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Your death might be the worst thing ever to happen to you (but maybe you shouldn’t care)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Travis Timmerman
Travis Timmerman*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA
*
Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Deprivationism cannot accommodate the common sense assumption that we should lament our death iff, and to the extent that, it is bad for us. Call this the Nothing Bad, Nothing to Lament Assumption. As such, either this assumption needs to be rejected or deprivationism does. I first argue that the Nothing Bad, Nothing to Lament Assumption is false. I then attempt to figure out which facts our attitudes concerning death should track. I suggest that each person should have two distinct attitudes toward death: one determined by agent’s reasonable expectations about when she will die and one determined by the amount of metaphysically possible good one reasonably believes death precludes.

Keywords

Deathbadnessdeprivationismharmfitting attitudes
Type
Distinguished Lecture
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 46 , Issue 1 , February 2016 , pp. 18 - 37
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Journal of Philosophy 2016

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Footnotes

*

Earlier versions of this paper were given at the Facing Death conference at Rhodes University and the Immortality Project Capstone conference in Riverside, California.

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