Smooth Motions

1. Death is annihilation.
2. The living have not yet been annihilated (otherwise they wouldn’t be alive).
3. Death does not affect the living. (from 1 and 2)
4. So, death is not bad for the living. (from 3)
5. For something to be bad for somebody, that person has to exist, at least.
6. The dead do not exist. (from 1)
7. Therefore, death is not bad for the dead. (from 5 and 6)
8. Therefore death is bad for neither the living nor the dead. (from 4 and 7)

2. The arguments concerning the Epicurean indifference to the temporal duration of the good (e.g., PD 19, 20; elsewhere), can be connected to the claim that death is not a harm. There appears to be textual evidence that this connection was intended or appreciated, e.g., Letter to Menoeceus 126, De Rerum Natura 3.940-50, 3.1088-90, probably elsewhere. (Lucretius’ point that “we cannot deduct a single moment of the time of our death” seems kind of irrelevant to me, as I would not think of the aim as minimizing the time that one is dead [an infinite span of time], but rather increasing the amount of time one spends enjoying life).

Since what gets identified with the highest good cannot be increased with time, cutting one’s pleasure short (via death) cannot be construed as a deprivation of goods. And so even if we allow that depriving someone of a good constitutes a harm, this does not occur in death. However, as I’ve expressed before, this notion of indifference to temporal duration is very mysterious to me — even on the assumption that the good for Epicureans involves a state of aponia and ataraxia. Nowhere in the readings can I find a cogent argument for such temporal duration indifference. Being in a good state for a longer period of time seems (all else equal) better than being in a good state for a shorter period of time.

If temporal duration indifference about the good is justified, this would seem to support the conclusion that death is not a harm. However, it seems that it could do so in a rather straightforward manner. Roughly: since more life is not better, and since death involves no negative sense experience, death is not a harm (or a bad thing). But then this seems to make the “no subject of harm” considerations (mentioned in Letter to Menoeceus) superfluous.

3. Lucretius’ “symmetry argument”: “Look back now and consider how the bygone ages of eternity that elapsed before our birth were nothing to us. Here, then, is a mirror in which nature shows us the time to come after our death. Do you see anything fearful in it? Do you perceive anything grim? Does it not appear more peaceful than the deepest sleep?” (De Rerum Natura 3.972-6).

Now, this might be interpreted not as an argument for the conclusion that death is not a harm, but rather merely as remarks intended to ameliorate one’s fear of death. The latter seems to be a viable interpretation, and I would not have much (if anything) to say against Lucretius on this score. But if this passage was intended to be an argument about the harmlessness of death, it does not seem to be very persuasive.

The most I would see it doing on this score is reiterating Epicurus’ claim that good and bad must consist in some sense-experience. It does not address the commonsense idea that a deprivation of a good is a bad thing (independent of any negative sense experience associated with the deprivation).

If deprivation of good is generally a bad thing, then we might accept some kind of temporal symmetry — and claim both that it is bad that a good life will not continue indefinitely into the future and that it is bad that a good life did not begin indefinitely far into the past. If deprivation of a good is not generally a bad thing, but a bad thing when it deprives, e.g., an identifiable individual (as opposed to possible, indeterminate individuals) of goods, then we might accept a kind of temporal asymmetry — and claim that, for a particular individual living a good life, while it is a bad thing that her life will not continue indefinitely into the future, it does not make sense to think of it as a bad thing that she was not born earlier. There are various reasons for deciding between an asymmetric view versus a symmetric view (e.g., whether harms and benefits must affect identifiable individuals; whether harms and benefits are relative to existent desires, etc.). Asymmetric views tend to think it sensible to speak of the harm or badness of death, but not of the harm or badness of not ever having been brought into existence. (Also see Thomas Nagel’s paper “Death” in Mortal Questions; and Parfit discusses many of these sorts issues in Reasons and Persons).

4. If Epicureans lack a single, coherent argument to the conclusion that death is not a harm, then perhaps their multiple distinct arguments to this conclusion might be best explained by the pressing need to justify holding an anxiety-reducing belief (that death is not a harm). Without conclusive evidence that none of the Epicurean arguments establish the claim that death is not a harm, the below suggestion may seem uncharitable of me. However, perhaps the implicit reasoning of Epicureans went something like this: If we believe that death constitutes a harm (or a bad event) for us, then we will fear death. We should not fear death (as it causes unnecessary suffering). Therefore, we should not believe that death constitutes a harm for us. However, this line of reasoning would (at best) only support the conclusion that we should not believe that death is a harm for us, not that death is not (really) a harm for us.