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Comparative Harm, Creation and Death

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 July 2015

NEIL FEIT
NEIL FEIT*
Affiliation:
The State University of New York at Fredonianeil.feit@fredonia.edu
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Abstract

Given that a person's death is bad for her, when is it bad? I defend subsequentism, the view that things that are bad in the relevant way are bad after they occur. Some have objected to this view on the grounds that it requires us to compare the amount of well-being the victim would have enjoyed, had she not died, with the amount she receives while dead; however, we cannot assign any level of well-being, not even zero, to a dead person. In the population ethics literature, many philosophers have argued along similar lines that bringing someone into existence can neither harm nor benefit her. Working within the comparative framework (on which harms make us worse off), I respond by proposing a good sense in which we can say that dead people, and actual people at alternatives in which they do not exist, have a well-being level of zero.

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Type
Research Article
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Utilitas , Volume 28 , Issue 2 , June 2016 , pp. 136 - 163
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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References

1 Bradley, Ben, Well-Being and Death (Oxford, 2009), p. 73CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

2 See, for example, Rosenbaum, Stephen, ‘How to be Dead and Not Care: A Defense of Epicurus’, American Philosophical Quarterly 23 (1993), pp. 217–25Google Scholar; Mothersill, Mary, ‘Old Age’, Proceedings and Addresses of the APA 73 (1999), pp. 9–23Google Scholar; Suits, David, ‘Why Death Is Not Bad for the One Who Died’, American Philosophical Quarterly 38 (2001), pp. 69–84Google Scholar; Hershenov, David, ‘A More Palatable Epicureanism’, American Philosophical Quarterly 44 (2007), pp. 170–80Google Scholar.

3 In virtue of considerations having to do with desert, we might want to distinguish intrinsic value simpliciter from intrinsic value for a person. I do – for example, see Feit, Neil and Kershnar, Stephen, ‘Explaining the Geometry of Desert’, Public Affairs Quarterly 18 (2004), pp. 273–98Google Scholar. Here, though, the focus is purely on what determines a person's own well-being, and so on intrinsic value for a person.

4 Bradley, Well-Being and Death, p. 48.

5 Bradley, Well-Being and Death, p. 71.

6 Notable examples include the views defended in Feldman, Fred, ‘Some Puzzles About the Evil of Death’, The Philosophical Review 100 (1991), pp. 205–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Broome, John, Ethics out of Economics (Cambridge, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bradley, Well-Being and Death.

7 This is essentially Bradley's view. See Bradley, Ben, ‘When is Death Bad for the One Who Dies?’, Noûs 38 (2004), pp. 1–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bradley, Well-Being and Death, pp. 84–92. In Feit, Neil, ‘The Time of Death's Misfortune’, Noûs 36 (2002), pp. 359–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar, I defended another, somewhat similar, view about the time of events’ badness. I think Bradley's account is correct.

8 See Bradley, Well-Being and Death, p. 92, for discussion.

9 Priorism has been defended by many philosophers. For example, see Feinberg, Joel, Harm to Others (New York, 1984)Google Scholar; Pitcher, George, ‘The Misfortunes of the Dead’, American Philosophical Quarterly 21 (1984), pp. 183–8Google Scholar; Bigelow, John, Campbell, John and Pargetter, Robert, ‘Death and Well-Being’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 71 (1990), pp. 119–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Li, Jack, ‘Commentary on Lamont's When Death Harms its Victims’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 77 (1999), pp. 349–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Luper, Steven, ‘Posthumous Harm’, American Philosophical Quarterly 41 (2004), pp. 63–72Google Scholar; Luper, , ‘Mortal Harm’, Philosophical Quarterly 57 (2007), pp. 239–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 See Bradley, Well-Being and Death, p. 92. But Bradley, at pp. 18–30 especially, also argues persuasively against this sort of desire satisfactionist view of well-being.

11 Epicurus, ‘Letter to Menoeceus’, The Stoic and Epicurean Philosophers, ed. Oates, W., trans. Bailey, C. (New York, 1940), pp. 30–4, at 31Google Scholar.

12 Feinberg, Harm to Others, p. 80.

13 See Feldman, Fred, Confrontations with the Reaper (New York, 1992), pp. 89–105Google Scholar, and Feldman, ‘The Termination Thesis’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 24 (2000), pp. 98–115CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for discussion.

14 See, for example, McMahan, Jeff, ‘Death and the Value of Life’, Ethics 99 (1988), pp. 32–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Feldman, ‘Some Puzzles’.

15 See Bradley, ‘When is Death Bad?’ for discussion of this point. See also Johansson, Jens, ‘The Timing Problem’, The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death, ed. Bradley, B., Feldman, F. and Johansson, J. (New York, 2013), pp. 255–73Google Scholar.

16 For more discussion, see Bradley, Well-Being and Death, pp. 81–3; Johansson, ‘The Timing Problem’.

17 This line of thought has been advanced by Bigelow, Campbell and Pargetter, ‘Death and Well-Being’; Silverstein, Harry, ‘The Evil of Death Revisited’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 24 (2000), pp. 116–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Draper, Kai, ‘Epicurean Equanimity Towards Death’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 69 (2004), pp. 92–114CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hershenov, ‘A More Palatable Epicureanism’; Luper, ‘Mortal Harm’; Johansson, ‘The Timing Problem’.

18 The strategy of reconciling the Epicurean conclusion with the belief that killing is wrong, for example, is considered as a fall-back position in McMahan, ‘Death and the Value of Life’, and defended in Hershenov, ‘A More Palatable Epicureanism’.

19 Parfit, Derek, Reasons and Persons (Oxford, 1984)Google Scholar and Broome, Ethics out of Economics contain worries that we cannot meaningfully compare the value of a person's life with the value of non-existence. Bykvist, Krister, ‘The Benefits of Coming into Existence’, Philosophical Studies 135 (2007), pp. 335–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar, contains arguments that since non-existence is not a state that anyone can be in, it cannot be better or worse for a person than existence. Herstein, Ori, ‘Why “Nonexistent People” Do Not Have Zero Wellbeing but No Wellbeing at All’, Journal of Applied Philosophy 30 (2013), pp. 136–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar, has an argument that ‘non-existent people’ cannot have the properties that ground well-being, and so cannot have a zero level of well-being.

20 Luper, ‘Mortal Harm’, p. 244.

21 Luper, ‘Mortal Harm’, p. 244.

22 Bradley, Well-Being and Death, p. 103.

23 Bradley, Well-Being and Death, p. 104.

24 I omitted the case in which S has well-being at t at neither the actual world nor the nearest world where E does not occur, which might be the case if t is, say, several hundred years after S's death. A complete view would have the value here be zero (zero minus zero).

25 Bigelow, Campbell and Pargetter, ‘Death and Well-Being’, p. 120.

26 Bradley, Well-Being and Death, p. 108.

27 In Well-Being and Death, p. 99, Bradley uses this name for a slightly different view, one that presupposes a hedonistic account of well-being. The differences are irrelevant for present purposes.

28 Bradley, Well-Being and Death, pp. 108–9.

29 Hershenov, ‘A More Palatable Epicureanism’, p. 174.

30 Bradley, Well-Being and Death, pp. 109–10.

31 Johansson, ‘The Timing Problem’, p. 266

32 Holtug, Nils, ‘On the Value of Coming into Existence’, The Journal of Ethics 5 (2001), pp. 361–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 370; Bykvist, ‘The Benefits of Coming into Existence’, p. 339.

33 Holtug, ‘On the Value of Coming into Existence’, p. 381.

34 Bykvist, ‘The Benefits of Coming into Existence’, pp. 342–5. See also Johansson, Jens, ‘Being and Betterness’, Utilitas 22 (2010), pp. 285–302CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 292.

35 Roberts, Melinda, ‘Can it Ever Be Better Never to Have Existed At All? Person-Based Consequentialism and a New Repugnant Conclusion’, Journal of Applied Philosophy 20 (2003), pp. 159–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 169.

36 Roberts, ‘Can it Ever Be Better?’, p. 178.

37 Johansson, ‘Being and Betterness’, p. 290.

38 Bradley, Well-Being and Death, p. 106.

39 Bradley, Well-Being and Death, p. 106.

40 Bradley, Well-Being and Death, p. 107.

41 Bradley, Ben, ‘Asymmetries in Benefiting, Harming and Creating’, Journal of Ethics 17 (2013), pp. 37–49, at 47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 See Feldman, ‘Some Puzzles’, p. 209. Johansson, ‘Being and Betterness’, also uses such a notion to make comparative judgements about existence and non-existence, but (as I understand Johansson) he does not identify it with well-being.

43 Cf. Broome, Ethics out of Economics, p. 168.

44 The proposition in question is the negation of the proposition that Nora is pleased at t. The same goes for the other, similar, propositions about Nora in this section.

45 The claim that the proposition that Obama does not exist exists only in worlds where Obama exists is controversial. The project in this section, I think, would be even easier without it.

46 See, for example, Fine, Kit, ‘Plantinga on the Reduction of Possibilist Discourse’, Alvin Plantinga, ed. Tomberlin, J. and van Inwagen, P. (Dordrecht, 1985), pp. 145–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 163.

47 Adams, Robert, ‘Actualism and Thisness’, Synthese 49 (1981), pp. 3–41Google Scholar.

48 That is, Actualism, or the No Properties of the Non-Existent Principle.

49 Fine, ‘Plantinga’, p. 165.

50 If the complete absence of properties makes true certain propositions of the form S has zero well-being, are we forced to say that an abstract thing like logic, for example, has zero temperature? I don't think so. Having a temperature of zero Kelvin arguably requires additional qualities entailing spatial extension or material constitution. See Holtug, ‘On the Value of Coming into Existence’, pp. 381–2, and Herstein, ‘Why “Nonexistent People” Do Not Have Zero Wellbeing’, p. 141, for some discussion of this issue.

51 Bradley, Well-Being and Death, p. 104.

52 Johansson, ‘The Timing Problem’, p. 265.

53 I delivered a version of this article in August 2014 at the PANTC Conference on Bioethics and the Philosophy of Medicine, University at Buffalo, NY. I would like to thank members of the PANTC reading group and audience members for helpful discussion. Special thanks go to Christopher Boorse, Jim Delaney, David Hershenov, Steve Kershnar, Lewis Powell and Phil Reed. I would also like to thank my colleagues, Andy Cullison, Steve Kershnar and Dale Tuggy, for helpful comments on the article at our faculty workshop, BDM. Kershnar gets double counted but he deserves double thanks.