160 Ethics
“Death”
Thomas Nagel
Death, so what?
• In continuing the project of replacing moral
sentiment with considered moral judgment, it
is often necessary to question some or all
deeply held ideas.
• One of these for which Thomas Nagel supplies
some substantial analysis is the idea that
death, the ultimate end, is a bad thing.
What is good about life?
• This is a good place to start, and it seems at
minimum, that experience itself, continued
(though not necessarily continuous) is a good
thing. If all the character of our experiences,
good and bad, were stripped away, would be
still value the result?
What is bad about death?
• Whatever is good about life, it seems clear that
Bach, who lived longer than Schubert, had more
of it than Schubert.
• The same thing cannot be said about death. If
something is bad about death, we certainly do
not say that Shakespeare has had more of it than
Proust.
• So whatever we must say about death, there is
nothing positive about it that is bad, but its
badness is in that it deprives us of something
good.
3 problems with regarding death as
bad:
1. In order to be bad for someone, something must
actually be unpleasant for them. Death does not fit
this.
2. If something bad is to happen to someone, it has to
happen to a given person at a given time. This is very
difficult with death because when someone is dead
they cease to exist so before death happens, they’re
alive and not dead, and after death happens they’re
dead and don’t exist any longer.
3. There is an unexplained asymmetry between disliking
that we will not exist after we are dead and not
minding that we did not exist before we were born.
Relational versus nonrelational
properties
• Some properties are unitary, like the color something
is, or its mass, etc. By ‘unitary’ it is meant that the
property has only one subject.
• A relational property necessarily has more than one
subject. Properties like ‘is taller than’, ‘is better than’,
etc. are relational because they require two things in
order to be sensibly discussed. It would be absurd to
say something like “Bob is taller” (taller than who or
what?).
Nagel on properties and states:
• People, and the states that people are in can be positively located in
definitive points in space and time (that is, you exist at all the places
and times that you occupy during your lifetime).
• Some goods and bads can likewise be identified with particular
states (like being in pain happens at a particular time). This means
being in pain is a unitary property.
• Some properties may not be so spatiotemporally identified (being
in an improved state of health does not happen at a given time,
rather it is a comparison between your states at separate times).
Being in an improved state of health is a relational property.
• Some relational properties only go in one direction (e.g. ‘is taller
than’) while some go in both directions (e.g. ‘is married to’).
Nagel’s proposal:
• “[I]t is arbitrary to restrict the goods and evils that can
befall a man to nonrelational properties ascribable to
him at particular times”
• In other words, for something to be bad for someone,
it need not have to be bad for them at any given time,
or because of any particular state of the agent at any
given time. The reason that death is bad then, is
because it involves a relational property (being dead is
worse than being alive) rather than a unitary property
(being dead is bad).
• This requires accepting that non-existent things may
have (at least relational) properties.
Some examples:
• Nonexistent things have relational properties:
Abraham Lincoln was taller than Louis XIV… when?
• Nonexistent things have at least some unitary
properties: Santa Claus wears a red suit, Charles
Dickens is an author, John Wilkes Booth is a
murderer.
• Breaking a deathbed promise does wrong to the one
who is dead… the one who does not exist.
The solutions to 1 and 2:
• Nagel’s answer to 1. then is to say that it is not
that death is positively bad for whoever is
dead, but that it is worse for them than being
alive.
• Nagel’s answer to 2. is that relational
properties do not have to happen to people at
given times, rather they are a comparison
between states of a person, and persons may
have properties even after they are dead.
An example:
• Nagel appeals to an example to deal with 1., 2., and
3. Consider an intelligent adult who suffers a brain
injury and is reduced to the state of an infant, who is
happy when full and comfortable. We can still say
something bad has happened to them even though
they themselves are not in an unhappy state after
the injury (contra 1.). We can say that they have lost
something that they used to have, and so the
misfortune they have suffered is describable as a
relational property (contra 2.).
Example (continued)
• To respond to 3., Nagel points out that we think the man in
the example loses something (his adult faculties), and so we
have a right to describe his situation as a misfortune, and it is
different from his situation as an actual infant, because at that
point he had not lost anything, rather he was in the process of
gaining something (his adult faculties).
• This describes the difference between prenatal and post
mortem nonexistence. In the former we are moving from
non-existence to existence, a good thing; in the latter we are
moving from existence to non-existence, a bad thing.
Analysis:
• Is Nagel’s account convincing? That is, does it
account for why we think that death is a bad
thing while avoiding common objections to such
thoughts?
• Epicurus (who we will read later) says that death
is neither to be feared nor welcomed because it is
not, in itself anything at all for a person. What is
Nagel’s reply to this position?
• What other things do we blithely assume are
good or bad, without necessarily examining why
we feel that way about them?