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Philos Stud (2013) 162:309317
DOI 10.1007/s11098-011-9766-6
Fred Feldman
Published online: 23 June 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
Abstract According to the Deprivation Approach, the evil of death is to be explained by the fact that death deprives us of the goods we would have enjoyed if we had lived longer. But the Deprivation Approach confronts a problem rst discussed by Lucretius. Late birth seems to deprive us of the goods we would have enjoyed if we had been born earlier. Yet no one is troubled by late birth. So its hard to see why we should be troubled by its temporal mirror image, early death. In a 1986 paper, Anthony Brueckner and John Martin Fischer appealed to a version of Derek Parts Bias toward the Future; they claimed that early death deprives us of future goods that we care about, while late birth deprives us of past goods that we dont care about. In this paper I show that the BruecknerFischer principle is open to several possible interpretations, but that it does not solve the Lucretius problem no matter how we understand it.
Keywords Death Deprivation Approach Lucretius The mirror of time
Symmetry problem Brueckner and Fischer Part Bias toward the future
Asymmetry
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Its natural to think that deathespecially premature deathcan be a terrible thing for the one who dies. In many cases, when we are crying at a funeral, some component of our grief seems to arise from concern about the decedent. We think that his early death was a tragedy for him. Puzzles arise when we try to explain precisely why death is so terrible for the one who dies in those cases in which it is terrible.
F. Feldman (&)
Department of Philosophy, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Amherst, MA 01003, USA e-mail: [email protected]
Brueckner and Fischer on the evil of death
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310 F. Feldman
Three familiar points of clarication: (a) Often a persons death is bad for others; but thats not what is in question here. We are focusing on the question why death is bad for the one who dies. (b) When we speak of deaths being bad for someone, we should not confuse death with dying. If a person suffers a lot as he is...