In Defense of Deprivationism

Death generally seems bad for those who have died. Is it? If so, what makes it bad? In this dissertation, I defend a deprivation view of the badness of death, according to which one's death is bad for her when (and because) it deprives her of good life she would have had were her actual death not to occur.;Chapter 1: Perhaps death's badness is an illusion. Epicureans think so and argue that agents cannot be harmed by death when they're alive (because death hasn't happened yet) nor when they're dead (because they do not exist by the time death comes). In the first chapter, I argue that each version of Epicureanism faces a fatal dilemma: it is either committed to a demonstrably false view about the relationship between prudential reasons and well-being or it is involved in a mere verbal dispute with deprivationism.;Chapter 2: In the second chapter, I argue that categorical desire views of the badness of death are false. I show that categorical desire views are subject to two serious problems. First, they entail that it is not bad for someone to not be resuscitated after dying a bad death. Second, they cannot account for cases in which it is good to prevent people from coming into existence or cases in which it is good to prevent them from continuing to exist. I then argue that revising categorical desire views to avoid these problems requires adopting a form of deprivationism.;Chapter 3: Even once the alternatives to deprivationism have been ruled out, a number of interesting questions remain. If earlier-than-necessary death is bad because it deprives individuals of additional good life, then why isn't later-than-necessary conception bad for the same reason? Deprivationists have traditionally argued that conception is not bad because it is impossible to be conceived earlier, but death is bad because it is possible to die later. In the third chapter, I demonstrate that this proposed solution does not work by showing how it is possible to be conceived earlier in the same relevant senses it is possible to die later. I then offer a new solution to this asymmetry problem by separating the potential badness of each type of event (i.e. conception and death) from the degree to which these events should be salient .;Chapter 4: In the fourth chapter, I show that deprivation accounts cannot accommodate the commonsense assumption that an agent should lament her death if and only if it is bad for her. Call this the Nothing Bad, Nothing to Lament Assumption (NBNL). Deprivationism coupled with NBNL leads to absurd conclusions. This means that we must either reject deprivation accounts of the badness of death or reject NBNL. I show that a commitment to an incontrovertible moral principle entails that, contrary to commonsense, we should reject NBNL.;If death isn't necessarily lamentable when it's bad for us, then when (if ever) is it lamentable? In the second part of the fourth chapter, I develop a positive account of appropriate attitudes toward death. Specifically, I argue that each person should have two distinct attitudes toward death. The first kind of appropriate attitude is determined by how well an agent P fares relative to her subjectively justified beliefs about her expected quality and quantity of life. The second kind of appropriate attitude is determined by the amount of good P was subjectively justified in believing was metaphysically possible for her to have obtained had P not died when she did.;Chapter 5: In his Death and the Afterlife, Samuel Scheffler provides a compelling argument that people would see less reason and be significantly less motivated to pursue most of their life's projects if they were to discover that there is no collective afterlife (i.e. future generations of humans continuing to exist after they die). Although Scheffler focuses on how people would react to learning there is no collective afterlife, people's imagined responses are presumed to be, for the most part, appropriate. In this chapter, I focus on issues concerning how people ought to react to learning there is no collective afterlife. Answers to this question leads to surprising conclusions that challenge some of the normative claims Scheffler seems disposed to endorse.;This paper has two central aims. First, I attempt to show that negative attitudes toward the lack of a collective afterlife are warranted for two reasons that have been heretofore overlooked. Second, I argue that the lack of a collective afterlife need not be bad, all things considered, for most people. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).