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Notes
When a person’ death prevents her from enjoying good things in life, we can also say that her death deprives her of those good things. This is how the deprivation account got its name. But it is worth stressing that the deprivation account does not entail that death is always bad for the one who dies. In some cases, death can be good for a person when its occurrence prevents the person from undergoing further pain and suffering.
The present discussion concerns personal value, i.e., things being good or bad for a person. So, in this paper, what is valuable should always be understood as what is valuable for a person.
More precisely, Bradley thinks the only attitude we should have toward death is the attitude of indifference. So, for him, any positive or negative attitudes would be unfitting.
Bradley defines “prevention” in counterfactual terms, which accords with the usage by deprivation theorists described in section 1: Event A prevents Event B from happening if and only if A occurs and B does not occur, and B would have occurred had A not occurred.
Some philosophers allow that backtracking counterfactual conditionals can be true. See, for example, Lewis (1979).
This point echoes the second clarificatory remark in Section 1.
I use the term “entity” broadly to include not only objects but also properties. And what I understand by a “fact” is an object’s instantiating a property, so a fact, in the present context, is something that can be represented by a true proposition but not itself identical to it.
I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this point.
An anonymous reviewer’s helpful comments led me to add the stipulation that the disease does not involve any painful experiences. This stipulation is needed in order to guarantee that any disease-related fear Bamm-Bamm has is directed toward merely comparative badness.
This example is adapted from Johansson and Risberg (2023, p. 516).
Here I assume that had Betty not decided to throw away the pill, she would have decided to let Bamm-Bamm take it.
The following discussion is inspired by Howard (2022), and the examples used are also from his article.
I mentioned the example of resentment and apology only for illustrative purposes. I am open to the possibility that the fittingness of resentment is not affected by the presence of an apology and the act of forgiving. For an argument for this view, see Howard (2022, p. 84).
These remarks are reminiscent of Frances Kamm’s (2020) Willhavehadism. Very roughly, Willhavehadism holds that the badness of one’s death is determined by how many goods one has enjoyed before she dies. It is clear that deprivation theorists must disagree with Willhavehadism on this point, for according to the deprivation account, the value of death is solely determined by what would have happened to the person had she not died. Despite the disagreement over what determines the value of death, deprivation theorists can still maintain that how well a person lives is relevant to whether her death merits fear or not. More specifically, deprivation theorists can hold that how well a person lives acts as a background condition that affects whether a comparatively bad death merits fear, even though a person’s lifetime well-being does not itself figure into the determination of whether the death is bad at all. I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for calling my attention to the similarity between Willhavehadism and the idea implied in my remarks.
For an excellent discussion of this kind of fear of death, see Behrendt (2019).
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to David Palmer for his guidance on this writing project. And I would also like to thank Clerk Shaw for his valuable comments on the earlier draft of this paper. Finally, thanks are due to an anonymous reviewer for extremely helpful comments.
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Fan, N. Two Kinds of Arguments Against the Fittingness of Fearing Death. J Value Inquiry (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-023-09978-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-023-09978-x