Abstract
According to the “deprivation approach,” a person’s death is bad for her to the extent that it deprives her of goods. This approach faces the Lucretian problem that prenatal non-existence deprives us of goods just as much as death does, but does not seem bad at all. The two most prominent responses to this challenge—one of which is provided by Frederik Kaufman (inspired by Thomas Nagel) and the other by Anthony Brueckner and John Martin Fischer—claim that prenatal non-existence is relevantly different from death. This paper criticizes these responses.
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Notes
I presuppose here that we are not going to have any mental states after we have died.
That a person is “intrinsically better off” in one scenario than in some other scenario just means that the former scenario is intrinsically better—better in itself—for her. Thus, it does not mean that she is better off in terms of her own intrinsic features, for instance.
Lucretius (1940, p. 134).
Kaufman’s suggestion is endorsed in Benatar (2006, p. 215).
Kaufman does not give a precise formulation of the deprivation approach, and I am not confident he would endorse the formulation I used in Sect. 1 (“something is overall bad for a person if and only if, and to the extent that, she would have been on balance intrinsically better off if it had not obtained”). But it does seem plausible to construe his suggestion as a defense of that particular view. For, presumably, something deprives me of being on balance intrinsically better off if and only if I would have been on balance intrinsically better off if it had not occurred. And Kaufman might claim that, if an individual lacks a capacity for preferences, it cannot be true that she would have been on balance intrinsically better off if some actual event had not occurred—for this requires her to be worse off in the actual scenario; and it is at least arguable that this in turn requires her to have a capacity for preferences in the actual scenario.
I write ‘roughly’ because Kaufman grants that not every single detail of my psychology is essential to thick me (Kaufman 1999, p. 14).
In Johansson 2008, I discuss some other possible interpretations of Kaufman, including the suggestion that some basic personality traits and attitudinal dispositions are essential to me. In that article I also criticize Fischer’s suggestion that the subject of deprivation and harm is either (a) an aggregate of a thin person and a capacity to make evaluations and form preferences or (b) an aggregate of the two entities in (a) and a thick person (Fischer 2006, p. 195).
After this paper was written, and after it was possible for me to make any substantial changes to it, Brueckner and Fischer published a response to Feldman 2011, acknowledging that BF (see Sect. 7) was too simplistic (Brueckner and Fischer 2012). They propose that BF should be adjusted to this principle:
BF*: Death deprives us of something it is rational for individuals to care about, whereas prenatal nonexistence deprives us of something it is not rational for individuals to care about. (Brueckner and Fischer 2012, §3)
They also suggest the following de dicto interpretation of BF*:
BF*(dd): When death is bad for an individual X, it is bad for X because it is rational for X to care about the fact that if X dies, X will be deprived of some pleasant experiences (though X may not know what experiences these will be) that X otherwise would have enjoyed (whereas prenatal nonexistence is not bad for an individual because, even though it deprives him or her of pleasant experiences, it is not rational for an individual to care about the fact that if he or she is born late he or she will be deprived of some pleasant experiences). (Brueckner and Fischer 2012, §3)
BF* and BF*(dd) do not require the person whose death is bad for her to actually care about a certain fact; what is important is instead what it is rational for her to care about (whether or not she in fact does so). However, my main points in Sects. 8 and 9 apply here as well. First, just as BF(dd) is an odd interpretation of BF (see Sect. 8), so BF*(dd) is an odd interpretation of BF*: on BF*(dd), the relevant object of X’s care is the fact that if X dies, X will be deprived of some pleasant experiences; but that fact is not something of which death deprives X. Second, just as how well off I am in a certain possible world w does not seem to depend on what I care about in some world other than w (see Sect. 9), so it does not seem to depend on what it is rational for me to care about in some world other than w. It might well depend on what it is rational for me to care about in w; but there is no reason to deny that if I had been born earlier, it would have been rational for me to care about the pleasures that I would thereby receive. Third, just as the deprivation approach, in order to be plausible, should not be construed as saying that an event is bad for me by depriving me of something I in fact care about (see Sect. 9), so it should not be construed as saying that an event is bad for me by depriving me of something it is in fact rational for me to care about. Again, compare with pain and goodness: even if, for some reason, it is not actually rational for a person to care about a painful torture, it is still good for her to avoid the torture, at least provided that, if she had been tortured, it would have been rational for her to care about it and she would have been on balance worse off. Surely the analogous thing holds for pleasure and badness.
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Many thanks to audiences at Lund University, the University of Gothenburg, and Uppsala University for their helpful comments on a distant ancestor of this paper.
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Johansson, J. Past and Future Non-Existence. J Ethics 17, 51–64 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-012-9137-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-012-9137-3