耶鲁大学开放课程-哲学-死亡的26课的英文字幕17

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Death: Lecture 17 Transcript

Professor Shelly Kagan: Last time we made the turn from metaphysics to value theory. We started asking about what it is about death that makes it bad. The first aspect of the badness of death that we talked about was the fact that when somebody dies, that's hard on the rest of us. We're left behind having to cope with the loss of this person that we love. Nonetheless, it seems likely that if we want to get clear about the central badness of death, it can't be a matter of the loss for those who remain behind, but rather the loss, the badness of death, for the person who dies. That, at any rate, is what I want to focus on from here on out. What exactly is it about my death, or the fact that I'm going to die, that makes that bad for me?

Now, I want to get clear about precisely what it is we want to focus in on here. Now, one thing that could be bad, obviously, is the process of dying could be a painful one. It might be, for example, that I get ripped to pieces by Bengali tigers. And if so, then the actual process of dying would be horrible. It would be painful. And clearly it makes sense to talk about the process of dying as something that could potentially be bad for me. Although similarly, I might die in my sleep, in which case the process of dying would not be bad for me. At any rate, I take it that most of us, although we might have some passing concern about the possibility that our process of dying might be a painful one, that's not, again, the central thing we're concerned about when we face the fact that we're going to die.

It's also true, of course, that many of us find--;here, right now, while we're not actually dying--the prospect of dying to be unpleasant. So, one of the things that's bad about my death for me is that right now I've got some unhappy thoughts as I anticipate the fact that I'm going to die. But again, that can't be the central thing that's bad about death, because the prospect of my death--it

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makes sense for that to be a painful one or an unpleasant one, only given the further claim that death itself is bad for me. Having fear or anxiety or concern or regret or anguish or whatever it is that maybe I have now about the fact that I'm going to die, piggybacks on the logically prior thought that death itself is bad for me. If it didn't piggyback in that way, it wouldn't make any sense to have fear or anxiety or dread or anguish or whatever it is that I may have now.

I mean, suppose I said to you, \and that thing is going to be simply fantastic, absolutely incredible, absolutely wonderful.\with dread and foreboding in thinking about it.\at all. It makes sense to be filled with dread or foreboding or what have you only if the thing you're looking forward to, anticipating, is itself bad. Maybe, for example, it makes sense to dread going to the dentist, if you believe that being at the dentist is a painful, unpleasant experience. But if being at the dentist isn't itself unpleasant, it doesn't make sense to dread it in anticipation.

So again, if we're thinking about the central badness of death, it seems to me that we've got to focus on my being dead. What is it about my being dead that's bad for me? Now, if we pose that question, it seems as though the answer should be simple and straightforward. When I'm dead, I won't exist. Now previously, in the first part of the class, we spent some time saying that, look, on certain views, there'll be a period of time in which you might be dead, but your body might still be alive. Or you might be dead, but even though your body still exists, it's not alive, but you exist as a corpse. Put all that aside. Go to the period beyond any of that murky stuff in the short-term and just, for simplicity, let's suppose with the physicalists that once I die, I cease to exist. All right.

So, don't we have the answer to what's bad about death right there? When I'm dead, I won't exist. Isn't that the straightforward explanation about why death is bad? Now, what I want to say, in effect, is this. I do think the fact that I won't exist does provide the key to getting clear about how and why death is bad. But I

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don't think it's quite straightforward. I think, as we'll see, it actually takes some work to spell out exactly how death, how nonexistence, could be bad for me. And even having done that, there'll be some puzzles that remain that we'll be turning to in a little while.

So, the basic idea seems to be straightforward enough. When I'm dead, I won't exist. Isn't it clear that nonexistence is bad for me? Well, immediately you get an objection. You say, how could nonexistence be bad for me? After all, the whole point of nonexistence is you don't exist. How could anything be bad for you when you don't exist? Isn't there a kind of logical requirement that for something to be bad for you, you've got to be around to receive that bad thing? A headache, for example, can be bad for you. But of course, you exist during the headache. Headaches couldn't be bad for people who don't exist. They can't experience or have or receive headaches. How could anything be bad for you when you don't exist? And in particular, then, how could nonexistence be bad for you when you don't exist?

So it's not, as I say, altogether straightforward to see how the answer \bad for me, because when I'm dead I don't exist,\answers the problem, as opposed to simply focusing our attention on the problem. How can

nonexistence be bad for me? The answer to this objection, I think, is to be found in drawing a distinction between two different ways in which something can be bad for me.

On the one hand, something can be bad for me, we might say, in an absolute, robust, intrinsic sense. Take a headache, again, or some other kind of pain--stubbing your toe or getting stabbed or whatever it is, being tortured. Pain is

intrinsically bad. It's bad in its own right. It's something we want to avoid for its own sake. And those--;Normally, things that are bad for you are bad intrinsically. They're bad by virtue of their very nature. There's something about the way they are that you don't want those that are bad in their own right.

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But there's another way of something being bad for you that it's easy to overlook. Something can be bad comparatively. Something could be bad because of what you're not getting while you get this bad thing. It could be what the economists call bad by virtue of \bad because while you're doing this, you're not getting something better. How could that be? Let's have a simple example. Suppose that I stay home and watch something on TV--Deal or No Deal. I watch this on TV and I have a good enough time. How could that be bad for me? Well, in terms of the first notion of bad, something being intrinsically bad, it's not bad. It's a pleasant enough way to spend a half an hour, or however long the show is on. On the other hand, suppose what I could be doing instead of watching a half an hour of television is being at a really great party. Then we might say, the fact that I'm stuck home watching television is bad for me in this comparative sense. It's not that it's, in itself, an unpleasant way to spend some time; it's just that there's a better way to spend time that I could be doing, in principle at least. If only I'd gone. If only I'd been invited. If only I remembered, what have you. And because I'm foregoing that better good, there's something bad, comparatively speaking, about the fact that I'm stuck at home watching TV. There's a lack of the better good. A lack is not intrinsically bad, but it's still a kind of bad in this second sense. To be lacking a good is, itself, bad for me.

Similarly, suppose I hold out two envelopes and I say, %up the first one, you pick the first one, and you open it up and you say, \ten bucks! Isn't that good for me?\Anyway, well, it's not intrinsically good, it's only good as a means to buy something. But it's sort of good. It's worth having for its own right, because of what it can get you. But if unbeknownst to you, the other envelope had $1,000 in it, then we can say, \Bad in what sense? Because you would have been better off, had you picked the second envelope. You would have been having more good, or a greater amount of good.

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Well, nonexistence can't be bad for me in our first sense. It can't be that

nonexistence is intrinsically bad, worth avoiding for its own sake. That would only make sense if nonexistence was somehow, for example, painful. But when you don't exist, you have no painful experiences. There's nothing about nonexistence in and of itself that makes us want to avoid it. Nonexistence is only bad for me in this comparative sense, because of the lack. When I don't exist, I'm lacking stuff. What am I lacking? Well, of course, what I'm lacking is life and more particularly still, the good things that life can give me. So, nonexistence is bad by virtue of the opportunity costs that are involved. Famously, W.C. Fields on his tombstone says, \you don't get to experience and enjoy any longer the various good things that life would offer us. So nonexistence does point to the key aspect about death. Why is death bad? Because when I'm dead I don't exist. But if we ask, why is and how can it be the case that nonexistence is bad? the answer is, because of the lack of the good things in life. Because when I don't exist, I am not getting the things that I could have otherwise gotten, if only I were still alive. Death is bad because it deprives me of the good things in life.

This account is nowadays known as the deprivation account of the evil or badness of death, for obvious reasons, right? The key thought is, the central bad about death, about nonexistence, is that it deprives you of the goods of life you might otherwise be getting. That's the deprivation account. And it seems to me that the deprivation account basically has it right. Eventually, I'll go on to argue that there are other aspects of death that may also contribute to its badness, aspects above and beyond the one that gets focused on by the deprivation account. But still, it seems to me the deprivation account points us correctly to the central thing about death that's bad. What's most importantly bad about the fact that I'll be dead is the fact that when I'm dead, I won't be getting the good things in life. I'll be deprived of them. That's the badness of death according to the deprivation account.