Views on Death

The action or fact of dying or being killed; the end of the life of a person or organism. The permanent ending of vital processes in a cell or tissue. To die is to cease to be alive.

But there seem to be cases in which a thing ceases to be alive without dying; or those non living organism that has yet to die. They exist but not alive, coasting until actual physical death, but emotionally and spiritually not alive. These include cases of suspended animation, where life processes stop but could be restarted, and fission, where a living being divides into two new living beings.

What is Dying? What a Rhetorical Question!!!

Everyone has died many times before, and died many different ways, we all are experts at dying.

What is the Art of Dying? Art is the creative activities, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power. As such, dying well is the Art form of Dying.

The Philosophical view of Death

Among the oldest philosophical questions are questions about personal identity. What is a person? What are the persistence conditions for people? The answers to these questions bear on the question of what happens to us when we die. Most nonphilosophers seem to believe that each person has a nonphysical soul that continues to exist after the death of the body, perhaps in heaven, hell, or purgatory. But this view is not widely held by philosophers, because the existence of a nonphysical soul is usually thought to be problematic. The most popular views about what we are include the view that we are, fundamentally and essentially, animals-—the biological view-—and the view that we are essentially psychological entities —the psychological view. If the biological view is true, then what we say about our persistence conditions should mirror what we say about the persistence conditions of other biological organisms such as trees. If we are essentially psychological entities, and our persistence conditions are determined by relations of psychological connectedness over time, it would seem we go out of existence at or before biological death (unless, perhaps, another organism stands in the appropriate psychological relations).

Fred Feldman defends the view that we continue to exist after death, either as dead people or as dead things that were once people. Eric Olson gives objections to this view, but concludes that all views about what happens to us when we die are beset with problems.

Dean Zimmerman argues that the view that it is possible to survive one's death is defensible on a variety of metaphysical views (which is not to say that we in fact do survive our deaths).

Philosophical questions about time have been thought to be relevant to questions about death. In various ways, it has been thought to matter whether the past and future are real. If the future is not real, perhaps we should not be afraid of our future deaths, since they are not real. If the past is not real, perhaps death cannot be bad for us, since once we die and are purely past, we will in no way exist to be the subject of harm.

Ted Sider argues that we need not adopt any particular view about the metaphysics of time in order to hold that death is bad. According to Sider, we must be careful to distinguish whether we are making ordinary claims, such as that the table is hard, or claims about fundamental reality, such as that there are no tables but only simples arranged tablewise. The claim that death is bad is an ordinary claim, while views about the reality of the past and future are views about the underlying nature of reality; the ordinary claim about death could be underwritten by a variety of metaphysical views but might not be undermined by any of them.

Lars Bergstrom suggests another way in which facts about time might affect how we should think about our deaths. If time is not linear but circular, then we will, in some sense, live again one day. Perhaps accepting this view about time should to some degree temper our sadness about our deaths.

As Gareth Matthews and Phillip Mitsis explain, the great Ancient Greek philosophers (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus) typically argued that we should not fear death, because it is not bad for us. Most of these arguments do not strike contemporary philosophers as compelling. For example, Socrates's suggestion that death is like a dreamless sleep and seems hard to take seriously.

But Epicurus's arguments, and those of his Roman admirer Lucretius, have continued to engage us; a few are convinced by them, and even those who think them unsound have different views about where they go wrong. Two arguments have received the most attention. The timing argument goes like this: there is no time at which death could harm me, since, as I go out of existence at the moment of my death, I do not overlap in time with my own death; thus death cannot be bad for me. The symmetry argument goes like this: there is no reason to be afraid of my own future nonexistence, because future nonexistence is no more to be feared than past nonexistence, and I neither fear nor have any reason to fear (or have any negative attitudetoward) my own past nonexistence.

Epicurus seemed to think that since a person goes out of existence when she dies, death cannot be bad because the dead person can have no painful experiences. But those who think death is bad are not moved by this line of reasoning. The standard way to account for the badness of death is to endorse some sort of deprivation account. According to the deprivation account, death is bad for someone if, and to the extent that, it deprives that individual of a more valuable life. Thus it is possible for death to be bad without involving any painful postmortem experiences.

Some have wondered whether the fact that death deprives its victim of the goods of life is sufficient for death to be a genuine misfortune for its victim.

Kai Draper has argued that other mere deprivations, such as failing to find Aladdin's lamp, do not seem like genuine misfortunes, because it is inappropriate to feel bad about them.

Christopher Belshaw also argues that mere deprivation is insufficient for death to be a misfortune. Rather, the victim must also have had a desire to live. So simply logic would dictate that if you never lived, then death cannot be a deprivation.

Joel Feinberg and George Pitcher claimed that death is bad in virtue of the fact that it frustrates the interests, that is, the desires, of the deceased. When death frustrates an interest, it is bad for the individual who had that interest, and moreover, it is bad for her at the time she had the interest. Thus we would seem to have an answer to the timing problem: death is bad for its victim at times before she died. This view enables us to account for posthumous harm in the same way we account for the harm of death: events occurring after one's death can frustrate interests one had while alive.

Williams's 1973 paper sparked much interesting discussion of immortality: would it be a good thing to live forever? Williams claimed that one would eventually run out of reasons to live, and then death would cease to be a misfortune. His arguments for these claims were suggestive but cryptic. John Fischer and Connie Rosati criticize those arguments. Fischer argues that a certain sort of immortal life might well be worth having, while Rosati appeals to facts about agency to explain why we want to extend our existence.

One reason we might care about these questions about the badness of death is that we care about justifying the claim that killing is wrong, and the wrongness of killing seems to have something to do with how bad death is for the victim. If death weren't bad, we might think our attitudes toward murder were unjustified. But it seems wrong to say that the degree of wrongness of killing someone depends on how bad it is for that person to die, because even if death would not be very bad for its victim (perhaps because he is very old and does not have long to live anyway), it would still be seriously wrong to murder that person.

Matthew Hanser attempts to explain by appeal to a respect-based view of the wrongness of killing. While killing another person is normally seriously wrong, there are some cases of killing about which it is not so obvious what to say. What, if anything, might make it permissible to kill fetuses, nonhuman animals, combatants, murderers, or the terminally ill?

Sometimes there is controversy over the wrongness of killing certain individuals at least in part in virtue of controversy over whether death is bad for those individuals. For example, it is sometimes argued that death is not bad for nonhuman animals or human fetuses in virtue of the fact that they lack relevant desires, or have insufficient psychological connectedness over time.

Tags: death, afterlife, soul, reincarnation