02.16.09
Bad Reasoning about the Badness of Death
Jim Holt became popular with his “Stop Me if You’ve Heard This: a History of Philosophy in Jokes.” It is, we understand, a clever way of wrapping philosophical ideas in jokes so that people who don’t wish to study philosophy at a university might become acquainted with the ideas of philosophers. The humor draws us to the ideas. It’s an ingeniously fun way to bring people to philosophical ideas. It’s a brilliant idea and a noble undertaking.
Holt, this week, reviewed the ideas in Cricthley’s Book of Dead Philosophers in the NYT book section. This time things are backwards. He sets out to make philosophers look ridiculous but succeeds in becoming the butt of his own joke. He spends most of his review space ostensibly refuting Epicurus’ arguments on why it is not logical to fear death. Epicurus’ argument goes like this:
1) Death is annhililation, so there is nothing to worry about.
2) Whether I die young or old, it doesn’t matter, either way I am dead.
3) Your existence in death is essentially like your existence before being born. There is no more reason to fear one more than the other.
It seems impossible to interpret the sense of “death” in this argument as anything other than the experience simply being dead: that is the best interpretation of the first clause. There is no sense in which the argument addresses what happens before that - how one comes to be dead, the processes, the experiences, or the implications of death on the living. The argument is simply about how one experiences the state of being dead in the first person.
We intend to argue:
1) There is nothing logically wrong with Epicurus’ argument.
2) Whether it is logical to fear death depends upon whether death actually is annihilation.
3) Either way, it is not unreasonable to fear death.
We may end up arguing for a conclusion not incompatible with Holt’s; but we worry greatly about the path he takes, because it persistently confuses the experiences of being alive with those of being dead.
Holt trots out some refutations by Nagel “Just because you don’t experience something as nasty … doesn’t mean it’s not bad for you. Suppose a person has a brain injury that reduces him to the mental condition of a contented baby.” Nagel argues that this is bad in the same way death is bad. Therefore death is bad and to be feared. But this argument fails to see the experience from the point of view of the person experiencing it. If one is actually having the experience Nagel describes, fear plays no role; for in that state one is neither anxious nor fearful nor in pain. It fact, billions of people regularly seek to exist in this state by taking alcohol or other mind-altering drugs. Some arrive and never leave. We may judge that to be bad; or we may not. But the badness associated with it has nothing to do with the way the person in question experiences it.
We might reasonably fear being in that state; but the reason we would fear it is not because of what one might actually experience when in the state. Rather, fear arises from a realization that we would have failed to meet an expectation of how we “ought” to be - namely rational, functional human beings capable of exerting control over our environment. We fear the loss of control. Having control over our environment may be a reasonable expectation of being alive, but it is clearly not a reasonable expectation of being dead. That’s one big difference between Nagel’s two cases.
Holt, in reasoning about the second argument, once again misunderstands the point of view. He asserts, “The second argument is just as poor. It implies that John Keats’s demise at 25 was no more unfortunate at 25 than Tolstoy’s at 82.”
Is Holt arguing that Keats’s experience after death was somehow worse than Tolstoy’s? I wonder how he would demonstrate that? That is what one would have to prove to demolish argument 2). But he does not attempt it. Instead, Holt points out “The amount of time you’re dead matters only if there is something undesirable about being dead.” This, of course, is the nub of Nagel’s argument. And it is why Nagel’s argument comes perilously close to violating the first premise set by Epicurus. Any contradiction here is Nagel’s, not Epicurus.’
Once again, Holt trots out Nagel to refute the third argument “… there is an asymmetry between the two abysses that flank your life. The time after you die is time of which your death deprives you. You might have lived longer…” Or you might have been born earlier.(1) Once again, Nagel’s argument succeeds only when one starts with the assumption that the experience of being dead is to be feared. But that’s not a logically tenable assumption upon which to base the argument; for that is what we are arguing to begin with.
One may reasonably wonder what Epicurus really thought. Was Epicurus seriously proposing that it was unreasonable to fear death? Or was he arguing that there is no logical imperative to fear death? Perhaps he was doing the latter simply to make a point. There is a great difference between the two. Logic is but the grinding machinery, not the food in thought process. If Epicurus was arguing that there was no logical imperative to fear death, his argument relies on the stated assumption that all sensation and feeling cease with death. Experience ends there.
If this assumption is correct, there is no logical imperative to fear one’s own death. It is an argument that has considerable force. And it can help one live a life with less fear of death. That’s can be both a liberating and an ennobling end; and it is an end to which most religions are disposed.
If, on the other hand one believes that one experiences pain after death, then there is reason to fear. The whole of the logical force of Epicurus’ argument rests on the idea that first person experience of all sorts ends with one’s own death.
Nagel and Holt argue as if Epicurus believed that it is unreasonable to fear death; and that, therefore, no reasonable person actually fears death. Their reasoning does not adhere to the bounds set by Epicurus. It is not unreasonable to argue that, despite Epicurus’ logical construction one might reasonably fear the process of dying; for it can be fraught with pain. One might even fear the state of death itself, despite logical arguments to the contrary. The difference is that good reasoning can take into account emotive inputs. In fact, good reasoning must do so.
Hume observed that all properly motivated actions arise from proper feeling; and reason properly serves empathetic emotions. He argued that if one asked “why?” to any explanation of moral propositions often enough and long enough, one always ended up with a statement about happiness or unhappiness. Death makes us unhappy. Pain makes us unhappy. Injustice makes us unhappy. Not just in the first person, but in the second and third person.
Epicurus was interested in happiness, too. If one believes all experience ends at death, it is illogical to argue that one is unhappy when one is dead. This does not make us stop fearing death; it only helps us understand it is not logically consistent to do so. We fear death not because of the logical imperative to do so but because this is physiologically the way we are wired. Fear is functional; but it is not always logical.
Today we are rediscovering that the worst criminals are, in fact, psychopaths. They are not stupid people; in fact, many appear to be remarkably intelligent and logical. They are, however, people for whom proper empathetic emotions are suppressed or absent. They experience perverse pleasure in observing the pain and suffering of others. By contrast, people who are socially oriented and well - adjusted are informed by empathetic feeling. This gives force to the idea that in the real world, moral action is informed by proper empathetic orientation, not by the force of pure logic.
Holt clearly understands the distinction between logical and reasonable, between pure reason and reasoning in the service of empathetic emotions: he exploits it in a rhetorical flourish at the end of the essay referring to the rather fearful “Falangist cry ‘Vive la Muerte’ - long live death.” This is an appeal to our emotions, not to logic.
We have reason to fear that cry since it is a reference not to one’s existence after one has ceased to exist, but to the whole painful process of dying. It is also a reference to our own experience of the tragedy of loss associated with the death of another. But the fear aroused by that cry has almost nothing to do with Epicurus’ argument.
Holt’s argument employs a time-honored philosopher’s trick of using the same word to signify materially different things. In the Epicurean argument, the linguistic token “death” stands for first person experiences after one is dead. Nothing else. There is, however, no point in Holt’s discussion in which Holt is referring to the same thing. Mostly, Holt is talking about experiences of the living in the face of death. (2)
In some cases he uses the same token to refer to death in some abstract, hypothetical case. Or to death as we now imagine it, anticipate it, and fear it. The abstraction includes both the process of dying and the possibility that the death occurs to someone else. For example, if we were to assume that Keats died leaving a wife, young children, and a parent or two to survive him, then there is a great measure of pathetic feeling surrounding his death. If we were to assume that Tolstoy died after all his known relatives and even his own housekeeper were dead, then there is nobody to mourn his passing. This makes Keats’ death more tragic to all living observers. Similarly, we can assume that civilization lost more in Keats’ death than in Tolstoy’s because the latter, presumably, had fewer good pieces of literature left in him.
The tragedy of Keats’ death is realized not by Keats himsel so much as it is by everyone else. Holt pretends otherwise.
Where the Falangists show up, however, “death” refers not only to death in the third person, but also to the process of experiencing the pains associated with dying in the first person. It refers to death of others brought on by violent means, especially by some institution that has no legal or moral authority to do so. It refers to the fearful pains associated with dying a violent death in the first person. It is certainly reasonable to fear, for instance, the process of being hacked to death by partisans. But this process is not at all what Epicurus was referring to.
Holt is confusing the things we experience after ceasing to exist with those we experience during process of transitioning to that state. He is confusing things we experience after the death of others with those we might experience after our own death. One might as well confuse what one remembers of one’s own experience of birth (what is null) with
i) The birth of others
ii) All the things that preceded our own birth.
Doing so logically nullifies the existence of others. And it denies history.
Epicurus’ argument is a logically sound one. To reject it, one must reject the first premise. If one can fully accept the first premise, then one must logically end where Hume did, asserting no logical reason to fear being dead. That, however, very much different from fearing the Falangist cry - it’s as different as being alive and being dead.
NOTES
(1) If one accepts the premise that when one is dead, all experience ceases, then there can be no difference between the experience that precedes life from the experience that follows it. To try to argue that there is would be as silly as mounting a deep inquiry into what happened before the start of the Big Bang - i.e. the start of time. When there is no matter there is no time; where there is no time, there is no “before.”
(2) It may seem like a trivial distinction - the distinction between dying and being dead; but it is no more trivial than the distinction between the process of having your house painted and living in a freshly painted house, or the distinction between the process of getting a root canal and living thereafter with a tooth that doesn’t hurt. A failure to make these vital distinctions can lead to serious errors of judgment. I hate getting root canals and I hate having my house painted, but I enjoy living with the outcomes.