Disappointment, sadness, and death

Philosophical Review

Volumn 108, Issue 3, 1999, Pages 387-412

  Draper, Kai ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 45949089649     PISSN: 00318108     EISSN: 15581470     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2998466     Document Type: Article

References (28)

1. I am assuming, of course, that we are mortal, that death is not an illusion, but rather exactly what it appears to be: the end of conscious existence. (This assumption may be false, but every indication I have sug gests otherwise.) I am not assuming that death deprives its subject of each and every benefit that he or she enjoyed while alive. Some have argued that one can continue to receive certain benefits (for example, fame) after death, and I want to leave open the possibility that they are right. Thus, when I claim that death deprives its subject of life's benefits, I should be taken to mean that death, understood as the permanent end of conscious existence, deprives its subject of benefits (for example, enjoyment) the receipt of which requires conscious existence.
2. I should mention that I will not consider two very common Epicurean objections to arguments from deprivation. One is the objection that being deprived of a good is an evil for the subject of the deprivation only if the subject misses the good or otherwise suffers as a result of the deprivation. The second is the argument that, since death annihilates its subject, after you die, there is no "you" that can be identified as the victim of a deprivation or any other evil. These objections have been adequately refuted by others.
3. See, for example, Fred Feldman, Confrontations with the Reaper (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 127-56.
4. Thomas Nagel, "Death," reprinted in his Mortal Questions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 1-10.
5. Feldman Confrontation, 150. I have a few quibbles with Feldman's for mulation of D. One is the awkwardness in speaking of a state of affairs as being true or false. Another is that, unless I am mistaken, the definiendum in D should be the total (extrinsic and intrinsic) value for S of P rather than the extrinsic value for S of P. For the difference between the intrinsic value for S of the life S would lead if P obtains and the intrinsic value for S of the life S would lead if P does not obtain would depend partly on how much intrinsic value P would have for S.
6. Feldman Confrontations, 151; my emphasis.
7. I describe an emotional response as "fitting," or "merited," or "appropriate," I do not intend to imply that one ought to have that re sponse. If I am cornered by a dangerous beast, for example, the danger would merit fear even if, because the beast is of the sort that is more likely to attack if it senses fear, I ought to avoid feeling fear if I can. (In a similar way, someone's behavior can merit blame or punishment even if special circumstances make it unwise to blame or punish.)
8. What I am calling a "genuine evil" is to be distinguished from what philosophers often call an "evil." In common philosophical parlance, a good is something worthy of being desired or sought, and, correspondingly), an evil is something worthy of aversion or avoidance (or something the absence of which is worthy of being desired or sought). Given this use of the term 'evil', one can quickly reach the conclusion that being deprived of life's benefits is an evil. But the conclusion is not very interesting given that many deprivations that are not the least bit troubling are also evils. Failing to find Aladdin's lamp, for example, is a deprivation that is quite worthy of being avoided however impossible it may be to avoid it. Accordingly I am concerned-in this essay not with the question of whether death is an evil in the sense of being worthy of avoidance, but rather with the question of whether death is a genuine evil in the richer sense of being a suitable object of fear or sadness or dread or dissatisfaction or some other negative emotional response (in addition to being a suitable object of avoidance). In particular, I am concerned with the question of whether death is a genuine evil for its subject-that is, whether it is fitting to be troubled by the prospect of one's own death (and to avoid one's own death if one can).
9. There is also a general lesson for value theory here. If we assign value or disvalue to a state of affairs on the basis of comparing the value of its obtaining with the value of its not obtaining, then we divorce the concepts of value and disvalue from their usual emotional and attitudinal connections. We are forced to say of certain things that, on the one hand, they have enormous disvalue (or value) for us, but on the other hand, it would be inappropriate for us to be the least bit troubled (or delighted) by them. This shouldn't cause any mischief so long as we are aware of what we are doing. But if we are unaware, then we will be apt to make mistakes in reasoning like Feldman's-leaping from the premise that something would have great comparative disvalue for someone to the conclusion that it would be awful, or dreadful, or a terrible misfortune, for her.
10. Notice too that it is equally plausible to suggest that when someone is prevented from being harmed in a way that was likely, she is the recipient of good fortune. It would be good fortune for me, for example, should the police lose the evidence that will otherwise put me behind bars.
11. Condition (1) stands in need of clarification, for there are many senses in which the receipt of a benefit might be "likely." The notion of likelihood that I am employing here is sometimes referred to as "objective chance." The objective chance of a fair coin coming up heads on a given toss is one half, to cite the usual example. In appealing to this notion, I do not intend to invoke any mysterious metaphysical categories. For statements about objective chances may be translatable into statements about relative frequencies, as some have argued. What is crucial here is to avoid defining 'likely' in a way that makes it a purely subjective matter whether an event is likely. For if something could be likely simply because one regards it as so, then E would wrongly imply that, for example, the barefoot climber who believed that he was likely to reach the summit and so win the million dollars would be the victim of a misfortune when he failed to do so.
12. I owe this example to Charles Young.
13. On the other hand, assuming that my aunt's recovery is comparatively quite bad for me, I am inclined to describe her recovery as a misfortune for me. If I am right about this, then this case suggests that, just as we should resist the temptation to leap to the conclusion that death is a genuine evil from the premise that death is comparatively bad, we should also avoid leaping to this conclusion from the premise that death is a misfortune.
14. Lucretius, On Nature (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 3, 969-74.
15. Of course, it may be possible to construct imaginary cases of persons so deprived. Perhaps we can imagine, for example, a fetal human being suffering a freak accident that prevents its brain from developing for, say, fifty years. Begging a few metaphysical questions, we can then say that this individual whose life is decades shorter because he comes into existence decades later than he might have was deprived of many good years of life that he was likely to enjoy. But given that description, I think we would also want to say that, barring any compensating benefits from the accident, the individual in question was the victim of a misfortune. Moreover, while disappointment would not be a fitting response here, clearly dissatisfaction of some sort would be appropriate.
16. There are, then, at least two ways that certain unlikely deprivations can be "put into perspective," thereby tempering the disappointment that typically attends such deprivations. First, the fact that one has done well with respect to some kind of good can temper one's disappointment when one does not do as well as one was likely to have done. And second, the fact that it was unlikely that one would receive a benefit can temper one's disappointment when, even though it subsequently became likely that one would receive it, one is nevertheless deprived (as in the example of losing the winning lottery ticket down the storm drain). Some may want to insist that in certain cases of this sort, disappointment is unfitting even if conditions (1) and (2) of E are fulfilled. My own intuitions do not support this conclusion. But if the objection were pressed, I could respond by stipulating that the celeris paribus clause in E is satisfied only if the deprivation in question cannot be put into perspective in one of these two ways. This would narrow the scope of E, but E would still justify regarding the typical premature death as a misfortune and a genuine evil.
17. Perhaps I should say, "given the human condition as we know it." Advances in the biological sciences may extend the human life span be yond a few score years. It is not clear, then, how long it is possible for a human being to live. Nevertheless, as shall become apparent below I would not be satisfied with any finite life span that progress might bestow upon our descendants.
18. Lucretius On Nature, 3, 935-36.
19. Perhaps Lucretius was thinking along these lines when he offered this advice to the old who cannot bear the thought of their passing: "Come now give up all these things which are foreign to your time of life, and with a calm mind yield them to your sons, for yield you must" (my emphasis). Here Lucretius seems to move from the premise that inevitably the elderly are soon to be deprived of life's benefits to the conclusion that it is inappropriate for the elderly to be troubled by the prospect of this deprivation. See Lucretius, 3.959.
20. Nagel, "Death," 10. To be fair to Nagel, there are indications (9-10) that he may not regard this dismissal of the relevance of inevitability as decisive. He does concede that "we have to set some limits on how possible a possibility must be for its nonrealization to be a misfortune (or good fortune, should the possibility be a bad one)." And he suggests that the "most serious difficulty with the view that death is always an evil" is to justify regarding as a misfortune a "limitation, like mortality; that is normal to the species." Clearly struggling with this issue, he goes on to make a series of puzzling remarks. He says, for example, that a "man's sense of his own experience ⋯ does not embody this idea of a natural limit," and that human beings do not have an "essentially limited future." No doubt, but it is not clear what conclusion can be drawn from these facts. He then says, "Normality seems to have nothing to do with it, for the fact that we will all inevitably die in a few score years cannot by itself imply that it would not be good to live longer." Here he seems to make the same mistake made by Feldman. Granted, even if death in a few score years is inevitable, it may be good to live longer and, hence, comparatively bad not to live longer. But again, the real issue is not whether death is comparatively bad for the one who dies, but whether it is a genuine evil for the one who dies.
21. For example, a woman whose society has deeply rooted sexist norms suffers a misfortune when, inevitably, she is denied benefits (such as the opportunity to develop her talents) that she ought to receive. And although disappointment would not be the appropriate response to her inevitable deprivation, a variety of other negative emotional responses (for example, dissatisfaction and resentment) would be quite fitting.
22. My use of the terms 'want' and 'desire' in this essay is rather narrow. Most of us would (very reasonably I think) prefer to be omnipotent, but we do not desire omnipotence in the sense I intend. That is, we do not want it in the sense that implies that we will be dissatisfied if we do not receive it. This sense of 'want' and 'desire' is not uncommon. If I told you, for example, that I want to be omnipotent, you would be more likely to respond, "Too bad," or, "You want too much," rather than, "Who doesn't?"
23. See, for example, Palle Yourgrau, "The Dead ," Journal of Philosophy 86 (1987): 84-101.
24. I owe this point to Michael Ialacci.
25. Anthony L. Brueckner and John Martin Fischer, "Why Is Death Bad?" in The Metaphysics of Death, ed. John Martin Fischer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 226-27.
26. One possibility here is suggested by F. M. Kamm. She argues that losses are typically worse than mere privations of benefits at least partly because they involve a decline from a relatively good condition to a relatively bad one. Thus, on her view, death is troubling partly because it involves a sharp decline from being a recipient of life's benefits to not being a recipient of those benefits. See Morality, Mortality, vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 40-42, 67-71. Another possibility is suggested by considering just how high a standard is being set by Lucretius when he insists that it is unreasonable for the old to be troubled by the loss of life's benefits. I have never ruled the universe or flown like a bird. This makes it easy to accept the fact that I will never receive these benefits. But I am well acquainted with the usual benefits of human existence. This is partly why I want them. And regardless of how long I live, I cannot simply choose to stop wanting more of these benefits as if my desires flowed from a spigot that can be shut off at will. It is rather demanding, then, for Lucretius to insist that it is foolish and vicious of the elderly to continue wanting, for example, to be with their loved ones simply because they cannot possibly be with them too much longer. On the con trary, it may even be vicious to stop wanting to be with them. Imagine telling a loved one, "I have had my fill of life and am ready to die. Never seeing you again is not troubling to me."
27. Much of what we know about Epicurus's ethical system can be found in his Letter to Menoeceus, in Letters, Principle Doctrines, and Vatican Sayings (New York: Macmillan, 1988), 53-59.
28. Certain Buddhists might raise similar concerns. For it is a tenet of Buddhism that suffering is the product of attachment, of the grasping sort of desire that makes us cling to whatever we have (including ourselves). To rid ourselves of this sort of desire, we need to overcome the illusion that there is anything to cling to, that is, we must recognize that radical impermanence is one of the marks of all being. Even the persistence of the self is regarded as an illusion, and hence clinging to the self is a product of ignorance. Accordingly, we can free ourselves from our attachments if we can fully realize that everything is radically impermanent. And having freed ourselves from our attachments, we will be freed from our fear and loathing of death. (As many Buddhists would readily affirm, this is easier said than done.)