish sense of delight, he explained to me, “God has some amazing powers, like being able to see and hear everything. But his greatest superpower is that he’s invisible!”

I chuckled at his use of the word “superpower,” which made God sound like a superhero, just like Spider-​Man! But laughter aside, he had opened up the doorway to speak about some profound issues, so I brought up the topic of death.

“Benjamin,” I asked, “do you know that, someday, mommy, daddy, and you are going to die?”

“Yes,” he replied.

“I’m almost sixty,” I explained, “so I could live another twenty years.”

“I don’t think you’ll live quite that long,” he said. “But maybe something like that.” (Thank you, Benjamin! We’ll just have to see how things go.)

Then I asked, “Did you know that you could die at any time?”

He said, “I don’t think I’ll die anytime soon.”

“But,” I replied, “you could. This is not something in our control. You are young, so you could live for a very long time. But since we’re driving in a car, we could be in a car crash five minutes from now, and we could both be killed instantly. So even if you’re very, very young, you can die at any time. If you stay healthy, the chances that you’ll live a long life go up. But in the end, when we die is not under our control.”

Benjamin nodded and seemed to understand. And fortunately, we arrived home safely a few minutes later.

__________________________________

From Breakfast with Seneca: A Stoic Guide to the Art of Living by David Fideler, published by W. W. Norton.

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This article considers several questions concerning the philosophy of death.

First , it discusses what it is to be alive. This topic arises because to die is roughly to lose one’s life.

The second topic is the nature of death, and how it bears on the persistence of organisms and persons.

The third topic is the harm thesis , the claim that death can harm the individual who dies. Perhaps the most influential case against the harm thesis was made by Epicurus. His argument is discussed, as is a contemporary response, the deprivationist defense of the harm thesis.

The fourth topic is a question that seems to confront proponents of the harm thesis, especially those who offer some version of the deprivationist defense: if a person is harmed by her death, at what time does her death make her worse off than she otherwise would be? Some answers are considered.

Fifth is further issues that may lead us to doubt the harm thesis. One is a further question about deprivationism: we are not always harmed by what deprives us of things; what makes some of these worrisome and not others? Next is a question concerning the fact that there are two different directions in which our lives could be extended: into the past (our lives could have been longer if they began earlier), or into the future (they could have been longer if they ended later). Assuming the former does not matter to us, why should the latter?

The sixth topic concerns events that occur after a person has died: is it possible for these events to harm her?

Seventh is a controversy concerning whether extreme long life, even immortality, would be good for us. Of particular interest here is a dispute between Thomas Nagel, who says that death is an evil whenever it comes, and Bernard Williams, who argues that, while premature death is a misfortune, it is a good thing that we are not immortal, since we cannot continue to have our current characters and remain meaningfully attached to life forever.

A final controversy concerns whether or not the harmfulness of death can be reduced. It may be that, by adjusting our conception of our well-being, and by altering our attitudes, we can reduce or eliminate the threat death poses us. But there is a case to be made that such efforts backfire if taken to extremes.

1.1 Life as a Substance

1.2 life as an event, 1.3 life as a property, 2.1 life and death, 2.2 death and suspended vitality, 2.3 being dead, 2.4 resurrection, 2.5 death and what we are, 2.6 death and existence, 2.7 criteria for death, 3.1 the epicurean case, 3.2 the deprivationist defense, 4.1 concurrentism, 4.2 priorism, 4.3 subsequentism, 4.4 indefinitism, 4.5 atemporalism, 5.1 harmless preclusion.

• 5.2 Lucretius and the Symmetry Argument

6.1 Doubts About Posthumous Harm

6.2 retroactive harm, 7.1 never dying would be good, 7.2 never dying would be a misfortune, 8. can death’s harmfulness be reduced, other internet resources, related entries.

To die is to cease to be alive. To clarify death further, then, we will need to say a bit about the nature of life.

Some theorists have said that life is a substance of some sort. A more plausible view is that life is a property of some sort, but we should also consider the possibility that lives are events. If we say that lives are events, we will want to know something about how to distinguish them from other events, and how they are related to the individuals that are alive. It would also be useful to know the persistence conditions for a life. If instead we conclude that life (or alive ) is a property, we will want to clarify it, and identify what sorts of things bear it. Let us briefly discuss each of these views—that life is a substance, a property, or an event.

We can deal quickly with the view called ‘vitalism’ (defended by Hans Driesch, 1908 and 1914, among others), which holds that being alive consists in containing some special substance called ‘life.’ Vitalism is a nonstarter since it is unclear what sort of stuff vitalists take life to be, and because no likely candidates—no special stuff found in all and only in living things—have been detected. Moreover, vitalism faces a further difficulty, which Fred Feldman calls ‘the Jonah Problem’: a dead thing, such as a whale, may have a living thing, say Jonah, inside it; if Jonah has ‘life’ inside him, then so does the whale, but by hypothesis the whale is not alive. Of course, in this example Jonah is in the whale’s stomach, not in its cells, but the difficulty cannot be solved by saying that an object is alive if and only if it has ‘life’ in its cells, as an infectious agent (organisms with ‘life’ in them) could survive, for a time, within the dead cells of a dead whale.

As Jay Rosenberg noted (1983, p. 22, 103), sometimes when we speak of a life we mean to refer to the events that make up something’s history—the things that it did and the things that happened to it. (For example, the publication of The Problems of Philosophy was one of the events that made up one life, namely Bertrand Russell’s.) Yet a rock and a corpse have histories, and neither has a life. Presumably, then, ‘a life,’ in the sense we are discussing, refers to the history of something that is alive. In that case what we are really looking for is clarification of a property, not an event. We want clarification of what it is to be alive.

According to a second theorist, Peter van Inwagen, while a life is indeed an event, it is not the history of something. “‘Russell’s life,’” van Inwagen writes (1990, p. 83), “denotes a purely biological event, an event which took place entirely inside Russell’s skin and which went on for ninety-seven years.” Russell’s life included the oxygenation of his hemoglobin molecules but not the publication of his books.

If lives are biological events, it would be useful to know more about what they are, how they are individuated, and what their persistence conditions are. Van Inwagen declines to provide these details (1990, p. 145). He assumes that (the events he calls) lives are familiar enough to us that we can pick them out. But he does make the useful comment that each such event is constituted by certain self-organizing activities in which some molecules engage, and that it is analogous to a parade, which is an event constituted by certain marching-related activities of some people. Having taken the notion of a life for granted, he draws upon it in his account of organisms. On his view (1990, p. 90), some things compose an organism if and only if their activity constitutes a life.

Many theorists have defended the view that life, or (being) alive, is a property, but there is considerable disagreement among them about what precisely that property is. The main views on offer are life-functionalist accounts and accounts that analyze life in terms of DNA or genetic information or evolution by natural selection.

Life-functionalism, a view introduced by Aristotle, analyzes the property alive in terms of one or more salient functions that living things typically are able to perform. The salient functions Aristotle listed were nutrition, reproduction, sensation, autonomous motion, and thought. However, life-functionists disagree about how to formulate their account and about which functions are salient. Take Aristotle’s list. Obviously, it would be a mistake to say that something is alive if and only if it can perform all of the functions on the list. Might we say that, for something to be alive, it suffices that it be capable of one or more of the listed functions? Is being capable of one of these functions in particular necessary for something to be alive? As Fred Feldman points out, neither of the suggestions just mentioned is acceptable. Devices such as Roomba cleaning robots can do one of Aristotle’s functions, namely move themselves, but are not alive, so being able to do at least one listed function does not suffice for being alive. Nor is it plausible to say that any one on the list is necessary for being alive. Which on the list would this necessary function be? Perhaps nutrition? Adult silk moths are alive but lack a digestive system, so are incapable of nutrition. And, as many theorists have noticed, many living things cannot reproduce; examples include organisms whose reproductive organs are damaged and hybrid animals such as mules.

What, now, about accounts that analyze life in terms of genetic information? Feldman thinks that something like the Jonah problem arises for any account according which being alive consists in containing DNA or other genetic information, as dead organisms contain DNA. A further problem for such views is that it is conceivable there are or could be life forms (say on other planets) that are not based on genetic information. This latter difficulty can be avoided if we say that being alive consists in having the ability to evolve, to engage in Darwinian evolution, assuming that evolution by natural selection is possible for living things that lack nucleic acid. We might adopt NASA’s definition, according to which life is “a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.” However, accounts like NASA’s are implausible for a further reason: while the ability to evolve by natural selection is something that collections of organisms—species—may or may not have, it is not a feature an individual organism may have. Later members of a species come to have features earlier members lacked; some of these new features may make survival more or less likely, and the less ‘fit’ are weeded out of existence. An individual organism, such as a particular dog, cannot undergo this process. Yet individuals may be alive.

Because he has encountered no successful account of life, no account exempt from counterexamples, Feldman concludes that “life is a mystery” (p. 55). Despite his skepticism, however, there is a good case to be made for saying that what distinguishes objects that are alive from objects that are not is that the latter have a distinctive sort of control over what composes them, which the former lack. Let us see if we can make this claim clearer.

Consider ordinary composite material objects that are not alive. We can assume that, at a given time, these are made up of, or composed of, more simple things, such as molecules, by virtue of the fact that the latter meet various conditions. Among the conditions is the requirement that (in some sense in need of clarification) they be bonded together . Take the boulder near my front porch. Among the things that compose it now will be a few molecules, say four molecules near the center of the boulder, that are bonded together, in that each is bonded to the others, directly or indirectly (a molecule, A, is in directly bonded to another molecule, B, if A is directly bonded to a molecule C that is directly bonded to B, or if A is bonded to a molecule that is indirectly bonded to B). The things that make up the boulder are not limited to these four molecules, but they are limited to molecules that are bonded to them. Nor is the boulder unique in this way; something similar seems true of any composite material object. A composite material object is composed of some things at a time only if those things are bonded together at that time.

What sort of bonding relationship holds among the things that compose material objects? Any answer to this question will be controversial. Let us set it aside, and move on to some further assumptions about the composition of nonliving composite material objects, namely that a great many of them persist for a while (some persist for a very long time) and that what composes them at one time normally differs from what composes them at other times. Exactly how this works is a complicated matter, but among the conditions that such objects must meet if they are to persist is that any change in their composition be incremental. (Even this condition is controversial. For more on material objects, see the article Material Constitution and Ordinary objects.) Consider the boulder again. Suppose that at one time, t 0 , it is composed of some molecules, and that all or most of these molecules remain bonded to each other until a later time t 1 . Suppose, too, that no or few (few as compared to the number of molecules that composed the boulder at t 0 ) molecules come to be newly bonded to these by the time that t 1 rolls around. Under these conditions the boulder undergoes an incremental change in composition, and it seems plausible to say that the boulder remains in existence over the interval t 0 – t 1 , and, at t 1 , is composed of the molecules that remain bonded together with the molecules that are newly attached to them. Presumably, it will also survive a series of such incremental changes in composition. But it will not survive drastic and sudden changes. It would stop existing, for example, if the molecules that compose it were suddenly dispersed.

Enough said about composite material objects that are not alive. Now let us see if we can shed some light on what makes living objects special. What is it that distinguishes an object that is alive from an object that is not?

The answer seems to be that, normally, a live object has a distinctive sort of control over whether things come to be, or cease to be, part of it. The control in question is made possible by activities its constituents themselves are capable of. Contrast objects that are not alive, say automobiles. What an ordinary car is composed of is settled for the car by the mechanics who repair it (detaching some parts and affixing others), by whether it is involved in an accident and loses some parts, and so forth. Imagine a car that is not passive in this way. Imagine that its parts were somehow capable of replacing some of themselves with fresh parts, without assistance from outside, so that the activities of the parts that compose the car today were responsible for its being composed of certain parts tomorrow. That would make it quite lifelike.

Let us describe, in a bit more detail, what the molecules that compose living objects can do:

• Working together, these molecules can engage in activities that are integrated in conformity with (under the control of) the information that some of them carry (information that is comparable to blueprints and instructions), much as soldiers that make up an army can engage in activities that are integrated in conformity with battle plans and instructions issued by the commanding officers that are among them.
• Deploying these activities, the molecules can self-modify, in the sense that they can bond new (perhaps recently ingested) molecules to themselves, or prune (and excrete) some away, combining themselves in various ways (e.g., constructing cells), thereby giving way to a slightly different assembly of molecules at a later time, and fueling their activities by drawing upon external energy sources or stored reserves.
• The molecules can also pass along their ability to self-modify, enabling the molecules to which they give way to continue these activities, thus allowing the object they compose to sustain a given form (or forms) over time (say that of a dog) despite the fact that what composes that object at one time differs from what composes it at another time.

The view on offer—we might call it the compositional account of life—is that an object is composed of things that are capable of the activities just described if and only if it is alive.

This account of life needs refinement, but it avoids at least most of the worries mentioned earlier. It implies that an object may be alive even though it is sterile (as in the case of mules), even though it survives on stored energy (as in the case of a silk moth), and conceivably even if it lacks nucleic acid (yet is still composed of things that engage in activities integrated in conformity with information they carry). In fact, it implies that being capable of none of the items on Aristotle’s list is necessary nor sufficient for being alive. What is more, the compositional account just sketched implies that being alive is a property an individual, say the last remaining dodo, may bear on its own, which suggests that it may be alive without being capable of Darwinian evolution. At the same time, it explains how collections of live individuals may evolve. Individual objects are alive only if their composition is under the control of some of their parts (e.g., nucleic acid molecules) that carry information. The mechanisms by which such information is carried tend to be modified over time, altering the information they carry, and thus the features of the organisms they help shape, introducing mutations that may or may not facilitate survival. (For more on the nature of life, see Bedau 2014 and the entry on Life.)

The previous section discussed the nature of life, thereby clarifying what it is that death ends. This section discusses the nature of death and how death is related to the persistence of organisms and persons. (For an excellent discussion of views of death outside of the analytic tradition, see Schumacher 2010.)

According to the compositional account of life discussed in the previous section, objects that are alive have a distinctive capacity to control what they are composed of, fixing these constituents together in various ways, by virtue of the fact that their constituents can engage in various self-modifying activities that are integrated in conformity with information they carry. Let us call these vital activities .

It is one thing to have the capacity to engage in vital activities and another actually to engage in them, just as there is a difference between having the ability to run and actually running. Being alive seems to involve the former. It consists in having the relevant capacity. To die is to lose this capacity. We can call this the loss of life account of death .

The event by which the capacity to engage in vital activities is lost is one thing, and the state of affairs of its having been lost it is another. ‘Death’ can refer to either. However, the capacity to engage in vital activities may be lost gradually, rather than all at once, so it is reasonable to speak of a process of dying. In some cases that process is especially complicated, because the self-modifying activities of some organisms result in the construction of complex physiological systems that must remain largely intact for the self-modifying activities of these organisms to remain integrated. In defining death, some theorists focus on these systems, and claim that an organism’s life ends when that organism’s physiological systems can no longer function as an integrated whole, or when this loss becomes irreversible (Christopher Belshaw 2009; David DeGrazia 2014).

The loss of life account of death has been challenged by theorists who claim that things whose vital activities are suspended are not alive (Feldman 1992, Christopher Belsaw 2009, Cody Gilmore 2013, and David DeGrazia 2014). When zygotes and embryos are frozen for later use in the in vitro fertilization procedure, their vital activities are brought to a stop, or very nearly so. The same goes for water bears that are dehydrated, and for seeds and spores. It seems clear that the zygotes and water bears are not dead, since their vital activities can easily be restarted—by warming the zygote or by wetting the water bear. They are not dead, but are they alive? If we deny that they are alive, presumably we would do so on the grounds that their vital activities are halted. If something’s life can be ended by suspending its vital activities without its dying, then we must reject the loss of life account of death.

However, the loss of life account is thoroughly established in ordinary usage, and is easily reconciled with the possibility of suspended vitality. In denying that frozen embryos are dead, it is clear that we mean to emphasize that they have not lost the capacity to deploy their vital activities. When we say that something is dead, we mean to emphasize that this capacity has been lost. Having used ‘dead’ to signal this loss, why would we want to use the word ‘alive’ to signal the fact that something is making active use of its vital activities? Our best option is to use a pair of contrasting terms. We can use ‘viable’ to indicate that something has the capacity to deploy vital activities and ‘unviable’ to indicate that it has lost this capacity. When instead we are concerned about whether or not something is engaging its vital activities, we can use different contrasting terms, say ‘vital’ and ‘nonvital’, the former to characterize something that is employing its capacity for vital activities and the latter to characterize something that is not making use of its capacity for vital activities. What seems relatively uncontroversial is that being dead consists in unviability. To retain the loss of life account, we have only to add that being alive consists in viability. We can then say that a frozen embryo is viable and hence alive despite its lack of vitality, and it will die if its life ends (it will die if it ceases to be viable). Of course, if we are willing to abandon the loss of life account, we could instead use ‘alive’ to characterize something that is both viable and vital. We would then say that a frozen embryo is not alive (since it lacks vitality) but also that it is not dead (since it remains viable).

People often speak of being dead as a ‘state’ or ‘condition’ as opposed to an event or process. They say an organism comes to be in this state once it dies. This way of speaking can be puzzling on the assumption that what dies ceases to exist. (This assumption is discussed below.) If the assumption is true, then an organism that dies stops existing but simultaneously comes to be in the state of death. Mustn’t something exist at a time if it is (literally) in some state at that time? But of course it would be absurd to deny that something can truly be dead on the grounds that death is a state and what does not exist at a time cannot be in any state at that time.

Why not solve the problem by saying that upon dying an organism leaves a corpse, and it is the corpse that is in the state of being dead? There are several problems with this suggestion. Some organisms do not leave corpses. What corpses are left eventually disintegrate. Whether an organism leaves a corpse or not, and whether its corpse exists or not, if that organism dies at time t and does not regain life then it is dead after t .

The difficulty can be avoided if we say, with Jay Rosenberg 1983, p. 42), that dead is a relation between an organism, the time it died, and a subsequent time, and that when someone asserts, at some given time t , ‘Socrates is dead,’ what is asserted (ignoring the possibility of restored life, discussed in the next section) is roughly that Socrates died before t .

As is mentioned below, some theorists deny that an object that is at one time an organism may continue its existence as a corpse. Such theorists will say that organisms and their corpses are two different objects. They may conclude that ‘dead’ is ambiguous—that it means one thing as applied to organisms, and another thing as attributed to the corpses organisms leave. In any case, they will need to deny that, as concerns corpses, being dead implies having died, as corpses are never alive, according to them. If, on the other hand, an object that is an organism may continue its existence as a corpse, then, at any time t after that object dies, ‘dead’ applies univocally to it at time t , and means roughly died before t .

It will be useful to sharpen the loss of life account if, as seems conceivable, it is possible to restore life to something that has died.

Restoration in this sense is quite different from the revival of something, such as a frozen embryo, whose vital activities have been halted. Something can be revived only if it is alive—only if it has the capacity to deploy vital activities, as in the case of a frozen zygote. It is revived when it regains vitality. Something’s life can be restored only if it has lost its capacity for vital activities. Life is restored when this capacity is regained.

To bring the possibility of restoration into view, imagine a futuristic device, the Disassembler-Reassembler , that chops me into small cubes, or individual cells, or disconnected atoms, which it stores and later reassembles just as they were before. It is far from obvious that I would survive—and that my life would continue—after Reassembly. (Assuming that I am a material object, the account of objects sketched in Section 1.3 implies that chopping me into bits ends my existence forever.) But even if my existence would pick up again after Reassembly occurs, it is quite clear that I would not live during intervals when my atoms are stacked in storage. I would not even exist during such intervals. If I can be Reassembled, my life would be restored, not revived. Restoration, not revival, is a way of bringing a creature back from the dead.

Now imagine a Corpse Reanimator , a device that moves molecules back to where they were prior to the death of the creature that left the corpse, and restarts its vital activities. Some theorists say that I continue my existence as a corpse if it remains in good shape; they will assume that I remain in existence after losing my life, and continue my existence after the Corpse Reanimator does its work. On their view the Corpse Reanimator restores my life--it gives me back the capacity to engage in vital activities.

Given the possibilities of restoration and revivification, it seems best to refine the loss of life account, as follows:

Dying is the loss of an object’s life—the loss of its capacity to perpetuate itself using vital activities. An object dies at the time it loses this capacity. It is dead at all times afterwards, except while that capacity is regained.

Death for you and me is constituted by the loss of our capacity to sustain ourselves using vital activities. This characterization of death could be sharpened if we had a clearer idea of what we are , and its implications concerning our persistence. After all, we cannot retain any capacities if we fail to persist, so if we fail to persist we stop being capable of vital activities. We die. However, what we are, and what is involved in our persistence, is a matter of controversy.

There are three main views: animalism , which says that we are human animals (Snowdon 1990, Olson 1997, 2007); personism , which says that we are creatures with the capacity for self-awareness; and mindism , which says that we are minds (which may or may not have the capacity for self-awareness) (McMahan 2002). Animalists typically say that we persist over time just in case we remain the same animal; mindist typically suggest that our persistence requires our remaining the same mind. Personism is usually paired with the view that our persistence is determined by our psychological features and the relations among them (Locke 1689, Parfit 1984). (For more on what we are, see the entry on Personal Identity.)

If we are animals, with the persistence conditions of animals, we die when we cease to be the same animal. If we are minds, with the persistence conditions for minds, we die when we cease to meet these conditions. And if persistence is determined by our retaining certain psychological features, then the loss of those features will constitute death.

These three ways of understanding death have very different implications. Severe dementia can destroy a great many psychological features without destroying the mind, which suggests that death as understood by personists can occur even though death as understood by mindists has not. Moreover, human animals sometimes survive the destruction of the mind, as when the cerebrum dies but the brainstem does not, leaving an individual in a persistent vegetative state. Many theorists also think that the mind could survive the extinction of the human animal, say when the brain is removed from the body, kept alive artificially, and the remainder of the body is destroyed (assuming that a bare brain is not a human animal). These possibilities suggest that death as understood by mindists can occur even though death as understood by animalists has not (and also that the latter sort of death need not be accompanied by the former.)

What is the relationship between existence and death? May people and other creatures continue to exist after dying, or cease to exist without dying?

Take the first question: may you and I and other creatures continue to exist for some time after our lives end? Fred Feldman (1992, p. 91) coins the term termination thesis to refer to the view that “when a person dies, he or she … goes out of existence; subsequently, there is no such thing as that person.” (A version of the thesis applies to any living thing.) We can call those who accept the termination thesis terminators , and those who deny it anti-terminators . One point anti-terminators such as Feldman (1992, 2000, 2013) cite is that people who encounter corpses sometimes call them dead animals, or dead people. Such talk may suggest that we believe that animals continue to exist, as animals, while no longer alive. The idea might be that an animal continues to count as the same animal if enough of its original components remain in much the same order, and animals continue to meet this condition for a time following death (Mackie 1997). On this view, if you and I are animals (as animalists say), then we could survive for a time after we are dead, albeit as corpses. In fact, we could survive indefinitely, by arranging to have our corpses preserved.

However, this way of defending the anti-terminators’s view may not be decisive. The terms ‘dead animal’ and ‘dead person’ seem ambiguous. Normally, when we use ‘dead people’ or ‘dead animal’ we mean to speak of persons or animals who lived in the past. One dead person I can name is Socrates; he is now a ‘dead person’ even though his corpse surely has ceased to exist. However, in certain contexts, such as when we are standing inside morgues, we seem to use the terms ‘dead animal’ and ‘dead person’ to mean “remains of something that was an animal” or “remains of something that was a person.” On this interpretation, even in morgues calling something a dead person does not imply that it is a person.

Still, the dispute between terminators and anti-terminators is unlikely to be settled on the basis of how we use terms such as ‘dead animal’ and ‘dead person.’ Metaphysical considerations must weigh in. For example, consider that the remarks made in Section 1.3 about the persistence of objects are consistent with the possibility that objects that are people may continue their existence as corpses, which may be useful to anti-terminators. On the other hand, many theorists think that nothing is a person unless it has various psychological features, which corpses lack, and some think that nothing is an organism unless it is alive. Terminators may be able to exploit these thoughts.

What about the second question: can creatures cease to exist without dying? Certainly things that never were alive, such as bubbles and statues, can be deathlessly annihilated. Arguably, there are also ways that living creatures can be deathlessly annihilated (Rosenberg 1983, Feldman 1992, Gilmore 2013). Perhaps an amoeba’s existence ends when it splits, replacing itself with two amoebas, and the existence of chlamydomonas ends when pairs of them fuse to form a zygote. Yet when amoebas split, and chlamydomonas fuse, vital activities do not cease. If people could divide like amoebas, perhaps they, too could cease to exist without dying. (For a famous discussion of division, fusion, and their implications, see Parfit 1981.) If such ‘deathless exits’ are possible, we would have to modify the loss of life account of death.

However, proponents of the loss of life account can hold their ground. They can say that division, fusion, and other apparent examples of deathless exits are unusual ways of dying, because, in such cases, nonexistence is not brought about via the destruction of vital activities, but they are not ways of escaping death altogether. Proponents of the loss of life account might also turn the tables on its critics, and argue as follows: nothing can be alive unless it exists, so if something ceases to exist it ceases to be alive, but to cease to be alive is to die. So there are no deathless exits.

Defining death is one thing; providing criteria by which it can be readily detected or verified is another. A definition is an account of what death is ; when, and only when its definition is met, death has necessarily occurred. A criterion for death, by contrast, lays out conditions by which all and only actual deaths may be readily identified. In some cases criteria for death are intended to capture conditions by which the actual deaths of human persons may be identified. Such a criterion falls short of a definition, but plays a practical role. For example, criteria for the death of a person would help physicians and jurists determine when death has occurred.

In the United States, the states have adopted criteria for the death of a person modeled on the Uniform Determination of Death Act (developed by the President’s Commission, 1981), which says that “an individual who has sustained either (1) irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions, or (2) irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem, is dead. A determination of death must be made in accordance with accepted medical standards.” In the United Kingdom, the accepted criterion is brain stem death, or the “permanent functional death of the brain stem” (Pallis 1982).

These current criteria are subject to criticism, even if we put aside reservations concerning the qualifier ‘irreversible’. Animalists might resist the criteria since the vital activities of human beings whose entire brains have ceased to function can be sustained artificially using cardiopulmonary assistance. Mindists and personists might also resist the criteria, on the grounds that minds and all psychological features can be destroyed in human beings whose brain stems are intact. For example, cerebral death can leave its victim with an intact brain stem, yet mindless and devoid of self-awareness. (For more on criteria for death, see the article on the Definition of Death.)

3. Epicurus and the Harm Thesis

Is death bad for some people who die? Is it good for some of them?

According to the harm thesis , death is, at least sometimes, bad for those who die, and in this sense something that ‘harms’ them. It is important to know what to make of this thesis, since our response itself can be harmful. This might happen as follows: suppose that we love life, and reason that since it is good, more would be better. Our thoughts then turn to death, and we decide it is bad: the better life is, we think, the better more life would be, and the worse death is. At this point, we are in danger of condemning the human condition, which embraces life and death, on the grounds that it has a tragic side, namely death. It will help some if we remind ourselves that our situation also has a good side. Indeed, our condemnation of death is here based on the assumption that more life would be good. But such consolations are not for everyone. (They are unavailable if we crave immortality on the basis of demanding standards by which the only worthwhile projects are endless in duration, for then we will condemn the condition of mere mortals as tragic through and through, and may, as Unamuno (1913) points out, end up suicidal, fearing that the only life available is not worth having.) And a favorable assessment of life may be a limited consolation, since it leaves open the possibility that, viewing the human condition as a whole, the bad cancels much of the good. In any case it is grim enough to conclude that, given the harm thesis, the human condition has a tragic side.

It is no wonder that theorists over the millennia have sought to defeat the harm thesis. Let us consider some challenges to the harm thesis, beginning with the case against it developed by the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus.

Epicurus (341–270) adopted a version of hedonism according to which pleasure (or pleasant experiences) is the only thing that is intrinsically good for us (that is, the only thing that is good for us in itself), while pain (or painful experiences) is the only thing that is intrinsically bad for us, bad in itself. Call this view intrinsic hedonism. (For a discussion of intrinsic value, see the entry on Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Value.) Epicurus’s commitment to intrinsic hedonism prompted him to say, in his Letter to Menoeceus , that “everything good and bad lies in sensation.” He also claimed, in that same letter, that “when we are, death is not, and when death is present, then we are not.” The death of a person, and that person’s existence, do not overlap in time. On the basis of this assumption about death and existence, he concluded that a person’s death does not cause her to have any experiences (sensations)—indeed, “death is to be deprived of sensation.” In the following passage, he uses these thoughts against the harm thesis:

Make yourself familiar with the belief that death is nothing to us, since everything good and bad lies in sensation, and death is to be deprived of sensation. … So that most fearful of all bad things, death, is nothing to us, since when we are, death is not, and when death is present, then we are not.

Much about Epicurus’s argument is unclear, so let us work through it more carefully and see if we can fill in some details that he did not supply. Some speculation will be necessary, but we can develop a reconstruction that aligns with the things he wrote.

Earlier we mentioned one of the views Epicurus accepted, which we can state as follows:

• Intrinsic hedonism is true: a person’s experiences (sensations) of pleasure (or her pleasant experiences) are the only things that are intrinsically good for her, the only things that are good for her in themselves, while her experiences of pain (or painful experiences) are the only things that are intrinsically bad for her, bad in themselves.

From this view it follows that

• something is intrinsically good or bad for a person only if it is an experience.

Now, regardless of whether a person experiences her death, that death is not itself an experience. (Compare: I may experience jogging down the street, and I may experience the cup that is in front of me, but neither jogging nor the cup is itself an experience. My experiences are, so to speak, in my mind. Cups are not.) Let us add this observation to the argument:

• A person’s death is not an experience.

And if a person’s death is not an experience at all, clearly it is not an experience that is intrinsically good or bad for her. So, from 1–3, it follows that

• a person’s death is not intrinsically good or bad for her.

However, something that is not intrinsically bad for a person might nevertheless make other things happen that are detrimental to her, in which case it may be extrinsically bad for her. Seeing somebody fall and break her arm is not intrinsically bad for a person, but it might well cause her painful sadness, which makes the accident she saw extrinsically bad for her. Similarly, something that is not intrinsically good for a person might be extrinsically good for her.

Epicurus recognized the possibility of extrinsic goodness. It is not entirely clear how he understood it, but he seemed to accept a view we can call extrinsic instrumentalism : something is extrinsically good or bad for a person only if it makes her have things (other than itself) that are intrinsically good or bad for her. Let us add this to the argument:

• extrinsic instrumentalism is true: something is extrinsically good or bad for a person only if it makes her have things that are intrinsically good or bad for her.

Armed with this assumption, Epicurus can reject the possibility that a person’s death is extrinsically bad for her, arguing as follows. Because Epicurus thought that the death of a person and that person’s existence do not overlap in time, he thought that

• a person’s death does not make her have any experiences.

From premises 2, 5 and 6 it follows that

• a person’s death is not extrinsically good or bad for her.

To complete the argument against the harm thesis, Epicurus would need an additional assumption, such as this:

• something is good or bad for a person only if it is either intrinsically or extrinsically good or bad for her.

Premises 4, 7 and 8 entail that the harm thesis is false:

• a person’s death is not good or bad for her.

Is this Epicurean argument convincing? Let us see if we can find weak spots. We can begin with a reservation concerning the term ‘death.’

Earlier we noted that ‘death’ might be used for dying, the event or process of losing life, or being dead, the property of having lost life. The first reservation about the argument is that it is strongest if its uses of ‘death’ refer to being dead, and not to (the event or process of) dying. Here is why.

Being dead is not an experience, and it does not make a person have any experiences. So (on Epicurus’s assumptions) it is neither intrinsically nor extrinsically bad for a person to be dead. However, a person may experience dying , and the experience of dying (the experiences dying causes her to have) might well be intrinsically bad for her, even if only painful experiences are intrinsically bad for her (as premise 1 says). So even if being dead is not extrinsically bad for a person, the question arises as to whether, for some people, it is extrinsically bad to die . If something makes a person have painful experiences, isn’t it extrinsically bad for her, other things being equal? At least this much is true: the Epicurean argument does not show that dying painfully is not extrinsically bad for a person.

Apparently, then, the argument does not demonstrate that neither being dead nor dying is ever bad for those who die. Nevertheless, unless we find further weaknesses in it, it still seems to support powerful conclusions: being dead is neither good nor bad for those who die, and dying is extrinsically good or bad for them only if and insofar as it causes them to have painful (pleasant) experiences. Dying is wholly a matter of indifference for those who do not experience it, say because they sleep through it.

But there are further reservations to consider. Intrinsic hedonism is questionable. So is extrinsic instrumentalism.

Consider the first of these. Which things are intrinsically good or bad for us is a controversial matter , but many theorists deny that the list is limited to pleasure and pain. (For further discussion, see the entry on Intrinsic Goodness, the entry on Preferences, and “What Makes Someone's Life Go Best,” Parfit 1984, pp. 493–502.) Adding more things to the list can undermine the Epicurean argument.

For example, we might adopt some version of preferentialism, or the desire fulfillment account, which is the view that it is intrinsically good for us to fulfill one of our desires (assuming that the desire meets various conditions; exactly what these are is controversial—let us put the matter aside), and it is intrinsically bad for us to have a desire that comes to be thwarted. Now, many of my desires may be fulfilled, and many may be thwarted, without my noticing—desire fulfillment need have not experiential upshot. If I want my child to be happy, and she is, my desire is fulfilled, even if she has travelled away so far from me that I cannot interact with her, now or ever again. So preferentialism blocks the Epicurean’s move from premise 1 to 2.

Preferentialism also blocks the move to 7. Epicureans cannot use extrinsic instrumentalism to deny that a person’s death is extrinsically good or bad for her if the things that are intrinsically good or bad for her are not limited to experiences. Preferentialism implies that things may be extrinsically bad for us by virtue of thwarting our desires, regardless of whether this has any experiential upshot. Suppose, for example, that I desire that my child have a happy upbringing, and, for various reasons, it turns out that I am the only one who can make this happen, but I die suddenly, and as a consequence she has a miserable childhood. Arguably, my untimely death would be bad for me, in that it would thwart my desire, even if I die in my sleep, and am never aware of her fate. (The role a person’s experience plays in her being harmed is discussed by several theorists, including Rosenbaum 1986, Nussbaum 2013, Silverstein 2013, and Fischer 2014.)

Now consider some worries about extrinsic instrumentalism, which says that something is extrinsically good or bad for us only if it causes us to have things that are intrinsically good or bad for us. This view overlooks something that Thomas Nagel (1970) noted in his seminal essay “Death,” namely the fact that things may be extrinsically good or bad for us, other things being equal, by virtue of causing us not to have—by virtue of precluding our having—things that are intrinsically good or bad for us. Consider that being rendered unconscious prior to surgery is extrinsically good for a patient who otherwise would endure great suffering when the physicians apply the knife, in that it keeps him from suffering, and not because it causes him to accrue pleasure or some other good. Of course, after waking, the patient might also accrue pleasure or some other good as an indirect result of having been sedated, but in view of the suffering that it averts, being sedated is extrinsically good for him whether he receives that indirect bonus or not. As well, being made unconscious might be extrinsically bad for a person, say when it precedes, not surgery, but rather some joyous occasion he will miss because he is not conscious while it occurs. It is extrinsically bad for him, in this case, because it prevents him from taking joy in the occasion he misses. This remains true whether or not he also accrues some pain or other intrinsic evil as an indirect result of being sedated.

If it is indeed the case that things may be extrinsically good (bad) for us, other things being equal, by virtue of precluding our having evils (goods), we will want to allow for this fact in settling on an adequate understanding of what makes things good or bad for us. Next let us consider how this might be done, and the implications for the harm thesis.

To argue that death may be bad for those who die (even if they do not experience dying), theorists typically draw upon some version of the comparativist view that we are harmed by what makes our lives as wholes worse than they otherwise would be, and benefitted by what makes our lives as wholes better than they otherwise would be (early proponents of this view include Nagel 1970, Quinn 1984, and Feldman 1991). Applying comparativism, we may claim that, in at least some cases, dying at a time makes our lives as wholes worse than they would have been had we not died when we did, roughly because, by cutting our lives short, it deprives us of good life. This suggestion about death needs further development, but first let us explain the comparativist view more clearly.

Note that how well off you are at one time is likely to differ from how well off you are at another time. Your welfare level rises and falls over time. (For a discussion of welfare, see the article on Well-Being.) What determines how well off you are at a time, or during an interval of time, are the things you then accrue that are intrinsically good for you, goods such as pleasure, together with the things you then accrue that are intrinsically bad for you, evils such as pain (using the term ‘evil’ as a synonym for ‘bad’). Accruing the former at a time boosts your welfare level during that time, other things being equal, while accruing the latter lowers your welfare level during that time. Your welfare level during an interval of time will be positive if the goods you then accrue outweigh the evils. It will be 0—neither positive nor negative—if and only if you are capable of accruing goods or evils (unlike, say, a shoe, which is incapable of faring well or ill) but the goods you accrue are exactly offset by the evils and vice versa. The welfare level resulting from the goods and evils you accrue over the course of your life we may call your lifetime welfare level .

Using the notion of a lifetime welfare level, let us formulate an account of what it is for something to be extrinsically good or bad for us. Let us say that something is extrinsically good (bad) for us if and only if, and to the extent that, it is overall good (bad) for us simpliciter , where:

an event is overall good (bad) for us simpliciter if and only if, and to the extent that, it makes our lifetime welfare level higher (lower) than it otherwise would be.

(Why add the term ‘simpliciter’? Read on.) By way of illustration, consider a typical case in which you receive treatment by a dentist. Let us assume that, on this particular occasion, the dentist fills a cavity in one of your teeth, and that, had you not received this treatment, your tooth would have decayed, painfully, for months, until finally you would have sought out proper treatment. So the salient difference between your lifetime welfare level in the situation in which you are treated right away, on one hand, and the lifetime welfare level you would have in the case that you were not treated until much later, on the other, is that, in the latter situation, that level is significantly lower, due to the pain you would incur. Hence, on these assumptions, receiving treatment was overall good for you: the greater that pain would have been, the better for you it was that you were treated.

Note that things that are overall good for you may be a mixed bag—they may bring some pain or other intrinsic evils in their wakes, as well as some intrinsic goods, and the mix may differ from time to time. In some cases, what is overall good for you simpliciter is overall bad for you in a temporally relative sense—overall bad for you during some period of time . And although it is overall bad for you during one period of time, it might be overall good for you during some other period of time. Let us elaborate upon this point briefly. Comparativists can say that:

an event is overall good (bad) for us at some time t if and only if, and to the extent that, it makes our lifetime welfare level higher (lower) at t than it otherwise would be.

Suppose, for example, that, while your tooth’s cavity is being filled, the dentist’s drill causes you pain, and that this is pain you would not have had if you had not sought treatment, and instead watched TV. In that case, your visit to the dentist is overall bad for you during the time your tooth is being repaired. Yet, as emerged earlier, your visit to the dentist is overall good for you simpliciter , insofar as it enables you to reduce the episodes of toothache you would suffer over the course of your life.

Comparativists can accept intrinsic hedonism, but need not. They could, for example, pair comparativism with some version of the preferentialist view (mentioned earlier) that getting what we want—fulfilling one of our desires—is intrinsically good for us, and having our desires thwarted is intrinsically bad for us. Comparativism is neutral on the issue of what counts as the intrinsic goods and evils. Theorists who conclude that things other than pleasure are intrinsically good for us will want to weigh them in when they assess an individual’s welfare level. For example, preferentialists can say that even if accruing pleasure boosts a person’s welfare level so does desire fulfillment.

According to comparativism, a person’s death, whether painful or not, may well be overall bad for her (and hence extrinsically bad for her). To decide whether a person’s death is overall bad for her simpliciter (usually we can drop ‘simpliciter’ without creating confusion) we compare her actual lifetime welfare level to the lifetime welfare level she would have had if she had not died. Suppose, for example, that Hilda died (painlessly) on December 1, 2008 at age 25 and that, had she not died, she would have gone on to prosper for 25 years—her welfare level during that time would have been high—then suffer during her final five years. Her overall welfare level over her final 30 years would have been high, despite the downturn during the last five. Hence her lifetime welfare level had she not died at age 25 is significantly higher than her lifetime welfare level would be upon dying at 25. The former is boosted by the many goods she accrues during her final 30 years, and these goods are absent from her lifetime welfare level as it would be were her life ended at age 25. Hence dying at 25 is overall bad for her.

Importantly, dying at a time is not overall bad for everyone who dies. In fact, it will be overall good in many cases. Imagine that, had she not died at age 25, Hilda would have fared badly for 25 years—her welfare level during that time would have been low. We might also suppose that, during her last five years her welfare level would have been positive. Despite this last stipulation concerning her final five years, her lifetime welfare level had she not died at 25 is significantly lower than her lifetime welfare level would be if she did die at 25, so, on our new assumptions, dying at 25 is overall good for her.

According to comparativism, when a death is bad for us despite not making us accrue intrinsic evils such as pain, it is bad for us because it precludes our coming to have various intrinsic goods which we would have had if we had not died. We might say that death is bad for us because of the goods it deprives us of, and not, or at least not always, because of any intrinsic evils for which it is responsible. This stance is sometimes called deprivationism , and its proponents deprivationists .

As promising as it is, however, there may be grounds for doubting that comparativists can give the harm thesis a deprivationist defense. Let us discuss one such doubt next.

4. The Timing Puzzle

If we cannot identify a time when something makes us worse off than we otherwise would be, we might well doubt that it really was bad for us. We might go so far as to say that what never makes us worse (better) off than we otherwise would be is not bad (good) for us. Call this the Epicurean presumption . Given this presumption, proponents of the harm thesis need an answer to the timing question , which asks: if death is bad for us, at what time (or times) does it make us worse off than we otherwise would have been? In some cases in which things are bad for us, it seems rather easy to identify times when we are made worse off, but in other cases, especially in some cases involving death, it seems more difficult, which may make us worry about the deprivationist defense of the harm thesis. All this needs elaboration.

If having something is intrinsically bad for us, it is bad for us—because it is intrinsically bad for us—while we have it. Moreover, if something is overall bad for us wholly by virtue of making us have things that are intrinsically bad for us, we can say that it makes us worse off while we have those evils. For example, coming to be infected with a flu virus is overall bad for us, and the time it makes us worse off is not when we come to be infected, but rather while we are sick, while we suffer. (If we came to be infected with a virus, and our immune system dealt with it, preventing our becoming sick, the infection would not be bad for us.) This line of thought suggests that a painful death makes us worse off while we die, or rather while dying is painful for us. What about a painless death? Might it also be bad for us? (If so, when are we made worse off?) Perhaps; more on that in a bit.

We can use the term concurrentism for the view that a bad death makes us worse off while we die.

If we reject intrinsic hedonism, we might conclude that death can make us worse off not just while we die but at other times as well. If we adopt some form of preferentialism, we can take the view that things may make us worse off at the time one of our desires is thwarted. Suppose that, as George Pitcher (1984) suggested, a desire that you have now may be thwarted by your death, even though you will die several months from now. In that case, it might be now that your death makes you worse off than you would have been had you not died. Pitcher’s assumptions suggest that priorism is true: death may make you worse off before you die. It may harm you retroactively.

Identifying a time something makes us worse off seems rather easy in cases, such as the examples of infection or thwarted desire, in which it brings us have pain or other things that are intrinsically bad for us. But what about cases in which something is bad for us due to the fact that it precludes our having things that are intrinsically good for us? In cases like this, the victim incurs deprivation harm . But at what time are such persons worse off than they otherwise would be? When, in particular, does dying painlessly make a person worse off?

Is it possible to defend a concurrentist answer to this question about death? Julian Lamont (1998) says we incur deprivation harm at the time some event ensures that we will not retain or attain some good that is otherwise available. Call such an event an ensuring event . Death may itself be an ensuring event, he thought, so death and deprivation harm may occur simultaneously.

But this suggestion appears doubtful. Recall the earlier case in which we come to be infected and only later experience any symptoms. The event of coming to be infected is overall bad for us, but it seems implausible to say that this makes us worse off than we otherwise would be at the time we are infected . Instead, it seems, coming to be infected makes us worse off later, while we are sick. We are unlikely to adopt concurrentism as our story concerning catching the flu, which makes it doubtful as our story concerning deprivation harm.

In cases like catching the flu, it makes sense to say that the offending event is bad for its victim after it occurs—while she is incurring intrinsic evils she otherwise would lack. Perhaps the same is true of deprivation harm. Recall the example, discussed earlier, in which being sedated at time t is bad for a person due to the fact that it deprives her of good things: in this example, it seems, being sedated makes her worse off than she otherwise would be at a time after t —at the time when she would have been enjoying those goods had she not been sedated. Can we extend this story to the deprivation harm for which a victim’s death is responsible? Does a person’s death makes her worse off than she otherwise would be after she dies—during the time when she would have been enjoying the goods of which her death has deprived her, had she not died? Call this stance subsequentism . Proponents of subsequentism include Neil Feit (2002) and Ben Bradley (2004, 2009).

Subsequentism is plausible only if we can make good sense of the welfare level someone occupies while dead, but this may not be possible. There are at least two problems to discuss.

One difficulty is the problem of the subject . Suppose we are terminators rather than anti-terminators (discussed in Section 2.6). Suppose, too, that you die at time t 1 but had you not you would have experienced joy at time t 2 . Time t 2 arrives while you are dead, so that, given the termination thesis, t 2 arrives while you no longer exist. Consider the property, lacks joy . Does it make sense to attribute this (or any other) property to you at t 2 ? Does it make sense to say that some subject has a property at a time when that subject does not exist? If not, it seems difficult to make sense of your having a welfare level then. Epicurus seemed to be thinking along these lines when he wrote that “death is nothing to us, since when we are, death is not, and when death is present, then we are not.” (Echoing Epicurus, Nagel 1970 wrote “So long as a person exists, he has not yet died, and once he has died, he no longer exists; so there seems to be no time when death, if it is a misfortune, can be ascribed to its unfortunate subject.” But if this is the reason we cannot ascribe misfortune to a victim of death then we cannot even ascribe death to any victim.)

It might seem possible to solve the problem of the subject by simply switching sides and becoming anti-terminators, but this will not work. Anti-terminators can say that it is a straightforward matter to attribute the property lacks joy to you at t 2 , since you still exist at t 2 . You are your (joyless) corpse at t 2 . This won’t work because you might die and go out of existence without leaving a corpse, and even if you leave a corpse it might rot away, taking you out of existence, well before time t 2 arrives. Both possibilities are consistent with the fact that, had you not died when you did, at t 1 , you would have experienced joy at t 2 .

Still, there are more promising strategies for solving the problem of the subject. Subsequentists might adopt a view that is sometimes called metaphysical eternalism (defended by Nagel 1970 and Silverstein 1980, among others). On this view, past and future objects are ontologically on a par with present objects. Existing things are spread out in both space and time. Suppose it is possible to refer to anything that is ontologically on a par with present objects. Then, given metaphysical eternalism, we can still refer to Socrates, even though ‘Socrates’ refers to something whose existence is temporally located wholly in the past, and say of him that he is not alive. For similar reasons, perhaps, we can also attribute the property lacks joy to a person, such as Socrates, whose existence is over.

However, even if they can solve the problem of the subject, and make sense of attributing properties to subjects who are dead, subsequentists face another difficulty: it seems confused to speak of how well off a subject is during times when she is dead. Now, it does make sense to attribute the property lacks joy to a corpse, and to a person who has stopped existing. Anti-terminators will add that a person will have this property— lacks joy —while she is a corpse. But it makes no sense to ask how well off a person is while she is a corpse or during some time after she has stopped existing altogether. The concept of faring well or ill does not apply to things like concrete blocks and corpses or to persons while they are corpses. Things that do fare well or ill may pass through periods of time when they have a level of welfare that is equal to 0—during those times they are capable of accruing goods or evils but do neither—but unlike them, bags of concrete are not capable of having any welfare level, not even a level of 0. The same seems true of a corpse. And the same seems true of us during such times as we are no longer alive—times when we have become corpses or when those corpses have turned to dust.

Many theorists who reject subsequentism assume that because death takes a person out of actual existence, the dead are not “there” to be harmed. Palle Yourgrau (2019) rejects this assumption. He combines modal realism (the view that, like the actual world, other possible worlds are concrete objects) with the thesis of transworld identity (one and the same object exists in more than one possible world), and says that although a dead person no longer exists in the actual world, one and the same person is still alive, and exists, in other possible worlds. We may deny that, after a person has died, she is no longer real at all—not “there” to be harmed—because she still exists in other worlds, according to Yourgrau.

Some (Nagel 1970; Silverstein 1980) suggest that death harms us but at no determinate time. This view is criticized by Julian Lamont (1998) on the grounds that it implies that some events take place but at no particular time. But William Grey (1999) counters that Lamont has misunderstood Nagel’s (and Grey’s) indefinitist position, which is that the harm death causes is incurred during a stretch of time that has blurry boundaries (compare: the time of the onset of baldness).

As Grey understands it, indefinitism is correct only if subsequentism, priorism or concurrentism is true (Grey opts for subsequentism), for even a period of time with blurry edges must occur before, after or at the same time as a mortem event (eternalism is an exception since an infinite period has no boundaries to blur).

Suppose we conclude that there just is no (stretch of) time, whether with blurry edges or not, at which we are made worse off than we otherwise would be by a death that precludes our having goods we otherwise would have. Given the Epicurean presumption, we would have to conclude that it is not bad for us to be deprived of such goods by death. But of course we need not accept this conclusion. We can instead reject the Epicurean presumption. Being deprived of goods by death is bad for us, we can say, if, and insofar as, it is overall bad for us simpliciter , and to be overall bad for us simpliciter , there need not be a time at which death makes us worse off than we otherwise would be. There need be no time at which death makes our welfare level lower than it otherwise would be. Death can preclude our enjoying years of pleasant activities, making our lives worse than they would have been had we not died, even if at no time we are worse off than we would be had our lives not been cut short.

Isn’t it still possible to raise a question about timing, namely: if death is overall bad simpliciter for those who are deprived of happy years, at what time is it bad for them? This question does indeed arise, but it is not the timing question we have been asking, and an answer to the one is not an answer to the other. The answer to the new question is this: if true at all, the proposition that death is overall bad for us simpliciter is an eternal, a timeless, truth (Feldman 1991). A timeless truth is a proposition that is true at all times if true at all. That 6 is less than 7 is an example. That the welfare level Harry accrued today is lower than the welfare level Mary accrued today is another example. And so is the proposition that Sam’s death is overall bad for him simpliciter . It amounts to the claim that Sam’s actual lifetime welfare level is lower than the lifetime welfare level Sam would have accrued had he not died. Jens Johansson (2013) coined the term atemporalism for the view that “death is bad for the deceased but not at any time.” (For further discussion of atemporalism see Lamont 1998, Silverstein 2000 and Feit 2002.)

5. Further Reservations Concerning the Harm Theses

Before we move on, let us consider some further objections to the harm thesis and the deprivationist defense of it.

Another worry about the deprivationist defense is that deprivationism appeals to comparativism, and comparativism says that an event or state of affairs harms me, in that it is bad for me, when my life would have been better for me, my lifetime welfare higher, had that that event not occurred. However, there seem to be exceptions.

I am not harmed, it seems, by failing to be brilliant, or rich and beautiful. But compare my life as it is, with my unimpressive IQ, income and looks, to my life as it would be were I brilliant or rich or beautiful: the former is considerably worse than the latter. My not being a genius (or rich and so forth) precludes my coming to have many goods. It makes my life worse than it otherwise would be, so comparativism seems to imply that not being a genius is bad for me. Suppose you have the winning Mega Millions jacpot ticket, and you decide to give it to me. Before you hand it over, you have a stroke and die. Has your death harmed me?

Epicureans might renew their attack on the harm thesis by exploiting examples like these. The examples appear to show that things can have enormous negative value for me without harming me. Similarly, Epicureans might insist, the preclusion of goods by death is harmless: cut short, my life is worse than it would be were I not to die, but this comparative difference does not show that I am harmed.

It seems that the comparative criteria work well when we evaluate losses, such as the loss of my arms, and also when we evaluate some lacks, such as the inability to see or to feel pleasure. But, arguably, the criteria have worrisome implications when we evaluate certain other lacks, such as my lack of genius. It is relatively clear that a person is harmed by the inability to see but less clear that he is harmed by the lack of genius. Why is that?

Nagel seems inclined to think that the solution is to “set some limits on how possible a possibility must be for its nonrealization to be a misfortune,” but also mentions that we might not regard, as a misfortune, “any limitation, like mortality, that is normal to the species.” Draper suggests that harmless preclusion involves cases in which the events or states of affairs that would be good for us if they held are highly improbable (Draper 1999). Another explanation might focus on the relative importance of having some goods rather than others. In some moods, we may consider it harmful to be deprived of a good just when it is important for us to have it. The troublesome lacks we have been discussing might be lacks of goods it is unimportant to have; such lacks would not be harmful even though we would be better off without them. (But if, against all odds, a person is a genius, or rich, or beautiful, would taking these away be harmless to her?)

5.2 The Symmetry Argument

Lucretius, a follower of Epicurus, extended Epicurus’s case against the harm thesis. The argument he developed involved a thought experiment:

Look back at time … before our birth. In this way Nature holds before our eyes the mirror of our future after death. Is this so grim, so gloomy? (Lucretius 1951)

According to his symmetry argument, it is irrational to object to death, assuming it ends our existence, since we do not find it objectionable that we failed to exist prior to being alive, and the way things were for us while not existing then is just like the way things will be for us after death ends our existence; our pre-vital nonexistence and our posthumous nonexistence are symmetrical, alike in all relevant respects, so that any objection to the one would apply to the other.

Lucretius’s argument admits of more than one interpretation, depending on whether it is supposed to address death understood as dying or as being dead (or both).

On one interpretation, the argument is this: the ending of life is not bad, since the only thing we could hold against it is the fact that it is followed by our nonexistence, yet the latter is not objectionable, as is shown by the fact that we do not object to our nonexistence before birth. So understood, the symmetry argument is weak. It would have some force for someone who thought initially that death puts us into a state or condition that is ghastly, perhaps painful, but that need not be our complaint. Instead, our complaint might be that death precludes our having more good life. Notice that the mirror image of death is birth (or, more precisely, becoming alive), and the two affect us in very different ways: birth makes life possible; if a life ends up being good for us, birth starts a good thing going. Death makes further life impossible; it brings a good thing to a close.

Perhaps Lucretius only meant to argue that being dead is not bad, since the only thing we could hold against it is our nonexistence, which is not really objectionable, as witness our attitude about pre-vital nonexistence. So interpreted, there is a kernel of truth in Lucretius’s argument. Truly, our pre-vital nonexistence does not concern us much. But perhaps that is because our pre-vital nonexistence is followed by our existence. Perhaps we would not worry overly about our post-vital nonexistence if it, too, were followed by our existence. If we could move in and out of existence, say with the help of futuristic machines that could dismantle us, then rebuild us, molecule by molecule, after a period of nonexistence, we would not be overly upset about the intervening gaps, and, rather like hibernating bears, we might enjoy taking occasional breaks from life while the world gets more interesting. But undergoing temporary nonexistence is not the same as undergoing permanent nonexistence. What is upsetting might be the permanence of post-vital nonexistence—not nonexistence per se.

There is another way to use considerations of symmetry against the harm thesis: we want to die later, or not at all, because it is a way of extending life, but this attitude is irrational, Lucretius might say, since we do not want to be born earlier (we do not want to have always existed), which is also a way to extend life. As this argument suggests, we are more concerned about the indefinite continuation of our lives than about their indefinite extension . (Be careful when you rub the magic lamp: if you wish that your life be extended, the genie might make you older!) A life can be extended by adding to its future \(or\) to its past. Some of us might welcome the prospect of having lived a life stretching indefinitely into the past, given fortuitous circumstances. But we would prefer a life stretching indefinitely into the future.

Is it irrational to want future life more than past life? No; it is not surprising to find ourselves with no desire to extend life into the past, since the structure of the world permits life extension only into the future, and that is good enough. But what if life extension were possible in either direction? Would we still be indifferent about a lengthier past? And should our attitude about future life match our attitude about past life?

Our attitude about future life should match our attitude about past life if our interests and attitudes are limited in certain ways. If quantity of life is the only concern, a preference for future life is irrational. Similarly, the preference is irrational if our only concern is to maximize how much pleasure we experience over the course of our lives without regard to its temporal distribution. But our attitude is not that of the life- or pleasure-gourmand.

According to Parfit, we have a far-reaching bias extending to goods in general: we prefer that any good things, not just pleasures, be in our future, and that bad things, if they happen at all, be in our past. He argues that if we take this extensive bias for granted, and assume that, because of it, it is better for us to have goods in the future than in the past, we can explain why it is rational to deplore death more than we do our not having always existed: the former, not the latter, deprives us of good things in the future (he need not say that it is because it is in the past that we worry about the life-limiting event at the beginning of our lives less than the life-limiting event at the end). This preference for future goods is unfortunate, however, according to Parfit. If cultivated, the temporal insensitivity of the life- or pleasure-gourmand could lower our sensitivity to death: towards the end of life, we would find it unsettling that our supply of pleasures cannot be increased in the future, but we would be comforted by the pleasures we have accumulated.

Whether or not we have the extensive bias described by Parfit, it is true that the accumulation of life and pleasure, and the passive contemplation thereof, are not our only interests. We also have active, forward–looking goals and concerns. Engaging in such pursuits has its own value; for many of us, these pursuits, and not passive interests, are central to our ‘identities’, our fundamental values and commitments. However, we cannot make and pursue plans for our past. We must project our plans (our self–realization) into the future, which explains our forward bias. (We could have been devising and pursuing plans in the past, but these plans will not be extensions of our present concerns.) It is not irrational to prefer that our lives be extended into the future rather than the past, if for no other reason than this: only the former makes our existing forward-looking pursuits possible. It is not irrational to prefer not to be at the end of our lives, unable to shape them further, and limited to reminiscing about days gone by. As Frances Kamm (1998, 2021) emphasizes, we do not want our lives to be all over with.

Nevertheless, it does not follow that we should be indifferent about the extent of our pasts. Being in the grip of forward-looking pursuits is important, but we have passive interests as well, which make a more extensive past preferable. Moreover, having been devising and pursuing plans in the past is worthwhile. If fated to die tomorrow, most of us would prefer to have a thousand years of glory behind us rather than fifty. We want to have lived well.

In “Death” Thomas Nagel offered a response to Lucretius that has been widely discussed. It is entirely reasonable not to want to come into existence earlier even though we want to live longer, Nagel said, because it is metaphysically impossible for a person to have come into existence significantly earlier than she did, even though it is possible for a person to have existed longer than she actually did. However, his response hinges on questionable assumptions about the essential features of people’s origins, as Nagel acknowledges (in footnote 3 of the reprint of “Death” in his collection Mortal Questions .) Imagine someone who originated from a zygote that had been frozen for a very long time. Mightn't that zygote have been frozen for a brief time instead? Wouldn’t that be a way for this person to have come into existence far earlier than she did?

According to Frederik Kaufman (2016, p. 63), this thought experiment (perhaps tweaked a bit) might provide a way in which a human organism could have come into existence far earlier than she did, but it does not provide a way in which a person could have come into existence far earlier. “Persons (properly understood) cannot exist earlier than they do.” He bases this view on the assumption—challenged by animalists but defended by Parfit—that persons are objects (distinct from organisms) with psychological persistence conditions, chief among which is psychological continuity, together with the assumption that “if mental continuity is constitutive of personal identity, then when a particular consciousness emerges is essential to that person.”

6. Posthumous Harm

According to Aristotle,

a dead man is popularly believed to be capable of having both good and ill fortune—honour and dishonour and prosperity and the loss of it among his children and descendants generally—in exactly the same way as if he were alive but unaware or unobservant of what was happening ( Nicomachean Ethics 1.10)

The belief Aristotle reported in this passage is that a person may be benefitted or harmed by things that happen while she is dead. Nagel (1970, p. 66) agrees; drawing upon his indefinitist approach he says that “a man's life includes much that does not take place within the boundaries … of his life” and that “there is a simple account of what is wrong with breaking a deathbed promise. It is an injury to the dead man.” If something that occurs while a person is dead is bad for her, let us say that it is responsible for posthumous harm . (But this way of speaking is potentially misleading, as theorists who argue that posthumous events may harm us need not assume that the victims are worse off while they are dead.) Is there such a thing as posthumous harm?

The main reason to doubt the possibility of posthumous harm is the assumption that it presupposes the (dubious) possibility of backwards causation. As Ernest Partridge wrote, “after death no events can alter a moment of a person's life” (1981, p. 248). The dead may be wronged, Partridge thought, but being wronged is not a kind of harm. (The claim that a person may be wronged by actions others take after she is dead is itself quite controversial. Like Partridge, some theorists think that people may be wronged but not harmed posthumously. Priorists typically argue that both are possible, while other, theorists, such as J.S. Taylor 2012, argue that neither is possible.)

We might also question the possibility of posthumous harm by drawing on the assumption (made by Mark Bernstein 1998, p. 19, and Walter Glannon 2001, p. 138, among others) that something is intrinsically good or bad for a person only if it reduces to her intrinsic, non-relational properties. For simplicity, we can focus on one version of this view, namely intrinsic hedonism. Suppose we assume that a person is harmed only by what is intrinsically or extrinsically bad for her, that intrinsic hedonism is the correct account of intrinsic harm and comparativism is the correct account of extrinsic harm, and also that the termination thesis (people do not exist while dead) is true. On these assumptions, it is impossible for an event that occurs after a person dies to be bad for her. It cannot be bad for her in itself and it cannot be overall bad for her either. To be overall bad for a person, a posthumous event would have to make her have fewer goods or more evils or both than she would have had if that event had not occurred. But nothing that happens after a person dies and ceases to exist has any bearing on the amounts of pleasure or pain in her life. Nothing that occurs after she ceases to exist modifies any of her intrinsic properties.

Although the above assumptions rule out the possibility of posthumous harm, they are entirely consistent, we have seen, with the possibility of mortal harm, the possibility that people are harmed by dying. (We might think otherwise if, as some theorists do, we assume that a person no longer exists at the time she dies. Joel Feinberg 1984, following Barbara Levenbook 1984, defined death as “the first moment of the subject’s nonexistence,” which makes death something that occurs after a person has ceased to exist, and suggests that by ruling out the possibility that a person is harmed by things that occur after she ceases to exist we rule out the possibility of mortal harm.)

Those who defend the possibility of posthumous harm deny that it involves backwards causation. But how could posthumous events affect people if not via backwards causation?

Some theorists say that posthumous harm occurs when posthumous events change the value of a person’s life for the worse. Dorothy Grover (1989) suggests that posthumous events may affect the “quality” of a person's life, say by changing the value of her accomplishments. David Velleman (1991) argues along similar lines, claiming that later events may affect the meaning of earlier events, and the latter bears on the value of a person’s life.

Some theorists (for example, Pitcher 1984, Feinberg 1984, Luper 2004 and 2012, and Scarre 2013) appeal to preferentialism to explain the possibility of posthumous harm. We noted earlier that preferentialists can defend the idea that some events harm their victims retroactively, and that death is such an event. Preferentialists can take a similar stance on posthumous events, assuming that things that happen after we die may determine whether desires we have while alive are fulfilled or thwarted.

According to Pitcher, posthumous events harm us by being responsible for truths that thwart our desires. For example, being slandered while I am dead makes it true that my reputation is to be damaged, and this harms me at all and only those times when I desire that my reputation be untarnished. It is while I am alive that I care about my reputation’s always being intact, and it is while I am alive that my well-being is brought lower by posthumous slander. Similarly, my desire that my child have a happy upbringing even if I am not there to provide it will be thwarted if, after I die, she catches some devastating illness. The event that makes it true that my child will be miserable occurs after I am gone, but this truth thwarts my desire about my child now, so it is now that I am worse off. The posthumous events themselves harm me only indirectly; directly I am harmed by their making things true that bear on my interests.

However, the desire-based case for the possibility of posthumous harm remains controversial. It will be rejected by theorists who doubt that people are harmed by events that do not modify their intrinsic features, and by theorists who think that it hinges on the possibility of backwards causation, of course. Velleman (1991, p. 339) rejects the desire-based case on the grounds that “we think of a person's current well-being as a fact intrinsic to the present, not as a relation that he currently bears to his future.” Some theorists echo a criticism that was offered by Partridge (1981, p. 246). Consider an event that thwarts one of a person's desires. To harm her by virtue of thwarting that desire, Partridge claims, the event must occur while she still has that desire , while she still cares about whether it is fulfilled, but she and her desire are gone by the time a posthumous event occurs. For some theorists (Vorobej, 1998, Suits 2001), the point is that we have no reason to care whether our desires are fulfilled by events that occur once we no longer have those desires, and we no longer have desires after we die. Parfit resisted this charge by noting that while some of our desires are conditional on their own persistence (we want them fulfilled at a time only on condition that we will still have them at that time), others are not.

7. Never Dying

Is it always a misfortune for us to die? Would never dying instead be bad for us? In a pair of influential essays, Thomas Nagel defends an affirmative answer to the first question, while Bernard Williams defends an affirmative answer to the second.

In “Death” (and in The View From Nowhere , p. 224) Nagel argues that no matter when it happens, dying is bad for those who die. He bases this view on the claim that “life is worth living even when the bad elements of experience are plentiful and the good ones too meager to outweigh the bad ones on their own. The additional positive weight is supplied by experience itself, rather than by any of its contents.” (1970, p. 60) Nagel’s view appears to be that it is intrinsically good for us to experience things, and that this good is great enough to outweigh any evils that accompany it. Hence a person’s welfare level is positive at any time when she is experiencing things, and no matter how much misery continued existence will bring her, it is overall good for her to live longer, assuming that she continues to experience things. (Nagel does not argue that being deprived of continued life would be a misfortune if that life were entirely devoid of experience.)

Nagel considers objections to his view towards the end of his essay. One might argue, Nagel points out (as noted earlier), that mortality is not a misfortune on the grounds that the nonrealization of remote possibilities (like being immortal) is not harmful, or on the grounds that limitations that are normal to the species (like mortality) are not harmful. He responds that the normality and inevitableness of death “do not imply that it would not be good to live longer.” Whenever death comes, it would have been good to live longer, so it is bad for us that we will not: “if there is no limit to the amount of life that it would be good to have, then it may be that a bad end is in store for us all.” (1970, p. 69)

Nagel’s case for saying that death is always bad for those who die rests on his claim that the goodness of experiencing outweighs any accompanying evils. However, the latter is implausible, as is evident to anyone who would rather be sedated into unconsciousness than undergo the suffering she would otherwise experience during surgery. Under such circumstances, sedation is overall good for us, despite the fact that (indeed: because) it stops us from experiencing things for a time. And once this is acknowledged, it seems reasonable to add that, under certain circumstances, dying would be overall good for us, and hence not bad for us after all. It would be overall good for us if the further life we otherwise would have would bring us great evils, such as suffering, that are not offset by goods.

Bernard Williams (and others, such as Shelly Kagan 2012) takes the view that it would be bad to live forever, even under the best of circumstances. In his influential essay “The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality,” Williams argues that although the deaths of some persons is a misfortune for them, never dying would be intolerable. In arguing for these views, Williams draws upon the notion of a categorical desire, which we can clarify as follows.

Consider a woman who wants to die. She might still take the view that if she is to live on, then she should be well fed and clothed. She wants food and clothing on condition she remain alive. In this sense her desires (for food and clothes) are conditional on her remaining alive, and, in being conditional on her living on, they do not give her reason to live. Contrast a father who desires that his beloved daughter have a good start in life. His desire is not conditional on his remaining alive. In this sense, it is, Williams says, categorical. In fact, his desire gives him reason to live, because he can see to her well-being if he survives. Williams thinks that our categorical desires are not only what motivate us to live on, they give meaning to our lives, and are important elements of our characters. He also thinks that it is by virtue of the fact that we will retain the same character until a later time that it is clear to us that we will be the same person until then.

The bearing on death, according to Williams, is, first, that we have good reason to condemn a death that is premature in the sense that it thwarts our categorical desires. Second, mortality is good, for if we live long enough, eventually we will lose our categorical desires. At that point we will no longer be motivated to live on, and oppressive boredom will set in. When we contemplate this fate from our vantage point in the present, we find it that it is not even clear to us that these bored seniors are us.

If we could find a way to extend our lives indefinitely, yet avoid the ravages of senescence, and remain healthy and mentally competent, couldn’t we avoid becoming jaded with life by gradually varying our interests over time, adding to and perhaps replacing some of our categorical desires, again and again? Several theorists including Nagel (1986, p. 224, n. 3), Glover (1977, p. 57), and Fischer (1994), have argued that the lives of superseniors need not become dull and tedious. Williams’s view is that it is not possible to make eternal life desirable (which claim is not identical to the claim that eternal life would inevitably be bad for us). Varying my categorical desires will not work, because, to be desirable, the endless life I design for myself must meet two conditions: (1) “it should clearly be me who lives forever,” and (2) “the state in which I survive should be one that, to me looking forward, will be adequately related, in the life it presents, to those aims I now have in wanting to survive at all.” (1973, p. 83) If I replace my categorical desires, I fall afoul of at least one of these conditions. Life under the future desires is detached from life under my current categorical desires. Moreover, the desires I give myself in the future will be elements of a character that is very different from my current character; replacing my current character with an entirely different one later in life makes it far less clear, Williams appears to think, that the individual living that later life is me. “The degree of identification needed with the later life … is absolutely minimal.” (1973, p. 85)

Williams’s claim that immortality cannot be made desirable remains controversial. It is not obvious that eternal life is undesirable if it involves changing our categorical desires and characters (insofar as our characters are defined by the desires). Nor is it obvious that such changes must violate Williams’s two conditions for the desirability of continued life. Williams seems to think that the individual who is changed in this way will not clearly be the same person as before, but he stops short of saying that it clearly will not be the same person (indeed, he defends a bodily continuity criterion for identity in “The Self and the Future,” pp. 46–63, so he presumably thinks that a person does survive changes of desires and character). Concerning Williams’s second condition, his view is that if we replace our characters and desires, “there is nothing left by which he can judge” whether future life is desirable (1093, p. 85). Yet it seems reasonable to take the view now that it would be good for me to develop and fulfil desires in the future—desires I now lack. Many of us would welcome the prospect of gradually transforming our interests and projects over time. The gradual, continuous transformation of our desires and projects does not end our lives, or existence. It is distinct from, and preferable to, annihilation. If we could live endlessly, the stages of our lives would display reduced connectedness, yet remain continuous, which is a property that is important in the kind of survival most of us prize. Even after drinking from the fountain of eternal youth, we would tend to focus on relatively short stretches of our indefinitely extensive lives, being animated by the specific projects and relationships we have then. However, sometimes we would turn our attention to long stretches of life, and then, prizing continuity, we might well phase in new and worthwhile undertakings that build upon, and do not wholly replace, the old. (For further discussion of the desirability of eternal life, see Overall 2003, Bortolotti 2009, Smuts 2011, Luper 2012b, Altshuler 2016, Buben 2016, Cholbi 2016, and Fischer 2019.)

Even if death is usually bad for those of us who die, perhaps it need not be bad for us, if we prepare ourselves suitably. This might be possible if some form of preferentialism is true, and if, by altering our desires, we could cease to have any interests that dying would impair. For then we might be able to thanatize our desires, in this sense: we might abandon all desires that death might thwart. Among these are desires we can satisfy only if we live on for a few days, but also desires we cannot possibly satisfy within the span of a normal lifetime, and the desire for immortality itself. Instead of desiring that some project of mine succeed, which is a desire that might be thwarted by my death, I might instead adopt a conditionalized version of this desire, namely: should I live on, let my project succeed. If all goes well, thanatizing would insulate us from harm from death by leaving us with no interests with which dying interferes.

Unfortunately, this strategy will backfire. The main problem is that death can interfere with desire fulfillment not just by falsifying the objects of our desires but also by precluding our having desires (Luper 2013). So even if we resolve, from now on, to limit ourselves to desires whose objects cannot be falsified by death, we are still vulnerable to the harm death will do us if it precludes our having and fulfilling desires. Hence thanatizing would force us to avoid having any desires whose fulfillment would have benefitted us, and to deny ourselves such desires would be as bad for us as the harm we are trying to avoid.

However, the core idea of adapting our desires is useful, if not taken to an extreme. It is prudent to avoid taking on goals we cannot possibly attain, and hence prudent to eschew projects that cannot possibly be completed during the course of a normal lifetime.

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Partridge, E., 1981. “ Posthumous Interest and Posthumous Respect ,” Ethics 91, no. 2. Reprint made available by the author.

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Essays About Death: Top 5 Examples and 9 Essay Prompts

Death includes mixed emotions and endless possibilities. If you are writing essays about death, see our examples and prompts in this article.

Over 50 million people die yearly from different causes worldwide. It’s a fact we must face when the time comes. Although the subject has plenty of dire connotations, many are still fascinated by death, enough so that literary pieces about it never cease. Every author has a reason why they want to talk about death. Most use it to put their grievances on paper to help them heal from losing a loved one. Some find writing and reading about death moving, transformative, or cathartic.

To help you write a compelling essay about death, we prepared five examples to spark your imagination:

1. Essay on Death Penalty by Aliva Manjari

2. coping with death essay by writer cameron, 3. long essay on death by prasanna, 4. because i could not stop for death argumentative essay by writer annie, 5. an unforgettable experience in my life by anonymous on gradesfixer.com, 1. life after death, 2. death rituals and ceremonies, 3. smoking: just for fun or a shortcut to the grave, 4. the end is near, 5. how do people grieve, 6. mental disorders and death, 7. are you afraid of death, 8. death and incurable diseases, 9. if i can pick how i die.

“The death penalty is no doubt unconstitutional if imposed arbitrarily, capriciously, unreasonably, discriminatorily, freakishly or wantonly, but if it is administered rationally, objectively and judiciously, it will enhance people’s confidence in criminal justice system.”

Manjari’s essay considers the death penalty as against the modern process of treating lawbreakers, where offenders have the chance to reform or defend themselves. Although the author is against the death penalty, she explains it’s not the right time to abolish it. Doing so will jeopardize social security. The essay also incorporates other relevant information, such as the countries that still have the death penalty and how they are gradually revising and looking for alternatives.

You might also be interested in our list of the best war books .

“How a person copes with grief is affected by the person’s cultural and religious background, coping skills, mental history, support systems, and the person’s social and financial status.”

Cameron defines coping and grief through sharing his personal experience. He remembers how their family and close friends went through various stages of coping when his Aunt Ann died during heart surgery. Later in his story, he mentions Ann’s last note, which she wrote before her surgery, in case something terrible happens. This note brought their family together again through shared tears and laughter. You can also check out these articles about cancer .

“Luckily or tragically, we are completely sentenced to death. But there is an interesting thing; we don’t have the knowledge of how the inevitable will strike to have a conversation.”

Prasanna states the obvious – all people die, but no one knows when. She also discusses the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Research also shows that when people die, the brain either shows a flashback of life or sees a ray of light.

Even if someone can predict the day of their death, it won’t change how the people who love them will react. Some will cry or be numb, but in the end, everyone will have to accept the inevitable. The essay ends with the philosophical belief that the soul never dies and is reborn in a new identity and body. You can also check out these elegy examples .

“People have busy lives, and don’t think of their own death, however, the speaker admits that she was willing to put aside her distractions and go with death. She seemed to find it pretty charming.”

The author focuses on how Emily Dickinson ’s “ Because I Could Not Stop for Death ” describes death. In the poem, the author portrays death as a gentle, handsome, and neat man who picks up a woman with a carriage to take her to the grave. The essay expounds on how Dickinson uses personification and imagery to illustrate death.

“The death of a loved one is one of the hardest things an individual can bring themselves to talk about; however, I will never forget that day in the chapter of my life, as while one story continued another’s ended.”

The essay delve’s into the author’s recollection of their grandmother’s passing. They recount the things engrained in their mind from that day –  their sister’s loud cries, the pounding and sinking of their heart, and the first time they saw their father cry. 

Looking for more? Check out these essays about losing a loved one .

9 Easy Writing Prompts on Essays About Death

Are you still struggling to choose a topic for your essay? Here are prompts you can use for your paper:

Your imagination is the limit when you pick this prompt for your essay. Because no one can confirm what happens to people after death, you can create an essay describing what kind of world exists after death. For instance, you can imagine yourself as a ghost that lingers on the Earth for a bit. Then, you can go to whichever place you desire and visit anyone you wish to say proper goodbyes to first before crossing to the afterlife.

Every country, religion, and culture has ways of honoring the dead. Choose a tribe, religion, or place, and discuss their death rituals and traditions regarding wakes and funerals. Include the reasons behind these activities. Conclude your essay with an opinion on these rituals and ceremonies but don’t forget to be respectful of everyone’s beliefs. 

Smoking is still one of the most prevalent bad habits since tobacco’s creation in 1531 . Discuss your thoughts on individuals who believe there’s nothing wrong with this habit and inadvertently pass secondhand smoke to others. Include how to avoid chain-smokers and if we should let people kill themselves through excessive smoking. Add statistics and research to support your claims.

Collate people’s comments when they find out their death is near. Do this through interviews, and let your respondents list down what they’ll do first after hearing the simulated news. Then, add their reactions to your essay.

There is no proper way of grieving. People grieve in their way. Briefly discuss death and grieving at the start of your essay. Then, narrate a personal experience you’ve had with grieving to make your essay more relatable. Or you can compare how different people grieve. To give you an idea, you can mention that your father’s way of grieving is drowning himself in work while your mom openly cries and talk about her memories of the loved one who just passed away. 

Explain how people suffering from mental illnesses view death. Then, measure it against how ordinary people see the end. Include research showing death rates caused by mental illnesses to prove your point. To make organizing information about the topic more manageable, you can also focus on one mental illness and relate it to death.

Check out our guide on  how to write essays about depression .

Sometimes, seriously ill people say they are no longer afraid of death. For others, losing a loved one is even more terrifying than death itself. Share what you think of death and include factors that affected your perception of it.

People with incurable diseases are often ready to face death. For this prompt, write about individuals who faced their terminal illnesses head-on and didn’t let it define how they lived their lives. You can also review literary pieces that show these brave souls’ struggle and triumph. A great series to watch is “ My Last Days .”

You might also be interested in these epitaph examples .

No one knows how they’ll leave this world, but if you have the chance to choose how you part with your loved ones, what will it be? Probe into this imagined situation. For example, you can write: “I want to die at an old age, surrounded by family and friends who love me. I hope it’ll be a peaceful death after I’ve done everything I wanted in life.”

To make your essay more intriguing, put unexpected events in it. Check out these plot twist ideas .

An elegy for a dying microbe explores what we really mean by ‘death’

Ageing and death

Peregrinations of grief

A friend and a falcon went missing. In pain, I turned to ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ – and found a new vision of sorrow and time

A hunter’s lyrical reflection on the humbling business of being mortal

Thinkers and theories

We’ll meet again

The intrepid logician Kurt Gödel believed in the afterlife. In four heartfelt letters to his mother he explained why

Alexander T Englert

The haunting of modern China

In Nanjing, Hong Kong and other Chinese cities, rapid urbanisation is multiplying a fear of death and belief in ghosts

Andrew Kipnis

Even in modern secular societies, belief in an afterlife persists. Why?

Meaning and the good life

The world turns vivid, strange and philosophical for one plane crash survivor

Toby ponders the inner lives of the sheep that roam atop his parents’ graves

Animals and humans

Goodbye Pixel

Although it felt more like bereavement for a person than the loss of a thing, the death of a pet isn’t exactly like either

Julian Baggini

When his elderly parents make a suicide pact, Doron struggles to accept their choice

Rituals and celebrations

In a Mongolian wind burial, a body falls on land before getting swept up to the heavens

Values and beliefs

A funeral director takes in bodies that social stigma leaves unclaimed

How an end-of-life doula found her vocation as a companion for the dying

Is grandad on the moon?

We no longer have a clear sense of how to introduce our children to death. But their questions can help us face up to it

Pragya Agarwal

Final thoughts

Do deathbed regrets give us a special insight into what really matters in life? There are good reasons to be sceptical

Mood and emotion

Grieving Kobe Bryant, Conor wonders: why do untimely celebrity deaths hit so hard?

Sooner or later we all face death. Will a sense of meaning help us?

Warren Ward

Marcus Aurelius helped me survive grief and rebuild my life

Jamie Lombardi

This mortal coil

The fear of death drives many evils, from addiction to prejudice and war. Can it also be harnessed as a force for good?

Jeff Greenberg

Psychiatry and psychotherapy

It’s complicated – why some grief takes much longer to heal

Marie Lundorff

Death by design

We can choose how we live – why not how we leave? A free society should allow dying to be more deliberate and imaginative

Daniel Callcut

Thinking about one’s birth is as uncanny as thinking of death

Alison Stone

‘When it comes to the end, we all want the same things.’ Why animals need a good death

‘Where is it that we are?’ A poet conjures a journey along the waters of the afterlife

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Our Stories Essays On Life, Death, And Free Will

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In this collection of essays on the metaphysical issues pertaining to death, the meaning of life, and freedom of the will, John Martin Fischer argues (against the Epicureans) that death can be a bad thing for the individual who dies. He defends the claim that something can be a bad thing--a misfortune-for an individual, even if he never experiences it as bad (and even if he does not any longer exist). Fischer also defends the commonsense asymmetry in our attitudes toward death and prenatal nonexistence: we are indifferent to the time before we are born, but we regret that we do not live longer. Further, Fischer argues (against the immortality curmudgeons, such as Heidegger and Bernard Williams), that immortal life could be desirable, and shows how the defense of the (possible) badness of death and the (possible) goodness of immortality exhibit a similar structure; on Fischer’ s view, the badness of death and the goodness of life can be represented on spectra that display certain continuities. Building on Fischer’ s previous book, My Way a major aim of this volume is to show important connections between issues relating to life and death and issues relating to free will. More specifically, Fischer argues that we endow our lives with a certain distinctive kind of meaning--an irreducible narrative dimension of value--by exhibiting free will. Thus, in acting freely, we transform our lives so that our stories matter.

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Death and Dying: How to Accept the End of Life Ideas Research Paper

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Undoubtedly, nowadays, people have to deal with some significant challenges. However, the fundamental problem—people must deal with death—has never altered. One of the most challenging concerns an adult must deal with is understanding death. The researchers emphasized that only some of these stages were possible for humans to go through at that point. Some contend that losses, grieving, and people’s unique life experiences are different, and there cannot be universal stages. Family members frequently express their grief in different ways after a loss. Families may become closer after experiencing grief, or they may become more distant. While knowing about death and how it impacts one’s family can help one get through the challenging times together, no one can adequately equip one to handle their sadness. Family members experience loss in various ways and at different times. It can take a long time to recover from a bereavement; for example, it could take years to get used to losing a spouse. When a parent dies, children may experience sadness in fits and starts over several years.

In lifetimes, humans experience losses of various kinds and magnitudes. While some of these losses are small and barely influence people sharing them, others are significant and cause great pain. The ways that people deal with grief, death, and dying differ from one country to the next, depending on culture, local traditions, religion, and personal beliefs. In some cultures, before going to the funeral home, neighbors, friends, and relatives assemble to pray, sing, and share memories (Anderson, Sanders, and Kinnair 17). It is crucial to understand loss better, grieving, and how to manage sadness to deal with the losses covered in the following chapters. Compared to the more emotional and private grief process, mourning is more external, cultural, and public. Wearing black clothing during mourning to signal to the public that one is grieving and is emotionally wounded is one of the rituals observed in some cultures when someone is in mourning.

Loss-related grief hurts and is frequently intolerable, and it can be challenging to maintain a good outlook on life when one is in pain. If one searches for it, grief does have a bright side, and loss can lead to numerous types of growth. One can observe signs of growth as a result of going through complex events months or years after the mourning experience once one has healed from the emotional sorrow. As a result of unpleasant circumstances, some people can observe beneficial improvements. It might be difficult for dying people to express their feelings to friends and family. Waves of robust and challenging emotions, including great sadness, emptiness, despair, shock, numbness, guilt, or regret, may be experienced when a loved one passes away. They could be incensed at the manner of their loved one’s passing, with their hatred directed at themselves, other loved ones, or any outside influences.

In conclusion, everyone has unique feelings and perspectives regarding death and dying. The social environment significantly affects attitudes and ideas regarding topics of death. Different civilizations have different funeral rites and hold different customs and beliefs regarding the afterlife. Numerous theories suggest that everything may be viewed from various angles and explain how death is perceived differently in other civilizations. When a significant loss is imminent, it is essential to develop a perspective on death and have the ability to make an objective determination about one’s sentiments.

Anderson, Elizabeth, et al. “ The nature and benefits of team-based reflection on a patient death by healthcare professionals: A scoping review .” Journal of interprofessional care, vol. 33, no. 1, 2019, pp. 15–25. Web.

• Children's Growth and Development
• The Impact of Entrepreneurship Programs on Children’s Development
• Mourning Rituals in Five Major World Religions
• Cultural Differences in Grieving: Common Emotions and Different Traditions
• Rosetti’s “The Woodspurge” and Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia”
• Adolescence as a Period of Social Development
• COVID-19 & Early Childhood Cognitive Development
• Adolescent Development and Age-Related Issues
• Friendship and Peer Networking in Middle Childhood
• Infants' Differential Social Responses to Beauty
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2024, January 2). Death and Dying: How to Accept the End of Life Ideas. https://ivypanda.com/essays/death-and-dying-how-to-accept-the-end-of-life-ideas/

"Death and Dying: How to Accept the End of Life Ideas." IvyPanda , 2 Jan. 2024, ivypanda.com/essays/death-and-dying-how-to-accept-the-end-of-life-ideas/.

IvyPanda . (2024) 'Death and Dying: How to Accept the End of Life Ideas'. 2 January.

IvyPanda . 2024. "Death and Dying: How to Accept the End of Life Ideas." January 2, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/death-and-dying-how-to-accept-the-end-of-life-ideas/.

1. IvyPanda . "Death and Dying: How to Accept the End of Life Ideas." January 2, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/death-and-dying-how-to-accept-the-end-of-life-ideas/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Death and Dying: How to Accept the End of Life Ideas." January 2, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/death-and-dying-how-to-accept-the-end-of-life-ideas/.

Death, Immortality, and Meaning in Life : Precis and Further Reflections

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• Published: 12 February 2022
• Volume 26 , pages 341–359, ( 2022 )

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I offer an overview of the book, Death, Immortality, and Meaning in Life , summarizing the main issues, arguments, and conclusions (Fischer 2020). I also present some new ideas and further developments of the material in the book. A big part of this essay is drawing connections between the specific issues treated in the book and those in other areas of philosophy, and in particular, the theory of agency and moral responsibility. I highlight some striking similarities of both structure and content between the death/meaning in life literature and the free will/moral responsibility literature.

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Jean Améry on the Value of Death and Dying

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One might say, with some degree of oversimplification, that human beings have (at least) two basic drives: management of our anxieties about death and finding meaning in life. (Sex would be up there too!) Ernest Becker ( 1997 ) described the first as “terror management,” and Victor Frankl ( 2006 ) highlighted the human quest for meaning. Of course, neither was the first to identify these forces, but they are salient modern presentations of the ideas. My book (Fischer 2020 ) is essentially organized around these two drives.

The following is a brief overview of the book, with sketches of the main arguments and conclusions. I also include some “further reflections,” including material I have published after the book. These thoughts help to put the book in a larger context by connecting it to related debates. I highlight the relationships between the issues pertaining to death/meaning of life and agency (free will and moral responsibility). I also seek to build on some of the views in the book to show how they can be developed further. This essay is not just a summary, but an essay in which I attempt to make new contributions.

Meaning in Life

We typically (although not always) take premature death to be bad for the individual who dies—especially for those beings (like us) capable of living meaningful lives. Indeed, premature death is sometimes thought to be a tragedy for the deceased. (I will return to these assumptions of “common sense” in discussing death’s putative badness.) There is thus an important connection between the special badness of death for the deceased and the capacity for meaning in life, although I do not contend that death can be a bad thing only for those capable of leading meaningful lives.

I agree with Susan Wolf ( 2010 ) and others that there is no meaning of life for human beings in general, but I do think (unlike Wolf, as far as I can see) that there can be a meaning of a particular individual’s life. I hold that we can associate the meaning of an individual’s life with the content of her “life-story” or “narrative” (interpreted strictly). I further hold that it is important and illuminating to distinguish the meaning of an individual’s life from the level of meaningfulness of the life. They are two interrelated but separate notions. So: distinguish the meaning of life in general, the meaning of a particular person’s life, and the level of meaningfulness of a person’s life.

Some salient proposals (in “Western,” broadly speaking, societies, such as ours) for meaningfulness-enhancing features include fulfilling God’s purposes, loving another or others and having friendships, being in contact with something “greater” than oneself (where this need not be a perfect or divine being, but can include, among other things, ongoing activities such as science, the arts, athletics, and scholarship), leaving a lasting mark through accomplishments, and so forth. Note that many, if not all of the prominent suggestions, involve making important connections , or perhaps, connections of objective value.

Having a meaningful life—a life whose description counts as a narrative—is an all-or-nothing thing. It requires meeting two conditions: (i) non-delusory connection to reality and (ii) freedom. Such lives can be graded on a spectrum of meaningfulness, depending on our evaluation of the mix of meaning-enhancing and meaning-diminishing features of the life. A life that is meaningful can be located on the meaningfulness scale, so long as it meets the threshold specified by the two constraints.

Analytically then there are two moments in the evaluation of lives with respect to meaning. First one determines whether a person’s life meets the basic requirements for having a meaning. Next one judges the life’s level of meaningfulness in a scalar , not an all-or-nothing way. Meeting the basic constraints on having a meaningful life at all is the gateway to greater or lesser meaningfulness, as determined by an overall evaluation of the meaningfulness-relevant factors.

The abstract structure of this view is similar to my view about the relationship between moral responsibility and (say) blameworthiness. On my view, moral responsibility is the “aptness” to a set of normative responses—judgments, attitudes (such as resentment), and activities (such as punishment). Moral responsibility is the “gateway” to such responses, and it requires meeting certain basic epistemic and control conditions. Once these are met, there is a further evaluation of praiseworthiness and blameworthiness, and the application of the responses in question in a particular situation. Both views—about moral responsibility and meaning in life—involve two analytic steps, the first of which is all-or-nothing, and the second scalar. (For simplicity’s sake I am putting together judgments of [say] blameworthiness and whether the expression of blame is justified in a particular context; they are strictly speaking analytically separate scalar judgments.)

A person “writes” her narrative by acting freely. (I deem “acting freely” to be the freedom component of moral responsibility.) As with any author, she uses material from various “sources” in writing—she does not write in a vacuum. Others give important content to our stories, and then we stitch them together and give them a shape. A free action (an action where the agent acts freely) corresponds to a sentence in the narrative of one’s life.

In acting freely, one does not necessarily express a character trait or propound into public space a value for which one stands. For example, one may exhibit weakness of will, deception, or other failures of practical reasoning or its implementation in action. Rather, one adds an element to the narrative of one’s life—an element whose meaning interacts with other elements in a distinctive way. We can explain why there is no single meaning of human life in general by noting that there is no single agent (individual or group) who freely and intentionally acts so as to write a narrative of the human species.

I accept David Velleman’s ( 1991 , 2003 ) view that a narrative (strictly speaking, that is, not a mere story or chronicle) has three characteristics: it is apt to elicit an affective or emotional reaction in an appropriate audience, it features meaning holism (the meaning or value of one part can depend on its relationship to others), and it gives a distinctive kind of “totalizing” explanation of the life. A totalizing explanation yields an understanding of the whole life, and its parts, in terms of its ending.

In an important way the meaning of an individual’s life pulls apart from considerations of relative meaningfulness of lives: more or less meaningfulness is not a matter of better or worse narrative value, in any sense of “narrative value.” A better story (better “in the telling”) does not make for a more meaningful life. Neither does more or richer meaning holism. The features in virtue of which the chronicle of an individual’s life is a narrative do not bear directly on the degree of meaningfulness in a life, even though they endow the life with a specific meaning. Narratives tell the unique stories of individuals’ lives, and they can be placed on a scale of meaningfulness (relative to the consensus of a given social group or society).

It is an interesting question (that I explore in less detail than it deserves) to what extent we need to understand meaningfulness in terms of doing rather than being . Often being active rather than passive is prized in discussions of meaningfulness in human lives—we don’t want to be slothful couch-potatoes or “blobs,” to use Susan Wolf’s ( 2010 ) term. We do not however think that a Zen Buddhist monk’s life necessarily scores low on the meaningfulness scale. It is thus important to think more carefully about the distinction between activity and passivity. I (Fischer 2021 [a], 2021 [b]) believe that there is an active sense of “being,” by reference to which we can deem the Buddhist monk’s life relatively meaningful and distinguish it from those of some (but not all) couch-potatoes.

Why Is Death Bad, and Should We Fear It?

Many of us fear death, and sometimes this is a central fact of our lives. When we think carefully about death, however, it is puzzling how it can be a bad thing for the deceased. She’s not around anymore, and if it were not a bad thing, she shouldn’t fear death at all. These puzzles about death’s badness give rise to a strategy pioneered by Epicurus for alleviating our anxieties about death (given a secular framework). The Epicurean strategy is further developed by Lucretius and also by various contemporary philosophers, including Nussbaum ( 1994 ).

Epicurean Challenges

The Epicurean contends that death cannot be a bad thing for the individual who dies, because there is no individual left to be the subject of this purported misfortune. The point that there is no individual left implies that the status of being dead (as opposed to the process of dying) involves no unpleasant experiences on the part of the individual who dies. The Epicurean thus contends that it cannot be bad for her. Also, unlike other harms, it doesn’t seem that there is a time at which the badness of death occurs. At the time of being dead, there is no subject of the harm left: and when the subject still exists, the harmful state of affairs has not yet begun to obtain. Epicurus’s famous “rallying cry” is: “When the person is, death is not, and when death is, the person is not.”

Lucretius offered another argument in defense of the Epicurean position. He pointed out that our being dead and our status before we were born appear to be metaphysically symmetric (“mirror images”): they are both extended periods of nonexistence, and late birth and early death appear to be parallel. Given this metaphysical symmetry, it seems that we should have psychological symmetry—symmetric attitudes toward these two periods. On this view, since we don’t regret the time before we were born, we should not (say) fear death. The Epicurean concludes that death is nothing to fear.

I suppose it would be nice if these Epicurean points were uncontroversial and decisive, since they would provide comfort. This is, however, a bit optimistic, and some would even say, “wishful thinking.” I consider several ways of responding to the Epicureans, many of which are quite cogent. I contend, however, that there are important grains of truth in their views—insights that might be missed if one dismisses their arguments too abruptly.

The No-Experience Problem

I believe that various things can be bad for an individual, even though she doesn’t have negative experiences as a result: experience is not all there is to harm or badness (just as it is not all there is to goodness). I thus reject “experiential ethics,” and, more generally, the view that all kinds of value can be reduced to, or defined in terms of, experience.

I consider at some length an example offered by Thomas Nagel ( 1970 ). In this case an individual is betrayed behind her back by people who present themselves to her as friends. Perhaps they have regular “meet-ups” where they attack her scurrilously, accusing her of cheating on her partner, plagiarizing her writings, and so forth. The woman however never finds out about these meetings and is otherwise unaffected by them (even indirectly). I agree with Nagel that this sort of case indicates that one can be harmed by something—a bad thing can happen to one—even in the absence of any unpleasant experience caused by it. This is a first step toward defending the notion that death, conceived as an experiential blank, can be bad for the deceased.

The Epicurean however will not be convinced, because there is an important difference between the betrayal case and death: one could find out about and be affected (experientially) by the betrayals, but when dead the individual cannot (by hypothesis) have any negative experiences. This reveals a gap in the argument against Epicureanism based on the betrayal example.

I build on Nagel’s example by constructing a related case in which it is impossible (in the relevant sense) for a betrayed individual to find out about the “meet-ups” or be otherwise affected by them. In this sort of example, there is a “counterfactual intervener,” White, standing by, ready to block any information about the betrayals from reaching the individual in question. If someone were to seek to call her, the cell phone number would be blocked, if someone were to come to the door, the security system would be triggered, and so forth. We stipulate that everything in the “actual sequence” involving the betrayals is the same in both the original case and the modified case (including White). I contend then that if the individual who is the target of the scurrilous verbal attacks is harmed in the original case, she is also harmed in the modified case. Harm is an “actual-sequence” notion.

The case involving the counterfactual intervener, White, is parallel in structure to the widely discussed “Frankfurt-style Cases” (FSCs), which involve the counterfactual intervener, Black (Frankfurt 1969 ). The latter cases have been introduced to impugn the “Principle of Alternative Possibilities” (PAP), according to which moral responsibility for an action requires freedom to do otherwise, and thus to defend the claim that moral responsibility is an actual-sequence notion. Of course, it is controversial whether the FSCs are successful in dethroning PAP, and it is similarly unclear whether the modified betrayal case succeeds in refuting the “possible experience” requirement for harm. You might say that the issues are not Black and White! In the book I do however defend the dialectical efficacy of the modified betrayal case, as I have (elsewhere) defended the FSCs (Fischer 1994 , 2010 ). Both harm and moral responsibility are actual-sequence concepts.

The Timing Problem

There are some viable options (I resisted “live” options) for specifying the time of the harm of death, including “subsequentism,” according to which the badness of death takes place during the time at which the individual is dead. I suggest that “being harmed by death” at a time t (which can be an interval of time) is not a temporally nonrelational or intrinsic property of an individual existing at (or during) t . For example, Aristotle now has the property of being written about by John Fischer. Thus, the subsequentist need not be saddled with the Problem of Predication—the problem of making sense of the notion that an individual who does not exist at t can have an intrinsic property at t. The distinction between “hard” and “soft” properties (and facts), which is important in discussions of arguments for logical and also theological fatalism, is the same as the distinction between temporally nonrelational (intrinsic) and temporally relational (extrinsic) properties (Fischer 1983 , 1986 , 2016 ).

In the book I briefly suggest this strategy (employing the distinction between temporally intrinsic and temporally extrinsic properties) for answering the Problem of Predication and thus opening a path to subsequentism, I develop it more fully in an article that complements and extends the treatment in the book. (Fischer Forthcoming(a) ). My strategy for opening the door to a more complete defense of subsequentism employs the distinction between the time of the truth of a proposition about a subsequent time and the time of the occurrence of the truthmaker of that proposition.

In his important work on fatalism and free will, John Perry ( 2004 ) invokes this distinction to analyze the notion of “fixity” of the past. For Perry a proposition that is true in the past need not be considered “fixed” and out of one’s control to falsify until the truthmaker for the proposition occurs. Just as Perry analyzes the fixity of the past by making the crucial distinction, I analyze the time of death’s badness in terms of this distinction. This suggests an interesting connection between the literatures on free will and death—one which deserves further exploration.

Note that the propositions in question in the debates about the time of death’s badness are comparative and normative. They are about one life (say one in which death is later) being better than another. The already delicate issues pertaining to the timing problem and metaphysical grounding of propositions are rendered more challenging by the need to address such propositions. I am not familiar with a discussion of comparative normative propositions in the metaphysical grounding literature.

The Lucretian Mirror Image Argument

In the book I argue that there are attractive strategies for responding to Lucretius’s Mirror Image Argument: the Parfit-style ( 1984 : 165–166) response, which appeals to a reasonable psychological asymmetry (we care about the future in a way in which we don’t care about the past), the asymmetry of (plausible) possibility response (it is relatively easy to imagine a later death, but hard to imagine an early birth), and the preference-thwarting response (death thwarts preferences, while late birth does not).

I discuss a Parfit-style response developed by Anthony Brueckner and me ( 1986 ). It insists that we can prescind the metaphysics from the psychology; that is, the metaphysical symmetry noted by Lucretius need not imply a psychological symmetry of the relevant kind. In Parfit’s famous thought-experiments involving a patient who is awaiting news in a hospital, Brueckner and I “switch out” news about a painful surgery and replace it with a pleasant drug-induced experience. The examples show that, other things equal, we prefer our pains in the past (Parfit’s example) and pleasures in the future (Brueckner’s and mine). Since early death deprives us of future pleasures whereas late birth deprives us of past pleasures, we care more about early death. Here metaphysics does not drive psychology; the metaphysics is symmetric, whereas the psychology is (and arguably should be) asymmetric.

The asymmetry of plausible possibility response, suggested by Nagel (although he also worries about it), holds that there is indeed a metaphysical asymmetry: whereas it is plausible that an individual (the very same one) can live longer than she actually does, it is not plausible that she (the very same individual) could have been born significantly earlier than she actually was. This provides a different response to Lucretius, although the two strategies of response are entirely compatible.

Another (also compatible) response to the Lucretian Mirror Image Argument is suggested by Bernard Williams’s ( 1973 ) account of why death is bad. Williams rejects the deprivation theory of death’s badness on behalf of a “preference-thwarting” model. Accepting this approach, one could say that early death thwarts “categorical preferences” (to pursue projects that give one reason to continue living), whereas late birth does not (insofar as there are as yet no projects to thwart). I hold that this is also a promising avenue of response to Lucretius, worthy of further consideration.

I note here a final strategy of response, not explored in any detail in the book—the Asymmetry of Causal Power approach. Since we can causally affect the future but not the past, it makes sense to focus our practical reasoning on future possibilities, rather than the past. This asymmetric psychological orientation complements the Brueckner/Fischer point that this confers significant survival advantages. Insofar as an advantage in natural selection offers (part of) a rational justification, our future focus is shown to be (at least to some extent) rational, and not just a descriptive psychological feature of human beings.

The Deprivation Theory of Death’s Badness and Fear of Death

Why is death bad for the individual who dies, when it is indeed bad? An influential view is the deprivation account of death’s badness, according to which (roughly speaking) death deprives the deceased of goods she would have had, but for her early death. These goods would have made that life (in which she lives longer) better than the life she actually leads. Typically, premature death is bad because it both deprives the individual of good experiences in the future (as part of what would have been an on-balance better life), and it thwarts preferences to pursue projects that give meaning to life. When only one condition is met, death is bad to some extent; when both are met, death is bad in a stronger sense. This shows why the death of a nonhuman animal can be bad to some extent, whereas only the death of a human being (or person) can be a tragedy for the deceased.

I follow others, including Draper ( 2013 ), however, in distinguishing between judging that it is a bad thing that one dies prematurely and fearing this possibility. This is an important distinction, and it must be emphasized that the Epicureans were more concerned with diminishing fear than expunging negative judgments. Given that death is a non-experiential bad, it is very different from boredom or torture. We can take at least some consolation from this. It seems to me that fear is keyed to unpleasant experiences, whereas our judgments about harms are not constrained in this way.

If all of this is correct the Epicureans are at least partly vindicated, and the insight could be an important part of a secular strategy for terror management (as I note below in my discussion of near-death experiences). The partial vindication pertains to fear, rather than judgments of badness. Whereas I argued in the book that it is not irrational to fear premature death (the status of being dead) to some extent, I have changed my views on this particular point—moving toward the Epicurean position—since it was published.

I wish to sketch some reflections that motivate my new view. Recently I had (minor) surgery that required me to be under general anesthesia for an hour. When I reflect back on that surgery and focus on my status during that hour, I recognize that I had no experiences and, specifically, no unpleasant experiences. I further realize that there would have been no reason prior to the surgery to fear my status during that hour. Of course, I could reasonably have been concerned with whether the surgery would be a success, and even fear that I would never awaken from the anesthesia. I don’t think, however, that it would have been reasonable to fear being in the experiential black hole induced by the anesthesia, and there is no relevant difference (as regards fear) between this situation and one in which I would be under anesthesia for a very long time.

Further, I do not see any difference, as regards the relevant sort of fear, between this last situation and one in which I wouldn’t exist at all during the period under consideration. From the experiential point of view—i.e., from the “inside,” so to speak—there would be no difference. That is, there would be no difference between existing and having no experiences and not existing anymore (and therefore having no experiences). If fear is keyed to unpleasant experiences, there should be no difference with respect to fear. Thus, given that prior to my surgery it would have been unreasonable to fear my period of unconsciousness when under surgery, it would be similarly inappropriate to fear the status of being dead. I will return to my “conversion” on this issue in my reply to Timmerman in this symposium.

Before I move on, I pause here to consider a passage from Samuel Scheffler ( 2013 : 84).

One immediate objection to the [Epicurean] argument is that it seems to imply not only that we have no reason to fear death but also that nobody can ever have reason to wish for death. Imagine, however, a torture victim who is undergoing such horrible agonies at the hands of a sadistic Epicurean that he begs his tormenter to kill him. And imagine that the Epicurean torturer replies: ‘So death, the thing you fervently desire, is nothing to you, since so long as you exist, death is not with you; but when death comes, then you will not exist. It does not then concern you either when you are living or when you are dead…’

Scheffler goes on to point out that the torturer’s response is “preposterous.”

This is indisputably true, but no consequence of the Epicurean view. That view has it that the status of death in itself is not a matter of concern (specifically, fear) to us, but this does not imply that future possibilities for our lives will not be of interest. I certainly can hope that my future life will be as good as possible, and if the torture is bad enough, I can hope that the torture will end immediately. If it is evident that the torture will continue, or even continue a long time, I might well prefer an immediate death. This would not however because I prize the status of nonexistence, but because I care about my future life and avoiding terrible pain.

Similarly, some have wondered whether an Epicurean would have any reason to step off a track to avoid an oncoming train whose brakes have failed (an Epicurean Trolley Problem!). If the Epicurean can envisage a good life in her future, she certainly has reason to step off the track, but not because of the necessity of avoiding the status of being dead.

It is also odd that Scheffler refers to the torturer as an “Epicurean Torturer.” Charitably, this is probably not meant to be taken seriously. In any case, it makes sense only if an Epicurean must be an egoist, but this is not so. The Epicurean can care about what happens to her loved ones, potential torture victims, or the planet, for that matter, after she dies. She may, for example, make out a will or establish a trust for her loved ones. This would be because she now cares about how they will fare in the future, not because she will suffer after she has died if they unjustly struggle or be able to appreciate their flourishing. Epicurus held that one can have a range of reasons for action that affect the future, but these reasons don’t pertain to one’s positive or negative experiences during the period of being dead. There is nothing in the core Epicurean doctrine that “death is nothing to us” that implies that one cannot care about others (now and even after one dies). This point holds apart from any views of Epicurus himself, although Epicurus did commend the moral virtues and recognized the need for justice.

The “Forever” Wars

If death is indeed bad, would immortality be good? From the beginning of human existence, we have had a profoundly ambivalent attitude toward immortality. In his famous treatment, Gerald Gruman ( 2003 ) distinguished between “prolongevists” and “apologists.” Roughly speaking, the prolongevists are “pro-immortality,” whereas the apologists are anti-immortality. I have proposed a related, but slightly different, distinction between immortality optimists and curmudgeons.

I distinguish Immortality Curmudgeons, Optimists, and Realists. This refinement is rendered necessary in part by contemporary environmental crises. The Curmudgeons, most notably Bernard Williams ( 1973 ) in contemporary philosophy, argue that no form of immortality is worthy of choice by human beings, in virtue of basic facts about human character. His main thesis is that any human being would eventually become bored in an immortal life. Bernard Williams has done more than anyone else to propel discussions of the potential desirability of immortality into contemporary discussions in analytic philosophy. He is, you might say, the Chairman of the Bored, to borrow a phrase from the otherwise forgettable Iggy Pop song, “I’m Bored.”

The Optimists deny this contention of the Curmudgeons, and they further claim that it is likely (and, for some theorists, highly probable) that human beings will achieve the status of immortality in the not-so-distant future (with a range of not-so-distantness). The Realists reject the fundamental contention of Williams and the Curmudgeons, but they also disagree with the Optimists about the likelihood that we will achieve immortality (soon or perhaps ever). Their view is bleaker about the future of our increasingly fragile environment.

Since it is a view involving probabilities, there is a range of Realist views. I am an Immortality Realist. I hold that it is less likely than not that humans will be able to achieve a sustainably life-supporting environment into the future. Not impossible, but maybe only about 30%, so we have to get at it! The Immortality Realist has a healthy concern for the future of the human race—a worry that can result in action to save our planet.

The Immortality Curmudgeons and their Concerns

Daring to fire some salvos in the “Forever” Wars, I consider a panoply of arguments offered by the Immortality Curmudgeons, who are certainly in the majority among philosophers (historically and now). A large majority of philosophers (especially in contemporary discussions) are dreary spoil-sports about immortality! Such arguments include the worry that an immortal life would lack “form,” that it could not correspond to a narrative, that it would not have the stages required for a recognizably human life, that an infinitely long life cannot be grasped by the human mind, that such a life could not be the life of a single human individual, that it could not be “fraught” and thus precious, and that it would necessarily be boring. I find none of them persuasive, although I respect the worries. In particular, I remain cognizant of the difficulties of imagining and thus accurately evaluating, an immortal life, because so many features of our lives, as we know them, would have to be very different. I concede that we need to drive carefully in this terrain and respect reasonable philosophical speed limits.

In considering the Curmudgeons’ arguments, I emphasize an important distinction made by Steven Cave ( 2012 ). He distinguishes “medical immortality” from “true immortality.” If one is medically immortal, one will not die of “natural causes,” including diseases or (say) biological degradation caused by aging. Even so, one would be vulnerable to death by accidents, homicidal actions of others, and so forth. One expert estimates that nowadays medical immortality would be about six thousand years. That’s a (somewhat informed) guess as to how long (on average) a human being who is medically immortal (but not truly immortal) would last before he accidentally walks off a cliff, is involved in a fatal car accident, murdered by an assailant, and so forth.

A truly immortal individual is invulnerable to death and knows it. (This would seem to imply that he could not take steps to end his own life, which introduces difficulties.) In the book I contend that many of the Curmudgeons’ arguments depend on the assumption that the sort of immortality under consideration is true immortality, rather than medical immortality. The dialectic changes dramatically when we switch to medical immortality, which is, after all, the sort envisaged in Bernard Williams’s ( 1973 ) famous example of Elina Makropulos.

Elina can take an elixir that will ensure that she not die of diseases or aging for 300 years, at which point she again faces of decision about whether to take the elixir. There is no indication in the play or opera in which Elina appears that this elixir would render her truly immortal—invulnerable to death by any cause—for 300 years. Much of the discussion in the contemporary literature spawned by Williams’s classic paper is insufficiently attentive to the different challenges posed by medical and true immortality. Indeed, it is striking that some philosophers who employ the Makropulos case to introduce their worries go on to present arguments that target a different sort of immortality—true immortality!

As I pointed out above, many contemporary philosophers are Immortality Curmudgeons. I feel sometimes as if agreement with Bernard Williams on this point is a knee-jerk reaction among the philosophical cognoscenti . In one salient example (ed. Kolodny: 2013) of this “kumbaya—singing,” Samuel Scheffler, Niko Kolodny, and Seana Shiffrin all express their agreement with his conclusion, although not necessarily his argumentation.

Not all well-known and highly respected philosophers however are Curmudgeons. Thomas Nagel ( 2014 : Sect. 3) writes:

Couldn’t [immortal lives] be composed of an endless sequence of quests, undertakings, and discoveries, including successes and failures? Humans are amazingly adaptable, and have developed many forms of life and value in their history so far… I am not persuaded that the essential role of mortality in shaping meaning we find in our actual lives implies that earthly immortality would not be a good thing. If medical science ever finds a way to turn off the aging process, I suspect we would manage.

Immortality in an Afterlife

There are different routes to immortality: secular and religious. I argue that many of the same issues arise as to the potential desirability (and even coherence) of secular and religious immortality. One might say that Mark Twain ([original date unavailable]/ 1970 ) is to skepticism about the desirability of religious immortality (in some sort of “afterlife”) as Bernard Williams is to skepticism about that of secular immortality. Of course, Twain expresses his worries in a considerably less rigorous (although more colorful) way than does Williams! He laments the singing of hymns and waving of palm branches as a terrible way to spend eternity, expresses his preference for the company in hell (despite the better weather in heaven), and so forth. I argue that the responses to the Secular Curmudgeon are in many instances parallel to promising responses to Religious Immortality Curmudgeons. It is noteworthy that the arguments and responses are parallel.

For instance, I have invoked the possibility of “repeatable” pleasures as one (although not the only way) of resisting the contention that secular immortality would necessarily be boring. One does not have to sing hymns or wave palm-branches! This point has an analogue in the view of heaven presented vividly in the Koran, which is described as containing numerous sensual delights. I highlight the fact that many of the concerns about the recognizability and desirability of secular and religious immortality are similar, and the resources available to address them are also similar in interesting ways.

Of course, the specifics are different in the two contexts—secular and religious. Religious immortality in the monotheistic Western tradition is true immortality, not mere medical immortality. Arguably religious views that involve reincarnation posit medical immortality (at least as regards bodily death, as “currently” embodied). The recognizability problem emerges in religious immortality if we suppose that we (our souls) are literally “united” with God in an afterlife, or if we imagine resurrection as the relevant sort of communion with God. As regards reincarnation, it not obvious how I—the very same person—could start a different life as a member of another species.

Near-Death Experiences: Supernaturalism

Many, including (somewhat) scholarly writers on the subject, think that near-death experiences (NDEs) are a portal into immortality in the religious sense. They adopt the doctrine of “supernaturalism about NDEs,” according to which our minds are nonphysical (the doctrine of dualism—typically substance dualism), separate from our bodies in NDEs, and travel toward an otherworldly realm. To clarify, the supernaturalist does not contend that NDErs merely have experiences as of their minds or “souls” separating from their body and traveling toward an otherworldly realm. Rather, she holds that NDErs’ minds actually do separate from their bodies and actually do travel toward (and sometimes even reach) such a realm.

I canvass a suite of arguments for supernaturalism about NDEs. These include (but are not limited to) the contention that in NDEs people have conscious experiences when their brains are “offline”; that NDEs have similar content (at an abstract level) across persons, cultures, and times; and that some occur in contexts in which the NDErs accurately report verifiable contents that could not have been acquired via naturalistic means. I find them unpersuasive.

It is a staple of the NDE literature that NDEs take place when the brain is “offline” in the sense in which it could support consciousness (as opposed to the biological “housekeeping” tasks). This “NDE Timing Problem” plays a big role here, as in the discussion of the time of death’s badness. It is however totally unwarranted to conclude from the science, together with the NDE reports, that the conscious episodes experienced in NDEs take place when the brain could not have supported consciousness.

The primary reason for this is that, just as with dreams, their contents may not be presented as having taken place at the time at which the brain activity that plausibly supports the episode occurs. So, for instance, it is very plausible that the conscious stream of episodes in a dream take place as the brain is ramping up for awakening. Although this is when the episodes actually take place, it is typically not the time interval during which the depicted events are represented as taking place. There is simply no evidence here that conscious episodes take place when the brain cannot underwrite consciousness—so no evidence of dualism (in any form). Further, nearly all neuroscientists conclude that it is almost certain that consciousness does not survive the death of the brain. (One might say that NDErs are “woke!”)

Why Universality of Content?

NDEs have similar content across cultures and times, although the specific details are different and to some extent culturally determined. They typically contain some (but not necessarily all) of the following: an out-of-body experience, travel toward another (otherworldy) realm guided by deceased loved ones and/or religious figures, vivid colors and lucid imagery, ascension from darkness toward light, awakening just prior to making contact with the protected realm, a life review, and so forth.

Why this relatively abstract similarity of structure and content? The supernaturalists contend that it is because NDErs are in contact with a single otherworldly realm (heavenly or hellish). This however ignores the inconvenient differences in the contents of NDEs—some see Christian religious figures, some Hindu, some ride on the wings of butterflies, and so forth. If they are all grasping a single otherworldly realm, why the significant differences in specific contents?

The supernaturalist interpretation also ignores the fact that human beings have certain commonalities that can explain the similarity in contents of NDE reports. Our brains are similar. It is also relevant that human beings generally (although not universally) undergo similar psycho-social development, and we all have similar basic psychological tendencies. This kind of multifactorial naturalistic explanation can explain the general similarity in content, as well as the differences in details. We need not posit contact with a single otherworldly realm to explain the patterns in NDEs. We can more productively attend to features of the experiencer , rather than the putative object or cause of the NDE. The proponents of supernaturalism have “tunnel vision,” so to speak!

How do NDErs Know?

There are numerous veridical reports by NDErs of information that apparently could not have been acquired via ordinary naturalistic means. They are instances of what NDE researchers call “apparently non-physical veridical perception.” The supernaturalists place great weight on the fact that they are veridical , often using terms like “extraordinary” and “remarkable.” It is however not so extraordinary or remarkable that of the millions of NDE reports, some not insignificant number of them turn out to be true. It would indeed be surprising if the “apparently non-physical” part were actually non-physical, but this is much more difficult, if not impossible, to establish. One could be confused if one’s sole or even primary focus were on the veridicality of such reports, rather than their putatively non-physical means of generation.

Supernaturalism is a potent strategy of terror management. The intellectually and emotionally intoxicating cocktail of terror management and confirmation bias is indeed strong, but all the arguments for supernaturalism are unconvincing. The literature on NDEs—both popular and “academic” (published by MDs or PhDs in arguably scholarly books and journals)—is replete with pseudo-science and riddled with non-sequiturs (Mitchell-Yellin and Fischer 2014 , Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin 2016 , Fischer Forthcoming(b) ). It is however not surprising that the supernaturalist books sell millions of copies (and make the authors rich in dollars, if not insights), given the powerful terror management they offer and the human tendency toward confirmation bias.

After all, who wishes to read the judicious and skeptical reflections of an analytical philosopher, when one can read about the adventures of a neurosurgeon exploring a beautiful and compelling heavenly realm, flying on the wings of a butterfly? Many cling to what is comforting to them as they consider the prospect of death, and they do not wish to have this comfort threatened or etiolated in any way. The stakes are too high, and the comfort too great. Hence the not-so-peaceful responses to those who dare to challenge the supernaturalist orthodoxy by people who have allegedly imbibed the enlightenment offered by NDEs! I’m tempted to ask, “Where’s the peace, love, and understanding?”

I do not primarily seek terror management, but rigor antemortis , so to speak—an analytical rigor sadly lacking in much of the literature on NDEs. I do not however embrace NDE Denialism, the view that people do not have the NDEs they report. I believe that people really have NDEs with the contents they report, but that these contents are not necessarily literal and accurate depictions of external reality. As with my position of Immortality Realism, I am an NDE Realist.

As with my views about immortality and NDEs, I (Fischer 1994 , Fischer and Ravizza 1998 ) take a “middle path” in my account of moral responsibility. I (and my co-author) argue that the freedom-relevant component of moral responsibility is “guidance control,” which involves a certain kind of “reasons-responsiveness.” The sort of reasons-responsiveness in question is not strong, nor weak, but “moderate reasons-responsiveness.” (Fischer and Ravizza 1998 ) Further, my account of guidance control is squarely in between the requirement of alternative-possibilities freedom (“freedom to do otherwise”) and no requirement of freedom of any sort, a view attributed to Peter Strawson. ( 1962 ). I agree with Gautama Buddha’s insight that the middle path is often the path of wisdom.

As I explain in the next section, the NDE realist can explain the awe-inspiring and transformative capacities of NDEs by reference to a story that these experiences tell—a story that does not imply or presuppose supernaturalism. The beauty of NDEs can be captured in a naturalistic framework, which I present in the book and continue to develop in subsequent work (Fischer 2020 [a], 2020 [b], 2020 [c]).

Near-Death Experiences, Naturalism, and Meaning

For the supernaturalist, the story of NDEs is a story of separation from one’s body and travel toward (and sometimes into) an otherworldly realm. The stories purportedly show, as in the title of a prominent book, that “heaven is for real.” They offer a “proof of heaven.” These interpretations select only parts of the reported contents of most NDEs, and they interpret them literally. They offer a supernaturalist strategy for managing the terror we feel when considering death, and a view of meaning in life as alignment with an other-worldly being. The stories, interpreted in this way, are literally about the trip of an “after-lifetime” (Fischer 2020[c]).

In contrast, I focus on the totality of the reported contents, including their depictions of journeys from the known to the unknown, guided by a loving mentor, in search of an important connection. Further, I interpret the stories metaphorically. In the book I contend that we are deeply moved by the stories NDEs tell because of the centrality in our lives of voyages of discovery—journeys that take us along paths from the known to the unknown, guided by more experienced mentors and loved ones, toward an important connection. Taken literally, the contents of NDE reports do indeed depict a trip of an after-lifetime. I contend that it is more fruitful to interpret them metaphorically, and to home in on the “trip” part, rather than the “after-lifetime” part. Often spiritual experiences are described as “journeys” or “trips” (especially when induced by psychedelic substances), and NDEs are paradigmatic spiritual experiences.

This gives a naturalistic explanation of the deep meaning and transformational power of NDEs, insofar as we affectively “recognize” this sort of journey, which is featured at various points in human life. NDEs tap into an emotional template that is deep and profound in human life. They speak to us in ways that capture our attention and can result in lifelong transformations. My point: we do not need to adopt a supernaturalist interpretation of NDEs to explain their deep meaning and transformational potency.

My interpretation offers a different sort of approach to terror management. When we are anxious about “death,” sometimes we are thinking of death as the last part of dying, which can indeed be painful and lonely—quite frankly, worthy of fear and even terror. Our deaths however do not have to be full of pain and loneliness. The story NDEs tell is a story of loving guidance. In facing the most daunting part of our journey—from life to death—we need not be alone. One of the chief lessons of NDEs is that we should move toward more humane ways of dying, rather than continue the practice of extending life indefinitely in sterile and insolating institutional settings.

On my interpretation, the terror management offered by NDEs is about “death” in the sense of the last part of dying , i.e., the transition from being alive to being dead. It is not about the status of being dead. We can however employ this moral of NDE stories as an important part of an overall secular terror management strategy, which combines a more humane way of dying with Epicurean insights into the status of being dead. Supernaturalism has no monopoly on terror management. The famous psychiatrist Irving Yalom ( 2009 ) employs Epicurean ideas, especially about the status of being dead, in his clinical practice.

Besides terror management, another of the basic drives mentioned at the beginning of this piece is seeking meaning in life. NDEs model the core of meaningfulness in life: the importance of making valuable connections . After all, NDEs depict a journey toward a protected realm, guided by a loving mentor, in search of a connection of ultimate value. The stories of NDEs thus point to strategies for achieving meaning in our lives.

Return to the relationship between the theory of free will and moral responsibility and that of meaning in life. Throughout my career, I have sought to give a naturalistic account of moral responsibility (and its associated free agency) in terms of “guidance control,” which is a certain kind of agent-owned reasons-responsiveness. An individual can act from their own reasons-responsive capacities in a naturalistic world. When I act from my own, reasons-responsive mechanism, I do it my way . Free agency and moral responsibility involve a distinctive kind of guidance : active guidance in which the individual seeks to connect with reasons (Fischer 1994 , Fischer and Ravizza 1998 ).

As I’ve pointed out above, NDEs tell the story of guidance by loved ones from the known to the unknown, with the goal of forging a valuable connection. Active , “initiating” guidance is central to moral responsibility, and trusting acceptance of loving guidance is part of the stories of NDEs. Meaningfulness in human life in its various aspects, then, emerges from this combination of active initiation of guidance and trusting acceptance of it. We might say: meaning in life comes from guidance toward important connection. Perhaps the most basic element in both the active and passive context is guidance : exhibiting guidance control and accepting loving guidance.

Why is guidance the key element in these central normative dimensions of human life? This is a very difficult question, and I hesitate even to attempt an answer. I will however venture to do it, with the understanding that this is merely a tentative idea for consideration. It is meant simply to be suggestive.

Many philosophers in both the literatures on free will/moral responsibility and meaning in life have pointed out that human beings are “in between” God (as conceptualized by “perfect being theology) and nonhuman animals. (I do not here assume that such a God exists; rather, I’m simply working with the concept.).

Harry Frankfurt ( 1971 : 14) writes:

The concept of a person, then, is not only the concept of an entity that has both first-order desires and volitions of the second order. It can also be construed as the concept of a type of entity for whom the freedom of its will can be a problem. This concept excludes all wantons, both infrahuman and human, since they fail to satisfy an essential condition for the enjoyment of freedom of the will. And it excludes those suprahuman beings, if there are any, whose wills are necessarily free.

Gary Watson ( 1975 : 220) puts the point in a slightly different way:

The truth, of course, is that God (traditionally conceived) is the only free agent, sans phrase . In the case of God, who is omniscient and omnipotent, there can be no disparity between valuational and motivational systems. The dependence of motivation and valuation is total, for there is but a single source of motivation…. In the case of the Brutes, as well, motivation has a single source: appetite and (perhaps) passion. The Brutes (or so we think) have no valuational system. But human beings are only more or less free agents [insofar as they have both valuational and motivational systems].

These two famous agency theorists point out that we human beings are the only beings with two potentially conflicting subsystems of (or perhaps inputs to) practical reasoning: in Frankfurt’s case, higher and lower-order desires and in Watson’s, mere desires and values. The challenge for a free agent is to “secure conformity” (in Frankfurt’s phrase) between the two subsystems. In contrast, neither God nor nonhuman animals has this challenge, since they have only one subsystem in their practical ecologies.

I pause to note an anomaly in Frankfurt’s view—or perhaps it is simply a feature. He contends that God cannot be construed as a person, since His will is necessarily free: securing a conformity between his second-order volitions and first-order desires (if He has them) does not even arise. Frankfurt might be correct about this, but it conflicts with an influential view that God is a person. The reasons why some think of God as a person, and their relationships to God as “personal,” typically have nothing to do with the structure of God’s will. Although I cannot explore this issue in depth here, I simply note that it either shows (as Frankfurt contends) that, upon reflection, God is not a person, or that Frankfurt’s account of the concept of personhood is problematic.

Richard Taylor ( 1981 / 2019 : 777), whose topic is meaning in life (rather than agency), contends that we have an intermediate status with respect to the creation of meaning:

God, we are taught, did not merely come upon all this and decide to make it his own through sheer power. Instead, he created it all, we are told, and really if for this reason alone thought to be God. We are not gods, but we are not just animals either. We need not stagger dreamlike through the four stages of life to death, accompanied by a series of trivial thoughts… We can instead… live meaningfully, by creating our own meanings…

We have identified another connection between agency and meaning, and I am now in a position to offer a tentative suggestion about the key status of guidance. A perfect being is static; such a being does not change in some sort of transition toward perfection. It is already perfect in every way. Thus, God (if God exists) does not need guidance from another (and, in particular, a loving mentor or guide). Further, nonhuman animals cannot be guided by reasons qua reasons—they are not “reasons-responsive.” They might be able to guide their behavior by cues in their environment, but not reasons.

Human beings are imperfect. We are broken, all of us, or at least “incomplete,” and we strive to “fix” ourselves or achieve a kind of “completion.” We are in this sense not static, but dynamic. Unlike God, we need guidance by trusted mentors, who offer us reasons for action. Unlike nonhuman animals, we can guide our actions by these reasons: we are reasons-responsive . Imperfect beings like us generate value and meaning from a complex mix of active and passive guidance. These capacities for active and passive guidance are exquisitely attuned to each other: our trusted and loving mentors provide us reasons for action, and we are capable of guiding our actions by precisely those reasons. It’s a hand-in-glove fit.

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Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to the guest editor, Justin Capes, for supporting and organizing this symposium, and for his thoughtful comments. Thanks also to two anonymous referees for this journal whose comments helped to improve the paper greatly. Prior versions of the contributions to this symposium were delivered at the APA Pacific meetings in April 2020 (via zoom). On that occasion Connie Rosati was the third commentator, and I have benefited greatly from her insightful comments. I’m thankful to Becko Copenhaver for suggesting and facilitating this symposium.

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Fischer, J.M. Death, Immortality, and Meaning in Life : Precis and Further Reflections. J Ethics 26 , 341–359 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-022-09392-8

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Published : 12 February 2022

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-022-09392-8

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Of Death Summary

Bacon opens the essay with a simile of death and darkness. He starts his argument the men fears that death in the same a child fears the darkness. The fear of darkness increases among the children when the horrific tales about the darkness is narrated to them. Same is the case with men. With the stories of death is narrated to them, the fear inside them increases. It is natural to think about death, however, to think about it with composure is a virtue of the wise men. To worry about the sin after committing is the characteristic of a holy and religious man but to fear the death as the supremacy of nature is man’s weakness.

Bacon quotes another philosopher Seneca that one will be sensible to imagine and longed-for the death as it brings relief from the sorrows and sufferings of life. In certain condition, someone’s life might be too wearisome to tolerate, and death passes relief to them. Some people live a life without any excitement and actions in it. Such a life could neither be regarded as pleasing one nor the sorrowful. However, one cannot bear such a wearisome life for a long period of time. Eventfully, resulting in death.

Of Death Analysis

Critical appreciation:.

Brevity, directness, wit, and to the point arguments are one of the qualities that Bacon’s essay contain. The systematic way of writing makes bacon’s essay to move from one point to another logically. Moreover, the subject matters he discusses in his writing style are all based on the real life and the reader found an epigrammatic wisdom in it. With the use of metaphors, similes referring to various historical stories makes his essay comprehensible and agreeable.

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