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A Good Death

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 July 2016

DALE DORSEY
DALE DORSEY*
Affiliation:
University of Kansasddorsey@ku.edu
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Abstract

Largely in response to Epicurus’ famous challenge, philosophers have been quite imaginative in coming up with ways in which death is bad. Most often, death is described as an instrumental bad. Given that I would have obtained additional welfare benefits had I not died when I did, my death causes me to miss out on intrinsic goods I might otherwise have obtained. In this article, however, I argue that the standard account (and its corollaries) misses an important feature of the dis/value of death. I argue that some deaths can be good – intrinsically good – for the person who dies.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , June 2017 , pp. 153 - 174
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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References

1 Nagel, Thomas, ‘Death’, in Mortal Questions (Cambridge, 1979)Google Scholar; Luper, Steven, The Philosophy of Death (Cambridge, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Feldman, Fred, Confrontations with the Reaper (Oxford, 1993)Google Scholar; Bradley, Ben, Well-Being and Death (Oxford, 2009)CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

2 Kamm, Frances, Morality, Mortality, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1993), ch. 1Google Scholar.

3 David Webb Peoples, Unforgiven.

4 Most historians agree that there was, in fact, an African-American man named John Henry who did, in fact, battle a steam drill, succumbing in its aftermath. The questions that remain largely concern the location of the battle (sites in West Virginia and Alabama seem most likely) and John Henry's origin (was he a prisoner who worked on the railroad as part of a chain gang, or a former, freed slave?).

5 Some may disagree and instead claim that it is not the deaths considered here that are intrinsically good, but rather the events surrounding said deaths (including, e.g., Henry's triumph over the steam drill). This is an important objection, which I discuss in more detail in section III.3.

6 Of course, not the only explanation. One possibility is that this death might have contributory value – it might itself lack intrinsic value but might contribute to the intrinsic value of some other feature of Irwin's life. As I'll explore below, I'm not particularly critical of this alternative, but argue instead for the ‘intrinsic’ interpretation.

7 You'll notice that I insist that projects, to be valuable, must be valued. While I find this constraint eminently plausible, it is not everyone's cup of tea. Indeed, the argument to come does not depend on even this level of subjectivism; one could simply substitute the word ‘valuable’ for ‘valued’ if one believes that there are some valuable projects that need not be valued by the person in question. I'll continue to use the latter word for the purposes of exposition, however.

8 Bradford, Gwen, Achievement (Oxford, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Hurka, Thomas, Perfectionism (Oxford, 1993), esp. chs. 8-9Google Scholar.

10 Portmore, Douglas, ‘Welfare, Achievement, and Self-Sacrifice’, Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 3 (2007)Google Scholar.

11 Scanlon, T. M., What We Owe To Each Other (Cambridge, MA, 1998), ch. 3Google Scholar.

12 Keller, Simon, ‘Welfare and the Achievement of Goals’, Philosophical Studies 121 (2004), pp. 27–41 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 The most significant minus is the suggestion that, because projects are necessarily temporally extended, the value of projects does not accrue at any one particular time; if this is correct, it would appear that a plausible claim about evaluative benefits, i.e. that all welfare is temporally located, must be denied. In addition, one must also deny the (again plausible) claim that the welfare value of a whole life is an additive function of the welfare value of individual times in that life. The most significant plus is the ability to accommodate a Moorean claim about intrinsic value (explored below), viz. that all intrinsic value supervenes on intrinsic properties. I'm not going to explore the plausibility of any of these theses here, and will simply leave open the suggestion that the benefit of projects is borne, in part, by the projects themselves.

14 Someone might dispute this explanation on the following grounds. The first person's win is better than the second person's not because of the relevant relation to the first person's other life events, but instead because (as stipulated) the first person puts her rational capacities to use in winning. Perfectionists, for instance, will hold that the exercise of her capacities in this way is an intrinsic good-making feature of this event for her that is perhaps absent from the second person's win-by-blind-luck. And while I'm not interested in rejecting perfectionism here (I have done so elsewhere, see Dorsey, Dale, ‘Three Arguments for Perfectionism’, Noûs 44 (2010), pp. 59–79 CrossRefGoogle Scholar), it seems to me that we can abstract from this feature and still retain the significance of this event for the first person. Imagine, for instance, that the first person decides to ‘let go’ of her training and just be guided by pure instinct and luck. I deny that in this case the championship win would be no better for her than for the second person.

15 Most famously, this view is advocated by Velleman, David, ‘Well-Being and Time’, in The Possibility of Practical Reason (Oxford, 2000), pp. 56–84 Google Scholar. See also Dorsey, Dale, ‘The Significance of a Life's Shape’, Ethics 125 (2015), pp. 303–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar. One note of contrast: Thomas Hurka (Perfectionism, pp. 121-8) claims that unity is an important feature of a life, but his point is somewhat different from the above. For Hurka, particular projects are more valuable when they unify more rather than fewer distinct events throughout a person's life. While I agree with the broad outline of this proposal, Projects Improve Events is a different claim, viz. that the unification relations can render the events themselves better for a person.

16 Dorsey, Dale, ‘Subjectivism without Desire’, The Philosophical Review 121 (2012), pp. 407–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dale Dorsey, ‘Idealization and the Heart of Subjectivism’, Noûs (forthcoming).

17 Question: does this entail that the conclusion of this project is intrinsically good for the architect? And if the answer is ‘yes’, as it would appear I must admit, doesn't this entail a bizarre claim, viz. that the architect has a high welfare level after death? Response: I accept the claim that the completion of this building is intrinsically good for the architect, for all the reasons I have so far been bringing out. However, to say that this entails that the architect has a high level of well-being after death mistakes the events that make someone better-off, and the temporal location of the benefits conveyed by those events. I have so far said nothing about the latter issue here, and would prefer to remain as broadly uncommitted as I can be. For my money, the best view is to hold that the benefit for the architect in this case occurs during those times at which the architect is working on, or living according to, his project. But I won't defend this here.

18 Bradley, Well-Being, p. 157.

19 David Velleman: ‘A person may rationally be willing to die even though he can look forward to a few more good weeks or months . . . The rationality of the patient's attitude depends on whether an earlier or later death would make a better ending to his life story’ (Velleman, ‘Time’, p. 347).

20 Bradley, Well-Being, pp. 160-1.

21 For additional defences of views according to which good narratives are of prudential value, see Antti Kauppinen, ‘The Narrative Calculus’, Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics (forthcoming) and ‘Meaningfulness and Time’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 84 (2011), pp. 345-77.

22 Bradley, Well-Being, pp. 161-2.

23 Bradley, Well-Being, p. 19. See also Moore, , ‘The Conception of Intrinsic Value’, in Philosophical Studies (New York, 1922), pp. 253–75Google Scholar.

24 See Korsgaard, Christine, ‘Two Distinctions in Goodness’, in Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge, 1997)Google Scholar Pages; Zimmerman, Michael, The Nature of Intrinsic Value (Lanham, MD, 2001)Google Scholar.

25 Dorsey, Dale, ‘Intrinsic Value and the Supervenience Principle’, Philosophical Studies 157 (2012), pp. 267–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 If you're really committed to the dependence of intrinsic value on intrinsic properties, you might instead insist that the state of affairs in which Irwin's death maintains the relevant relational properties is itself the bearer of intrinsic value in this case. ( Bradley, Ben, ‘Is Intrinsic Value Conditional?’, Philosophical Studies 107 (2002), pp. 23–44 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.) Though this attempt seems to me somewhat tortured, I suppose it's a way to salvage the view in question, but it seems to me not to tell against my proposal in a way that makes a material difference.

27 See Hurka, Perfectionism, ch. 9.

28 Thanks to Kris McDaniel and Christian Coons for very helpfully pressing this objection.

29 I would like to thank Christian Coons, Molly Gardner, Chris Heathwood, Brad Hooker, Kris McDaniel, Jason Raibley, Doran Smolkin, David Sobel, Nellie Wieland, and audiences at California State University, Long Beach and the Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress for very helpful comments on this article.