DEATH
By Thomas Nagel From Mortal
Questions (New York: Cambridge U. Press, 1979) pp. 1-10. If death is the
unequivocal and permanent end of our existence, the question arises whether
it is a bad thing to die. There is conspicuous
disagreement about the matter: some people think death is dreadful; others
have no objection to death per se, though they hope their own will be
neither premature nor painful. Those in the former category tend to think
those in the latter are blind to the obvious, while the latter suppose the
former to be prey to some sort of confusion. On the one hand it can be said
that life is all we have and the loss of it is the greatest loss we can
sustain. On the other hand it may be objected that death deprives this
supposed loss of its subject, and that if we realize that death is not an
unimaginable condition of the persisting person, but a mere blank, we will
see that it can have no value whatever, positive or negative. Since I want to leave
aside the question whether we are, or might be, immortal in some form, I
shall simply use the word 'death' and its cognates in this discussion to mean
permanent death, unsupplemented by any form of conscious survival. I
want to ask whether death is in itself an evil; and how great an evil, and of
what kind, it might be. The question should be of interest even to those who
believe in some form of immortality, for one's attitude towards immortality
must depend in part on one's attitude toward death. If death is an evil
at all, it cannot be because of its positive features, but only because of
what it deprives us of. I shall try to deal with the difficulties surrounding
the natural view that death is an evil because it brings to an end all the
goods that life contains. We need not give an account of these goods here,
except to observe that some of them, like perception, desire, activity, and
thought, are so general as to be constitutive of human life. They are widely
regarded as formidable benefits in themselves, despite the fact that they are
conditions of misery as well as of happiness, and that a sufficient quantity
of more particular evils can perhaps outweigh them. That is what is meant, I
think by the allegation that it is good simply to be alive, even if one is
undergoing terrible experiences. The situation is roughly this: There are
elements which, it added to one's experience, make life better; there are
other elements which if added to one's experience, make life worse. But what
remains when these are set aside is not merely neutral: it is
emphatically positive. Therefore life is worth living even when the bad
elements of experience are plentiful, and the good ones too meager to
outweigh the bad ones on their own. The additional positive weight is
supplied by experience itself, rather than by any of its consequences. I shall not discuss
the value that one person's life or death may have for others, or its
objective value, but only the value that it has for the person who is its
subject. That seems to me the primary case, and the case which presents the
greatest difficulties. Let me add only two observations. First, the value of
life and its contents does not attach to mere organic survival; almost
everyone would be indifferent (other things equal) between immediate death
and immediate coma followed by death twenty years later without reawakening.
And second, like most goods, this can be multiplied by time: more is better
than less. The added quantities need not be temporally continuous (though
continuity has its social advantages). People are attracted to the possibility
of long-term suspended animation or freezing, followed by the resumption of
conscious life, because they can regard it from within simply as a continuation
of their present life. If these techniques are ever perfected, what from
outside appeared as a dormant interval of three hundred years could be
experienced by the subject as nothing more than a sharp discontinuity in the
character of his experiences. I do not deny, or course, that this has its own
disadvantages. Family and friends may have died in the meantime; the language
may have changed; the comforts of social, geographical, and cultural
familiarity would be lacking. Nevertheless those inconveniences would not
obliterate the basic advantage of continued, thought discontinuous,
existence. If we turn from what
is good about life to what is bad about death, the case is completely
different. Essentially, though there may be problems about their
specification, what we find desirable in life are certain states, conditions,
or types of activity. It is being alive, doing certain things,
having certain experiences, that we consider good. But if death is an evil,
it is the loss of life, rather than the state of being dead, or
nonexistent, or unconscious, that is objectionable.1 This asymmetry is important. If
it is good to be alive, that advantage can be attributed to a person at each
point of his life. It is good of which Bach had more than Schubert, simply
because he lived longer. Death, however, is not an evil of which Shakespeare
has so far received a larger portion than Proust. If death is a disadvantage,
it is not easy to say when a man suffers it. There are two other
indications that we do not object to death merely because it involves long
periods on nonexistence. First, as has been mentioned, most of us would not
regard the temporary suspension of life, even for substantial
intervals, as in itself a misfortune. If it ever happens that people can be
frozen without reduction of the conscious lifespan, it will be inappropriate
to pity those who are temporarily out of circulation. Second, none of us
existed before we were born (or conceived), but few regard that as a
misfortune. I shall have more to say about this later. The point that death
is not regarded as an unfortunate state enables us to refute a curious
but very common suggestion about the origin of the fear of death. It is often
said that those who object to death have made the mistake of trying to
imagine what it is like to be dead. It is alleged that the failure to
realize that this task is logically impossible (for the banal reason that
there is nothing to imagine) leads to the conviction that death is mysterious
and therefore a terrifying prospective state. But this diagnosis is
evidently false, for it is just as impossible to imagine being totally
unconscious as to imagine being dead (though it is easy enough to imagine
oneself, from the outside, in either of those conditions). Yet people who are
averse to death are not usually averse to unconsciousness (so long as it does
not entail a substantial cut in the total duration of waking life). If we are to make
sense of the view that to die is bad, it must be on the ground that life is a
good and death is the corresponding deprivation or loss, bad not because of
any positive features but because of the desirability of what it removes. We
must now turn to the serious difficulties which this hypothesis raises,
difficulties about loss and privation in general, and about death in
particular. Essentially, there
are three types of problem. First, doubt may be raised whether anything
can be bad for a man without being positively unpleasant to him:
specifically, it may be doubted that there are any evils which consist merely
in the deprivation or absence of possible goods, and which do not depend on
someone's minding that deprivation. Second, there are special
difficulties, in the case of death, about how the supposed misfortune is to
be assigned to a subject at all. there is doubt both to who its
subject is, and as to when he undergoes it. So long as a person
exists, he has not yet died, and once he has died, he no longer exists; so
there seems to be no time when death, if it is a misfortune, can be ascribed
to its unfortunate subject. the third type or difficulty concerns the
asymmetry, mentioned above, between out attitudes to posthumous and prenatal
nonexistence. How can the former be bad if the latter is not? It should be
recognized that if these are valid objections to counting death as an evil,
they will apply to many other supposed evils as well. The first type of
objection is expressed in general form by the common remark that what you
don't know can't hurt you. It means that even if a man is betrayed by his
friends, ridiculed behind his back, and despised by people who tread him
politely to his face, none of it can be counted as a misfortune for him so
long as he does not suffer as a result. It means that a man is not injured if
his wishes are ignored by the executor of his will, or if, after his death,
the belief becomes current that all the literary works on which his fame rest
were really written by his brother, who died in Mexico at the age of 28. It
seems to me worth asking what assumptions about good and evil lead to these
drastic restrictions. All the questions
have something to do with time. There certainly are goods and evils of a
simple kind (including some pleasures and pains) which a person possesses at
a given time simply in virtue of his condition at that time. But this is not
true of all the things we regard as good or bad for a man. Often we need to
know his history to tell whether something is a misfortune or not; this
applies to ills like deterioration, deprivation, and damage. Sometimes his
experiential state is relatively unimportant -- as in the case of a
man who wastes his life in the cheerful pursuit of a method of communicating
with asparagus plants. Someone who holds that all goods and evils must be
temporally assignable states of the person may of course try to bring
difficult cases into line by pointing to the pleasure or pain that more
complicated goods and evils cause. Loss, betrayal, deception, and ridicule
are on this view bad because people suffer when they learn of them. But it
should be asked how our ideas of human value would have to be constituted to
accommodate these cases directly instead. One advantage of such an account
might be that it would enable us to explain why the discovery of these
misfortunes causes suffering -- in a way that makes it reasonable. For the
natural view is that the discovery of betrayal makes us unhappy because it is
bad to be betrayed -- not that betrayal is bad because its discovery makes us
unhappy. It therefore seems to
me worth exploring the position that most good and ill fortune has as its
subject a person identified by his history and his possibilities, rather than
merely by his categorical state of the moment -- and that while this subject
can be exactly located in a sequence of places and times, the same is not
necessarily true of the goods and ills that befall him. 2 These ideas can be
illustrated by an example of deprivation whose severity approaches that of
death. Suppose an intelligent person receives a brain injury that reduces him
to the mental condition of a contented infant, and that such desires as
remain to him can be satisfied by a custodian, so that he is free from care.
Such a development would be widely regarded as a severe misfortune, not only
for his friends and relations, or for society, but also and primarily, for
the person himself. This does not mean that a contented infant is
unfortunate. The intelligent adult who has been reduced to this
condition is the subject of the misfortune. He is the one we pity, though of
course he does not mind his condition. It is in fact the same condition he
was in at the age of three months, except that he is bigger. If we did not
pity him then, why pity him now; in any case, who is there to pity? The intelligent
adult has disappeared, and for a creature like the one before us, happiness
consists in a full stomach and a dry diaper. If these objections
are invalid, it must be because they rest on a mistaken assumption about the
temporal reelation between the subject of a misfortune and the circumstances
which constitute it. If, instead of concentrating exclusively on the
oversized baby before us, we consider the person he was, and the person he could
be now, then his reduction to this state and the cancellation of his natural
adult development constitute a perfectly intelligible catastrophe. This case should
convince us that it is arbitrary to restrict the goods and evils that can
befall a man to nonrelational properties ascribable to him at particular
times. As it stands, that restriction excludes not only such cases of gross
degeneration, but also a good deal of what is important about success and
failure, and other features of a life that have the character of processes. I
believe we can go further, however. There are goods and evils which are
irreducibly relational; they are features of the relations between a person,
with spatial and temporal boundaries of the usual sort, and circumstances
which may not coincide with him either in space or in time. A man's life
includes much that does not take place within the boundaries of his life.
These boundaries are commonly crossed by the misfortunes of being deceived,
or despised, or betrayed. (If this is correct, there is a simple account of
what is wrong with breaking a deathbed promise. It is an injury to the dead
man. For certain purposes it is possible to regard time as just another type
of distance.). The case of mental degeneration shows us an evil that depends
on a contrast between the reality and the possible alternatives. A man is the
subject of good and evil as much becomes he has hopes which may or may not be
fulfilled, or possibilities which may or may not be realized, as because of
his capacity to suffer and enjoy. If death is an evil, it must be accounted for
in these terms, and the impossibility of locating it within life should not
trouble us. When a man dies we
are left with his corpse, and while a corpse can suffer the kind of mishap
that may occur to an article of furniture, it is not a suitable object for
pity. The man, however, is. He has lost his life, and if he had not died, he
would have continued to live it, and to possess whatever good there is in
living. If we apply to death the account suggested for the case of dementia,
we shall say that although the spatial and temporal locations of the
individual who suffered the loss are clear enough, the misfortune itself
cannot be so easily located. One must be content just to state that his life
is over and there will never be anymore of it. That fact, rather than
his past or present condition, constitutes his misfortune, if it is one.
Nevertheless if there is a loss, someone must suffer it, and he must
have existence and specific spatial and temporal location even if the loss
itself does not. The fact that Beethoven had no children may have been a
cause of regret to him, or a sad thing for the world, but it cannot be
described as a misfortune for the children that he never had. All of us, I
believe, are fortunate to have been born. But unless good and ill can be
assigned to an embryo, or even to an unconnected pair of gametes, it cannot
be said that not to be born is a misfortune. (That is a factor to be
considered in deciding whether abortion and contraception are akin to
murder.) This approach also
provides a solution to the problem of temporal asymmetry, pointed out by
Lucretius. He observed that no one finds it disturbing to contemplate the
eternity preceding his own birth, and he took this to show that it must be
irrational to fear death, since death is simply the mirror image of the prior
abyss. That is not true, however, and the difference between the two explains
why it is reasonable to regard them differently. It is true that both the
time before a man's birth and the time after his death is time of which his
death deprives him. It is time in which, had he not died then, he would be
alive. Therefore any death entails the loss of some life that its
victim would have led had he not died at that tor any earlier point. We know
perfectly well what it wold be for him to have had it instead of losing it,
and there is no difficulty in identifying the loser. But we cannot say
that the time prior to a man's birth is time in which he would have lived had
he been born not then but earlier. For aside from the brief margin permitted
by premature labor, he could not have been born earlier: anyone born
substantially earlier than he would have been someone else. Therefore the
time prior to his birth prevents him from living. His birth, when it occurs,
does not entail the loss to him of any life whatever. The direction of time
is crucial in assigning possibilities to people or other individuals.
Distinct possible lives of a single person can diverge from a common
beginning, but they cannot converge to a common conclusion from diverse
beginnings. (The latter would represent not a set of different possible lives
of one individual, but a set of distinct possible individuals, whose lives
have identical conclusions.) Given an identifiable individual, countless
possibilities for his continued existence are imaginable, and we can clearly
conceive of what it would be for him to go on existing indefinitely. However
inevitable it is that this will not come about, its possibility is still that
of the continuation of a good for him, if life is the good, we take it to be.
3 We are left,
therefore with the question whether the nonrealization of this possibility is
in every case a misfortune, or whether it depends on what can naturally be
hoped for. This seems to me the most serious difficulty with the view that
death is always an evil. Even if we can dispose of the objections against
admitting misfortune that is not experienced, or cannot be assigned to a
definite time in the person's life, we still 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). The death of Keats at 24
is generally regarded as tragic; that of Tolstoy at 82 is not. Although they
will be both be dead for ever, Keats' death deprived him of many years of
life which were allowed to Tolstoy; so in a clear sense Keats' loss was
greater (though not in the sense standardly employed in mathematical
comparison between infinite quantities). However, this does not prove that
Tolstoy's loss was insignificant. Perhaps we record an objection only to
evils which are gratuitously added to the inevitable; the fact that it is
worse to die at 24 than at 82 does not imply that it is not a terrible thing
to die at 82, or even at 806. the question is whether we can regard as a
misfortune any limitations, like mortality, that is normal to the species.
Blindness or near-blindness is not a misfortune for a mole, nor would it be
for a man, if that were the natural condition of the human race. The trouble is that
life familiarizes us with the goods of which death deprives us. We are
already able to appreciate them, as a mole is not able to appreciate vision.
If we put aside doubts about their status as goods and grant that their
quantity is in part a function of their duration, the question remains
whether death, no matter when it occurs, can be said to deprive its victim of
what is in the relevant sense a possible continuation of life. The situation is an
ambiguous one. Observed from without, human beings obviously have a natural
lifespan and cannot live much longer than a hundred years. A man's sense of
his own experience, on the other hand, does not embody this idea of a natural
limit. His existence defines for him an essentially open-ended possible
future, containing the usual mixture of goods and evils that he has found so
tolerable in the past. Having been gratuitously introduced to the world by a
collection of natural, historical, and social accidents, he finds himself the
subject of a life, with an indeterminate and not essentially limited
future. Viewed in this way, death, no matter how inevitable, is an abrupt
cancellation of indefinitely extensive possible goods. 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 be good to live longer.
Suppose that we were all inevitably going to die in agony -- physical
agony lasting six months. Would inevitability make that prospect any
less unpleasant? And why should it be different for a deprivation? If the
normal lifespan were a thousand years, death at 80 would be a tragedy. As
things are, it may just be a more widespread tragedy. If there is no limit to
the amount of life that it would be good to have, then it may be that a bad
end is in store for us all. Notes
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