When is death worst for you? Here are a few possible accounts of the harm of death, and the answers each imply:
(1) Pure Deprivation Account: death is worse for you the more (of a good future) it deprives you of. The worst time to die is thus the moment you come into existence.
(2) Discounted Deprivation Account: since what matters in survival is psychological continuity, death is worse for you the more it deprives you of future stages that are relevantly psychologically similar to your present self. Given that young children are drastically different, psychologically, from the adults they grow into, they are not so deprived by the loss of their adult stages as an adolescent or young adult would be. Depending on the precise details, we may expect this account to typically imply that young adults are most harmed by death.
(3) Present Preference Account: death is worse for you the more of your present preferences (e.g. for future goods or achievements) or projects it will thwart. This may vary drastically from person to person, but again we can at least expect that adults will typically be more harmed by death than small children, on this account.
#1 seems implausible to me. An earlier death is not always more tragic, even supposing that it thereby deprives one of more good times. Intuitively, it is more tragic to come close to some great success, only to lose it all at the last moment, than to die before one even had a chance to begin such an ambitious project.
The latter two accounts accommodate this intuition by holding that the ultimate success of one's projects wouldn't be (much of) a benefit to one's younger self anyway. We effectively deny the younger self full ownership of their distant future. Since you cannot be deprived of what you do not "own" (in the relevant sense) in the first place, we obtain the result that the younger self is not so harmed by death as we might otherwise have thought.
One difficulty with this view is that it sits poorly with the commonsense view that disciplining a young child now may be good for him on net, if it will bring him to have a better life in the distant future. If distant benefits are not benefits to this child, then our justifications would instead have to be impersonal and utilitarian: we discipline this young child for the sake of someone else -- the adult he will grow into. This is almost as counter-intuitive as the implication of #1 that we sought to avoid. Is there no way to accommodate both intuitions: that later deaths may be more tragic, and yet also that later benefits should indeed count as (significant, not excessively discounted) benefits to the younger self?
I think there is a way. The previous strategy sought to establish mature deaths as more tragic by discounting the harm done (the benefits lost) by childhood death. But there is another way to go here. We could hold fixed the deprivational disvalue of childhood death, and instead argue that additional harms are suffered in some cases of mature death. Some kind of pluralist account, combining #1 and #3 in appropriate proportions, might accommodate both intuitions.
By allowing that the younger person fully owns their future, we can say that later benefits are also benefits to the younger person. And yet we are not forced to conclude that an earlier death, by depriving them of more, must thereby be worse for them. For in addition to the harms of deprivation, we also need to consider the harms of thwarted projects and preferences. Pluralists may hold, of someone who lives a bit longer and in this time starts some new ambitious projects, that while they have been deprived of fewer future experiences than they would have been in case of an earlier death, this comparative good is outweighed by the additional tragedy of having an active project fail. Hence we can make sense of how it is that this later death is more tragic (a greater harm to the individual it befalls) than an earlier death would have been.
Wednesday, December 09, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
12 comments:
Alternately, tragedy for an individual could be absolute with each occurrence and therefore not a cumulative function. Why are two lost days necessarily more tragic than one? Instinctively, we may be more sad when a child dies than when a 100 year old man dies - but that is conceit, a youthful egoism. We may find it true that when we are old - no future projects ahead of us - each day is valued absolutely and completely, and maximal tragedy is experienced with the thought of death.
Or, if tragedy can be quantified, a person near death may feel a heightened connection to life, as each day they have to fight for theirs, and so place their days alive at greater value.
Or, supply and demand: the less days a person has in front of them, the more valuable they are, and thus the more tragic is their loss.
Of course, this whole question is complicated (perhaps, hopelessly) by making it about our most tragic vision of death. It would be easier (and more beneficial) to inquire what is the most tragic death from the perspective of the bereaved.
Roy - right, an alternative view would be that the harm of death to an individual is constant, whatever their circumstances. This does not seem very plausible though. Compare these two cases:
(A) Bob shoots me as I sleep, though I would otherwise have lived for several decades and completed several of my outstanding projects.
(B) While I sleep, Alan injects me with an irreversible poison that ensures I will live for no more than 24 hours. Then Bob comes along and (as before) shoots me dead.
It seems clear that Bob did me a greater harm in the first case than in the second. In the first he deprived me of an entire life, whereas in the second he deprived me of only a day.
N.B. That's not to say that "two lost days [are] necessarily more tragic than one." It depends (for starters) on what those particular days would have been like, and what you would have achieved with them.
Objectively, I recognize the argument represented by A versus B - though that a nonexistent element (the future) can be quantified, it seems a contravention of logic. But your initial questions is subjective: "when is death worst for you," and though I trust your judgement now, I also think you might feel differently were you to inhabit example B.
First, irreversible poisons that can be timed to kill with effect seem implausible. This, not to be argumentative, but to highlight that humans will almost universally deny their impending destruction. Place yourself in situation A and B - would your reaction to the gunmen be even incrementally different in either? Or, without the gunman, situation (C):
(C) I poison you (24 hrs to live), allow you to wake, and then cooly inform you of your fate (perhaps I lie and say someone else poisoned you); then I offer up a super-fast acting poison that will kill you in seconds.
For your conclusion you to be valid, you would have to be more tempted by the poison in option (C) than in an otherwise normal situation. Of course we cannot test this, but I think you may find that option (C) would amplify your rejection of the poison, and not diminish it. The obvious reason being that time is now short, all the days micro projects have now become macro, and though the equation is altered, you are as committed to your future projects as you ever were.
To put it another way, the measure of an entire life varies with each life and what we know about it; to tell me I will die in 24 hrs is to tell me my entire life will be 24 hours more. But those 24 hours do not become less valuable to me when you catalogue all the wonderful things I could be doing if my life were longer.
I'm not sure what you mean by "subjective", or why you think it's relevant that "humans will almost universally deny their impending destruction." If people have false beliefs about a situation, their "reaction" may fail to track what's really warranted. That's why I gave cases where the agent is killed in their sleep -- rather than getting distracted by the merely psychological question of how they would actually react to the news, we can assess the philosophical question of what preferences seem warranted (on the part of a fully-informed and sympathetic spectator).
"those 24 hours do not become less valuable to me when you catalogue all the wonderful things I could be doing if my life were longer."
Indeed, one's final 24 hours may well be worth more to one than they would have been were one to survive longer. Even so, those final 24 hours are not worth nearly as much as an extra few decades. (Otherwise, there would be no harm done by administering the 24-hr poison!)
"Even so, those final 24 hours are not worth nearly as much as an extra few decades." --Really, by what measure? If someone were to take only one point from what I have commented here, it should be that the quoted is invalid. That is, from the point of view of the person who is about to die (i.e. the subject). My argument is that the future is value neutral; it does not exist and never will exist. If it is not real, it cannot have real value. Saying that 2 days are more valuable than 1 is the equivalent of saying 2 magic talismans are more valuable than 1. And to the question "with what properties do you conduct this equation," you must answer, "imaginary ones."
Of course, that would be a valid answer. State that you would be more aggrieved by an early death than a late one on the basis of your imagination, and we can all nod our heads and say fine. It is not making an argument, but that may not have been your intent.
"If it is not real, it cannot have real value."
This is confused. When I talk about the "value" of various possible outcomes, this is equivalent to talking about how desirable the outcome would be. That is, bring to mind the various 'possible worlds' on offer, and assess which of these outcomes we have most reason to prefer.
Once we have a firm grasp of this concept -- what we might call 'hypothetical value' -- we can elucidate a further sense of 'value' that only real things possess. This further notion we could call 'realized value'. The two concepts are related as follows: a possible outcome realizes its hypothetical value if and only if the possibility is actualized.
All this is just to clarify the intuitive distinction between saying that something 'has value' versus saying that it 'would be of value'. Obviously non-actual possibilities can be such that they would be of value, if only the possibility could be brought about. But they just as obviously don't realize this value unless they're actually brought about.
Now, the relevant value claims for this discussion are obviously hypothetical ones. I'm suggesting that to live just 24 hours more would not be as good as it would be to live for several decades more. In other words: if faced with these two options, one would have reason to prefer the latter.
Perhaps you are a normative skeptic, and do not think that we can ever say what is better or worse (i.e. what we have more or less reason to prefer). In that case there's no point in continuing the discussion. (If you want to discuss normative realism vs. skepticism, you may find more appropriate posts under my 'meta-ethics' category.)
Let's start with you original question: "When is death worst for you?" Here is the formal response.
The question asks for a personal answer; it must originate internally. It cannot, for example, derive from extra-personal judgment that witnesses or survives the death; thus,
P(1): Any conclusion on the value of death must be particular to the person that is dying.
We do not know what will happen in the future; thus,
P(2): We evaluate our own death when we are alive, will full knowledge of only the past and present.
Not being able to know our future selves, we cannot predict the psychic effects of a given experience on our future. Hypotheses on future events therefore do not support either way that future events will be of value; thus,
P(3): We only evaluate experiences with present and past knowledge of their value to our lives.
With P(1-3), we can address the question (and you can point out which is flawed if you disagree).
X begins at day 1. From day 1, he considers his agenda for the month. Day 5, an appointment with his sisters - Day 10, a date with his girlfriend - Day 14, he will complete his novel - Day 27, a friends wedding - Day 31, a meeting with a film studio to discuss their buying of his novel.
When X moves through the week he will value each experience differently as he inhabits it, but from X's present vantage he views them all with equal delight. Now you argue that X would experience a greater loss if he met his end on Day 2 as opposed to Day 30; this on the basis that X has more "reason to prefer" death on Day 30. And that does seem intuitive. He will have achieved most everything on his agenda and only be deprived of one future activity.
Here we use P(1-3) to find my conclusion: P(3) tells us that X's values analysis on Day 1 when applied to Day 30 is invalid. In fact, what we find is that as X accomplished each activity, their value diminished and the value of future activities grew proportionally. By day 30, with one activity left, maximal value was placed in his advancement to day 31.
P(2) affirms that no matter the actual outcome of Day 31, the value X places on it at day 30 (provided that is when he dies) is its actual value.
And finally, P(1) affirms that X dying on day 2 only suffers him the loss of the value he attributed to his future on day 1. As he would no longer be alive, any other judgment from a frame of reference of day 2 onward would not be particular to him.
This demonstrates that while X has many future projects, a death on day 2 or day 30, or indeed any point in his future, would create for him maximal tragedy.
I disagree with pretty much all of that. In particular, I meant for my question to be asked and answered from a god's eye view. Given all the facts about some particular possible life, when would the person be most harmed by death? Worries about our epistemic limitations and inability to know the future are irrelevant to the fundamental question, which asks what considerations would (in theory) determine the answer, not whether we are (in practice) ordinarily in a position to recognize those considerations.
You are clear here (in this most recent comment) but your main entry did not specify this information about the intent of your question. It would have saved time had you stated this earlier (though, I am glad for our discussion).
It seems a more banal inquiry - "from a god's eye view." Yes, if we were to independently judge, we could then see that some things are lost and in the aggregate more harm is done the earlier the death. But that will never be the case. I prefer, as you can tell, the practical.
And to that effect my proof is persuasive, is it not?
Not really. Your claims that "we cannot predict" future events is excessively skeptical. I'd think we're often in a position to reasonably judge that a person was harmed by their early death (more than they would have been by a later death). But I'm not really interested to pursue this disagreement further.
Back to the topic, you write: "in the aggregate more harm is done the earlier the death". But that only follows if we accept what I called the 'pure deprivation account'. The question is whether we should, or whether there is a better account of what's harmful about death.
It is interesting to go back and reread your three accounts for the harm of death. The second one - Discounted Deprivation Account - is my "we cannot predict" future events argument. Though, I suspect that is a misquote, or a misunderstanding of my argument. It is not that we cannot predict future events, it is that we cannot reliably predict how we will, in the future, react to them. We only know how we feel about them in the present. It is not just maturation (from child to adult) that results in psychological change, but a host of factors.
To your topic, accounts 1, 2, and 3 are very similar - too similar for reasonable support of any individual (or combined) account. And the question loses it's bite if we must be dispassionate, objective observers.
No, you might want to go back and read my post more carefully. The Discounted Deprivation Account is nothing to do with an inability to predict how we will react in future. The discounting is instead based on the idea that distant future stages do not (metaphysically) 'belong' to the present individual.
Post a Comment
Visitors: check my comments policy first.
Non-Blogger users: If the comment form isn't working for you, email me your comment and I can post it on your behalf.