All Western Philosophy begins with grief?Footnote ⁵

In a striking passage of her book, The Death of Socrates, Emily Wilson suggests that “all Western philosophy begins with grief”Footnote ⁶:

Wilson perhaps slightly overstates her case (as do most authors who are worth reading) in suggesting that all Western philosophy begins with Plato, and in particular with the grief Plato experiences at the death of Socrates, his friend, teacher, and mentor. In particular, this claim ignores the so-called “pre-Socratics,” of whom Wilson,Footnote ⁸ as herself a highly distinguished classicist, was certainly aware. However, she is of course right to suggest that the death of Socrates is pivotal in the early history of Western philosophy. The death of Socrates certainly also prompted Plato both to record and probably to freely invent, many of, or many parts of, the voluminous dialogues of, and with, Socrates, in large part to express this grief and also to preserve the memory and thought of his lost friend.

For most of us contemporary “jobbing” philosophers, when thinking of the origins of our subject, it is to Socrates that we inevitably turn, and Plato is our chief source.

Loss and justice

The grief occasioned by death is, I believe, almost universally experienced as irremediable and unjust loss, both to the dying individual if they know that they are dying and to those who love or value themFootnote ⁹. Or, perhaps less romantically, it is also experienced as a loss to those who did neither but who wanted that person to live to be held to account for their misdeeds!

Death, as an escape from justice or revenge, is also so understood by those who believe they have been wronged. Injustice, and hence justice, is clearly part of the concept of grief itself, a fact that seems to radically enhance its philosophical interest and importance.

Expressing, and writing about, grief has a long history.

In her wonderful essay on Homer’s Iliad,Footnote ¹⁰ Simone Weil recalls Homer’s description of Andromache, Hector’s wife, waiting for Hector to return home…

Weil comments:

And neither Homer nor Weil needed to add to this observation that distance from hot baths was often a place of danger and death, misery, suffering, and grievous destruction, a place where the tears and desolation of grief are never far away.

“Hot baths” speak to us, we flesh and blood creatures, of home, security, and comfort—physical and mental, of pleasure and sexuality, love, and care, of civilization, and of community.

Since Homer spoke, and his words (probably only much later) found their way into script, grief and the mourning it entails speak to us of justice and injustice, and of the human condition. This fate may well evolve into something we will think of as more than simply “the human condition,” but also in terms of “personhood,” thus allowing for the existence and equal moral status to be accorded to non-human persons. I have not, of course, forgotten that such non-human persons may, however improbably, include “the Immortal Gods”; the moral status of whom may well turn on the nature of their powers and their existential nature and on the plausibility (or otherwise) of their bodily existence.

Grief and justice

We need, however, to begin, as we have done, with grief, and even further back than we have so far ventured. First, of course, with Homer (around 762 BCE?) and remind ourselves of some milestones along the way. These milestones, inter alia, provide cultural evidence of the connection between grief and justice.

In the Old Testament Book of Samuel,Footnote ¹² King David mourns his son….

Macbeths’ immediate reaction on hearing of the death of his wife is eloquently expressive of a related, and I believe almost universal, feeling:

And, Macduff, on hearing from Rosse, that Macbeth has murdered his entire family, abuses heaven itself for failing to save their lives, and himself takes (partial) responsibility for the deaths of:

Macduff’s angry questioning of Heaven for not protecting “All my pretty ones” and for unjustly allowing them to be punished, for their misdeeds “Not for their own demerits but for mine,”Footnote ¹⁷, makes Heaven share responsibility for premature and unjust deathsFootnote ¹⁸ as Heaven surely must, if, that is, per impossible Heaven exists and is all it’s cracked up to be!

Macduff is an example of one who wants those who cause grief to be held to account, even if they be God or Gods; he pleads with Rosse to help by sharing his grief and its remedy….

Before we make, and are tempted to take, such “med’cines” it is as well to consider whether the causes of such grief are always going to be with us.

As I will discuss in some detail later, it has seemed for a while now that death and the injustice of death may not always be an immutable fact. We must give serious consideration to the possibility that many future people may be, what I have called, “functionally immortal,”Footnote ²⁰ though not “human” as we currently use the term.

I use the modifier “functionally” here to allow for the eventual loss of apparent “immortality.” These functionally immortal beings may be AI or have other origins and, as such, may not “die” or be “killed” in the senses in which we understand these concepts today. Perhaps even future members of our species will cease to be “mortals,” a designation which distinguished them/us from the “immortal Gods.” However, until that moment comes, both in this essay and perhaps also in life, death will remain, for all of us human persons, the ultimate injustice. The last, but also, an inescapable, injustice.

The paradox of unjust death

Claims asserting the injustice of death create a paradox. While some deaths are unjust because premature, undeserved, or unjustifiably brought about, many people perhaps (although not me)Footnote ²¹ also believe that death is simply, though improbably designated, a brute and inevitable “fact of life.” And, as such, it is no more “unjust” when it occurs without malevolent or criminal intent than other natural phenomena. It just “is what it is.” Death, as it is a fact of life, is nonetheless almost always experienced as profoundly unjust, both by the dying, if they are aware of their approaching death, and by those who care about, or for them.

Death always comes too soon!

Death always “comes too soon” to those who value life.

As I write these words, 2,421 years have passed since the death of Socrates in 399 BCE. Those years have, just confining myself to London, seen (inter alia) the grief-stricken words of Macbeth, first penned by William Shakespeare, probably around 1606, and the monstrous carnage of the COVID-19 global pandemic in 2020–2022 ff. An occasion of grief, unprecedented on this planet, since the Second World War.

Their literary expression ranges (among many others earlier and later) from Tragedy in 1606 to Comic Opera in 1887. Parochially, I do not have to travel far from where I live in London to witness the milestones of this movement. It is a scant mile from “Bankside” on the south bank of the river Thames where stands, and stood, Shakespeare’s Globe,Footnote ²² across to what is now, “Victoria Embankment Gardens” on the north bank. Here we still find W.S. Gilbert’s words from his libretto to “The Yeoman of the Guard,” carved on the memorial to his partner Sir Arthur Sullivan, the composer of that, and of the scores of the other “Savoy Operas,” first performed close by.Footnote ²³

W. S. Gilbert’s words of memorial to Sullivan are

Death, at whatever age and from whatsoever cause, almost always calls “too soon,” both for any individual for whom life is a “boon” and for the bereaved. Inevitably, the time of death and its manner are experienced as unjust. She or heFootnote ²⁴ should always have “died hereafter”!

Grief and loss

Dylan Thomas’ famous exhortation to rage against death, at whatever time of life itthreatens, not only expresses the anger but the injustice, of death, whene’er he call!

Death is the ultimate, the final, and usually the most grievous loss a human can suffer. Death is a loss for which the subject, the victim, cannotFootnote ²⁶ be compensated, and it is irremediable. Of course, loss, other than loss of life, may also occasion grief and may also be unjust, undeserved, and irremediable.

Shakespeare noted that while loss can occasion grief, the cause of the grief thereby occasioned is usually lost forever, but the grief can endure indefinitely.

Shakespeare’s Richard II, talking about the Royal succession to Bolingbroke (the future King Henry IV):

Poignant farewells

We humans have great reserves of mournfulness, which can be deployed, often over readily or over lengthily… but that does not make their expression inappropriate.

Juliet’s famous “goodnight” to Romeo, though far divorced from grief, is among countless beautiful and poignant “farewells.” Yet even here, still mournful, still focused on loss, however brief and sweet. Nevertheless, it is also yet both joyful and naive.

Farewells, and the significance of parting on good terms, lest there be no future opportunity to make amends, to make good what, for want of amends, would be bad or ugly, remind us again of justice. Farewells signal the huge significance of statements that may be, might turn out to have been, last words.

Also, they epitomize the significance of doing and saying the right thing, the thing that truly reflects our feelings and the state of affairs between ourselves and others. And of course, perhaps sometimes even, if also “often,” doing “the right thing” or speaking one’s mind, even when doing so is cruel, is also irresistible!

Bob Dylan, the greatest poet writing in English today, who is also of my own times, often takes apparent delight in a cruel honesty. In “Don’t think twice its alright,” one of the most unloving of love songs imaginable, he definitively cuts the knot:

One last lovely, and this time, thankfully, truly loving, farewell from (of course!) Shakespeare.

The beauty of his farewells reflects Shakespeare’s emphasis, unsurprisingly, on the importance of our words, not just of our deeds. And the fact that what we say often determines the state of the world in which we say it, quite as much, if not more, than what we do. This exchange of farewells between friends and brothers-in-arms takes place immediately before the battle of Philippi, which neither Brutus nor Cassius long survive….

Brutus

Cassius

Grief not occasioned by death

Loss, other than loss of life, should not be underestimated. Loss resulting in extreme poverty, or indeed extreme poverty without such loss, is still grievous, and not only when it is the absence of something previously present. Lost souls may wander for eternity… if only in literature. Loss may be an existential state.

But, to be “lost” is sometimes simply not to be, or never to have been “found.” Or, perhaps more profound (or, at least, possessing more “epigrammatic validity”Footnote ³¹) never to have found oneself!

Loss, as well as death, is often the occasion for grief; and grievous loss is, and has always been seen, at least by the bereaved and others who suffer loss, to be an outrage to justice. Or, for example, if the death is deserved, as the fulfillment of the demands of justice.

Death a necessary, but unwelcome, end?

Julius Caesar, in Shakespeare’s play of the same name, implies that the inevitability of death at some moment in the future removes both the rationality of fearing death and wishing to prolong life as a benefit to the person whose life it is. Historically, Julius Caesar, a phenomenally successful military commander, seems qualified, if not justified, in expounding authoritatively on the subject of fear:

To accept the necessity of death (though even death might not be an immutable state, or even a “necessary end,” as we shall see) is not necessarily to accept the timing of death. Grief is a rational response to the fact that although death is (currently)Footnote ³³ inevitable to flesh and blood creatures like ourselves, “the readiness is all.” And we are, almost none of us ever “ready,” despite Caesar’s disdain in the passage above and Hamlet’s apparent (and transient!) philosophy to the contrary:

…………………………………. There’s special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man knows aught of what he leaves, what is’t to leave betimes?Footnote ³⁴

But we (and Hamlet …perhaps?) would do, would have done, well to recall his earlier remarks on the same subject…

Of course, Hamlet may, as here, contradict himself. And even the very greatest of philosophers (of whom Shakespeare is certainly one) may do likewise.Footnote ³⁶ My own reading of this famous soliloquy is that the lines:

locate the real horror of death, not in the idea that it is an everlasting sleep (a rather anodyne and self-deceiving thought) but rather in the thought that sleep itself, along with everything else, has, for the dead person, been totally annihilated, totally obliterated, by death. Death is literally nothingness and ….“nothing will come of nothing.” Least of all sleep!Footnote ³⁷ Either way, death is very seldom welcomed, except as preferable to terrible and irremediable suffering. Or, as in the, somewhat unusual, case of Socrates, that he has accepted death, at a time, and in a manner of his choosing rather than await a more random and less self-controllable event.

Grief and injustice

Let us, for a moment, explore further the connection between grief and injustice. Doing so will reveal the extent to which the cornerstone of all morality is the commitment to the value of life, essentially the value of the lives of persons.

This, Thomas Hobbes (while discussing the duties of a sovereign), referred to as: “the procuration of the safety of the people.”

Finally, we may have to challenge both the inevitability of death and also the idea that death is not something to be feared or indeed indefinitely, if not infinitely, postponed.

The major injustice of death lies in the denial of a future, which denial always threatens and is always to most mere mortals, equally terrible, however old the individual and whatever her quality of life. Save only when the quality is such that the individual herself no longer wishes to live.

And this loss of a future is almost always undeserved, or at least is perceived as, undeserved, by the individual whose life is lost (if they know they are about to die) and by those who take a benevolent interest in them. So, far from the idea that continuing postponement of death is irrational or self-defeating, it is the very cornerstone of all morality.

The finality of death is also challenged in ways that do not undermine the rationality of the observations so far made. Let us return to the tenacity of the idea that death is unjust.

The injustice of death

Consider some common-sense reminders concerning attitudes to death:

Death involves injustice because it often results from the perceived breach of the duty to save and thus prolong life. Either of the dying subject, for example, in objections to suicide or self-murder, or by others who might have intervened to postpone the death, including in triage cases or protocols for prioritization for medical treatment or rescue.

Also, because we all (almost all?) want to live, and all have, at the point of death, experienced different and often sub-optimal length and quality of life. Even accepting the “inevitability” of death, almost no one is ever “ready” to die, and very few deserve death.

The postponement of death

I suggested a moment ago, by way of further gloss on Emily Wilson’s insight that Western Philosophy begins with grief, that all philosophy begins with a passionate sense of justice.

This is (partly) because grief is experienced as injustice, either to the dying individual or to those who loved or valued them. We (almost all of us) believe that we, and those we love, should die “hereafter” and never now. Except perhaps when death is the only way of avoiding some, or all, of “the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.”Footnote ³⁸ And we believe, we judge, the same of the deaths of those we love or care about: that they should, should have, died hereafter. Unless, as with the death of Socrates, it is a death that has been “chosen” by the person whose death it is and which, in Socrates’ case, he, to a large extent, controls.Footnote ³⁹

Emily Wilson reminds us that:

Does this fact that birth is always a death sentence indefinitely postponed undermine the rationality of grief and of mourning or, on the other hand, the value of life? I think not. It is to the reasons for cautious and circumscribed optimism that we must now turn.

The value of life principle

The “Value of Life Principle” is a principle of equality. All people are equal and none are more equal than others.Footnote ⁴² (The value of the life of each person is equal to the value of the life of any, regardless of all the “objective” differences between lives: health, wealth, happiness and degree of “goodness,” wickedness, or stupidity, etc.)

It is important to be clear that the value of life is not, and cannot be, a relative or qualitative value. Although I may be able to imagine a better life for myself, a better life to have, to have lived, or to have in prospect… better quality, however, measured, more of all the things I do, or could, wish for, or whatever else… it does not follow that others, who have and enjoy more of what I would wish to have and to enjoy, have more valuable lives in what we might call the “existential” sense.

I may wish to be, wish I am, wish I had here-to-fore been, more successful, more loved, healthier, more admired, stronger, richer, cleverer… and whatsoever else. It does not follow that others, who are, and have, all the things I lack and wish to have, or to have had, or are enjoying, or ever have had, more valuable lives, than mine. The value of life is the value that the person whose life it is gives it by simply wanting to, choosing to live on, or not wanting or choosing to renounce life. By knowing that they are alive and possessing the self-consciousness that goes with such knowledge, they qualify as persons whatever they are made of and however they came to be. As John Locke wrote around 1690:

For Locke, and for me, an individual cannot be free unless she is a “person” in Locke’s sense. That is someone who knows she exists and is capable, in the light of that knowledge, to want her existence to continue, or indeed not to continue. Locke’s meditation, begun as above, continues:

This is why, in John Donne’s famous words, “any man’s death diminishes me.” In his Devotion XVII, Donne anticipates the connection all persons, in Locke’s sense of the term “person,” have with one another. Donne died the year before Locke was born, and it is doubtful he would have accepted Locke’s explanation of just why it is that “any man’s death diminishes me.” But that “sameness, that continuation and awareness of the life of a rational being” is at the heart of Donne’s insight that “any man’s death diminishes me.”

This is Donne’s account:

The value of a life is the enduring value of a unique personal identity, and only that personal identity, that “sameness” of a rational being overtime, that unique identity of a “thinking intelligent being that has reason and refection” has such a value. Such a being, a person properly so called, alone can (and indeed has an obligation to) determine for themselves, as far as this is possible, the fate of their own self, because such beings alone know, are self-conscious of, the fact that they are a self and of what that self wants, thinks fears or needs. What makes the life of a person unique, and uniquely valuable, is that he or she, possibly, “they or it” has self-consciousness, which is also possessed by all other beings capable of valuing their own unique existence and as a result possessing the capacity to act in ways that contribute (positively or negatively) to their value and the value of others. They, and all persons, share mutual recognition and awareness.

Respecting the value of the lives of others is respecting the value that those others place upon their own lives. Respecting not the reasons they value their own lives (which are their own reasons and their own business [unless they voluntarily share those reasons]), but the fact that they do value life, however reasonable or unreasonable the special nature of that kind of self-conscious valuing appears to others.

The valuing of persons because they are persons—sui generis creatures with particular powers and capacities and not because of who they are, their personal identity, their lineage, however, characterized, their status, the particularity of the things they value, do, or cherish, or have done, in virtue of their nature, or because of their species membership, or lack of it, is that of which we speak.

Probably, Locke was aware of the advice Shakespeare gives, through Polonius: “above all to thine own self be true, and it must follow as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.”Footnote ⁴⁶

Polonius, of course, is not exactly in the same class as a philosopher as is Locke, …but Shakespeare most certainly is! He is as great a philosopher as the world has so far produced…and it’s a competitive field!

The safety of the people

Since life-saving is simply “death-postponing” with a positive spin, it follows that life-extending therapies are, and must always be, life-saving therapies and must share whatever priority life-saving has in our morality and in our social values, including as a reflection of the value of life. More of which anon.

I hope it is clear that I reject any conception of the value of life that equates “value” with “duration.” So long as the life is of acceptable quality (acceptable, that is, to the person whose life it is, and acceptable given the likely alternatives),Footnote ⁴⁷ we all have a powerful, many would claim an overriding, moral imperative, to save life, because to fail to do so when we reasonably can, would make us responsible for the resulting death.Footnote ⁴⁸

All contemporary nation-states do, as a matter of fact and, usually also as a clearly expressedFootnote ⁴⁹ principle, accept responsibility for the safety of “the people,” their people. Who precisely “their people” actually are, is often a matter of controversy. For example: are “the people” (for the purposes of understanding the responsibilities of nation states to and for “their people”) constituted by all the people at any time within their borders, or only all citizens, whether within the national borders or not, or all residents, or all those who are legally (rightfully?) resident within the borders… and so, almost, in case of need, ad infinitum.

My own view (for which I have no space to argue here) is that such state responsibility for the “safety of the people” extends at least to all persons within a national jurisdiction and for all citizens of that nation wherever they are. Pending agreement, or even clarity, on such issues as these, all decent persons, organizations, or governments, would and should “rescue” first and ask questions, if at all, later.

The philosopher who puts the “safety of the people” most firmly and clearly at the center of everything is Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury.Footnote ⁵⁰ Hobbes spent 11 years in Paris from around 1640, some of which he spent as tutor to the exiled Charles, Prince of Wales, who had made his court in Paris. It was during these years that Hobbes wrote his masterpiece, The Leviathan. Footnote ⁵¹

Chapter 30 of Part II of The Leviathan Footnote ⁵² opens with a wonderful statement of the social contract by which, we, the people, entrust the office of the sovereign (a monarch or an assembly) with sovereign power. The printed marginal note or “signpost” to this passage in The Leviathan Footnote ⁵³ is “The procuration of the good of the people” and it is clear from the extract from the opening of Chapter 30 that Hobbes understands “the safety of the people” in terms of a broad conception of “the good of the people”:

Later in the same chapter, Hobbes makes clear that:

He also allows that people who are the victims of accidental hardship or danger be provided for by the state:

Perhaps the clearest contemporary manifestation of this obligation of state responsibility for the protection of the people and responsibility for the good of the people is in provision of the principal emergency services, fire, police, ambulance, other health care or human welfare agencies, and defense forces or agencies. All these are directly concerned with the safety of the people. These entities are the responsibility of who or whatever it is that constitutes the state, and if they were not maintained by some means or other, the state would be abdicating its responsibilities. Health care, for example, and other “death postponement” strategies are also clear examples. By extension, education at all levels is also a service, required inter alia to secure the safety, and of course, the good of the people.

Equality

Hobbes’ emphasis on the procuration of the safety of the people is, of course, a way of protecting them from the injustice of premature grief, suffering, and death, so far as such protection is possible. It is also a fundamental dimension of the principle of equality.

It is scarcely imaginable that any state would not seek to provide rescue, and the safety that rescue affords, for all people within its borders and all its citizens wheresoever they may be. Indeed, it would be difficult to see how it could function as a unified state if it did not. So that, for example, when a state institutes vaccination programs against infectious diseases, or, as recently, against a murderous global pandemic, or when it provides safe drinking water, when it makes laws about speed limits on roads, or wearing of seatbelts in cars, or when it licenses firearms, or slaughters infected cattle, when it mobilizes national resources to fight forest fires, or to build flood defenses, when it evacuates towns in the path of a hurricane, or when a post mortem examination is ordered by the coroner or the courts to explain a mysterious death, responsibility for the safety of the people and their equality inter pares is recognized, acknowledged, and asserted!

The principle of equality is best understood as the requirement that to each person is shown the same concern and respect as is shown to any. To this formulation must surely be added the idea of “protection,” as a dimension of concern and respect. For what would concern and respect amount to if it did not manifest itself in the form of protection, particularly of the life and liberty of all. This is, I believe, clearly implicit in Ronald Dworkin’s formulation of equality and in his further articulation and explanations of it.Footnote ⁵⁶

There is only one thing wrong with dying!

The concept of the value of life, sometimes seems to invite even more complex questions, for example, the questions: “what’s so great about life?” and perhaps “are some lives simply not worth saving or living?” It is important to emphasize once more, that the value of life, as I use the term, has nothing to do with the “fitness to live,” or the relative worth or “worthiness” of the life of the individual concerned.

A rational person would surely accept that there is only one thing wrong with dying, and that is doing it when you do not want to.Footnote ⁵⁷ I venture to suggest that if there was a sort of “Devil’s Bargain” (or Godly bargain?) on offer such that those who took the bargain would only die when they wanted to and never when they did not want to, few sane persons would reject such a bargain. It seems probable, that there is nothing wrong with dying when you do want to!Footnote ⁵⁸

Respect for persons requires us to acknowledge the dignity and value of other persons, and to treat them as ends in themselves and not merely instrumentally, as means to ends, or to objectives chosen by others. This means respecting their autonomy.

Nothing is more quintessentially self-regarding as is choosing, as far as is possible, the moment and manner of one’s own death. And nothing that we, any of us, have ever done, or can do, is so obviously self-regarding, only our own business and affair, however, much others may express an interest. Of course, “every man’s death diminishes me,” but John Donne, the author of these words, had principally in mind unwanted deaths. The deaths of those who voluntarily choose to die, however, neither diminish the agent nor those for whom they care or who care for them, although the death may be profoundly upsetting, particularly to family and friends, or indeed, as we have noted, to enemies.

Autonomy is the ability to choose; and the freedom to choose between, competing conceptions of the good, of how to live. It is only by the exercise of autonomy that our lives become, in any real sense, our own. We are shaped by the decisions we make, and without the freedom to choose what we do and how we live, the possession of any significant personal identity at all is threatened. If we cannot, or do not want to, choose our path through life, in as far as it is within our control, including its destination and the nature and manner of our life’s end, we are certainly not living autonomously, although we may retain the ability to regain autonomy.

The ending of our lives often determines life’s final shape and meaning, both for ourselves and in the eyes of others. When we are denied control of the end of our lives, we are denied the capacity to give our lives their ultimate meaning so far as it is possible so to do.

As Ronald Dworkin memorably put itFootnote ⁵⁹:

Dying as liberation

It is difficult to improve upon the words that Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Cassius on the subject of suicide or, indeed, voluntary euthanasia. Cassius, of course, was a noble Roman, a Roman citizen, and he is here discussing what will happen if Julius Caesar makes himself a king and overthrows the Roman Republic:

I make no distinction here between the ethics of suicide, assisted suicide, nor of voluntary euthanasia. In each case, the agent is the individual who chooses to die when she might have postponed death. Whether the tool is a sword, self-administered or held by a friend while the subject rushes onto it (Cassius) or the hemlock administered by Socrates’ executioner.

Socrates case is, to be sure, more complex. He chose his death “tis true,”Footnote ⁶¹ but the choice was not entirely voluntary. He would have chosen, had the choice been open, to be, to have been, given, the opportunity to defend himself as to the capital charge he had facedFootnote ⁶² and to have been permitted to make that defense to an impartial jury of his peers.

The ability to choose (in so far as choice is possible) the time and manner of our own death can be both comforting and liberating. But this, of course, does not mean that in such cases, death itself is necessarily either welcome or autonomous.

To be “forced” to choose death when faced with worse alternatives may, in the circumstances, be an exercise of autonomy, but that does not make such choice “autonomous.” This is why the death of Socrates is so anomalous and so poignant. He could have escaped death by Hemlock if he had taken numerous opportunities to flee Athens to sanctuary elsewhere. He decided to stay, partly because he respected the laws of Athens, which had condemned him (Crito 51. c.),Footnote ⁶³ however, unjustly they had been enforced in his case. Partly also, so it seems, because his unjust condemnation to death provided him with an opportunity to die with dignity, among friends and in a painless manner, an opportunity he clearly judged worth taking, also because of the uncertainty of the manner of any future death that might overtake him.

As Emily Wilson explains:

If death is ultimately inevitable, then it can make sense, if the opportunity arises, to anticipate a death of unknown manner, time, and place with a more planned and expectedly comfortable event. An event of which the individual whose death it will be, remains in control, as far as is possible, of the details and circumstances, bearing in mind that most deaths (perhaps alas) afford no possibility, no room, for input from the dying individual.

If death is inevitable, then loss and grief at the loss, including loss of life, will hopefully, at least continue to make philosophy part of our world,Footnote ⁶⁵ which may be cold comfort (except perhaps to rather mean-spirited philosophers).

But death may not be inevitable. No one dies of old age; rather, they, we, perhaps if we are lucky, die of the diseases of old age. Grant that, and it may be possible, eventually, to cure or prevent all or most of the diseases of old age. If that proves possible, maybe, many of us, perhaps eventually, most of us, need not die.Footnote ⁶⁶

Is death really inevitable?

I have thought, spoken, and written about the various possible ways of “engineering” extreme longevity, and even of what I have called “functional immortality,”Footnote ⁶⁷ into the human organism on many occasions over the last 30 or so years.Footnote ⁶⁸ Here, I will not rehearse my reservations about the cogency of any ethical, or indeed allegedly prudential, arguments against the creation of dramatic increases in life expectancy, even if those measures are sufficiently dramatic to amount to the creation of people we might term as “functionally immortal.” Such functionally immortal individuals would not likely be totally invulnerable; they would not be indestructible. They could kill themselves or be killed by others or be destroyed by natural disasters: earthquake, famine, fire, flood, pestilence… All the usual suspects including the destruction of memory, whether embodied or stored in memory banks. Extreme longevity, even functional immortality, might not be able to cope with such things or cope with them in the time available or with the resources to hand.

Shakespeare’s Cassius thought that Cassius from bondage will (always be able to) deliver Cassius, and his enemies, minded or mindless, also have or had that power.

To answer our question: death is not, I believe, necessarily inevitable, at least in the longer term, but even if death becomes avoidable, it may, and in many circumstances will, remain inescapable, and perhaps often, even desirable. Even the “immortal Gods,” at least those with whom we are reasonably familiar through mythic history and religion, had, most of them, their weaknesses and vulnerabilities, their “Achilles heel.”

Suffice it to say here that while some people dislike the idea of more than normal lifetimes in which to “enjoy” the “time of their lives,” and would some of them apparently be sanguine about deliberately ending the lives of those who looked as if they could achieve it, others, myself, and my friend Jonathan Glover included, would be happy to have the chance of sampling a dramatically long life by contemporary standards.

In his wonderful book, Causing Death and Saving Lives,Footnote ⁶⁹ Glover remarks:

And I wholeheartedly agree with Glover about this!

Death may not, however, be the “fact of life” it is taken to be.Footnote ⁷⁰ And with the advent of so-called artificial intelligence (AI), we organic persons should think more in terms of the “existence” of individuals, than of the “lives” of people. This is necessary because “existence” does not beg the question as to the kind the nature of the existence under consideration.Footnote ⁷¹ Machine persons with real intelligence, intelligence which is by no means “artificial,” possibly unlike their creation, may not be “alive” as the term is generally understood. There may therefore be persons properly so-called, who cannot “die,” but are none the less self-conscious individuals with reason and the capacity for reflection.

When, and if, AI persons (manufactured machine persons, or possibly organically grown, but not conceived, persons) emerge, they may also be “functionally immortal,” in the sense that even when “switched off” they may at any time in principle be switched on again (or even switch themselves on again).

This they might train or engineer themselves to do, just as some humans can (apparently) wake themselves up from sleep at a time of their own choosing. For both machine persons and human persons, returning to “wakefulness” may make their unconscious periods more like a dreamless sleep or possibly the “dream laden” sleep imagined by Hamlet. And, in the case of androids, maybe they could induce sleep by counting electric sheep (with apologies to Philip K Dick: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and its subsequent identity as the film “Blade Runner”).Footnote ⁷²

And, when, and if, artificially intelligent machines become intelligent enough not only to avoid obstacles in their road (which even vacuum cleaners, grass-mowers or mice can do) but also achieve not simply mere consciousness but self-consciousness, then they will also have become “persons” properly so-called. Not human persons, not flesh and blood persons maybe, but persons nonetheless,Footnote ⁷³ persons in John Locke’s sense, persons, beings, like you and me in that they are self-consciousness and intelligent,Footnote ⁷⁴ whatever their species, provenance, and form, and however they come to be.

Persons, of whatever kind, will also, clearly, be language users,Footnote ⁷⁵ language users because thought and self-consciousness, require a medium, perhaps the capacity for an “internal soliloquy.” Thoughts do not just float about looking for a place to land. Language is the medium in which thoughts form and which indeed form the thoughts and their thinkers. Thought may take the form of images or moving pictures with narrative power, but still, this is a form of language.

In principle, if not, thus far, in fact, memories can be stored, their personality traits digitized, their physical presences, their “bodies,” re-built or re-grown. We may not have grounds to grieve for them because they may never have been “alive” in the biological sense. Any post “life” or other forms of existence, will only be postponed, possibly infinitely, but also, possibly, never annihilated.

Is “life” a matter of biology? What will be lost if it is not or ceases so to be?

Stephen Hawking, in a wonderfully lucid and prescient bookFootnote ⁷⁷ expands on what such possibilities might mean:

In developing this point, Hawking makes a crucial analogy between DNA and language:

Hawking concludes:

“Self-designed evolution” or “human enhancement”

Talking of how “intelligent life” might respond to the dangers facing humanity in the future, Hawking warns that:

Hawking’s phrase “self-designed evolution” perfectly fits the agenda ofcontemporary philosophical ethics with which I associate myself that has come to be classified in terms of “human enhancement”: the responsibility we, self-conscious beings, have and accept for what we might term: “the state of the world,” and for the state of humanity. In particular, reponsibility for failure to intervene where we reasonably can, to make the world a better place and people better people; in short, to self-design evolution, and indeed the world.

This obligation I set out in the first few pages of my doctoral dissertation in Oxford, presented, rather belatedly, in 1976, and which became my first book, Violence and Responsibility, published in 1980Footnote ⁸² and in more detail in my book Enhancing Evolution in 2007.Footnote ⁸³ However, human enhancement or self-designed evolution is, to say the least, “tricky”! Again, as Hawking notes:

New life forms and new species of persons

The value of the lives of persons is, in principle, unrelated to the extent of those lives. And equally so, to the “stuff” of which these persons are made, or the species of which they/we are members or into which we are or may be conveniently classified or, more doubtfully, “welcomed”?

The value of a person’s life stems from its nature, rooted in the capacities identified by Locke. Personhood is not necessarily species-specific, nor need it be confined to organic creatures, whether of mother born or from her womb “untimely ripped”; whether begotten or created, by woman or beast, by Gods or by other machines.

Also, in principle, persons can be animals, vegetables, minerals, fish, or fowl, and they only gain or lose their personhood by the gain or permanent loss of the capacities identified by John Locke, capacities which happen to be species typical of humans, but not necessarily unique to humans, nor of course be necessarily possessed by all humans or at all stages of their lives.

The advent, when it comes, of artificially intelligent beings capable of self-consciousness and self-replication is, or will be, a game changer.Footnote ⁸⁵ So long as their programs and memory are contained in a chip or have been stored in “the cloud” or “a cloud,” they will never be dead, they will never have ceased to be, and their being may be suspended, but not necessarily extinguished.

AI may then create a sort of “race,” or perhaps a “clade,” of non-mortal and non-human persons, persons whose being is not necessarily biological. We are familiar with precedents for this possibility, if not all of us, intimately thus familiar.

The immortal Gods “peopled” (in some sense of that term) the ancient and the classical worlds. Monotheistic religions, even today, contribute significantly to the number of, allegedly immortal, Gods, because they all have Gods of their own. Some, like Christianity, have “three in one” Gods, a “Trinity” that defies arithmetic, let alone logic.

Gods are often not nearly as God-like as their creators!

For example, some of the authors of the many “scriptures” (literally the “writings,” scribblings, or “books”) in which they star would have us believe that God/s created people in his, her, or their own image.Footnote ⁸⁶ A more plausible story is that we humans created Gods in our own image, or at least in the images available to our imaginings.Footnote ⁸⁷ An immortal AI might well, from a human perspective, have god-like qualities or what would appear to mere mortals to be God-like. Such immortal, hyper-intelligent beings might, of course, create their own “scribblings,” further “immortalizing” their own God-like creation and creations.

This raises a significant question about the gravity of grief. Suppose there’s seldom a reason to grieve for an AI, because it is functionally immortal (although, possibly, not indestructible) and philosophy “descends” from grief, will this will/might also presage the death of philosophy?Footnote ⁸⁸

Another, possibly more significant, question for those who value, or are even interested in, philosophy would be: will or could androids or other immortals have a taste, or even a use, for philosophy? Apologies to that most philosophical android—Marvin, hero of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, a five-part trilogy. Marvin was certainly capable of philosophy and other human-like weaknesses. (Another trilogy that defies arithmetic.)Footnote ⁸⁹

The paradox of fiction

Harold Bloom, a leading Shakespeare scholar, notes that:

Could Hawking’s living machines also persuade us of their Bloom-like heroic vitalism? Would it matter, and indeed, what would be lost, if they could not?

As a philosopher, I cannot, of course, endorse the consigning of “morality” to the realm of the “mere,” as Bloom airily suggests. Nor do I accept Bloom’s idea that Shakespeare was responsible for “the invention of the human.” Bloom’s main purpose in this passage (and elsewhere) is to highlight Falstaff’s and Hamlet’s cognitive, linguistic and imaginative vitality, their sheer “life force.” None of which was Shakespeare’s invention since these characteristics of humans were familiar to, and appreciated by, Shakespeare and his audiences, not just as real types but also as real people did millennia before Shakespeare wrote his plays.

Hence the popularity of Falstaff and the philosophy of Hamlet. To be sure, Shakespeare had to “build” these characteristics into “real fictitious persons”: persons and characters who would be both products of his imagination and recognizably “true” and “real” as one (or more) of us, (if exceptional “ones of us”) to his audiences.

This is the (not as famous as it should be) “paradox of fiction,”Footnote ⁹¹ which was probably first identified by Shakespeare as the fact that we can both recognize, appreciate, and be moved by, emotionally sympathetic to, the fate of “people” we know full well do not and never did, or will, exist “in real life.” Or by events that have not happened or by emotions that have not been felt by the fictional characters who “felt” them. Hamlet famously coined this paradox but (wisely) did not name it:

But how is it possible to be moved by the fate of Hecuba “the woman who never was” and by “people who never were,” or by events that never occurred? In short, by entities that have no fate at all. Such, perhaps, as an AI which/who will/be functionally immortal?Footnote ⁹³

My own view of this apparent paradox remains: that we (current humans) respond to what we “witness,” either before our very eyes and ears, or in report, visual, audible, or otherwise receivable.

Probably, evolution has taught us to, or caused us to, react first and ask questions later, just in case what we witness is dangerous and we need to take immediate action. Paradoxically, though we know, or when we know, that the harrowing event never occurred or the person who apparently suffered the event never existed, our reaction remains and even recurs. We react not simply to the real, but to the apparent! And once engaged, our emotions remain, although hopefully they do not prompt us to dive into or remain in shark-infested waters, either real or imaginary.

But we have learned to practice appropriate reactions to what we “witness” or believe we witness. It is part of how we learn. We have to learn “this is” a chair before we can learn that this is only “probably or possibly” a chair.

As Wittgenstein remarked:

Our ability to be moved by the fate of fictional characters, the paradox of fiction, is probably “hard-wired” by evolution so that our first thought is “danger” and only our second thought, possibly our educated thought, is—“maybe not” or “its ok!”

“Art’s tribute to nature”?

Could or would non-human persons, manufactured persons, self-manufactured, possibly like humans, but in their case, created, not begotten. Could such beings in some way exhibit what, in Bloom’s words, might constitute “art’s tribute to nature”?

Is the nature of humanity capable of being the subject of “invention” or manufacture, not just of birth or evolution?

This, while, hopefully, only slightly “over the top,” invites the question: If the basic category of morally significant beings is not human beings but persons in John Locke’s sense of that term: self-conscious beings with reason and reflection… what should we think of, and how should we value, non-human persons?Footnote ⁹⁵

Certainly, philosophy will be kept alive by grief and the sense of injustice that grief occasions. Even immortals, since they are not necessarily invulnerable, may continue to ponder whether “to be or not to be?” and continue to suffer “loss” and other grievous experiences.

But is the capacity for such suffering required for philosophy? Was it required in order to pose Hamlet’s question, “To be or not to be?” Or Falstaff’s very philosophical dissertation upon honor, which takes place on the eve of the battle of Shrewsbury and in which Falstaff, an inveterate “vitalist,” prioritizes life above all:

If all western philosophy begins with grief, maybe it need not end with the end of grief, if such a thing is possible.

Indeed, one might go further and suggest that all philosophy…, so far… has concerned itself in some way with the meaning, nature and value of life. And as Homer so eloquently suggested, much of the life of persons, and often its crucial moments, takes place far from comfort and from love—“far from hot baths.”

The distance to hot baths

The advent, if and when it arrives, of non-mortal persons who/which, because they are not organic, are not “alive” (as we have so far understood the term)Footnote ⁹⁷ as are the creatures we currently think of as “living beings,” will be challenging, to say the least. It will require that we and they re-think “the value of life”Footnote ⁹⁸ and perhaps use the term “the value of existence” in ways different to those to which we have accustomed ourselves!

Such future “persons” may have indefinite and even episodic existence and may not need or experience grief, at least as we currently understand the term. They may never, perhaps for good prudential reasons or for reasons of their constitution as “machines” of sorts, partake of hot baths. But for them, and for us mortal persons, the value and the nature of beings is the core of all philosophy, and the only beings, so far as we know capable of philosophy, are persons. A person, in John Locke’s famous words, is … a thinking, intelligent being that has reason and reflection and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places, which it does only by that consciousness which is inseparable from thinking, and as it seems to me essential to it.”Footnote ⁹⁹

Thinking intelligent non-mortal beings of the kind that AI may one day (a day that may already be in the past) produce or become, may well also be or become pre-occupied with their own value and nature—how could they not? We may hope that they have more open and philosophical natures than most of our particular species and are willing to include us in “the commonwealth” and in “the moral community,” as I hope we will be ready and willing to include them. For them, and also for us, doing so is likely to be a matter of survival.

A cautionary consideration here is that some animals and mammals, such as great apes, dolphins, and the octopus, may already be persons in the above senses but have not met a wholehearted welcome into the moral community of humans. A crucial aspect of this possible anomaly is the (apparent) absence in such creatures of a translatable language in which to express their personhood, or perhaps a human deficit in the ability to understand adequately their modes of communication and ways of life.

It maybe that non-mortal AI persons, when they appear, will have, or acquire, the belief that we humans are sufficiently alien and sufficiently inadequately endowed in whatever dimensions they judge to be constitutive of personhood or its AI equivalent for we humans to be regarded as beings of lesser moral status and significance to themselves. Perhaps in the way that we (most of us) think of the octopus. If this happens, the AI persons will have better knowledge of our values and nature than we have of theirs. It will be a brave human who will bet on their behaving better towards us than we have behaved to other sentient and intelligent beings. In this eventuality, we may well find ourselves seeing the truth of the words of Giuseppe de Lampedusa’s famous observation:

Without such a change, which will doubtless require considerable thought and preparation, there will be much unnecessary grief and much more need of philosophy. Admittedly, it may be interesting but problematic that philosophy begins with grief, it continues, as thought continues, with the evolution and quest for knowledge and understanding of “life, the universe and everything” by persons, however, constituted begotten or created. Such creatures may be common in the universe, or they may be peculiar to the planet earth. However, that may be, such “thinking intelligent beings, that have reason and reflection, and can consider themselves the same thinking things, in different times and places” are all we have to protect life and the living environment in what may be, for all we know for sure, the only habitable location in the universe.

And if and when we create different varieties of such beings or they re-create themselves, we must hope they, and we, manage to exist together in ways that minimize the grief and maximize the qualities for which Plato so admired Socrates; and which also animate science. These include, of course, the attempt to understand and explain as much of what is, and what happens, as possible. And to make all “persons” in Locke’s sense, as good and as creative as they can be. In short, to make the world a better place and people better people. Or as we perhaps should learn to say: the universe a better place and its persons better persons.