Table Of ContentImmortality and the
Philosophy of Death
Immortality and the
Philosophy of Death
Edited by
Michael Cholbi
London • New York
Published by Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd
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Selection and editorial matter © Michael Cholbi 2016
Copyright in individual chapters is held by the respective chapter authors.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
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without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: HB 978-1-78348-383-9
PB 978-1-78348-384-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Immortality and the philosophy of death / edited by Michael Cholbi.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-78348-383-9 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-78348-384-6
(pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-78348-385-3 (electronic)
1. Death. 2. Immortality. I. Cholbi, Michael, editor.
BD444.I46 2015
128’.5—dc23 2015032338
∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Introduction vii
PART I: IS DEATH BAD FOR THOSE THAT DIE? 1
1 Victims 3
Christopher Belshaw
2 Reconsidering Categorical Desire Views 21
Travis Timmerman
3 Epicureanism, Extrinsic Badness, and Prudence 39
Karl Ekendahl and Jens Johansson
4 Lucretius and the Fear of Death 53
Frederik Kaufman
5 The Harms of Death 67
Duncan Purves
6 Seeds: On Personal Identity and the Resurrection 85
Sophie-Grace Chappell
PART II: LIVING WITH DEATH 99
7 Fearing Death as Fearing the Loss of One’s Life: Lessons
from Alzheimer’s Disease 101
David Beglin
8 Constructing Death as a Form of Failure: Addressing Mortality
in a Neoliberal Age 115
Beverley Clack
v
vi Contents
9 Love and Death 135
Dan Werner
10 Learning to be Dead: The Narrative Problem of Mortality 157
Kathy Behrendt
11 Love and Death: The Problem of Resilience 173
Aaron Smuts
PART III: THE VALUE OF AN IMMORTAL LIFE 189
12 Immortality, Identity, and Desirability 191
Roman Altshuler
13 Resources for Overcoming the Boredom of Immortality
in Fischer and Kierkegaard 205
Adam Buben
14 Immortality and the Exhaustibility of Value 221
Michael Cholbi
Index 237
About the Contributors 241
Introduction
Many attempts have been made to define human nature—to identify the
characteristics that distinguish us Homo sapiens from other beings, particu-
larly our animal brethren. The capacity for language; a moral sensibility; an
enjoyment of art, play, or other activities, seemingly for their own sake; sci-
entific rationality; a religious impulse; claims have been made on behalf of
all of these as the factor that renders us uniquely human. Arguably though,
the defining feature of human existence is our relationship to death. Every
creature must die, and perhaps some nonhuman animals have some inchoate
awareness of their imminent death. But only humans, both individually and
collectively, grasp their mortality and are thereby compelled to confront their
own deaths. As Ernest Becker, author of the bestselling classic The Denial of
Death, explains it:
This is what has made it so simple to shoot down whole herds of buffalo or
elephants. The animals don’t know that death is happening and continue grazing
placidly while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective
and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the
same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is
over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one’s dreams
and even the most sun-filled days—that’s something else.1
Here Becker obliquely refers to a facet of death that human beings are likely
to be uniquely aware of. Death, Shelly Kagan points out, is ubiquitous: There
is no time at which we are completely immune from dying.2 The common
human fear of death thus does not stem simply from its being ultimately
unavoidable. It seems also to stem from its being omnipresent.
vii
viii Introduction
Of course, one of the themes of Becker’s work, and the work of the “terror
management theorists” he has inspired,3 is that the human fear of death is an
omnipresent motivator behind our cultural strivings, driving us to establish
religions, build monuments to our accomplishments, and defend (even with
persecution or violence) the worldviews that define our cultural outlooks, all
in an effort to “deny” death and achieve symbolic immortality. But even these
efforts at death denial nevertheless corroborate the claim that humans are dis-
tinctive in having to address death as a problem in living. For if Becker and
his ilk are correct, then many of us “address” death not so much by engaging
it but by unwitting efforts to circumvent it or nullify its effects on us.
Philosophy is part of human culture too. And while Western philosophers’
interest in addressing death has waxed and waned over the centuries, they
have not hidden from death or avoided scrutinizing death’s implications.
The first “golden age” of philosophical inquiry into death occurred in the
ancient Mediterranean world. For philosophers in the post-Socratic tradition,
especially the Roman Stoics and Epicureans, philosophy’s purposes were
both theoretical and practical. Successful philosophical inquiry, on their
conception of that enterprise, enables us to negotiate life’s perils and adversi-
ties, death included. Plato went so far as to declare that the true philosopher
pursues philosophy as preparation for death.
I would suggest that we are living through a second “golden age” of
philosophical inquiry into death. This renaissance of philosophical interest in
death traverses many traditions and methodologies, encompassing European
“Continental” thinkers (Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre) and Anglo-
American thinkers (Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel). The changing
nature of the death experience has also contributed to this renaissance. Those
in advanced industrialized cultures now routinely live well into “old age,”
with death oftentimes preceded by a period of prolonged physical decline
or senescence. As a result, most of us now have more time with which to
confront the reality of our own deaths. The same technological developments
that have extended life into old age have also put death more within our hands
than ever before. Indeed, one of the principal factors that drove the rise of
clinical medical ethics as a distinct field of inquiry in the twentieth century
was the question of whether, if at all, it is ethically defensible to take death
into our own hands by intentionally shortening or ending our lives. Concur-
rently, some believe that technological advances are nigh that will make it
possible to transcend or overcome death, through radically increasing the
human lifespan, ending or slowing the aging process so as to achieve physi-
ological immortality, or preserving our psychologies in digital form.
Contemporary philosophers are wrestling with the metaphysical and
ethical implications of these developments, even as they continue to look to
ancient thinkers such as Epicurus and Lucretius for insight into such matters.
Introduction ix
In so doing, they continue the ancient tradition, inviting us to interrogate the
aspects of our existence that are most puzzling or unsettling. The purpose of
this volume is to represent the cutting edge of contemporary philosophical
inquiry into death. The chapters collected here engage with three central areas
of philosophical concern.
The first area of concern is death’s purported badness. The common human
fear of death seems rational only on the condition that death is worthy of
being feared, that is, if there is something bad about death (where by “death”
here we intend the state of being dead, rather than the process of dying).
But it is not obvious that there is something bad about death. As Epicurus
famously argued, if death is a state of non-being—not a state that we ever
experience—then death should be seen as “nothing to us.” Yet, it is hard to
shake the intuition that death is not nothing to us—that death is often bad
for the person who dies. The chapters in Part I undertake the challenge of
explaining how, if at all, this can be so.
Christopher Belshaw (“Victims”) defends a claim regarding a condition
on death’s being bad: “Death can only be bad for beings with sufficiently
sophisticated psychologies to count as persons.” Persons, according to
Belshaw, have beliefs regarding the future and desires pertaining to what
occurs in the future. Thanks to these beliefs and desires, persons can want to
continue living, and death is bad, Belshaw argues, only for those who want to
live. It follows from Belshaw’s position that death cannot be bad for zygotes,
fetuses, or nonhuman animals whose psychologies lack the beliefs and desires
necessary for personhood. Such entities lack categorical desires, desires we
have that give us reason to continue living, not simply reasons to want our
lives to go well so long as we live (e.g., the desire to live without pain). In
“Reconsidering Categorical Desire Views,” Travis Timmerman develops two
hypothetical examples that raise difficulties for views like Belshaw’s that
appeal to such desires. His examples are designed to show that if a view like
Belshaw’s holds that death is bad because it thwarts the categorical desires
a person has at the time of her death, then this has counterintuitive impli-
cations. Timmerman proposes that such examples are better handled by a
deprivation account of death’s badness, wherein death at a given time is bad
for an individual to the extent that it precludes that individual enjoying goods
(or a good life) she would have enjoyed had she continued to live.
Karl Ekendahl and Jens Johansson (“Epicureanism, Extrinsic Badness, and
Prudence”) argue that, in the debates between Epicureans and their critics, this
focus on the extrinsic badness of death is often misguided. In judging whether
we have prudential reason to avoid death, Ekendahl and Johansson propose,
we should not turn on whether an individual’s death is extrinsically bad for
her. Rather, our prudential reasons to avoid death depend on whether doing so
maximizes intrinsic value for a person. If they are correct, then considerations
