death philosophy essay

Reflections on Death in Philosophical/Existential Context

Symposium: Reflections Before, During, and Beyond COVID-19
Published: 27 July 2020
Volume 57 , pages 402–409, ( 2020 )

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Nikos Kokosalakis 1

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Is death larger than life and does it annihilate life altogether? This is the basic question discussed in this essay, within a philosophical/existential context. The central argument is that the concept of death is problematic and, following Levinas, the author holds that death cannot lead to nothingness. This accords with the teaching of all religious traditions, which hold that there is life beyond death, and Plato’s and Aristotle’s theories about the immortality of the soul. In modernity, since the Enlightenment, God and religion have been placed in the margin or rejected in rational discourse. Consequently, the anthropocentric promethean view of man has been stressed and the reality of the limits placed on humans by death deemphasised or ignored. Yet, death remains at the centre of nature and human life, and its reality and threat become evident in the spread of a single virus. So, death always remains a mystery, relating to life and morality.

Death, Immortality, and Meaning in Life: Precis and Further Reflections

John Martin Fischer

An Attempt at Clarifying Being-Towards-Death

Death and the modern imagination.

John Carroll

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! In form and moving, how express and admirable! In action, how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? William Shakespeare ( 1890 : 132), Hamlet, Act 2, scene 2, 303–312.

In mid-2019, the death of Sophia Kokosalakis, my niece and Goddaughter, at the age of 46, came like a thunderbolt to strike the whole family. She was a world-famous fashion designer who combined, in a unique way, the beauty and superb aesthetics of ancient and classical Greek sculptures and paintings with fashion production of clothes and jewellery. She took the aesthetics and values of ancient and classical Greek civilization out of the museums to the contemporary art of fashion design. A few months earlier she was full of life, beautiful, active, sociable and altruistic, and highly creative. All that was swept away quickly by an aggressive murderous cancer. The funeral ( κηδεία ) – a magnificent ritual event in the church of Panaghia Eleftherotria in Politeia Athens – accorded with the highly significant moving symbolism of the rite of the Orthodox Church. Her parents, her husband with their 7-year-old daughter, the wider family, relatives and friends, and hundreds of people were present, as well as eminent representatives of the arts. The Greek Prime Minister and other dignitaries sent wreaths and messages of condolences, and flowers were sent from around the world. After the burial in the family grave in the cemetery of Chalandri, some gathered for a memorial meal. This was a high profile, emotional final goodbye to a beloved famous person for her last irreversible Journey.

Sophia’s death was circumscribed by social and religious rituals that help to chart a path through the transition from life to death. Yet, the pain and sorrow for Sophia’s family has been very deep. For her parents, especially, it has been indescribable, indeed, unbearable. The existential reality of death is something different. It raises philosophical questions about what death really means in a human existential context. How do humans cope with it? What light do religious explanations of death shed on the existential experience of death and what do philosophical traditions have to say on this matter?

In broad terms religions see human life as larger than death, so that life’s substance meaning and values for each person are not exhausted with biological termination. Life goes on. For most religions and cultures there is some notion of immortality of the soul and there is highly significant ritual and symbolism for the dead, in all cultures, that relates to their memory and offers some notion of life beyond the grave. In Christianity, for example, life beyond death and the eternity and salvation of the soul constitutes the core of its teaching, immediately related to the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ. Theologically, Christ’s death and resurrection, declare the defeat of death by the death and the resurrection of the son of God, who was, both, God and perfectly human (theanthropos). This teaching signifies the triumph of life over death, which also means, eschatologically, the salvation and liberation of humankind from evil and the injustice and imperfection of the world. It refers to another dimension beyond the human condition, a paradisiac state beyond the time/space configuration, a state of immortality, eternity and infinity; it points to the sublimation of nature itself. So, according to Christian faith, the death of a human being is a painful boundary of transition, and there is hope that human life is not perishable at death. There is a paradox here that through death one enters real life in union with God. But this is not knowledge. It is faith and must be understood theologically and eschatologically.

While the deeply faithful, may accept and understand death as passage to their union with God, Sophia’s death shows that, for ordinary people, the fear of death and the desperation caused by the permanent absence of a beloved person is hard to bear – even with the help of strong religious faith. For those with lukewarm religious faith or no faith at all, religious discourse and ritual seems irrelevant or even annoying and irrational. However, nobody escapes the reality of death. It is at the heart of nature and the human condition and it is deeply ingrained in the consciousness of adult human beings. Indeed, of all animals it is only humans who know that they will die and according to Heidegger ( 1967 :274) “death is something distinctively impending”. The fear of death, consciously or subconsciously, is instilled in humans early in life and, as the ancients said, when death is near no one wants to die. ( Ην εγγύς έλθει θάνατος ουδείς βούλεται θνήσκειν. [Aesopus Fables]). In Christianity even Christ, the son of God, prayed to his father to remove the bitter cup of death before his crucifixion (Math. 26, 38–39; Luke, 22, 41–42).

The natural sciences say nothing much about the existential content and conditions of human death beyond the biological laws of human existence and human evolution. According to these laws, all forms of life have a beginning a duration and an end. In any case, from a philosophical point of view, it is considered a category mistake, i.e. epistemologically and methodologically wrong, to apply purely naturalistic categories and quantitative experimental methods for the study, explanation and interpretation of human social phenomena, especially cultural phenomena such as the meaning of human death and religion at large. As no enlightenment on such issues emerges from the natural sciences, maybe insights can be teased out from philosophical anthropological thinking.

Philosophical anthropology is concerned with questions of human nature and life and death in deeper intellectual, philosophical, dramaturgical context. Religion and the sacred are inevitably involved in such discourse. For example, the verses from Shakespeare’s Hamlet about the nature of man, at the preamble of this essay, put the matter in a nutshell. What is this being who acts like an angel, apprehends and creates like a god, and yet, it is limited as the quintessence of dust? It is within this discourse that I seek to draw insights concerning human death. I will argue that, although in formal logical/scientific terms, we do not know and cannot know anything about life after/beyond death, there is, and always has been, a legitimate philosophical discourse about being and the dialectic of life/death. We cannot prove or disprove the existence and content of life beyond death in scientific or logical terms any more than we can prove or disprove the existence of God scientifically. Footnote 1

Such discourse inevitably takes place within the framework of transcendence, and transcendence is present within life and beyond death. Indeed, transcendence is at the core of human consciousness as humans are the only beings (species) who have culture that transcends their biological organism. Footnote 2 According to Martin ( 1980 :4) “the main issue is… man’s ability to transcend and transform his situation”. So human death can be described and understood as a cultural fact immediately related to transcendence, and as a limit to human transcendental ability and potential. But it is important, from an epistemological methodological point of view, not to preconceive this fact in reductionist positivistic or closed ideological terms. It is essential that the discourse about death takes place within an open dialectic, not excluding transcendence and God a priori, stressing the value of life, and understanding the limits of the human potential.

The Problem of Meaning in Human Death

Biologically and medically the meaning and reality of human death, as that of all animals, is clear: the cessation of all the functions and faculties of the organs of the body, especially the heart and the brain. This entails, of course, the cessation of consciousness. Yet, this definition tells us nothing about why only the human species, latecomers in the universe, have always worshiped their gods, buried their dead with elaborate ritual, and held various beliefs about immortality. Harari ( 2017 :428–439) claims that, in the not too distant future, sapiens could aim at, and is likely to achieve, immortality and the status of Homo Deus through biotechnology, information science, artificial intelligence and what he calls the data religion . I shall leave aside what I consider farfetched utopian fictional futurology and reflect a little on the problem of meaning of human death and immortality philosophically.

We are not dealing here with the complex question of biological life. This is the purview of the science of biology and biotechnology within the laws of nature. Rather, we are within the framework of human existence, consciousness and transcendence and the question of being and time in a philosophical sense. According to Heidegger ( 1967 :290) “Death, in the widest sense, is a phenomenon of life. Life must be understood as a kind of Being to which there belongs a Being-in-the-world”. He also argues (bid: 291) that: “The existential interpretation of death takes precedence over any biology and ontology of life. But it is also the foundation for any investigation of death which is biographical or historiological, ethnological or psychological”. So, the focus is sharply on the issue of life/death in the specifically human existential context of being/life/death . Human life is an (the) ultimate value, (people everywhere raise their glass to life and good health), and in the midst of it there is death as an ultimate threatening eliminating force. But is death larger than life, and can death eliminate life altogether? That’s the question. Whereas all beings from plants to animals, including man, are born live and die, in the case of human persons this cycle carries with it deep and wide meaning embodied within specific empirical, historical, cultural phenomena. In this context death, like birth and marriage, is a carrier of specific cultural significance and deeper meaning. It has always been accompanied by what anthropologists refer to as rites of passage, (Van Gennep, 1960 [1909]; Turner, 1967; Garces-Foley, 2006 ). These refer to transition events from one state of life to another. All such acts and rites, and religion generally, should be understood analysed and interpreted within the framework of symbolic language. (Kokosalakis, 2001 , 2020 ). In this sense the meaning of death is open and we get a glimpse of it through symbols.

Death, thus, is an existential tragic/dramatic phenomenon, which has preoccupied philosophy and the arts from the beginning and has been always treated as problematic. According to Heidegger ( 1967 : 295), the human being Dasein (being-there) has not explicit or even theoretical knowledge of death, hence the anxiety in the face of it. Also, Dasein has its death, “not in isolation, but as codetermined by its primordial kind of Being” (ibid: 291). He further argues that in the context of being/time/death, death is understood as being-towards-death ( Sein zum Tode ). Levinas Footnote 3 ( 2000 :8), although indebted to Heidegger, disagrees radically with him on this point because it posits being-towards death ( Sein zum Tode) “as equivalent to being in regard to nothingness”. Leaving aside that, phenomenologically the concept of nothingness itself is problematic (Sartre: 3–67), Levinas ( 2000 :8) asks: “is that which opens with death nothingness or the unknown? Can being at the point of death be reduced to the ontological dilemma of being or nothingness? That is the question that is posed here.” In other words, Levinas considers this issue problematic and wants to keep the question of being/life/death open. Logically and philosophically the concept of nothingness is absolute, definitive and closed whereas the concept of the unknown is open and problematic. In any case both concepts are ultimately based on belief, but nothingness implies knowledge which we cannot have in the context of death.

Levinas (ibid: 8–9) argues that any knowledge we have of death comes to us “second hand” and that “It is in relation with the other that we think of death in its negativity” (emphasis mine). Indeed, the ultimate objective of hate is the death of the other , the annihilation of the hated person. Also death “[is] a departure: it is a decease [deces]”. It is a permanent separation of them from us which is felt and experienced foremost and deeply for the departure of the beloved. This is because death is “A departure towards the unknown, a departure without return, a departure with no forward address”. Thus, the emotion and the sorrow associated with it and the pain and sadness caused to those remaining. Deep-down, existentially and philosophically, death is a mystery. It involves “an ambiguity that perhaps indicates another dimension of meaning than that in which death is thought within the alternative to be/not- to- be. The ambiguity: an enigma” (ibid: 14). Although, as Heidegger ( 1967 :298–311) argues, death is the only absolute certainty we have and it is the origin of certitude itself, I agree with Levinas (ibid: 10–27) that this certitude cannot be forthcoming from the experience of our own death alone, which is impossible anyway. Death entails the cessation of the consciousness of the subject and without consciousness there is no experience. We experience the process of our dying but not our own death itself. So, our experience of death is primarily that of the death of others. It is our observation of the cessation of the movement, of the life of the other .

Furthermore, Levinas (Ibid: 10–13) argues that “it is not certain that death has the meaning of annihilation” because if death is understood as annihilation in time, “Here, we are looking for other dimension of meaning, both for the meaning of time Footnote 4 and for the meaning of death”. Footnote 5 So death is a phenomenon with dimensions of meaning beyond the historical space/time configuration. Levinas dealt with such dimensions extensively not only in his God, Death and Time (2000) but also in his: Totality and Infinity (1969); Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence (1991); and, Of God Who comes to mind (1998). So, existentially/phenomenologically such dimensions inevitably involve the concept of transcendence, the divine, and some kind of faith. Indeed, the question of human death has always involved the question of the soul. Humans have been generally understood to be composite beings of body/soul or spirit and the latter has also been associated with transcendence and the divine. In general the body has been understood and experienced as perishable with death, whereas the soul/spirit has been understood (believed) to be indestructible. Thus beyond or surviving after/beyond death. Certainly this has been the assumption and general belief of major religions and cultures, Footnote 6 and philosophy itself, until modernity and up to the eighteenth century.

Ancient and classical Greek philosophy preoccupied itself with the question of the soul. Footnote 7 Homer, both in the Iliad and the Odyssey, has several reference on the soul in hades (the underworld) and Pythagoras of Samos (580–496 b.c.) dealt with immortality and metempsychosis (reincarnation). Footnote 8 In all the tragedies by Sophocles (496–406 b,c,), Aeschylus (523–456 b. c.), and Euripides (480–406 b.c.), death is a central theme but it was Plato Footnote 9 (428?-347 b.c.) and Aristotle Footnote 10 (384–322 b.c.) – widely acknowledged as the greatest philosophers of all times – who wrote specific treatises on the soul. Let us look at their positions very briefly.

Plato on the Soul

Plato was deeply concerned with the nature of the soul and the problem of immortality because such questions were foundational to his theory of the forms (ideas), his understanding of ethics, and his philosophy at large. So, apart from the dialogue Phaedo , in which the soul and its immortality is the central subject, he also referred to it extensively in the Republic , the Symposium and the Apology as well in the dialogues: Timaeus , Gorgias, Phaedrus, Crito, Euthyfron and Laches .

The dialogue Phaedo Footnote 11 is a discussion on the soul and immortality between Socrates (470–399 b.c.) and his interlocutors Cebes and Simias. They were Pythagorians from Thebes, who went to see Socrates in prison just before he was about to be given the hemlock (the liquid poison: means by which the death penalty was carried out at the time in Athens). Phaedo, his disciple, who was also present, is the narrator. The visitors found Socrates very serene and in pleasant mood and wondered how he did not seem to be afraid of death just before his execution. Upon this Socrates replies that it would be unreasonable to be afraid of death since he was about to join company with the Gods (of which he was certain) and, perhaps, with good and beloved departed persons. In any case, he argued, the true philosopher cannot be afraid of death as his whole life, indeed, is a practice and a preparation for it. So for this, and other philosophical reasons, death for Socrates is not to be feared. ( Phaedo; 64a–68b).

Socrates defines death as the separation of the soul from the body (64c), which he describes as prison of the former while joined in life. The body, which is material and prone to earthly materialistic pleasures, is an obstacle for the soul to pursue and acquire true knowledge, virtue, moderation and higher spiritual achievements generally (64d–66e). So, for the true philosopher, whose raison-d’être is to pursue knowledge truth and virtue, the liberation of the soul from bodily things, and death itself when it comes, is welcome because life, for him, was a training for death anyway. For these reasons, Socrates says is “glad to go to hades ” (the underworld) (68b).

Following various questions of Cebes and Simias about the soul, and its surviving death, Socrates proceeds to provide some logical philosophical arguments for its immortality. The main ones only can be mentioned here. In the so called cyclical argument, Socrates holds that the immortality of the soul follows logically from the relation of opposites (binaries) and comparatives: Big, small; good, bad; just, unjust; beautiful, ugly; good, better; bad; worse, etc. As these imply each other so life/death/life are mutually inter-connected, (70e–71d). The second main argument is that of recollection. Socrates holds that learning, in general, is recollection of things and ideas by the soul which always existed and the soul itself pre-existed before it took the human shape. (73a–77a). Socrates also advises Cebes and Simias to look into themselves, into their own psych e and their own consciousness in order to understand what makes them alive and makes them speak and move, and that is proof for the immortality of the soul (78ab). These arguments are disputed and are considered inadequate and anachronistic by many philosophers today (Steadman, 2015 ; Shagulta and Hammad, 2018 ; and others) but the importance of Phaedo lies in the theory of ideas and values and the concept of ethics imbedded in it.

Plato’s theory of forms (ideas) is the basis of philosophical idealism to the present day and also poses the question of the human autonomy and free will. Phaedo attracts the attention of modern and contemporary philosophers from Kant (1724–1804) and Hegel (1770–1831) onwards, because it poses the existential problems of life, death, the soul, consciousness, movement and causality as well as morality, which have preoccupied philosophy and the human sciences diachronically. In this dialogue a central issue is the philosophy of ethics and values at large as related to the problem of death. Aristotle, who was critical of Plato’s idealism, also uses the concept of forms and poses the question of the soul as a substantive first principle of life and movement although he does not deal with death and immortality as Plato does.

Aristotle on the Soul

Aristotle’s conception of the soul is close to contemporary biology and psychology because his whole philosophy is near to modern science. Unlike many scholars, however, who tend to be reductionist, limiting the soul to naturalistic/positivistic explanations, (as Isherwood, 2016 , for instance, does, unlike Charlier, 2018 , who finds relevance in religious and metaphysical connections), Aristotle’s treatment of it, as an essential irreducible principle of life, leaves room for its metaphysical substance and character. So his treatise on the soul , (known now to scholars as De Anima, Shields, 2016 ), is closely related to both his physics and his metaphysics.

Aristotle sees all living beings (plants, animals, humans) as composite and indivisible of body, soul or form (Charlton, 1980 ). The body is material and the soul is immaterial but none can be expressed, comprehended or perceived apart from matter ( ύλη ). Shields ( 2016 ) has described this understanding and use of the concepts of matter and form in Aristotle’s philosophy as hylomorphism [ hyle and morphe, (matter and form)]. The soul ( psyche ) is a principle, arche (αρχή) associated with cause (αιτία) and motion ( kinesis ) but it is inseparable from matter. In plants its basic function and characteristic is nutrition. In animals, in addition to nutrition it has the function and characteristic of sensing. In humans apart from nutrition and sensing, which they share with all animals, in addition it has the unique faculty of noesis and logos. ( De Anima ch. 2). Following this, Heidegger ( 1967 :47) sees humans as: “Dasein, man’s Being is ‘defined’ as the ζωον λόγον έχον – as that living thing whose Being is essentially determined by the potentiality for discourse”. (So, only human beings talk, other beings do not and cannot).

In Chapter Five, Aristotle concentrates on this unique property of the human soul, the logos or nous, known in English as mind . The nous (mind) is both: passive and active. The former, the passive mind, although necessary for noesis and knowledge, is perishable and mortal (φθαρτός). The latter, the poetic mind is higher, it is a principle of causality and creativity, it is energy, aitia . So this, the poetic the creative mind is higher. It is the most important property of the soul and it is immaterial, immortal and eternal. Here Aristotle considers the poetic mind as separate from organic life, as substance entering the human body from outside, as it were. Noetic mind is the divine property in humans and expresses itself in their pursuit to imitate the prime mover, God that is.

So, Aristotle arrives here at the problem of immortality of the soul by another root than Plato but, unlike him, he does not elaborate on the metaphysics of this question beyond the properties of the poetic mind and he focuses on life in the world. King ( 2001 :214) argues that Aristotle is not so much concerned to establish the immortality of the human individual as that of the human species as an eidos. Here, however, I would like to stress that we should not confuse Aristotle’s understanding with contemporary biological theories about the dominance and survival of the human species. But whatever the case may be, both Aristotle’s and Plato’s treatises on the soul continue to be inspiring sources of debate by philosophers and others on these issues to the present day.

Death in Modernity

By modernity here is meant the general changes which occurred in western society and culture with the growth of science and technology and the economy, especially after the Enlightenment, and the French and the Industrial Revolutions, which have their cultural roots in the Renaissance, the Reformation and Protestantism.

It is banal to say that life beyond death does not preoccupy people in modernity as it did before and that, perhaps, now most people do not believe in the immortality of the soul. In what Charles Taylor ( 2007 ) has extensively described as A SECULAR AGE he frames the question of change in religious beliefs in the west as follows: “why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?” (p. 25). The answer to this question is loaded with controversy and is given variously by different scholars. Footnote 13 Taylor (ibid: 65–75, 720–726) shows how and why beliefs have changed radically in modernity. Metaphysical transcendent beliefs on life and death have shrunk into this-worldly secular conceptions in what he calls, “the immanent frame”. As a consequence, transcendence and the sacred were exiled from the world or reduced to “closed world structures”. Footnote 14 In this context many scholars spoke of “the death of God” (ibid: 564–575).

In criticizing postmodern relativism, which brings various vague conceptions of God and transcendence back in play, Gellner ( 1992 :80–83) praises what he calls Enlightenment Rationalist fundamentalism, which “at one fell swoop eliminates the sacred from the world”. Although he acknowledges that Kant, the deepest thinker of the Enlightenment, left morality reason and knowledge outside the purview of the laws of nature, thus leaving the question of transcendence open, he still claims that Enlightenment rationalism is the only positive scientific way to study religious phenomena and death rituals. This position seems to be epistemologically flawed, because it pre-empts what concerns us here, namely, the assumptions of modernity for the nature of man and its implications for the meaning and reality of death.

In rejecting religion and traditional conceptions of death, Enlightenment rationalism put forward an overoptimistic, promethean view of man. What Vereker ( 1967 ) described as the “God of Reason” was the foundation of eighteenth century optimism. The idea was that enlightened rationalism, based on the benevolent orderly laws of nature, would bring about the redeemed society. Enlightened, rational leaders and the gradual disappearance of traditional religious beliefs, obscurantism and superstitions, which were sustained by the ancient regime, would eventually transform society and would abolish all human evil and social and political injustice. Science was supportive of this view because it showed that natural and social phenomena, traditionally attributed to divine agencies and metaphysical forces, have a clear natural causation. These ideas, developed by European philosophers (Voltaire 1694–1778; Rousseau, 1712–1778; Kant, 1724–1804; Hume, 1711–1776; and many others), were foundational to social and political reform, and the basis of the French Revolution (1789–1799). However, the underlying optimism of such philosophical ideas about the benevolence of nature appeared incompatible with natural phenomena such as the great earthquake in Lisbon in 1755, which flattened the city and killed over 100,000 people. Enlightenment rationalism overemphasised a promethean, anthropocentric view of man without God, and ignored the limits of man and the moral and existential significance of death.

In his critique of capitalism, in the nineteenth century, Marx (1818–1883), promoted further the promethean view of man by elevating him as the author of his destiny and banishing God and religion as “the opium of the people”. In his O rigin of the Species (1859), Charles Darwin also showed man’s biological connections with primates, thereby challenging biblical texts about the specific divine origin of the human species. He confirmed human dominance in nature. Important figures in literature, however, such as Dostoevsky (1821–1881) and Tolstoy (1828–1910), pointed out and criticised the conceit and arrogance of an inflated humanism without God, promoted by the promethean man of modernity.

By the end of the twentieth century the triumph of science, biotechnology, information technology, and international capitalist monetary economics, all of them consequences of modernity, had turned the planet into a global village with improved living standards for the majority. Medical science also has doubled average life expectancy from what it was in nineteenth century and information technology has made, almost every adult, owner of a mobile smart phone. Moreover, visiting the moon has inflated man’s sense of mastery over nature, and all these achievements, although embodying Taylor’s ( 1992 ) malaise of modernity at the expense of the environment, have strengthen the promethean view and, somehow, ignored human limits. As a consequence, the reality of death was treated as a kind of taboo, tucked under the carpet.

This seems a paradox because, apart from the normal death of individuals, massive collective deaths, caused by nature and by hate and barbarity from man to man, were present in the twentieth century more than any other in history. The pandemic of Spanish flue 1917–1919 killed 39 million of the world’s population according to estimates by Baro et al. (2020). In the First World War deaths, military and civilians combined, were estimated at 20.5 million (Wikipedia). In the Second World War an estimated total of 70–85 million people perished, (Wikipedia). This did not include estimates of more than seven million people who died in the gulags of Siberia and elsewhere under Stalin. But Auschwitz is indicative of the unlimited limits, which human barbarity and cruelty of man to man, can reach. Bauman ( 1989 :x), an eminent sociologist, saw the Holocaust as a moral horror related to modernity and wrote: “ The Holocaust was born and executed in modern rational society, at the high stage of our civilization and at the peak of human cultural achievement, and for this reason it is a problem of that society, civilization and culture. ”

Questions associated with the mass death are now magnified by the spread of the coronavirus (Covid-19). This has caused global panic and created unpredictability at all levels of society and culture. This sudden global threat of death makes it timely to re-examine our values, our beliefs (secular or religious), and the meaning of life. Max Weber (1948: 182), who died a hundred years ago in the pandemic of great influenza, was sceptical and pessimistic about modernity, and argued that it was leading to a cage with “ specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it had attained a level of civilization never before achieved. ”

So, what does this examination of philosophical anthropology illuminate in terms of questions of human nature and life and death in deeper intellectual, philosophical, dramaturgical context? Now, we are well into the twenty-first century, and with the revolution in information science, the internet, biotechnology and data religion , the promethean view of man seems to have reached new heights. Yet, massive death, by a single virus this time, threatens again humanity; are there any lessons to be learned? Will this threat, apart from the negativity of death, bring back the wisdom, which T. S. Elliot said we have lost in modern times? Will it show us our limits? Will it reduce our conceit and arrogance? Will it make us more humble, moderate, prudent, and more humane for this and future generations, and for the sake of life in this planet at large? These are the questions arising now amongst many circles, and it is likely that old religious and philosophical ideas about virtuous life and the hope of immortality (eschatologically) may revive again as we are well within late modernity (I do not like the term postmodernity, which has been widely used in sociology since the 1980s).

The central argument of this essay has been that death has always been and remains at the centre of life. Philosophically and existentially the meaning of death is problematic, and the natural sciences cannot produce knowledge on this problem. Religious traditions always beheld the immortality of the soul and so argued great philosophers like Plato and Aristotle. Modernity, since the Enlightenment, rejected such views as anachronistic and advanced an anthropocentric promethean, view of man, at the expense of the sacred and transcendence at large. Instead, within what Taylor (1967: 537–193) has described as the immanent frame, it developed “closed world structures,” which are at the expense of human nature and human freedom. One consequence of this has been massive death during the twentieth century.

Following Levinas ( 2000 ), I argued that death should not be understood to lead to nothingness because nothingness means certitude and positive knowledge, which we cannot have existentially in the case of death. In this sense the reality of death should not be understood to lead to annihilation of life and remains a mystery. Moreover, the presence and the reality of death as a limit and a boundary should serve as educative lesson for both the autonomy and creativity of man and against an overinflated promethean view of her/his nature.

David Martin ( 1980 :16) puts the matter about human and divine autonomy as follows: “Indeed, it is all too easy to phrase the problem so that the autonomy of God and the autonomy of man are rival claimants for what science leaves over”. This concurs with his, ( 1978 :12), understanding of religion, (which I share), as “acceptance of a level of reality beyond the observable world known to science, to which we ascribe meanings and purposes completing and transcending those of the purely human realm”.

We do not know how and when human beings acquired this capacity during the evolutionary process of the species. It characterises however a radical shift from nature to culture as the latter is defined by Clifford Geertz (1973:68): “an ordered system of meanings and symbols …in terms of which individuals define their world, express their feelings and make their judgements”.

For a comprehensive extensive and impressive account and discussion of Levinas’ philosophy and work, and relevant bibliography, see Bergo ( 2019 ).

Perhaps it is worth mentioning here that the meaning of the concept of time, as it was in Cartesian Philosophy and Newtonian physics, has changed radically with Einstein’s theories of relativity and contemporary quantum physics (Heisenberg 1959 ). Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle (Hilgervood and Uffink, 2016 ) is very relevant to non- deterministic conceptions of time/space and scientific and philosophical discourse generally.

Various religions articulate the structure of these meanings in different cultural contexts symbolically and all of them involve the divine and an eschatological metaphysical dimension beyond history, beyond our experience of time and space.

Ancient Egyptian culture is well known for its preoccupation with life after death, the immortality of the soul and the elaborate ritual involved in the mummification of the Pharaohs. See: anen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_ Egyptian_ funerary_ practices). Also the findings of archaeological excavations of tombs of kings in all ancient cultures constitute invaluable sources of knowledge not only about the meaning of death and the beliefs and rituals associated with it in these cultures but also of life and religion and politics and society at large.

For an extensive account of general theories of the soul in Greek antiquity see: Lorenz ( 2009 ).

For a good account on Pythagoras’ views on the transmigration of the souls see: Huffman ( 2018 ).

For a recent good account on the diachronic importance of Plato’s philosophy see: Kraut ( 2017 ).

For a very extensive analytical account and discussion of Aristotle’s philosophy and work with recent bibliography see: Shields ( 2016 ).

For an overview of Phaedo in English with commentary and the original Greek text see: Steadman ( 2015 ).

See, for instance, Wilson ( 1969 ) and Martin ( 1978 ) for radically different analyses and interpretations of secularization.

Marxism is a good example. God, the sacred and tradition generally are rejected but the proletariat and the Party acquire a sacred significance. The notion of salvation is enclosed as potentiality within history in a closed system of the class struggle. This, however, has direct political consequences because, along with the sacred, democracy is exiled and turned into a totalitarian system. The same is true, of course, at the other end of the spectrum with fascism.

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Kokosalakis, N. Reflections on Death in Philosophical/Existential Context. Soc 57 , 402–409 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-020-00503-5

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Published : 27 July 2020

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How death shapes life

As global COVID toll hits 5 million, Harvard philosopher ponders the intimate, universal experience of knowing the end will come but not knowing when

Colleen Walsh

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Does the understanding that our final breath could come tomorrow affect the way we choose to live? And how do we make sense of a life cut short by a random accident, or a collective existence in which the loss of 5 million lives to a pandemic often seems eclipsed by other headlines? For answers, the Gazette turned to Susanna Siegel, Harvard’s Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy. Interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Susanna Siegel

GAZETTE: How do we get through the day with death all around us?

SIEGEL: This question arises because we can be made to feel uneasy, distracted, or derailed by death in any form: mass death, or the prospect of our own; deaths of people unknown to us that we only hear or read about; or deaths of people who tear the fabric of our lives when they go. Both in politics and in everyday life, one of the worst things we could do is get used to death, treat it as unremarkable or as anything other than a loss. This fact has profound consequences for every facet of life: politics and governance, interpersonal relationships, and all forms of human consciousness.

When things go well, death stays in the background, and from there, covertly, it shapes our awareness of everything else. Even when we get through the day with ease, the prospect of death is still in some way all around us.

GAZETTE: Can philosophy help illuminate how death impacts consciousness?

SIEGEL: The philosophers Soren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger each discuss death, in their own ways, as a horizon that implicitly shapes our consciousness. It’s what gives future times the pressure they exert on us. A horizon is the kind of thing that is normally in the background — something that limits, partly defines, and sets the stage for what you focus on. These two philosophers help us see the ways that death occupies the background of consciousness — and that the background is where it belongs.

“Both in politics and in everyday life, one of the worst things we could do is get used to death, treat it as unremarkable or as anything other than a loss,” says Susanna Siegel, Harvard’s Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy.

Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

These philosophical insights are vivid in Rainer Marie Rilke’s short and stunning poem “Der Tod” (“Death”). As Burton Pike translates it from German, the poem begins: “There stands death, a bluish concoction/in a cup without a saucer.” This opening gets me every time. Death is standing. It’s standing in the way liquid stands still in a container. Sometimes cooking instructions tell you to boil a mixture and then let it stand, while you complete another part of the recipe. That’s the way death is in the poem: standing, waiting for you to get farther along with whatever you are doing. It will be there while you’re working, it will be there when you’re done, and in some way, it is a background part of those other tasks.

A few lines later, it’s suggested in the poem that someone long ago, “at a distant breakfast,” saw a dusty, cracked cup — that cup with the bluish concoction standing in it — and this person read the word “hope” written in faded letters on the side of mug. Hope is a future-directed feeling, and in the poem, the word is written on a surface that contains death underneath. As it stands, death shapes the horizon of life.

GAZETTE: What are the ethical consequences of these philosophical views?

SIEGEL: We’re familiar with the ways that making the prospect of death salient can unnerve, paralyze, or derail a person. An extreme example is shown by people with Cotard syndrome , who report feeling that they have already died. It is considered a “monothematic” delusion, because this odd reaction is circumscribed by the sufferers’ other beliefs. They freely acknowledge how strange it is to be both dead and yet still there to report on it. They are typically deeply depressed, burdened with a feeling that all possibilities of action have simply been shut down, closed off, made unavailable. Robbed of a feeling of futurity, seemingly without affordances for action, it feels natural to people in this state to describe it as the state of being already dead.

Cotard syndrome is an extreme case that illustrates how bringing death into the foreground of consciousness can feel utterly disempowering. This observation has political consequences, which are evident in a culture that treats any kind of lethal violence as something we have to expect and plan for. A glaring example would be gun violence, with its lockdown drills for children, its steady stream of the same types of events, over and over — as if these deaths could only be met with a shrug and a sigh, because they are simply part of the cost of other people exercising their freedom.

It isn’t just depressing to bring death into the foreground of consciousness by creating an atmosphere of violence — it’s also dangerous. Any political arrangement that lets masses of people die thematizes death, by making lethal violence perceptible, frequent, salient, talked-about, and tolerated. Raising death to salience in this way can create and then leverage feelings of existential precarity, which in turn emotionally equip people on a mass, nationwide scale to tolerate violence as a tool to gain political power. It’s now a regular occurrence to ram into protestors with vehicles, intimidate voters and poll workers, and prepare to attack government buildings and the people inside. This atmosphere disparages life, and then promises violence as defense against such cheapening, and a means of control.

GAZETTE: When we read about an accidental death in the newspaper, it can be truly unnerving, even though the victim is a stranger. And we’ve been hearing about a steady stream of deaths from COVID-19 for almost two years, to the point where the death count is just part of the daily news. Why is the process of thinking about these losses important?

SIEGEL: It might not seem directly related to politics, but when you react to a life cut short by thinking, “If this terrible thing could happen to them, then it could happen to me,” that reaction is a basic form of civic regard. It’s fragile, and highly sensitive to how deaths are reported and rendered in public. The passing moment of concern may seem insignificant, but it gets supplanted by something much worse when deaths are rendered in ways likely to prompt such questions as “What did they do to get in trouble?” or such suspicions as “They probably had it coming,” or such callous resignations as “They were going to die anyway.” We have seen some of those reactions during the pandemic. They are refusals to recognize the terribleness of death.

Deaths can seem even more haunting when they’re not recognized as a real loss, which is why it’s so important how deaths are depicted by governments and in mass communication. The genre of the obituary is there to present deaths as a loss to the public. The movement for Black lives brought into focus for everyone what many people knew and felt all along, which was that when deaths are not rendered as losses to the public, then they are depicted in a way that erodes civic regard.

When anyone dies from COVID, our political representatives should acknowledge it in a way that does justice to the gravity of that death. Recognizing COVID deaths as a public emergency belongs to the kind of governance that aims to keep the blue concoction where it belongs.

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There is one thing I can be sure of: I am going to die. But what am I to make of that fact? This course will examine a number of issues that arise once we begin to reflect on our mortality. The possibility that death may not actually be the end is considered. Are we, in some sense, immortal? Would immortality be desirable? Also a clearer notion of what it is to die is examined. What does it mean to say that a person has died? What kind of fact is that? And, finally, different attitudes to death are evaluated. Is death an evil? How? Why? Is suicide morally permissible? Is it rational? How should the knowledge that I am going to die affect the way I live my life?

This Yale College course, taught on campus twice per week for 50 minutes, was recorded for Open Yale Courses in Spring 2007.

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For more information about Professor Kagan’s book Death , click here .

Plato, Phaedo John Perry, A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych

Course Packet: Barnes, Julian. “The Dream.” In History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters .

Brandt, Richard. “The Morality and Rationality of Suicide.” In Moral Problems . Edited by James Rachels. New York: Harper & Row, 1979.

Edwards, Paul. “Existentialism and Death: A Survey of Some Confusions and Absurdities.” In Philosophy, Science and Method: Essays in Honor of Ernest Nagel . Edited by Sidney Morgenbesser, Patrick Suppes and Morton White. New York: St. Matrin’s Press, 1969. pp. 473-505

Feldman, Fred. “The Enigma of Death.” In Confrontations with the Reaper: A Philosophical Study of Nature and Value of Death . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. pp. 56-71

Hume, David. “On Suicide.” In Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary .

Kaufmann, Walter. “Death.” In The Faith of a Heretic . New York: New American Library, 1959. pp. 353-376

Kaufmann, Walter. “Death Without Dread.” In Existentialism, Religion, and Death: Thirteen Essays . New York: New American Library, 1976. pp. 224-248

Martin, Robert. “The Identity of Animal and People.” In There are Two Errors in the the Title of This Book: A Sourcebook of Philosophical Puzzles, Problems, and Paradoxes . Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2002. pp. 223-226

Montaigne, Michel de. “That to Philosophize is to Learn to Die.” In The Complete Essays .

Nagel, Thomas. “Death.” In Mortal Questions . New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979. pp. 1-10

Rosenberg, Jay. “Life After Death: In Search of the Question.” In Thinking Clearly About Death . Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1983. pp. 18-22

Schick, Theodore and Lewis Vaughn. “Near-Death Experiences.” In How to Think About Weird Things . New York: McGraw Hill, 2005. pp 307-323

Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels , Part III, chapter 10.

Williams, Bernard. “The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality.” In Language, Metaphysics, and Death . Edited by John Donnelly. New York: Fordham University Press, 1978. pp. 229-242

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Philosophy: “Death” Essay by Thomas Nagel Essay

Death is an integral part of a person’s life, although some people choose to think of it as dreadfull, while others consider it natural. While from a biological or medical perspective defining death, and thus one’s attitude is easy because it is the termination of vital activities, the philosophical view of it is more complicated. Therefore, the attitudes towards death and its inevitability and permanence may differ, leading to some people believing that death is evil. This paper aims to evaluate the arguments about death and the perception of this phenomenon presented by Thomas Nagel in his essay “Death” as well as examine the most severe difficulty with viewing death as an evil.

Firstly, the author defines death as a permanent state, leaving aside discussions regarding the possible survival of consciousness. As such, death can be viewed as something that deprives a person of all good things that exist in life. This approach can include wishes and desires, as well as happiness itself. Nagel (1970) argues that in this regard, the valuable attributes of one’s life are not connected to the mere organic survival of the body. Therefore, the first element of viewing death is evil that the author examines is the contrast of this occurrence to life, which is perceived as good.

Hence, when comparing those who lived long lives with those who lived less, one can argue that the former experienced more of this good, which would suggest that death is evil. However, Nagel (1970) cites an example of temporary freezing and renewal as a case that illustrates the view of existing or not existing at a certain period of time as a misfortune. If one were to be frozen and then revived, lack of his presence at a given point would not be perceived as bad, as Nagel (1970) suggests. Besides, none of the individuals perceive the fact that they did not exist before they were born as evil.

Secondly, it is essential to establish what is the most severe difficulty associated with viewing death as evil. Nagel (1970) argues that following the common belief that death is the inevitable and final element of a human’s life, it is necessary to determine if dying is a bad thing since it is usually perceived as such. The most serious difficulty, which arises as a result of viewing death as evil, is the direction of time and the associated opportunities and possibilities that people can have.

The examination of the concepts of life and evil, assigning the two phenomena with characteristics of good or bad, suggests that the fact that after dying a person can more extensive experience is the main attribute of death. According to Nagel (1970), evil is a lack or a deprivation of a certain quality. Also, it can be argued that death deprives a person of conscious life. As a result, an individual cannot experience the positive aspects of his or her life. This is because the activity of experiencing something is future-oriented and thus cannot be achieved after dying.

The counterargument to this claim is the idea that such deprivation does not harm the deceased as they cannot experience this difficulty. From this perspective, death is the ultimate end, and it is nor good nor bad, meaning that no dilemma with determining it as evil exists. However, Nagel (1970) states that “even if we can dispose of the objections against admitting misfortune that is not experienced, … we still have to set some limits on how possible a possibility must be for its nonrealization to be a misfortune ” (p. 80). The author considered this issue as the most severe difficulty when reviewing death as evil. In general, the death of a young individual is considered a tragedy as opposed to the death of an old individual. The latter is natural and implies that he or she had lived and experienced all the good elemnts of life. The former, however, was deprived of this opportunity and did not have as many good and positive experiences.

When comparing the deaths of Tolstoy and Keats, the author argues that the latter, who died at twenty-four, lost a lot more than the former. This approach is based on the mathematical calculations of the years of life and assumptions that Tolstoy experienced a lot more of the good aspects of life. Therefore, as Nagel (1970) argues, “in a clear sense, Keats’ loss was greater” (p. 80). Then, a controversy arises as one can argue that this approach results in the conclusion that losing Tolstoy was insignificant. From this perspective, determining whether death is evil in one case and not as evil in the other is the main issue. Arguably, in most cases, both Tolstoy and Keats died, which was an evil, as regardless of when and what age a person dies, it is a deprivation.

In essence, if people were to live only twenty or thirty years, the described difficulty would not arise. However, Nagel (1970) states that “the trouble is that life familiarizes us with the goods of which death deprives us” (p. 80). This means that humans can make a distinction between dying at a young age and dying at an old age. Hence, we appreciate the years of life and the good it brings. As a result of this, the distinction between the deprivation as a result of dying at twenty-four and eighty is a significant philosophical problem.

The author concludes his essay by arguing that the main issue of death is, in fact, the deprivation of life’s continuation. The mix of the good and bad experiences that a person has throughout life should also be considered. According to Nagel’s (1970) view, life is the biggest treasure that a person has, and thus losing it is a tragedy. In essence, this future-oriented view and the need to account for the continuation of life when determining if death is always evil are the main difficulties that the author cites.

Overall, this paper examined an essay by Thomas Nagel titled “Death.” In this work, the author evaluates the issue of dying and the perception that society has of this concept, which is usually negative. Death is a permanent state and a termination of a person’s existence. From the author’s perspective, the main difficulty with reviewing death as evil is the need to consider continuity of time when regarding the unused opportunities and possibilities. In most cases, the death of a young individual is perceived as tragic becuase of the many experiences that this person could have. In contrast to these, the death of an older adult is not viewed as such. Hence, difficulty in establishing clear criteria of when death is perceived as evil exists.

Nagel, T. (1970). Death. Noûs, 4 (1), 73-80.

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1. IvyPanda . "Philosophy: “Death” Essay by Thomas Nagel." July 27, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/philosophy-death-essay-by-thomas-nagel/.

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The Definition of Death

The philosophical investigation of human death has focused on two overarching questions: (1) What is human death? and (2) How can we determine that it has occurred? The first question is ontological or conceptual. An answer to this question will consist of a definition (or conceptualization ). Examples include death as the irreversible cessation of organismic functioning and human death as the irreversible loss of personhood . The second question is epistemological. A complete answer to this question will furnish both a general standard (or criterion ) for determining that death has occurred and specific clinical tests to show whether the standard has been met in a given case. Examples of standards for human death are the traditional cardiopulmonary standard and the whole-brain standard . Insofar as clinical tests are primarily a medical concern, the present entry will address them only in passing.

The philosophical issues concerning the correct definition and standard for human death are closely connected to other questions. How does the death of human beings relate to the death of other living things? Is human death simply an instance of organismic death, ultimately a matter of biology? If not, on what basis should it be defined? Whatever the answers to these questions, does death or at least human death have an essence—either de re or de dicto —entailing necessary and jointly sufficient conditions? Or do the varieties of death reveal only “family resemblance” relations? Are life and death exhaustive categories of those things that are ever animated, or do some individuals fall into an ontological neutral zone between life and death? Finally, how do our deaths relate, conceptually, to our essence and identity as human persons?

For the most part, such questions did not clamor for public attention until well into the twentieth century. (For historical background, see Pernick 1999 and Capron 1999, 120–124.) Sufficient destruction of the brain, including the brainstem, ensured respiratory failure leading quickly to terminal cardiac arrest. Conversely, prolonged cardiopulmonary failure inevitably led to total, irreversible loss of brain function. With the invention of mechanical respirators in the 1950s, however, it became possible for a previously lethal extent of brain damage to coexist with continued cardiopulmonary functioning, sustaining the functioning of other organs. Was such a patient alive or dead? The widespread dissemination in the 1960s of such technologies as mechanical respirators and defibrillators to restore cardiac function highlighted the possibility of separating cardiopulmonary and neurological functioning. Quite rapidly the questions of what constituted human death and how we could determine its occurrence had emerged as issues both philosophically rich and urgent.

Various practical concerns provided further impetus for addressing these issues. (Reflecting these concerns is a landmark 1968 report published by a Harvard Medical School committee led by physician Henry Beecher (Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School 1968).) Soaring medical expenditures provoked concerns about prolonged, possibly futile treatment of patients who presented some but not all of the traditionally recognized indicators of death. Certainly, it would be permissible to discontinue life-supports if these patients were dead. Concurrent interest in the evolving techniques of organ transplantation motivated physicians not to delay unnecessarily in determining that a patient had died. Removing vital organs as quickly as possible would improve the prospect of saving lives. But removing vital organs of living patients would cause their deaths, violating both laws against homicide and the widely accepted moral principle prohibiting the intentional killing of innocent human beings (see the entry on doing vs. allowing harm ). To be sure, there were—as there are now—individuals who held that procuring organs from, thereby killing, irreversibly unconscious patients who had consented to donate is a legitimate exception to this moral principle (see the entry on voluntary euthanasia ), but this judgment strikes many as a radical departure from common morality. In any event, in view of concerns about the possibility of killing in the course of organ procurement, physicians wanted clear legal guidance for determining when someone had died.

The remainder of this entry takes a dialectical form, focusing primarily on ideas and arguments rather than on history and individuals. It begins with an approach that nearly achieved consensus status after these issues came under the spotlight in the twentieth century: the whole-brain approach . (Most of what are here referred to as “approaches” include a standard and a corresponding definition of death; a few offer more radical suggestions for how to understand human death.) The discussion proceeds, in turn, to the higher-brain approach , to an updated cardiopulmonary approach , and to several more radical approaches. The discussion of each approach examines its chief assertions, its answers to questions identified above, leading arguments in its favor, and its chief difficulties. The entry as a whole is intended to identify the main philosophical issues connected with the definition and determination of human death, leading approaches that have been developed to address these issues, and principal strengths and difficulties of these visions viewed as competitors.

1. The Current Mainstream View: The Whole-Brain Approach

2.1 appeals to the essence of human persons, 2.2 appeals to personal identity, 2.3 the claim that the definition of death is a moral issue, 2.4 the appeal to prudential value.

3. A Proposed Return To Tradition: An Updated Cardiopulmonary Approach

4.1 Death as a Process, Not a Determinate Event

4.2 death as a cluster concept not amenable to classical definition, 4.3 death as separable from moral concerns, references cited, other important works, other internet resources, related entries.

According to the whole-brain standard, human death is the irreversible cessation of functioning of the entire brain, including the brainstem . This standard is generally associated with an organismic definition of death (as explained below). Unlike the older cardiopulmonary standard, the whole-brain standard assigns significance to the difference between assisted and unassisted respiration. A mechanical respirator can enable breathing, and thereby circulation, in a “brain-dead” patient—a patient whose entire brain is irreversibly nonfunctional. But such a patient necessarily lacks the capacity for unassisted respiration. On the old view, such a patient counted as alive so long as respiration of any sort (assisted or unassisted) occurred. But on the whole-brain account, such a patient is dead. The present approach also maintains that someone in a permanent (irreversible) vegetative state is alive because a functioning brainstem enables spontaneous respiration and circulation as well as certain primitive reflexes. [ 1 ]

Before turning to arguments for and against the whole-brain standard, it may be helpful to review some basic facts about the human brain, “whole-brain death” (total brain failure), and other states of permanent (irreversible) unconsciousness. (The most important terms for our purposes appear in italics.) We may think of the brain as comprising two major portions: (1) the “ higher brain ,” consisting of both the cerebrum , the primary vehicle of conscious awareness, and the cerebellum, which is involved in the coordination and control of voluntary muscle movements; and (2) the “ lower brain ” or brainstem . The brainstem includes the medulla , which controls spontaneous respiration, the reticular activating system , a sort of on/off switch that enables consciousness without affecting its contents (the latter job belonging to the cerebrum), as well as the midbrain and pons.

With these basic concepts in view, it may be easier to contrast various states of permanent unconsciousness. (For a helpful overview, see Cranford 1995.) “Whole-brain death” or total brain failure involves the destruction of the entire brain, both the higher brain and the brainstem. By contrast, in a permanent ( irreversible ) vegetative state (PVS), while the higher brain is extensively damaged, causing irretrievable loss of consciousness, the brainstem is largely intact. Thus, as noted earlier, a patient in a PVS is alive according to the whole-brain standard. Retaining brainstem functions, PVS patients exhibit some or all of the following: unassisted respiration and heartbeat; wake and sleep cycles (made possible by an intact reticular activating system, though destruction to the cerebrum precludes consciousness); pupillary reaction to light and eyes movements; and such reflexes as swallowing, gagging, and coughing. A rare form of unconsciousness that is distinct from PVS and tends to lead fairly quickly to death is permanent ( irreversible ) coma . This state, in which patients never appear to be awake, involves partial brainstem functioning. Permanently comatose patients, like PVS patients, can maintain breathing and heartbeat without mechanical assistance.

With this background, we turn to the advantages and disadvantages of the whole-brain approach. First, what considerations favor this approach over the traditional focus on cardiopulmonary function in determining death? The most prominent and arguably the most powerful case for the whole-brain standard appeals to two considerations: (1) the organismic definition of death and (2) an emphasis on the brain's role as the primary integrator of overall bodily functioning. (Some who regard a general definition of death as unnecessary have focused on consideration (2) in defending the whole-brain standard. Some others, as discussed later, have retained consideration (1) but dropped consideration (2).) An additional consideration that has been influential, yet is logically separable from the other two, is (3) the thesis that the whole-brain standard updates, without replacing, the traditional approach to defining death.

According to the organismic definition, death is the irreversible loss of functioning of the organism as a whole (Becker 1975; Bernat, Culver, and Gert 1981). Proponents of this approach emphasize that death is a biological occurrence common to all organisms. Although individual cells and organs live and die, organisms are the only entities that literally do so without being parts of larger biological systems. (Ideas, cultures, and machines live and die only figuratively; cells and tissues are literally alive but are parts of larger biological systems.) So an adequate definition of death must be adequate in the case of all organisms. What happens when a paramecium, clover, tree, mosquito, rabbit, or human dies? The organism stops functioning as an integrated unit and breaks down, turning what was once a dynamic object that took energy from the environment to maintain its own structure and functioning into an inert piece of matter subject to disintegration and decay. In the case of humans, no less than other organisms, death involves the collapse of integrated bodily functioning.

The whole-brain standard does not follow straightforwardly from the organismic conception of death. One might insist, after all, that a human organism's death occurs upon irreversible loss of cardiopulmonary function. Why think the brain so important? According to the mainstream whole-brain approach, the human brain plays the crucial role of integrating major bodily functions so only the death of the entire brain is necessary and sufficient for a human being's death (Bernat, Culver, and Gert 1981). Although heartbeat and breathing normally indicate life, they do not constitute life. Life involves integrated functioning of the whole organism. Circulation and respiration are centrally important, but so are maintenance of body temperature, hormonal regulation, and various other functions—as well as, in humans and other higher animals, consciousness. The brain makes all of these vital functions possible. Their integration within the organism is due to a central integrator, the brain.

This leading case for the whole-brain standard, then, consists in an organismic conception of death coupled with a view of the brain as the chief integrator of interdependent bodily functions. Another consideration sometimes advanced in favor of the whole-brain standard positions it as a part of time-honored tradition rather than a departure from tradition. (The argument may be understood either as an appeal to the authority of tradition or as an appeal to the practicality of not departing radically from tradition.) The claim is that the traditional focus on cardiopulmonary function is part and parcel of the whole-brain approach, that the latter does not revise our understanding of death but merely updates it with a more comprehensive picture that highlights the brain's crucial role:

Three organs—the heart, lungs, and brain—assume special significance … because their interrelationship is close and the irreversible cessation of any one very quickly stops the other two and consequently halts the integrated functioning of the organism as a whole. Because they were easily measured, circulation and respiration were traditionally the basic “vital signs.” But [they] are simply used as signs—as one window for viewing a deeper and more complex reality: a triangle of interrelated systems with the brain at its apex. [T]he traditional means of diagnosing death actually detected an irreversible cessation of integrated functioning among the interdependent bodily systems. When artificial means of support mask this loss of integration as measured by the old methods, brain-oriented criteria and tests provide a new window on the same phenomena (President's Commission 1981, 33).

According to this view, when the entire brain is nonfunctional but cardiopulmonary function continues due to a respirator and perhaps other life-supports, the mechanical assistance presents a false appearance of life, concealing the absence of integrated functioning in the organism as a whole.

The whole-brain approach clearly enjoys advantages. First, whether or not the whole-brain standard really incorporates, rather than replacing, the traditional cardiopulmonary standard, the former is at least fairly continuous with traditional practices and understandings concerning human death. Indeed, current law in the American states incorporates both standards into disjunctive form, most states adopting the Uniform Determination of Death Act (UDDA) while others have embraced similar language (Bernat 2006, 40). The UDDA states that “… an individual who has sustained either (1) irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions, or (2) irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brainstem, is dead,” (President's Commission 1981, 119). Similar legal developments have occurred in Canada (Law Reform Commission of Canada 1981; Canadian Congress Committee on Brain Death 1988). The close pairing of the whole-brain and cardiopulmonary standards in the law suggests that the whole-brain standard does not depart radically from tradition.

The present approach offers other advantages as well. For one, the whole-brain standard is prima facie plausible as a specification of the organismic definition of death in the case of human beings. Moreover, acceptance of whole-brain criteria for death facilitates organ transplantation by permitting a declaration of death and retrieval of still-viable organs while respiration and circulation continue, with mechanical assistance, in a “brain-dead” body. Another practical advantage is permitting, without an advance directive or proxy consent, discontinuation of costly life-support measures on patients who have incurred total brain failure. While most proponents of the whole-brain approach insist that such practical advantages are merely fortunate consequences of the biological facts about death, one might regard these advantages as part of the justification for a standard whose defense requires more than appeals to biology (see subsection 4.2 below).

The advantages proffered by this approach contributed to its widespread social acceptance and legal adoption in the last few decades of the 20 th century. As mentioned, every American state has legally adopted the whole-brain standard alongside the cardiopulmonary standard as in the UDDA. It is worth noting, however, that a close cousin to the whole-brain standard, the brainstem standard , was adopted by the United Kingdom and various other nations. According to the brainstem standard—which has the practical advantage of requiring fewer clinical tests—human death occurs at the irreversible cessation of brainstem function. One might wonder whether a person's cerebrum could function—enabling consciousness—while this standard is met, but the answer is no. Since the brainstem includes the reticular activating system, the on/off switch that makes consciousness possible (without affecting its contents), brainstem death entails irreversible loss not only of unassisted respiration and circulation but also of the capacity for consciousness. Importantly, outside the English-speaking world, many or most nations, including virtually all developed countries, have legally adopted either whole-brain or brainstem criteria for the determination of death (Wijdicks 2002). Moreover, most of the public, to the extent that it is aware of the relevant laws, appears to accept such criteria for death (ibid). Opponents commonly fall within one of two main groups. One group consists of religious conservatives—and, recently, a growing number of secular academics—who favor the cardiopulmonary standard, according to which one can be brain-dead yet alive if (assisted) cardiopulmonary function persists. The other group consists of those liberal intellectuals who favor the higher-brain standard (to be discussed), which, notably, has not been adopted by any jurisdiction.

The widespread acceptance in the U.S. of the whole-brain standard and the broader international acceptance of some sort of “brain death” criteria—whether whole-brain or brainstem—are remarkable considering the subtlety of issues surrounding the definition and determination of death. Yet this near-consensus has been broader than it is deep. Increasingly, both in academic and clinical circles, doubts about “brain death” are being voiced. Following are several major challenges to the whole-brain standard—and, implicitly, to the brainstem standard. (Several additional challenges are implicit in arguments supporting the higher-brain approach.)

The first challenge is directed at proponents of the whole-brain approach who claim that its standard merely updates, without replacing, the traditional cardiopulmonary standard. A major contention that motivates this thesis is that irreversible cessation of brain function will quickly lead to irreversible loss of cardiopulmonary function (and vice versa). But extended maintenance on respirators of patients with total brain failure has removed this component of the case for the whole-brain standard (PCB 2008, 90). The remaining challenges to the whole-brain approach are not specifically directed to those who assert that its standard merely updates the traditional cardiopulmonary standard.

First, in the case of at least some members of our species, total brain failure is not necessary for death. After all, human embryos and early fetuses can die although, lacking brains, they cannot satisfy whole-brain criteria for death (Persson 2002, 22–23). An advocate could respond by introducing a modified definition: In the case of any human being in possession of a functioning brain , death is the irreversible cessation of functioning of the entire brain. While this may be practically useful in the world as we know it for the foreseeable future, this definition is not conceptually satisfactory if it is possible in principle for some human beings with brains (that is, who have functioning brains at any point in their existence) to die without destruction of their brains. The “in principle” is important here, for this is not possible in our world currently. But suppose we develop the ability to transplant brains. (The thought-experiment that follows appears in McMahan 2002, 429.) Recall that the whole-brain standard is generally thought to receive support from an organismic definition of death. But such a conception of human death, one could argue, only makes sense on the assumption that we are essentially human organisms (see discussion of the essence of human persons in section 2.1)—as some proponents explicitly acknowledge (see, e.g., Olson 1997). According to the present critique, the brain is merely a part of the organism. Suppose the brain were removed from one of us, and kept intact and functioning, perhaps by being transplanted into another, de-brained body. Bereft of mechanical assistance, the body from which the brain was removed would surely die. But this body was the living organism, one of us. So, although the original brain continues to function, the human being, one of us, would have died. Total brain failure, then, is not strictly necessary for human death. A possible rebuttal to this challenge from one who accepts that we are essentially organisms is to argue that the existence of a functioning brain is sufficient for the continued existence of the organism (van Inwagen 1990, 173–174, 180–181). If so, then in the imagined scenario the original human being would survive the brain transplant in a new body. Thus, the rebuttal concludes, it is false that a human being could die although her brain continued to live.

Perhaps more threatening to the whole-brain approach is the growing empirical evidence that total brain failure is not sufficient for human death —assuming the latter is construed, as whole-brain advocates generally construe it, as the breakdown of integrated organismic functioning mediated by the brain. Many of our integrative functions, according to the challenge, are not mediated by the brain and can therefore persist in individuals who meet whole-brain criteria for death by standard clinical tests. Such somatically integrating functions include homeostasis, assimilation of nutrients, detoxification and recycling of cellular wastes, elimination, wound healing, fighting of infections, and cardiovascular and hormonal stress responses to unanesthetized incisions (for organ procurement); in a few cases, brain-dead bodies have even gestated a fetus, matured sexually, or grown in size (Shewmon 2001; Potts 2001). It has been argued that most brain functions commonly cited as integrative merely sustain an existing functional integration, suggesting that the brain is more an enhancer than an indispensable integrator of bodily functions (Shewmon 2001). Moreover, several studies have demonstrated that most patients diagnosed as brain dead continue to exhibit some brain functions including the regulated secretion of vasopressin, a hormone critical to maintaining a body's balance of salt and fluid (Halevy 2001). This hormonal regulation is a brain function that represents an integrated function of the organism as a whole (Miller and Truog 2010).

Another, related problem for the sufficiency of total brain failure for human death arises from reflection on locked-in syndrome . People with locked-in syndrome are conscious, and therefore alive, but completely paralyzed with the possible exception of their eyes. With intensive medical support they can live. The interesting fact for our purposes is that some patients with this syndrome exhibit no more somatic functioning integrated by the brain than some brain-dead individuals. Whatever integration of bodily functions remains is maintained by external supports and by bodily systems other than the brain, which merely preserves consciousness (Bartlett and Youngner 1988, 205–6). If total brain failure is supposed to be sufficient for death, and if this is true only because the former entails the loss of somatic functioning integrated by the brain, then the loss of those functions should also be sufficient for death. But these patients, who are clearly alive, show that this is not so. Either the whole-brain definition must be rejected or this particular reason for accepting the whole-brain approach must be rejected and some other good reason for accepting it found.

Recently, a new rationale—distinct from the one that understands human death in terms of loss of organismic functioning mediated by the brain—has been advanced in support of the whole-brain standard (PCB 2008, ch. 4). According to this rationale, a human being dies upon irreversibly losing the capacity to perform the fundamental work of an organism, a loss that occurs with total brain failure. The fundamental work of an organism is characterized as follows: (1) receptivity to stimuli from the surrounding environment; (2) the ability to act upon the world to obtain, selectively, what the organism needs; and (3) the basic felt need that drives the organism to act as it must to obtain what it needs and what its receptivity reveals to be available (ibid, 61). According to a sympathetic reading of the ambiguous discussion in which this analysis is advanced, any patient who meets even one of these criteria is alive and therefore not dead. A patient with total brain failure meets none of these criteria, even if a respirator permits the continuation of cardiopulmonary function. By contrast, PVS patients meet at least the second criterion through spontaneous respiration (a kind of acting upon the world to obtain what is needed: oxygen); and locked-in patients meet the first criterion if they can see or experience bodily sensation and certainly meet the third insofar as they are conscious. One difficulty with this “fundamental work” rationale for the whole-brain standard, a rationale that is intended to capture “what distinguishes every organism from non-living things” (ibid), is that some present-day robots, which are certainly not alive, seem to satisfy the first two criteria. If one insisted, contrary to the reading deemed sympathetic, that a being must satisfy all three criteria—as robots do not since they lack felt needs—in order to qualify as living, the same may be asserted not only of insentient animal life but also of presentient human fetuses and of unconscious human beings of any age. Another difficulty of the “fundamental work” rationale for the whole brain standard is that it was intended to replace the idea that integrated functional unity within an organism is what constitutes life—but the latter idea is extremely plausible and helps to explain what any “fundamental work” would be working toward (cf. Thomas 2012, 105). Whether any variation or modification of the present rationale for the whole-brain standard can survive critical scrutiny remains an open question.

Some traditional defenders of the cardiopulmonary approach believe that the insufficiency of whole-brain criteria for death is evident not only in exceptional cases, such as those described earlier, but in all cases in which patients with total brain failure exhibit respirator-assisted cardiopulmonary function. Anyone who is breathing and whose heart functions cannot be dead, they claim. The champion of whole-brain criteria may retort that such a body is not really breathing and circulating blood; the respirator is doing the work. The traditionalist, in response, will likely contend that what is important is not who or what is powering the breathing and heartbeat, just that they occur. Even complete dependence on external support for vital functions cannot entail that one is dead, the traditionalist will continue, as is evident in the fact that living fetuses are entirely dependent on their mothers' bodies; nor can complete dependence on mechanical support entail that one is dead, as is evident in the fact that many living people are utterly dependent on pacemakers.

A third major criticism of the whole-brain approach—at least in its legally authoritative formulation in the United States—concerns its conceptual and clinical adequacy. The whole-brain standard, taken at its word, requires for human death permanent cessation of all brain functions. Yet many patients who meet routine clinical tests for this standard continue to have minor brain functions such as electroencephalographic activity, isolated nests of living neurons, and hypothalamic functioning (see, e.g., Potts 2001, 482; Veatch 1993, 18; Nair-Collins and Miller forthcoming). Indeed, the latter, which controls neurohormonal regulation, is indisputably an integrating function of the brain (Brody 1999, 73). Now one could maintain the coherence of the whole-brain approach by insisting that the individuals in question are not really dead and that physicians ought to use more thorough clinical tests before declaring death (see, e.g., Capron 1999, 130–131). But whole-brain theorists tend to agree that these individuals are dead—that the residual functions are too trivial to count against a judgment of death (see, e.g., President's Commission 1981, 28–29; Bernat 1992, 25)—suggesting that the problem lies with the formulation of the whole-brain standard rather than with its spirit.

Within this spirit and in response to this challenge, a leading proponent of the whole-brain approach has revised both (1) the organismic definition of death to “the permanent cessation of the critical functions of the organism as a whole” and (2) the corresponding standard to permanent cessation of the critical functions of the whole brain (Bernat 1998, 17). The organism's critical functions may be identified by reference to its emergent functions—that is, properties of the whole organism that are not possessed by any of its component parts—as follows: “The irretrievable loss of the organism's emergent functions produces loss of the critical functioning of the organism as a whole and therefore is the death of the organism,” (Bernat 2006, 38). The emphasis on critical functions, of course, allows one to declare dead those patients with only trivial brain functions. According to this revised whole-brain approach, the critical functions of the organism are (1) the vital functions of spontaneous breathing and autonomic circulation control, (2) integrating functions that maintain the organism's homeostasis, and (3) consciousness. A human being dies upon losing all three. Whether this or some similar modification of the whole-brain approach adequately addresses the present challenge is a topic of ongoing debate (see, e.g., Brody 1999, Bernat 2006). What seems reasonably clear is that not all functions of the brain will count equally in any cogent defense of the whole-brain approach.

The judgment that some brain functions are trivial in this context invites a reconsideration of what is most significant about what the human brain does. According to an alternative approach, what is far and away most significant about human brain function is consciousness.

2. A Progressive Alternative: The Higher-Brain Approach

According to the higher-brain standard, human death is the irreversible cessation of the capacity for consciousness . “Consciousness” here is meant broadly, to include any subjective experience, so that both wakeful and dreaming states count as instances. Reference to the capacity for consciousness indicates that individuals who retain intact the neurological hardware needed for consciousness, including individuals in a dreamless sleep or reversible coma, are alive. One dies on this view upon entering a state in which the brain is incapable of returning to consciousness. This implies, somewhat radically, that a patient in a PVS or irreversible coma is dead despite continued brainstem function that permits spontaneous cardiopulmonary function. Although no jurisdiction has adopted the higher-brain standard, it enjoys the support of many scholars (see, e.g., Veatch 1975; Engelhardt 1975; Green and Wikler 1980; Gervais 1986; Bartlett and Youngner 1988; Puccetti 1988; Rich 1997; and Baker 2000). These scholars conceptualize, or define, human death in different ways—though in each case as the irreversible loss of some property for which the capacity for consciousness is necessary. This discussion will consider four leading argumentative strategies in support of the higher-brain approach.

One strategy for defending the higher-brain approach is to appeal to the essence of human persons on the understanding that this essence requires the capacity for consciousness (see, e.g., Bartlett and Youngner 1988; Veatch 1993; Engelhardt 1996, 248; Rich 1997; and Baker 2000, 5). “Essence” here is intended in a strict ontological sense: that property or set of properties of an individual the loss of which would necessarily terminate the individual's existence. From this perspective, we human persons—more precisely, we individuals who are at any time human persons—are essentially beings with the capacity for consciousness such that we cannot exist at any time without having this capacity at that time. We go out of existence, it is assumed, when we die, so death involves the loss of what is essential to our existence.

Unfortunately, the use of terminology in these arguments can be confusing because the same term may be used in different ways and terms are frequently used without precise definition. It is sometimes claimed, for example, that we are essentially persons . But what, exactly, is a person? Some authors (e.g., Engelhardt 1996, Baker 2000) use the term to refer to beings with relatively complex psychological capacities such as self-awareness over time, reason, and moral agency. Then the claim that we are essentially persons implies that we die upon losing such advanced capacities. But this means that at some point during the normal course of progressive dementia the demented individual dies—upon losing complex psychological capacities, however these are defined— despite the fact that a patient remains, clearly alive, with the capacity for (basic) consciousness . This view is extraordinarily radical and appears inconsistent with the higher-brain approach, which equates death with the irreversible loss of the capacity for (any) consciousness. A proponent of the view that we are essentially persons in the present sense, however, may hold that practical considerations—such as the impossibility of drawing a clear line between sentient persons and sentient nonpersons, and the potential for abuse of the elderly—recommend the capacity for consciousness as the only safe line to draw, thereby vindicating the higher-brain view (Engelhardt 1996, 250). Meanwhile, other proponents of the view that we are essentially persons (e.g., Bartlett and Youngner 1988) apparently hold that any member of our species who retains the capacity for consciousness qualifies as a person. This view, unlike the previous one, straightforwardly supports the higher-brain standard. Still other authors (e.g., Veatch 1993) hold that we are essentially human beings where this term refers not to all members of our species but just to those judged to be persons by the previous group of authors: members of our species who have the capacity for consciousness. And some authors who defend the higher-brain standard (e.g., McMahan 2002) assert that we are essentially minds or minded beings , which is to say beings with the capacity for consciousness. In each case, an appeal to our essence is advanced to support the higher-brain standard.

Taking this collection of arguments together, the reasoning might be reconstructed as follows:

For humans, the irreversible loss of the capacity for consciousness entails (is sufficient for) the loss of what is essential to their existence;
For humans, loss of what is essential to their existence is (is necessary and sufficient for) death;
For humans, irreversible loss of the capacity for consciousness entails (is sufficient for) death.

We have noted that various commentators who advance this reasoning hold that we are essentially persons in a sense requiring complex psychological capacities. We have noted that this implies that for those of us who become progressively demented, we die—go out of existence—at some point during the gradual slide to permanent unconsciousness. Even if practical considerations recommend safely drawing a line at irreversible loss of the capacity of consciousness for policy purposes, the implication that, strictly speaking, we go out of existence during progressive dementia will strike many as incredible. At the other end of life there is another problematic implication. For if we are essentially persons (in this sense), then inasmuch as human newborns lack the capacities that constitute personhood, each of us came into existence after what is ordinarily described as his or her birth.

For those attracted to the general approach of understanding our essence in terms of psychological capacities, a promising alternative thesis is that we are essentially beings with the capacity for at least some form of consciousness who die upon irreversibly losing that very basic capacity. Stated more simply, we are essentially minded beings, or minds, and we die when we completely “lose our minds.” (Note that this thesis is consistent with the claim that we are also essentially embodied.)

What, then, about the human organism associated with one of us minded beings? Surely the fetus that gradually developed prior to the emergence of sentience or the capacity for consciousness—that is, prior to the emergence of a mind—was alive. On the other end of life, a patient in a PVS who is spontaneously breathing, circulating blood, and exhibiting a full range of brainstem reflexes appears to be alive. Consider also anencephalic infants, who are born without cerebral hemispheres and never have the capacity for consciousness: They, too, seem to be living organisms, their grim prognosis notwithstanding. In response to this challenge, a proponent of the higher-brain approach may either (1) assert that the presentient fetus, PVS patient, and anencephalic infant are not alive despite appearances (Puccetti 1988) or (2) allow that these organisms are alive but are not of the same fundamental kind as we are: minded beings (McMahan 2002, 423–6). Insofar as life is a biological concept, and the organisms in question satisfy commonly accepted criteria for life, option (1) seems at best hyperbolic. At best, the claim is really that these organisms, though alive, are not alive in any state that matters much, so we may count them as dead or nonliving for our purposes. This claim, in turn, may be understood as depending on option (2), on which we may focus. This option implies that for each of us minded beings, there is a second, closely associated being: a human organism. The prospects of the present strategy for defending the higher-brain approach turn significantly on its ability to make sense of this picture of two closely associated beings: (1) the organism, which comes into existence at conception or shortly thereafter (perhaps after twinning is no longer possible) and dies when organismic functioning radically breaks down, and (2) the minded being, who comes into existence when sentience emerges and might—in the event of PVS or irreversible coma—die before the organism does. (For doubts on this score, see DeGrazia 2005, ch. 2).

Appealing to the authority of biologists and common sense, some philosophers (e.g., Olson 1997) charge as indefensible the claim that we (who are now) human persons were never presentient fetuses. One might also find puzzling the thesis that there is one definition of death, appealing to the capacity for consciousness, for human beings or persons and another definition, appealing to organismic functioning, for nonhuman animals and the human organisms associated with persons. It is open to the higher-brain theorist, however, to allow that there are also two closely associated beings in the case of sentient nonhuman animals—the minded being and the organism—with the death of, say, Lassie (the minded dog) occurring at her irreversible loss of consciousness (McMahan 2002, ch. 1). But some will find unattractive the failure to furnish a single conception of death that applies to all living things. To be sure, not everyone finds these objections compelling.

One of the most significant challenges confronting the present approach is to characterize cogently the relationship between one of us and the associated human organism. The relationship is clearly not identity —that is, being one and the same thing—because the organism originates before the mind, might outlive the mind, and therefore has different persistence conditions. This strongly suggests, perhaps surprisingly, that we human persons are not animals. If you are not identical to the human organism associated with you, then since there is at most one animal sitting in your chair, you are not she and are therefore not an animal (Olson 1997). Yet many consider it part of educated common sense that we are animals.

Might you be part of the organism associated with you—namely, the brain (more precisely, the portions of the brain associated with consciousness) (McMahan 2002, ch. 1)? But the brain seems capable of surviving death, when you are supposed to go out of existence. Are you then a functioning brain, which goes out of existence at the irreversible loss of consciousness? But it seems odd to identify the functioning brain—as distinct from the brain—as you. How could you be some organ only when it functions? Presumably you are a substance (see the entry on substance ), a bearer of properties, not a substance only when it has certain properties . One might reply that the functioning brain is itself a substance, a substance distinct from the brain, but that, too, strains credibility. Might you instead be not the brain, but the mind understood as the conscious properties of the brain? That would imply that you are a set of properties, rather than a substance, which is no less counterintuitive. Note that the charge of incredibility is not directed at the assertion that the mind is the functioning brain, or is a set of brain properties, and not a distinct substance—a thesis in good standing in the philosophy of mind (see the entries on identity theory of mind and functionalism ). The charge of incredibility is directed at the assertion that you are a set of properties and not a substance. [ 2 ]

Another possibility regarding the person/organism relationship is that the human organism constitutes the person it eventually comes to support (Baker 2000). One might even claim the legitimacy of saying—employing an “is” of constitution—that we are animals (or organisms), just as we can say that a statue constituted by a hunk of bronze, shaped in a particular way, is a hunk of bronze (ibid). Challenges to this reasoning includes doubts that we may legitimately speak of an “is” of constitution; if not, then the constitution view implies that we are not animals after all. Another challenge, which applies equally to the view that we minds are parts of organisms, concerns the counting of conscious beings. On either the constitution view or the part-whole view, you are essentially a being with the capacity for consciousness. Closely associated with you—without being (identical to) you, due to different persistence conditions—is a particular animal. But that animal, having a functioning brain, would also seem to be a conscious being. Either of these views, then, apparently suggests that for each of us there are two conscious beings, seemingly one too many. Despite such difficulties as these, the thesis that we are essentially minded beings remains a significant basis for the higher-brain approach to human death.

A second argumentative strategy in defense of the higher-brain approach claims to appeal to our personal identity while remaining agnostic on the question of our essence (Green and Wikler 1980). The fundamental claim is that, whatever we are essentially, it is clear that one of us has gone out of existence once the capacity for consciousness has been irreversibly lost, supporting the higher-brain standard of death. Clearly, though, any view of our numerical identity over time—our persistence conditions—is conceptually dependent on a view of what we essentially are (DeGrazia 1999; DeGrazia 2005, ch. 4). If we are essentially human animals, and not essentially beings with psychological capacities, then, contrary to the above argument, it is not clear—indeed, it is false—that we go out of existence upon irreversible loss of the capacity for consciousness; rather, we die upon the collapse of organismic functioning. The appeal to personal identity in support of the higher-brain standard depends on the thesis that we are essentially minded beings and therefore inherits the challenges facing this view, as discussed in the previous subsection. Nevertheless, the appeal to personal identity, construed as a distinct argumentative strategy, was somewhat influential in early discussions of the definition of death (see, e.g., President's Commission 1981, 38–9).

Another prominent argumentative strategy in support of the higher-brain approach contends that the definition of death is a moral issue and that confronting it as such vindicates the higher-brain approach (see, e.g., Veatch 1975, 1993; Gervais 1986, ch. 6). In asking how to determine that a human has died, according to this argument, what we are really asking is when we ought to discontinue certain activities such as life-support efforts and initiate certain other activities such as organ donation, burial or cremation, grieving, change of a survivor's marital status, and transfer of property. The question, in other words, is when “death behaviors” are appropriate. This, the argument continues, is a moral question, so an answer to this question should be moral as well. Understood thus, the issue of defining human death is best addressed with the recognition that irreversible loss of the capacity for consciousness marks the time at which it is appropriate to commence death behaviors.

Is the definition of death really a moral issue? To say that someone has died does seem tantamount to saying that certain behaviors are now appropriate while certain others are no longer appropriate. But it hardly follows that the assertion of death is itself a moral claim. An alternative hypothesis is that the sense of moral import derives from the fact that certain moral premises—for example, that we shouldn't bury or cremate prior to death—are shared by virtually everyone. Moreover, the concept of death is (at least originally) at home in biology, which offers many instances in which a determination of death—say, of a gnat or a clover—seems morally unimportant. Rather than asserting that death itself is a moral concept, it might be more plausible to assert that death, a biological phenomenon, is generally assumed to be morally important—at least in the case of human beings—given a relatively stable background of social institutions and attitudes about “death behaviors.” Furthermore, due to the moral salience of human death, discussions about its determination are often prompted by a moral or pragmatic agenda such as interest in organ transplantation or concerns about expensive, futile treatment. But these observations do not imply that death is itself a moral concept.

Even if it were, it would hardly follow that the higher-brain standard is preferable to other standards. A person with relatively conservative instincts might hold that death behaviors are morally appropriate only when the whole-brain or cardiopulmonary standard has been met. We need to ask, therefore, what grounds exist for the claim—advanced by proponents of the higher-brain standard—that death behaviors are appropriate as soon as someone has irreversibly lost the capacity for consciousness. Perhaps the best possible grounds are that irreversible loss of consciousness entails an existence lacking in value for the unconscious individual herself . It appears, then, that the strongest specification of the present line of reasoning actually relies upon the next (and final) argumentative strategy to be considered—and might, as we will see, lead to the conclusion that we should permit individuals to select among several standards of death.

The idea here is to defend the higher-brain approach on the basis of claims about prudential value (for a discussion, see DeGrazia 2005, 134–8). Conscious life, it is argued, is a precondition for virtually everything that we value in our lives. We have an enormous stake in continuing our lives as persons and little or no stake in continuing them when we are permanently unconscious. The capacity for consciousness is therefore essential not in a metaphysical sense connected to our persistence conditions, but in the evaluative sense of indispensable to us . One need not claim that the capacity for consciousness underlies everything of prudential value, just that it underlies the overwhelmingly greater part of what matters to us prudentially. And although, for many people, consciousness may not be sufficient for what matters prudentially—insofar as they find indispensable, say, some degree of self-awareness and meaningful interaction with others—it is certainly necessary; and the basic capacity for consciousness (as opposed to self-consciousness or personhood) is the only safe place to demarcate death for policy and social purposes. We should therefore regard irreversible loss of the capacity for consciousness as a human being's death—even if the original concept of death is biological and biological considerations favor some less progressive standard.

How persuasive is this case for the higher-brain approach? One might challenge the assumption that prudential, as opposed to moral, considerations ought to be decisive in adopting a standard for human death. On the other hand, as suggested in our discussion of the previous argumentative strategy, moral considerations may not favor a particular standard of death except insofar as they rest on prudential considerations—our present concern. But even if we accept the claim that human death should be understood on the basis of prudential values, we confront the prospect of reasonable pluralism about prudential value. While supporters of the higher-brain approach (who tend to be liberal intellectuals) are likely to have prudential values in line with this approach, many other people do not. If a patient has a stake in his family's need for closure should he enter a PVS—an interest that may be self-regarding as well as other-regarding—this fact would count against allowing the PVS to constitute death in his case. If an Orthodox Jew or conservative Christian believes that (biological) life is inherently precious to its possessor, even if the individual cannot appreciate its value at a given time, this would count against the higher-brain standard in the case of the individual in question. Perhaps, then, the appeal to prudential value favors not the higher-brain standard for everyone but a pro-choice view about standards of death . A jurisdiction might, for example, have one default standard of death but permit conscientious exemption from that standard and selection of a different one within some reasonable range of options (Veatch 2019).

In reply to this argument, a proponent of the appeal to prudential value might contend that it is simply irrational to value biological existence without the possibility of returning to consciousness. But this reply assumes the experience requirement : that only states of affairs that affect one's experience can affect one's well-being (for a discussion, see Griffin 1986, 16–19). The experience requirement is not self-evident. Some people believe that they are worse off for being slandered even if they never learn of the slander and its repercussions never affect their experience. Some even believe, following Aristotle's suggestion, that the quality of one's life as a whole can be affected by posthumous states of affairs such as tragedy befalling a loved one. Although the intelligibility of this belief in posthumous interests might be challenged, the following is surely intelligible: States of affairs that don't affect one's experience but connect importantly with one's values can affect one's interests at least while one exists . Desire-based accounts of well-being (see, e.g., Hare 1981) standardly accept this principle, for what is desired may occur without one's awareness of its occurrence and without affecting one's experience. These considerations illuminate the intelligibility of one's prudential values extending to a period of time when one is alive but irreversibly unconscious.

In view of apparently reasonable pluralism regarding prudential values, including reasonable disagreement about the experience requirement, it seems doubtful that appeal to prudential value alone can support the higher-brain standard for everyone. At the same time, and more generally, the higher-brain approach remains an important contender in the debate over the definition of death.

3. A Proposed Return to Tradition: An Updated Cardiopulmonary Approach

Prior to the brain-death movement, death was traditionally understood along the lines of the cardiopulmonary standard : death as the irreversible cessation of cardiopulmonary function . In the supportive background of this consensus on the cardiopulmonary standard hovered several general definitions or conceptualizations of death. Some champions of the traditional standard (e.g., Becker 1975) have conceptualized death in the same organismic terms that proponents of the whole-brain standard invoke: death as the irreversible cessation of functioning of the organism as a whole. Other champions of tradition have conceptualized death in more spiritual terms such as the departure of the animating (or vital) principle or loss of the soul.

In determining whether someone was dead, one could check for a pulse, moisture on a mirror held in front of the mouth, or other indications that the heart and lungs were working. Before the development of respirators and other modern life-supports, a working heart and lungs indicated continuing brainstem function. As we have seen, however, modern life-supports permitted cardiopulmonary function without brain function, setting up a competition between traditional and whole-brain criteria for determining death. Although, as noted above, the whole-brain approach achieved near-consensus status, this approach is increasingly questioned and faces significant difficulties. Its difficulties and those facing the more radical higher-brain alternative have contributed to renewed interest in the traditional approach.

Further contributing to renewed interest in the traditional approach—and warranting a brief digression—is an approach to organ donation that capitalizes on the fact that current American legal standards for death are disjunctive, permitting satisfaction of either the whole-brain standard or the cardiopulmonary standard, whichever applies first, for a declaration of death. This approach to organ donation, called donation after cardiac death (DCD) or non-heart-beating organ donation , was very rare until instituted with much publicity by the University of Pittsburgh in the early 1990s in response to a perception that awaiting a neurological determination of death for (heart-beating, respirator-maintained) organ donors was insufficient to meet the demand for viable organs. In the Pittsburgh program, a respirator-dependent patient who had previously agreed to forgo life supports and donate vital organs is taken to an operating room and disconnected from the respirator, leading predictably to cardiac arrest. Two minutes after cardiac arrest, the patient is declared dead on the basis of the cardiopulmonary standard: “irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions.” This procedure allows organ procurement to commence very shortly after cardiac arrest, providing relatively fresh organs for transplant. (Organs, of course, would not be viable if medical staff awaited a declaration of total brain failure—which requires confirmatory tests hours after initial tests—in the patients in question, who will not incur total brain failure unless respirator support is discontinued.)

The practice of DCD, which has expanded to several medical centers, has provoked considerable controversy. Critics have charged that in DCD vital organs are removed before patients are really dead, implying that organ procurement kills the patients. Some proponents of the whole-brain approach argue that the patients are not yet dead because only total brain failure (or perhaps that of the brainstem) constitutes human death. But current American law in its disjunctive form suggests otherwise—at least for legal purposes. Other critics of DCD charge that a patient cannot be dead two minutes after cardiac arrest because the loss of cardiopulmonary functioning is not irreversible: Victims of heart attack are sometimes revived more than two minutes after the arrest. One might reply that the loss of functioning is irreversible because, the patient having requested removal of life supports, no one may violate the patient's rights by resuscitating him or her (Tomlinson 1993). It seems fair to reply, however, that a decision not to resuscitate does not mean that resuscitation is impossible as suggested by the concept of irreversibility . Has the latter concept been conflated in DCD with the concept of permanence ? Permanent loss of function does not imply that resuscitation is impossible, just that it will not occur. [ 3 ] These concerns about abandoning the standard of irreversible loss of cardiopulmonary function apply even to more modest proposals, such as that advanced by the Institute of Medicine (2000), in which a declaration of death and DCD proceed after a waiting period of five minutes: Resuscitation is sometimes possible more than five minutes after a heart attack. Proponents of DCD might reply that permanence, rather than irreversibility, is the appropriate standard in this context (see, e.g., Bernat 2006, 41) or that DCD represents an instance where it is permissible to remove vital organs from someone who is dying but not yet dead. Certainly, any proponent of DCD will see the current law's (disjunctive) acceptance of cardiopulmonary criteria for death as offering a major practical advantage over any policy that accepted only whole-brain criteria.

We return to the view of those who champion only the cardiopulmonary standard. Proponents of this approach believe that it correctly implies, contrary to competing standards, that a human body that is breathing and maintaining circulation is alive regardless of whether continuation of these functions requires external support (as with “brain-dead” patients, locked-in patients, and normal fetuses) (Shewmon 2001; Potts 2001). At the same time, the usual characterization of the traditional approach is problematic in suggesting that the difference between human life and death comes down to the state of two organs: heart and lungs. This reductionistic picture arguably obscures the holistic nature of bodily functioning.

A more realistic picture, some argue, features integrative unity as existing diffusely throughout the organism. As a leading proponent puts it, “What is of the essence of integrative unity is neither localized nor replaceable: namely the anti-entropic mutual interaction of all the cells and tissues of the body, mediated in mammals by circulating oxygenated blood” (Shewmon 2001, 473). On this view, the brain, like the heart and lungs, is a very important component of the interaction among body systems, but is not the supremely important integrator as suggested by the (mainstream) whole-brain approach. Nor is the functioning of other organs and bodily systems passively dependent on the brain. The brain's capacity to augment other systems presupposes their preexisting capacity to function. This is true even of a brain function as somatically integrating as the maintenance of body temperature: the “thermostat” may be in the brain, but the “furnace” is the energy metabolism diffused throughout the body. If not covered with blankets, brain-dead bodies maintained on respirators will grow colder—but not comparably to corpses (ibid, 471).

Although a realistic picture of organismic functioning must be holistic, according to this updated traditional approach, it should also portray certain functions as central. Tradition is correct that respiration and circulation are especially crucial, but respiration is not simply lung function and circulation is not just a working heart. Both organs, after all, can be artificially replaced as the organism maintains integrated functioning. Respiration and circulation occur throughout the body as oxygenated blood circulates to different organs and bodily systems—a condition necessary and sufficient for the integrated organismic functioning that constitutes life. Unlike whole-brain and higher-brain death, loss of respiration and circulation leads relentlessly to the breakdown of cells, tissues, organs, bodily systems, and eventually the organism as a whole. Hence an updated traditional standard, which we might call the circulatory-respiratory standard : death as the irreversible cessation of circulatory-respiratory function .

The chief advantage of such an updated traditional approach, according to proponents, is that it most adequately characterizes the difference between life and death—where the latter is understood in terms of organismic functioning—in a full range of cases. Such cases include several that the whole-brain and higher-brain standards handle less plausibly such as prenatal human organisms prior to brain development as well as locked-in patients and “brain-dead” individuals whose vital functions are maintained with mechanical assistance. The present approach also avoids some of the conceptual problems facing the higher-brain approach, as discussed earlier.

Nevertheless, the traditional approach, whether updated or not, faces significant issues. One concern is that the approach overemphasizes our biological nature, suggesting we are nothing more than organisms, and by demoting the brain from prominence underemphasizes the mental life that is generally thought to distinguish our species from others. We human beings are not merely organisms or animals, the argument continues; we are also (after normal development) conscious beings and persons whose nature, one might say, is to transcend nature with culture. Our conception of human death should be faithful to a species self-image that does justice not only to our animality but also to our personhood (cf. Pallis 1999, 96).

Whole-brain (or brainstem) theorists and higher-brain theorists will extend this line of argument in different directions. The higher-brain theorist will suggest that our capacity for consciousness, a precondition for higher capacities and personhood, is so important that permanent loss of the basic capacity should count as death. The whole-brain theorist who develops the present line of reasoning will maintain greater contact with the organismic conception of death, stressing the brainstem's role in integrating vital functions and claiming either that (a) consciousness is a critical function of the organism, permitting it to interact adaptively to its environment (Bernat 1998), (b) consciousness is a characteristic aspect of the fundamental work of organisms like us, or (c) consciousness is crucial to our personhood, a feature no less important to what we are than our animality. The latter option, in effect, would move the whole-brain theorist to a dual-aspect understanding of human nature, as just discussed: human persons as essentially both persons and animals (cf. Schechtman 2014).

A second major challenge confronting any traditional approach is the specter of highly unpalatable practical consequences (Magnus, Wilfond, and Caplan 2014). Currently the whole-brain standard is enshrined in law. Suppose we reversed legislative course and returned to traditional criteria (whether updated in formulation or not). Then a patient who satisfied whole-brain criteria but not traditional criteria would count as alive. Unless we overturned the “dead-donor rule”—the policy of permitting extraction of vital organs only from dead bodies—then it would be illegal to procure organs from these living patients who have incurred total brain failure; yet the viability of their organs would require maintaining respiration and circulation with life-supports. There is broad agreement that having to wait until traditional criteria are met to harvest organs would constitute a great setback to organ transplantation (even if donation after cardiac death, which invokes traditional criteria, is permitted). Moreover, a legal return to traditional criteria for death might lead physicians to feel they had lost the authority to discontinue treatment unilaterally—when a family requests continued treatment—upon a determination of total brain failure despite what many would consider the futility of further treatment. Furthermore, laws for determining death would have to be revised.

A defender of tradition might respond that we can avoid most of these unsavory consequences while legally adopting traditional criteria for determining death (see, e.g., DeGrazia 2005, 152–8). We could, for one thing, abandon the dead-donor rule, permitting the harvesting of vital organs when authorized by appropriate prospective consent of the donor even though taking the organs, by causing the donor's death, would instantiate killing (Truog and Robinson 2003; Sade 2011). We could also authorize physicians—through hospital policies, professional guidelines, or laws—to withdraw life-supports unilaterally upon a declaration of total brain failure (perhaps even upon a determination of irreversible unconsciousness) in cases where continued treatment is unnecessary for organ procurement and appears otherwise futile. Not all of what are traditionally considered “death behaviors” need to be permanently anchored to a declaration of death. Thus we currently use advance directives and other considerations to justify withdrawal of life-supports in some circumstances, although several decades ago such withdrawal had to await a determination of death. There is no reason to regard further reforms of our practices surrounding death as beyond responsible consideration. Thus, despite rowing against the tide of the brain-death movement, the traditional approach has reclaimed the status of a serious contender in the debate over the definition of death.

4. Further Possibilities

In recent decades, the debate over the definition of death has generally been understood as a competition between the approaches discussed here: traditional, whole-brain (or brainstem), and higher-brain standards and their corresponding conceptualizations. Each of these approaches, however, makes certain assumptions that might be contested: (1) that death is more or less determinate, more event-like than process-like, (2) that there is a uniquely correct definition of death, which can be formulated in terms of necessary and jointly sufficient conditions, and (3) that human death is morally a very important marker. Now we will consider three nonstandard ways of thinking about death, each of which directly challenges one of these assumptions.

Each of the approaches considered so far asserts the correctness of a single standard of death. Might different standards be appropriate for different purposes? If so, then the debate characterized in previous sections has reflected, to some extent, an exercise in futility: a search that wrongly seeks a determinate event, which can be captured by a single standard, rather than a process.

According to two authors who develop this line of reasoning, the nearly simultaneous emergence of organ transplantation and mechanical ventilators provoked three practical questions: (1) When may doctors take organs for transplantation? (2) When may doctors unilaterally discontinue treatment? (3) When is a patient dead for legal purposes and appropriately transferred to an undertaker? (Halevy and Brody 1993). Rather than assuming that one standard for death will adequately answer these three questions—a possibility rendered doubtful by the interminable debate over standards—we should answer each question on its merits, disaggregating death accordingly.

Providing one example of how these practical questions might be answered, the authors argue that organ procurement is appropriate when the whole-brain standard has been met (apparently precluding DCD), unilateral discontinuation of treatment is appropriate when the higher-brain standard has been met, and a patient should legally count as dead when traditional criteria have been met (ibid). (Here we need not consider the authors' specific arguments for these determinations.)

But why must each answer invoke a standard of death? An alternative would be to adopt an updated traditional standard, which would supply legal criteria for death, while denying that unilateral discontinuation of treatment and organ procurement must await death. To be sure, harvesting vital organs from living patients would require an exception to the dead-donor rule, the social risks of which might well be avoided if death were disaggregated along the lines suggested. But the alternative possibility of separating death from particular “death behaviors” motivates the question of whether there are further grounds for disaggregating death into a process.

A possible further ground is the thesis that life and death, although mutually exclusive states, are not exhaustive: “Although no organism can fully belong to both sets [life and death], organisms can be in many conditions (the very conditions that have created the debates about death) during which they do not fully belong to either. … Death is a fuzzy set,” (Brody 1999, 72). What are we to think of this proposal?

It seems undeniable that the boundary between life and death is not perfectly sharp. [ 4 ] The specification of any standard will require some arbitrary line-drawing. Operationalizing the whole-brain standard requires a decision about which brain functions are too trivial to count and need not be tested for. Making a traditional standard clinically useful requires a cut-off point of some number of minutes without heartbeat or respiration for the loss of functioning to count as irreversible. A higher-brain approach needs criteria for determining what sorts of brain damage constitute irreversible loss of the capacity for consciousness and which count as reversible. Yet, while some arbitrariness is inevitable, and highlights a blurred boundary, the blurring in each instance concerns very specific criteria and clinical tests for determining that a standard has been met, not the standard itself. None of the blurred boundaries just considered is inconsistent with the claim that some standard is uniquely correct. Moreover, if essentialism regarding human persons is true—that is, if we human persons have an essence locating us in our most basic kind (e.g., animal, minded being)—this would strengthen the case for a uniquely correct standard by suggesting a foundation for one.

But we must consider the possibility that there is no correct standard. Perhaps death is no more determinate than adulthood. Some people are clearly adults and some people are clearly not adults. But, as any college professor knows, many people are ambiguously adults—mature enough to count as adults in some ways but not in others. Socially and legally, we treat 16-year-olds as adults for purposes of driving, 18-year-olds as adults for purposes of voting and bearing the full weight of criminal law, 21-year-olds as adult enough to drink alcoholic beverages, and so on. Nor is this disaggregation of adulthood incoherent or even particularly awkward; rather, it seems to fit the facts about the gradual development of maturity, acquisition of experience, and accumulation of birthdays. Disaggregating death, one might argue, would be similarly faithful to facts about the frequently very gradual demise of human persons.

Even if this argument persuades us that death is more process-like than event-like—and to do this it must persuade us that it is death itself, not dying , that is process-like—it does not follow that we ought to draw several lines for the determination of death. Consider the confusion that would likely result from such statements as “Grandmother is partly dead, but less dead than Grandfather, although he's not fully dead.” People are so accustomed to thinking of life and death as mutually exclusive, exhaustive sets that there would be considerable practical advantage in insisting on some sensible line that demarcates death in this way. It is true that disaggregating adulthood poses no insuperable practical difficulties, but death is importantly different. For we generally assume that one goes out of existence (at least in this world) at death, a rather momentous change with—at least in the status quo—far-reaching social and legal ramifications. Confusion as a result of plural lines for death may be more troubling and more likely, for the idea of someone's only partly existing is of questionable intelligibility. On the other hand, a proponent of disaggregating death might reply that (1) we could either reserve the language of death for the traditional standard or get used to the language of someone's being partially dead, and (2) we should appreciate that existence is sometimes partial as in the case of a half-assembled car.

Most discussions of the definition and determination of death assume that there is a uniquely correct definition of death. Definitions, classically understood, are supposed to state necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for the correct application of a word or concept. They may be thought to capture de re essences existing independently of human thought, language, and interests, or de dicto essences determined solely by linguistic meaning. The major approaches we have considered have tried both to define death by capturing its essence and to advance a standard for determining human death that coheres with the definition. But what if the term “death” cannot be defined in any such way?

One might insist that death can be defined, as the competing definitions demonstrate. But, of course, the trick is to define the term adequately. For example, the organismic definition—death as the irreversible cessation of functioning of the organism as a whole—makes no reference to consciousness. Yet surely, one might argue, any organism that maintains consciousness should count as alive even if the organism as a whole has irreversibly ceased to function (whether or not this possibility is merely theoretical). Definitions associated with the higher-brain approach—such as human death as the irreversible loss of mind—implausibly imply that a PVS patient is dead despite exhibiting spontaneous breathing and circulation, brainstem-mediated reflexes, and the like. The best explanation for the shortcomings of leading efforts to define death, the argument continues, is that death is not amenable to definition in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions (Chiong 2005). Let's consider two distinct ways this thesis might be developed.

First, one might argue that the concept of death exhibits only “family resemblance” relations among its instances, as Wittgenstein argued was the case for the concepts of game , language , and many others (Wittgenstein 1953). There are various features of an organism that count towards its being dead, yet there is no authoritative list of features all of which must be satisfied for it to be dead. Each of the following, for example, seems relevant: unconsciousness, absence of spontaneous efforts to breathe, absence of heartbeat, inertness, lack of integrated bodily functions, incapacity to grow, and physical decay. If all of these conditions are present, an organism has surely died. But producing an authoritative shortlist of necessary and sufficient conditions seems futile. One scholar has advanced a parallel claim about the concept of life:

When some property is central to the cluster—as I've argued consciousness is—then possessing only this one property may be sufficient for membership in [the class of living things]. However, merely possessing one or several properties that are peripheral to the cluster may not be sufficient for membership. [S]ome robots are organizationally complex and functionally responsive, though intuitively not alive (Chiong 2005, 26).

Another direction in which to take the thesis that death is not amenable to classical definition is to argue that death is a natural kind whose essence may be obscure. Kripke influentially argued that natural kinds—kinds determined by nature rather than by human thinking, language, or interests—often resist adequate definition because their essential features may be entirely unknown to those referring to the kind in question (Kripke 1970). To define a term by reference to the features people originally used to pick out the kind in question won't do, because those features may be accidental, not essential, and speakers may even be mistaken about them. Those naming the kind whale might have thought whales were the largest fish in the ocean, but whales are not fish and their size relative to other creatures is a contingent matter. We can refer meaningfully to whales, to the creatures picked out by the term whale (the name for the kind), without knowing the essential features of whales, features likely to involve subtle biological details. Perhaps death, too, is a natural kind whose essence is obscure (a possibility entertained in Chiong 2005, 24–25). A likely challenge to this argument is that we already know a great deal about the physical processes involved in death, making it unlikely that death has a hidden essence the failure to discover which impedes adequate definition.

Importantly, though, one can claim that death is a natural kind without accepting any kind of essentialism. An alternative to the essentialist conception is the homeostatic property cluster theory of natural kinds (Millikan 1999). On this view, natural kinds do not, or at least need not, share essential properties. They are comprised by members sharing a stable cluster of similarities, which are brought about by “homeostatic causal mechanisms” (such as, in the case of species, common developmental programs and selective pressures). On this view, X (e.g., a fetus) might be a member of a natural kind (e.g., our species) despite lacking one of the properties (e.g., the potential for rationality) among the cluster of similarities. Death and its opposite, life, might similarly be natural kinds lacking essences, each kind being associated with a cluster of properties that tend to go together and support one another without being necessarily coinstantiated (see, e.g., Chiong 2005). If so, death cannot be defined in a set of necessary and sufficient conditions—in which case no such definition can justify a particular standard.

If death has no essence and resists definition, what is the upshot? One possible inference—that the boundaries of death are vague—would partially merge this approach with the previous one, which construed death as a process. We have noted that one response to the claim of vague boundaries (the response favored in the previous approach) is to embrace several lines, each for a different purpose, in determining death. Another possibility is to understand the vague boundaries as inviting discretion in the matter of producing a single standard of death. So long as a particular standard does not have clear and highly implausible implications, it is admissible for consideration on this view. Society may then select, among admissible standards, whichever is most attractive for practical purposes. It has been argued, along these lines, that the higher-brain standard is inadmissible for implying that those in PVS are dead while the traditional cardiopulmonary standard is inadmissible for implying (in principle) that a still-conscious individual might be dead, clearing the ground for the whole-brain standard, which has no fatal implications and is attractive from a practical standpoint (Chiong 2005).

Having already explored difficulties (and strengths) of each standard, how might we evaluate the more general thesis that death is not amenable to classical definition? One strategy open to critics of this reasoning, of course, is to argue that some definition is adequate. Another is to defend the disaggregation of death, as previously discussed. A third strategy would be to argue that our failure thus far to produce an adequate definition does not mean that none is possible. Some concepts can be adequately captured by classical definitions even if it is difficult to produce them. It would appear premature, therefore, to render a judgment on the success of the present approach to understanding human death.

A final assumption underlying the mainstream discussion of the definition of death is that human death is a morally crucial marker. Were it not, then accuracy in the definition of death would be of purely ontological, conceptual, or scientific interest. This attitude, of course, is not the prevailing one. Not only do we tend to regard many behaviors as appropriate only if an individual has died; the criminal law treats as momentous the question of whether one person has killed—that is, caused the death of—another person, even if such considerations as motive, deliberation, and special circumstances are also important.

It is not difficult to see, though, how one might challenge this presumption of death's moral salience. After all, we have already begun to remove certain behaviors from the class of death behaviors. For example, in many circumstances termination of life supports need not await a patient's death. And, as we have noted, there are calls to abandon the dead-donor rule in the context of organ transplantation. We might go further in separating death from the cluster of moral concerns traditionally associated with it. For example, without embracing the higher-brain approach to death, we could hold that irreversible loss of the capacity of consciousness entails a loss of moral status , at which point traditional death behaviors are appropriate (Persson 2002). We might even overhaul the criminal law with respect to killing:

It is then the irrevocable loss of the capacity for consciousness that is the great loss; so it is for the causing of it that criminal law should mete out the severest punishment. Killing, or the causing of (biological) death, should be punished to this degree only if, as is normally the case, it brings along the irrevocable loss of the capacity for consciousness (ibid, 32).

One implication of this proposal is that harvesting organs from PVS patients, thereby killing them, would not be punishable insofar as these patients, having irrevocably lost the capacity for consciousness, have already suffered “the great loss” and no longer possess moral status. Some attracted to this approach will want to argue further that the crime of murder is really that of causing the irrevocable loss of the capacity for consciousness without first obtaining voluntary, informed consent from the person to be killed . The italicized qualification would create conceptual space for a justification of active euthanasia (see the entry on voluntary euthanasia ).

The present proposal to separate the issue of death from what is morally important is somewhat radical. Yet its chief ground for doing so, the claim that the capacity for consciousness is what underlies moral status, cannot be dismissed. On the other hand, this claim apparently relies on the thesis (which we considered in connection with the higher-brain approach) that only what affects one's experience can affect one's interests. As we saw, this thesis is far from self-evident. For those who disagree with it, the time of death—the time at which one no longer exists (at least in this world)—is likely to retain some of the moral importance traditionally accorded to it. Moreover, even if the philosophical case for demoting the moral importance of death were airtight, we cannot responsibly dismiss widely held sensibilities, including those at odds with the present approach, in constructing public policies concerning death. Certainly it is contestable to what extent the public could embrace further demotion of the moral importance of death, and to what extent its limited ability to do so matters for public policy.

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

International Network for Life Studies , founded by Professor Masahiro Morioka.
The U.K. Definition of Death , at The Linacre Centre for Healthcare Ethics.

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The Meaning of Death

Laszlo makay , george marosan jr. and david vatai consider whether death destroys meaning or creates it..

Unsurprisingly, people are obsessed with the meaning of their lives. Many also think that death is the antithesis of meaning – the single greatest obstacle to a meaningful life. However, what if this is a misunderstanding? Moreover, if we discovered the meaning of death (if any exists), would it cast light on the meaning of life?

All of us have heard things like “Everyone dies, so life is meaningless.” Or taking this logic to a higher level, someone may say: “The unavoidable destruction of the universe – via heat death, the big crunch, or the big rip, you name it – makes the existence of the entire human race meaningless.” These simple reasonings seem correct. Our own deepest fears only serve to help them appear realistic.

Things have meaning because they are meaningful to somebody. Once that person dies then nothing matters to them any more, so surely the things in their life that had meaning no longer do? Hasty conclusions are usually misleading, and in this case, the conclusions are incorrect. Some meanings or their bearers can survive our own individual deaths – such as our own children or our contribution to society. Many external goals and achievements may continue to exist after our death. And in some special cases – for example, sacrificing oneself for a noble cause – death may even be necessary to fully realise a meaningful individual life.

What about the meaninglessness of humanity on a cosmic scale? It doesn’t hurt to know that science tells us that the longer the forecasting period, the less reliable the prediction. Any prognosis in the range of billions of years is uncertain at best. If we do not know what comprises 95% of the universe, we cannot be confident of our predictions about it. We cannot even be certain that the universe will ever be destroyed. Consequently, it would be a long shot to find our existence meaningless just because of some uncertain end-of-the-cosmos scenarios set untold billions of years in the future.

Life and Death Issues

If we want to be correct about the meaning of life in the face of death, we should first understand some basics about death.

‘Life’ has different definitions depending on the perspective and approach. Someone may say that the basic criteria for life are the utilization of free energy, reproduction, and the capacity for metabolism; but there is no single correct definition. Philosophy, biology, even astronomy, have divergent descriptions.

The situation with death is similar. Until recently, people who did not breathe were considered dead. This criterion was so unreliable that being buried alive occurred so often that fear of it was common enough to get its own name: taphophobia . The methods to establish death slowly became more trustworthy: a lack of pulse or heartbeat, then observing the non-functioning of the brain.

While biology and the medical sciences have their various definitions of life and death, we should dig even deeper, to account for the viewpoint of physics. After all, biology is essentially based on chemistry, and chemistry is based on physics. At the most fundamental level of physics, we find the law of conservation of energy and matter. This law does not allow annihilation in the literal sense, only the transformation of matter and energy. Matter/energy cannot be destroyed and it cannot disappear; it can only change.

If there is no fundamental physics-level manifestation of ‘death’, how should we interpret the concept? According to biology, physics, and systems theory together, death is a so-called ‘emergent phenomenon’ within the systems of life or the biosphere. For instance, death can be narrowly interpreted as the end of vital signs of an organism, so there would be no death without biological life. Consequently, death is something that needs life first.

The relationship is unidirectional, since death cannot happen without life – but life can exist without death. Yes: according to physics, death is not a necessity. At a fundamental physical level, all living organisms could rejuvenate their bodies by using free energy in their environment; and there is no fundamental physical cause preventing organisms doing this indefinitely. Many proliferating unicellular organisms (such as the HeLa immortal cell line) do not die because of ‘old age’; death only occurs due to environmental influences or accidents. The unicellular organisms living today are the same line as those that started fission billions of years ago, continuously dividing and surviving. Immortality, or more precisely, negligible senescence – a lack of symptoms of aging in organisms – may even exist in case of multicellular organisms such as hydras, which do not grow old. Many quite complex organisms such as trees live for thousands of years. Of course, in the long term, the likelihood of death for the individuals of even these species rises to 100%, due to accidents, disasters, illness, or predators. However, that can take a comparatively long time, and does not explain the usual death due to old age for individuals of most species. We could even say that there is something strange with common inevitable death through old age. For example, species have different typical lifespans. The normal timing of the ‘unavoidable’ death from old age of the mayfly, mouse, elephant, and tree varies species-by-species in an extremely wide range, from days to thousands of years. Therefore, death from old age is not the result of being alive in general, but due to species-specific factors. In other words, natural death is a function of their biological structure, their behavior, and their environment. Dying after a mating ritual enables reproduction; or the further life of the individual helps to support offspring.

This shows the efficiency of the life-cycles of organisms. Death starts to show evolutionarily benefits. A genetically-programmed, species-specific, timely death frees up natural resources. In every species, offspring, requiring living space and resources, represent the capacity for mutations, and so enable evolutionary adaptation. It would be hugely restrictive to the offspring if all the ancestors remained alive: it would cause them to run out of resources and space in the short term, thereby obstructing adaptation in the long term. Thus on the larger scale, death serves life rather than ruins it. The evolutionary advantages of the eventual programmed death of organisms has usually proved to be greater than the non-dying seen in their unaging counterparts, so evolution has favored congenital mortality in most cases. That is exactly what we can see in nature: there are far more mortal organisms in multicellular species than immortal ones.

So death does not happen out of physical, chemical, or biochemical necessity, but because of its useful effects. Death does not simply depend on life (since only the living can die); rather, life – more precisely, evolutionary processes – gave birth to death for its own ‘purposes’, with the genesis of the first complex organisms, about seven hundred million years ago or so. Nevertheless, we as individuals consider death a catastrophe because of our personal involvement, fear, and loss. We can see death coming, but we cannot see its useful effects after our demise.

Life and Death Reconsidered

So what is death’s meaning? The meaning is its contribution to the success, survival, adaptation, and development of life. The fact that life is present almost everywhere on our planet in such a great diversity today is only made possible by death. By the same token, death has also contributed to the emergence of humanity.

Furthermore, immortality would not itself absolve life of apparent meaninglessness. In fact, a lack of death would make life unbearable in the long run, as well as unsustainable. Immortality would likely lead to an overcrowded Earth with societies full of inequalities and social tensions in a collapsing ecosystem. Powerful leaders and wealthy individuals would strive to maintain and increase their power and wealth; fewer new minds being born would bring about less innovation; and immortality’s impact on our already overstretched natural resources and environment would be catastrophic.

Does the meaning of death lead to the meaning of life, too? We have seen that death is not an obstacle to a meaningful life. Besides, it has its own meaning, by contributing to life. Therefore, life is meaningful too, is it not?

Unfortunately, death having a purpose does not automatically give meaning to life. And if life turns out to be meaningless, then death, even if it were evolutionarily valuable , would also be meaningless. We have simply removed some common misconceptions regarding death and its effect on the meaning of life. Therefore, we have somewhat reduced the likelihood of negative answers to whether life has a meaning. But giving a positive answer to the ancient question, if possible at all, requires further research.

Laszlo Makay obtained his MSc. in Finance and Management at the Budapest University of Economics. George Marosan Jr obtained a PhD in Philosophy in 1978. He has been a university professor since 1992. David Vatai obtained his MSc in English in 2016 and a minor in Philosophy in 2012 at the University of Szeged.

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The Concept of Death in Philosophy and Experience

This essay examines three approaches to the concept of death: an existential approach by Heidegger, a pragmatic evaluation by Nagel, and an experiential account by Philip Gould, who was not a professional philosopher but who wrote a detailed description of the time before his death from cancer. I compare and contrast the different approaches, and use Gould's account as real-life check on the two philosophical analyses.

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The gist of this paper will be my exploration of the kinds of issues that emerge when existentially-grounded phenomenologists confront the issue of death. After briefly examining the materialist perspective on consciousness, we will concentrate our attention on how the recognition of different levels of consciousness can show us how we can relate to death in different ways. We will proceed from examining the impossibility of the death of the self, to the possibility of transcendence through experiencing the death of the other. We will turn to Merleau-Ponty’s concept of bodily knowledge for help with the matter of how consciousness constitutes the world around itself and enables the possibility of transcendence. We will also examine passages from Nietzsche’s philosophy (with guidance from Heidegger and Blanchot) that cover the transition from viewing time as linear to viewing time as circular, and the transition from understanding our place in the universe in a passive, accepting way...

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Heidegger, Authenticity and the Self

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This article considers the relationship of Heidegger’s metaphysics of Being-toward-death to what Heidegger describes as “the enigma of motion,” that is, to Dasein’s “historicality.” In doing so, the article confronts a series of questions concerning fundamental realities of animate life, realities centering on angst in the face of death, but including curiosity and fear, for example, all such realities being what Heidegger terms “states-of-mind” or “moods.” Thus, the article basically questions Heidegger’s elision of a Leibkörper, not only in terms of feelings but in terms of an exaltation of language, an insular notion of Dasein’s historicality, and a narrow and deficient depiction of animals in his “philosophical biology.” Through a critical examination of the phenomenological disclosure that Heidegger seeks in his metaphysics of Being-toward-death, the article shows that death and the very concept of death hinges on being a body, a temporally finite animate body. Thus, however metaphysical its exposition, Being-toward-death is existentially anchored in being a body. keywords: “enigma of motion,” concept of death, poetry, being “poor in world,” being poor in body, states-of-mind, feelings

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THE EXPERIENCE OF DEATH and the Moral Problem of Suicide

Edouard d'Araille

Ground-breaking analysis of Death by the key Existentialist philosopher Paul-Louis Landsberg who died in a German concentration camp during the Second World War. A part of the group of philosophers embracing Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir, Paul-Louis Landsberg was published in the journal 'Les Temps Modernes' and released several works before his premature death at the hands of the Nazis. The present work 'The Experience of Death' is coupled with an equally forceful study of the 'Moral Problem of Suicide'. The portion of the work on death is perhaps the most perceptive and searching existentialist analysis of death apart from that of Martin Heidegger which features in his magnum opus 'Being and Time'. Landsberg was a Christian yet although he expresses some Christian views in his work he does not force any of his beliefs on his readers. In fact, as a Christian philosopher he is a controversial figure because of his liberal and forward-thinking views on suicide. This is a book that makes a deep impact upon anyone who dares to accompany the author on his honest explorations of Death and Suicide. - Brief biographical details and a bibliography are provided as well as full textual annotations and an Editor's Note as introduction. The volume is edited by the Historian of Thought Edouard d'Araille and has been provided as a complete text on Academia.edu for the last twelve months, courtesy of Living Time Global, the publishers. In place of the complete text, a key extract from the work is now provided at this web location.

Actual Problems of Mind. Philosophy Journal, (22), 108-136. https://doi.org/10.31812/apd.v0i22.4445

Andrii Leonov

In this paper, I am dealing with the phenomena of "life" and "death". The questions that I attempt to answer are "What is life, and what is death?" "Is it bad to die?" and Is there life after death?. The method that I am using in this paper is that of phenomenology. The latter I understand as an inquiry into meaning, that is, what makes this or that phenomenon as such. Thus, I am approaching the phenomena in question from the point of view of their meaning in the first place. I claim that ordinarily we constitute phenomena of "life" and "death" in a twofold way. When it comes to "life", one can specify "life-as-biological", and "life-as-a-possibility" senses. The former I understand as a cluster of biological processes that unfold in physical time. By "life-as-a-possibility", I understand a cluster of projects, potentials that depend on our subjectivity. I claim that we essentially perceive life-as-biological through life-as-a-possibility. When it comes to "death", I argue that we essentially constitute this phenomenon in a similar manner. On the one hand, we perceive "death" in the "death-as-biological/physical" sense which signifies the end of the organism's biological processes. On the other hand, we constitute "death" as the "existential/practical death"/"death-of-possibility." By that I mean an annihilation of all possibilities, and projects. In short, it is a situation when one's life suddenly loses all its meaning and value: death of meaning. I argue that what constitutes the significance of "death-as-biological" for us is what I call the "existential/practical death" or "death-of-possibility". I use the phenomena of mourning and suicide to illustrate my point better. Reflecting on whether it is bad to die, I claim that if we accept the hypotheses I am defending in the paper, it appears that death is bad because it entails the loss of all possibilities. I also want to show that people’s desire for immortality is in fact reasonable, because the more one lives, the more possibilities one is able to realize. In other words, people’s desire for immortality is grounded in the essential understanding of the phenomenon of life" as a possibility. Reflecting on whether there is life after death, my answer is twofold. Since there is no scientific evidence of life after physical/biological death, I think there is no reason to believe in such as well. But when it comes to the question whether there is life after the existential/practical death, my answer is positive: "Yes, there is!" I try to show that it is always possible to find the meaning of life even in the light of the most terrible events. In this sense, there is always a light at the end of the tunnel.

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A Philosopher's Case Against Death

The idea is intuitive: It is good to be alive; it is bad to die. Yet many, even most, resist this idea, and not just because they believe in an afterlife. Some of the resistance comes from the worries about what would happen to the world if we lived much longer: Overpopulation! Stagnation! Social security and pension crises! These are reasonable concerns: Something that appears to be good for the individual can have such bad effects for society that in the end it is good for no one. But more commonly, people simply appear to accept that death comes after a full life; they do not object to death, only untimely death.

Writer David Ewing Duncan traveled the United States giving talks on biotechnology and life extension. At each venue, he asked the audience if they would want to live 80 years, 120 years, 150 years, or forever. People were allowed to imagine breakthroughs in antiaging medicine. Out of 30,000 people, around 60 percent responded by saying 80 years, 30 percent said 120 years, nearly 10 percent said 150 years, and less than 1 percent said forever. His results were similar to those of a 2013 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center about Americans’ opinions on death. When asked how long they would want to live, 69 percent gave a number between 78 and 100. The average ideal life span turned out to be about 90. Only 8 percent said that they would want to live beyond 100, and only 4 percent said they would want to live beyond 120.

My own experience teaching an undergraduate class on the philosophy of death confirms some of these findings. At the beginning of each semester, I ask my class how long they would want to live, ideally. Contrary to what we might expect, the vast majority are content with a natural life span. They do not worry much about death. Half of the class say that they have never really thought about death. (Of course, this might be because they are young.) As someone who finds death to be a gruesome prospect, I find this easygoing attitude toward death weird. At first, I did not take it seriously. Surely they are only pretending to accept death in order to comfort themselves and each other! But when I pressed people around me on the matter, they too insisted that they were okay with dying. Really. This was not because they, like 80 percent of Americans, believed in an afterlife. People I spoke to were often agnostics, and they did not justify their equanimity by referring to heaven. Rather, they had accepted death and said that they had “made peace” with it. They had the same sentiments with regard to aging. The limiting conditions of our lives are fine to them just the way they are. Gradually it dawned on me: Could it be that what seems obvious (to me), namely, that it is bad to age and die, is actually a countercultural thought?

Stoic philosophers from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius implored us not only to accept death, but to love it as a part of the cosmically just iron laws of nature.

I began to study ideas about human mortality. What I found was that the acceptance of death is deeply embedded in our cultures. In the literature on death, this view is often referred to as “apologism” and contrasted with prolongevism, but it could also be labeled the “philosophical view” or the “wise view,” since all the most important philosophers and teachers of mankind have taught that we should not fear death.

Socrates likened earthly existence to a punishment and an illness and understood death to be a relief, something to look forward to. The Buddha similarly taught that life is suffering and saw our final and absolute extinction as the highest good. Stoic philosophers from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius implored us not only to accept death, but to love it as a part of the cosmically just iron laws of nature. The 16th-century thinker Montaigne, under the influence of Plato and the Stoics, goes so far as to identify philosophical wisdom with the acceptance of death in the famous title of one of his essays, “To Study Philosophy is to Learn How to Die.” Epicureans competed with Platonists and Stoics, but they agreed with these rival schools that death is nothing to fear.

In Book III of the Roman epicurean philosopher Lucretius’s “On the Nature of Things,” in a section called “On the Folly of Fearing Death,” we find nearly all of the main reasons given for not fearing annihilation that we hear to this day: (a) we have no experiences when dead, so it cannot be bad; (b) if we have had a good life, then we should “retire like a guest sated with the banquet”; (c) if we have had a bad life, then “why not make end of life and trouble?”; (d) life will get boring in the end because “all things are ever as they were”; (e) we should “yield” to the younger generation, because “one thing must be restored at the expense of others” in a natural circle of life, whereby “one thing shall never cease to rise up of another, and life is granted to none for freehold, to all on lease”; and (f) we must die to avoid overpopulation since “there must needs be substance that the generations to come may grow.”

These are a few examples of death’s ardent advocates, and the list could be continued by simply adding the name of any philosopher, or prophet for that matter, who comes to mind. The likelihood that the thinker will be against death is slim. In a recent book on our attitudes toward death, the authors conclude, with some surprise, “[C]ome to think about it, we can’t think of a single major philosopher or world religion that subscribes to the position that death is nothing more than a dreadful prospect, the worst possible cheat imaginable.” Gerald J. Gruman, author of a classic study on the history of our ideas about death, similarly concludes that “the leading intellectual currents [of the West are] extensively infiltrated by apologism: The belief that prolongevity is neither possible nor desirable.”

Many of the stories we tell bring home the apologist message. The human condition seems harsh, since it comes with aging, illness, and death. However, so the message goes, it is actually what is best for us, and if we resist it and try to change it something bad is bound to happen. This is the moral of one of the earliest known pieces of literature from the 18th century BC, the “Epic of Gilgamesh.” Gilgamesh, pained and frightened by the death of his companion, sets out to find the secret of eternal life. At one point he finds it in a plant he rescues from the depths of the ocean. When he carelessly leaves the plant on the ground to go bathing, a snake steals it. All his efforts fail in similar ways. He eventually learns that “life, which you look for, you will never find. For when the gods created man, they let death be his share, and life withheld in their own hands.”

It was also a favorite theme of the Greeks. Man’s hubris, his refusal to stay within his proper bounds, is punished: We should not fly too close to the sun. In the tale of Tithonus, Eos — the Goddess of Dawn — falls in love with Tithonus and asks Zeus to make him immortal. Zeus grants Tithonus his wish, but with a catch. While unable to die, Tithonus still ages. In the end, they could do nothing but lock the senile old man in a room where he still lies babbling incoherently. (The moral may be highly relevant today: Many fear that the quest for life extension will result in the horrific spectacle of hospital wards with row after row of senile, demented centennials.) We all know how Sisyphus was punished by the gods to push a rock up a hill for all eternity. What, though, did he do to deserve this punishment? The backstory is this: Sisyphus was a king who tricked Death into putting on handcuffs. He then locked Death in a wardrobe, and as a result, no one died any more. People were still trying to slaughter each other on the battlefield to no avail. Once order was restored and death reinstated, Sisyphus was punished by being given what he wished for — namely, immortality, but again with a catch. This is a fitting punishment thinks the apologist, since in her view life without death is in fact a never-ending, infernal pushing of the rock. Death, more peaceful than the deepest sleep, saves us from sharing Sisyphus’s fate. Thank you, Death.

We are living in a time that has much less respect for the notion of hubris, but many of our most popular works of imagination continue in the tradition of the acceptance of death.

These are, of course, old myths, and we are living in a time that has much less respect for the notion of hubris, but many of our most popular works of imagination continue in the tradition of the acceptance of death. This may not be obvious until one reflects on it. Yet in what popular work of art does a quest for immortality end well? In what work of art does the hero seek immortality but is stopped by the villain? “The Lord of the Rings,” “Narnia,” “Harry Potter,” and the “Star Wars” series, to mention some of our most beloved and widely recognized stories, all reinforce the apologist narrative. Both J. R. R. Tolkien’s and C. S. Lewis’s fantasy epics were written as responses to what both authors saw as disturbing and dehumanizing science-driven visions for humanity, advanced by writers such as Julian Huxley, J. B. S. Haldane, and Olaf Stapledon.

In “The Lord of the Rings,” earthly paradise is a low-tech pastoral old Britain, whereas evil is created in the industrial furnaces of Sauron. The story centers around a magical ring, the One Ring, which can give its bearer great powers, including life extension. But it also corrupts: After having lived five times his natural life span, one of its possessors literally turns into the slimy creep Gollum. Only the Ainur, including wizards, and the elves are immortal. Men, dwarves, hobbits, and most other races cannot live forever and thus are subject to aging and natural death. In Tolkien’s universe, despite many having a desire for it, immortality is not desirable for those who are mortal. Every race has a set span; to exceed this span proves to be agony.

Peter Jackson, who directed the films based on the books, is not alone in interpreting the One Ring as representing science and technology, as well as their seemingly uncontrollable powers. Even the best, with the best of intentions, cannot control it. We must renounce its powers and return to a more natural way of being in order to save ourselves.

In the first two installments of C. S. Lewis’s “Narnia” series, Jadis, a young princess, violates the law of Aslan and eats a magical apple from the Silver Tree, which gives her inexhaustible powers and immortality but also transforms her into the psychopathic, mass-murdering archvillain, the White Witch. In J. K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” series, the archnemesis is the formidable black magician, Voldemort, who, according to Wikibooks, “apparently believes nothing is worse than death; perhaps his greatest weakness is his inability to love.” Taken together, Lewis, Rowling, and Tolkien have sold 600 million copies of their books, far more than any other literature except for a few religious texts, all of which are, of course, also apologist. As movie adaptations — again taken together — they have grossed more than any other franchise, constituting a quarter of the top 40 grossing films of all time.

Speaking of films, while the first three installments of the “Star Wars” saga did not seem to be concerned with either hubris or death, the prequels showed themselves, at least partly, to be another cautionary tale about what happens if we do not accept death. Darth Vader, we learn, was once a young Jedi Knight whose final turn to the dark side was an effort to save his beloved princess from dying in childbirth. The Jedi Master Yoda, a personification of wisdom, encapsulates the moral: “Death is a natural part of life. Rejoice for those around you who transform into the Force. Mourn them do not. Miss them do not. Attachment leads to jealousy. The shadow of greed, that is.”

Moving beyond art, apologism is also the faith of our leading bioethicists. Leon Kass, the former chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics, writes in his book “Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity” that death “is a blessing for every human individual, whether he knows it or not,” and he complains that “the desire to prolong youthfulness [is] an expression of a childish and narcissistic wish incompatible with devotion to posterity.”

Fellow council member Francis Fukuyama warns that a graying population poses a wide range of threats, from economic collapse to the inability to defend our country. Daniel Callahan, another leading bioethicist, argues in favor of setting limits to how medicine is used. We should enable people to live well, but we should not seek to prolong their lives. Heart transplants, for example, should be reserved for younger patients, even given relatively ample resources, whereas the priority with older patients is to enable the best quality of life during their remaining years. Callahan believes a full human life is possible to achieve by 65. After 80, one’s death is still sad but not a tragedy; it is a tolerable death. Callahan rests his idea of a tolerable death on the concept of a “natural life span,” which he bases on “a persistent pattern of judgment in our culture and others of what it means to live out a life.” This “persistent pattern of judgment” referred to by Callahan is what I am referring to as the Wise View.

Thanatophobia, the fear of death, is, according to the mental health profession, no more rational than a fear of spiders, open spaces, or clowns.

In an echo of Soviet-style psychology, psychologists have even defined acceptance as the only sane, well-adjusted response to death. Thanatophobia, the fear of death, is, according to the mental health profession, no more rational than a fear of spiders, open spaces, or clowns. It is a product of “intrapsychic structural tension,” “infantile conflict,” or some other pejoratively labeled state. Kübler-Ross’s popular grief cycle model of how to face death and other forms of serious loss, by moving through the stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance, was initially intended to be strictly descriptive. However, it is often appropriated as a normative model of a healthy mind: We ought to move from denial to acceptance, and if we do not, then there is something wrong with us.

Should we naively insist that surely death — our own or that of a loved one — is simply gruesome, then philosophers, priests, and psychologists stand ready with their wisdom to tell us not to rage and rebel, but to relax and accept death because life has an end because it has a beginning, and it consists of different stages, each one with its particular meaning and charm, not unlike the seasons of the year. The limit of death raises the stakes; it makes each moment significant, each choice important, and it endows life with seriousness and meaning. We should seek a good life, not necessarily a long life. Death is a fitting culmination to a complete life, a well-deserved rest. A fear of death is foolish since either you cease to exist and can therefore not be harmed in any way (since you are not), or you go to a better place. Immortality should not be sought by greedily hanging on to our own particular existence, by refusing to yield and make space. Immortality should be sought in transcendence, in passing the flame of life on through our children, by contributing to the achievements of man, and through the religious and philosophical appreciation of the fundamental oneness of all being. The fact that many people seek to extend youth and postpone death at any cost is a sign of selfishness and decadence. It is hubristic, Promethean, and positivist. Death can be beautiful.

This may sound persuasive, but we should not buy it. Despite its dominance, its distinguished defenders, and its impressive provenance, the Wise View is false. If death is the end then it is simply awful, and it is time we admit it.

Unless there is an afterlife, we will all die — that much is undeniable. But it matters whether we die at 90 or 150. And it matters whether we continue to fall rapidly apart after 50, or if we can delay aging enough to continue in robust health far beyond that. Indeed, from the point of view of health, and healthcare, nothing can have a greater positive impact than addressing aging. Not to speak of the suffering it would prevent.

The Wise View, with its conservative acceptance of the status quo, stands in the way of a greater societal commitment to finding out what aging is, and slow it down, halt it, or perhaps even reverse it. Thankfully, we find ourselves at a turning point in history where the old stories in praise of human mortality are beginning to lose their grip. We are less willing to see death as a just divine punishment, less certain of an afterlife, less inclined to accept that everything that happens by nature is thereby good, and we are no longer certain that nothing can be done about death. We are beginning to allow ourselves to openly admit what our actions already say: namely, that we want youth and life and that we hate aging and death. A rebellion against death is brewing.

Ingemar Patrick Linden taught philosophy at NYU for nearly a decade. He is researching public attitudes to radical life extension. This article is adapted from his book, “ The Case Against Death .”

Corrections

The Philosophy of Death: Is it Rational to Fear Death?

In this article we consider Greek philosopher Epicurus’ reasons as to why we should not fear death, as well as some contemporary opinions on the philosophy of death.

Each of us has our own philosophy of death, our own thoughts about what it is to die and whether we should fear our end. In this article we explore the views on death of Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 BC), who proposed that we have no good reason to fear death and that we must relinquish our fear in order to live a happy life. We then consider the views of Thomas Nagel (b.1937), a contemporary philosopher whose views on the subject have proved influential.

Philosophy as Preparation for Death

Let us go back in time, to a place where philosophers roamed the earth. We find ourselves in classical Athens, in a period where Socrates , Plato , Aristotle and of course Epicurus lived and breathed. This was a time of great intellectual accomplishment and it was to form the bedrock of philosophy until this day. We are fortunate to have many surviving works of Plato, who wrote about the life and philosophy of Socrates in a series of dialogues. In one such Dialogue, entitled Phaedo , he reiterated Socrates’ philosophy of death :

“… the true philosophers are ever studying death; to them, of all men, death is the least terrible.”

jacques louis david death socrates painting

Very early on in the history of philosophy we see that death is seen as the raison d’etre of philosophy. Death is what motivates us towards achieving our goals, which helps us to appreciate our loved ones and which concludes our story. It is our marching towards death that forces us to consider how we ought to live and, contrastingly, how we ought to die. For Socrates and Plato the purpose of philosophy is obvious: it is preparation for death. For Plato, our preparation for death was also a preparation for a kind of afterlife, which is something that Epicurus did not agree with.

Who was Epicurus?

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Epicurus was born approximately seven years after Plato died and began his philosophical journey at the age of fourteen as a revolt against his teachers. He moved to Athens at the age of eighteen at the time Aristotle (a student of Plato’s Academy) was teaching at Chalcis, about eighty kilometres north of Athens. It was in Athens that Epicurus strayed from the esoteric teachings of Plato and formed his own naturalistic view of the world, which he published in hundreds of manuscripts (of which almost none survive and of which we know about through his disciples ’ writings and historical documents ).

Epicurus proposed that the world was made up of atoms (over two thousand years before they were shown to exist) and that the universe was infinite. He rejected Plato’s claims about the afterlife , believing that the soul dies with the body. He also encouraged a form of pleasurable living that was rejected by the Stoics , who thought his way of life was degenerate. Epicurus proposed that pleasure (defined as a lack of pain and mental disturbance) was the goal of life. But to achieve that goal we needed to rid ourselves of fear, especially the fear of death.

Is it Rational to Fear Death?

Epicurus believed that our fear of death is the worst fear we face in life because it pervades our thoughts while we are alive. According to Epicurus our fear of death stops us from living. To live properly and happily we must rid ourselves of the fear of death. But how do we do that?

Most of what we know about Epicurus’ philosophy of death comes from a surviving letter of his to one of his students, Menoeceus :

Accustom thyself to believe that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply sentience, and death is the privation of all sentience; therefore a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding to life an illimitable time, but by taking away the yearning after immortality. For life has no terrors for him who has thoroughly apprehended that there are no terrors for him in ceasing to live. Foolish, therefore, is the man who says that he fears death, not because it will pain when it comes, but because it pains in the prospect. Whatsoever causes no annoyance when it is present, causes only a groundless pain in the expectation. Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer.

Epicurus’ Argument

william stott garden epicurus leontium ternissa painting

Let’s break Epicurus’ argument down.

Things are only bad for us if they are experientially unpleasant
The dead have no experience
Therefore by 1 and 2 nothing can be bad for the dead
It is irrational to fear what will not be bad
Therefore by 3 and 4 it is irrational to fear death itself

For Epicurus’ argument to be persuasive you would need to accept at least two assumptions in his view, namely:

That death is the end of consciousness and that consciousness does not transcend the body;
You cannot be harmed by things you cannot experience.

If you accept both assumptions, you probably will agree with Epicurus that it is irrational to fear death. If you disagree with the first assumption (if you believe in the life of the soul after death, for example) you may find yourself seeking answers within theology about whether death should be feared.

Things become interesting if you dispute the second assumption.

Is Death a Harm?

Imagine you land a new job and are invited to a company party. You are having a nice time talking to the host, enjoying the atmosphere and the food provided. At this moment you assume that everything is going well. However, in the back room – away from earshot – your old work colleague Dave, who you invited as your plus-one, is telling the other guests about how much of a loser you are. Dave is eager to tell these people how slack you were in the old job and how everyone at the old job secretly despises you. At this moment your reputation among your new work colleagues is tainted, even though they keep their mouths shut around you and you never find out that Dave spread rumors about you.

The question is, have you been harmed?

Thomas Nagel, a contemporary American philosopher, argues that ‘yes,’ you have been harmed even though you do not experience the harm. We can think of many examples that may apply here, such as your partner cheating on you without you ever knowing. In such instances, he proposes that you have been harmed. What exactly about you is harmed is a question that could be asked, whereby the answer seems to depend on your view of personal identity. If you think that you are your thoughts and your body in the present moment, Nagel’s argument probably will not be persuasive since you do not experience the harm directly. This is the type of view that Epicurus seems to take.

However, if you think of yourself as a kind of narrative or story stretched over time, like Nagel seems to, then ‘you’ are your story, even if parts of your story are not known by you.

Thomas Nagel’s Philosophy of Death

How does this apply to the philosophy of death? For Nagel, death is a harm because it deprives us of life which he believes is intrinsically good. He states in his book Mortal Questions in a chapter titled Death that “All of us, I believe, are fortunate to have been born.” It is from this conviction about the value of life that he builds his argument for why death is a harm:

“If we are to make sense of the view that to die is bad, it must be on the ground that life is a good and death is the corresponding deprivation or loss [of that good]”

Nagel, unlike Epicurus, thinks that we are harmed by death because “the time after his death is time of which his death deprives him.” In other words, death deprives us of more life . It is for this reason that we step away from oncoming traffic and for why we mourn the death of a young person more intensely than that of an elderly person. However, the implications of Nagel’s deprivation view are endless. How can we psychologically deal with our own impending death? Should we seek out immortality ? Nagel’s philosophy of death, for better or for worse, puts the fear back into death.

Towards a Philosophy of Death

One’s answer to the question ‘is it rational to fear death?’ will determine a large part of their philosophy of death. To begin, we can ask which view is more reasonable, Nagel’s or Epicurus’s?

On one hand, Nagel’s view seems to make sense of our emotions about death and our behaviour towards it. However, Epicurus seems to suggest that our typical emotions about death and our behaviour towards it may not be rational.

One could question Nagel’s view that life is intrinsically good, or one could question whether we fear death itself, or if we fear the broader impacts and circumstances of our death, thus challenging Epicurus’ view. Perhaps, as is often the case, the answer lies somewhere in the middle. Could there be a way to dislike death and yet not fear it? Could we accept death in a way that allows us to live happy and fulfilling lives? That is up to us to determine, as we each form our own philosophy of death.

Socrates’ Philosophy And Art: The Origins Of Ancient Aesthetic Thought

By Casey Scott MA Philosophy, GDipEd English and Humanities, BA(Hons) Professional & Creative Writing Casey teaches philosophy and culture studies at a leading Australian university. His postgraduate research examined the metaphysics of biological concepts. He is a qualified English teacher with a degree in professional and creative writing and is about to begin his third degree in zoology and animal sciences.

two philosophy drawings jean arp and ernst barlach

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The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death

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Introduction: Philosophy of Death

Ben Bradley is Allan and Anita Sutton Professor of Philosophy at Syracuse University. He is the author of Well-Being and Death (Oxford University Press, 2009) and Well-Being (Polity, 2015), and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death (2012).

Fred Feldman is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he has been teaching since 1969. He has long been fascinated by philosophical problems about the nature and value of death. He is author of Confrontations with the Reaper: A Philosophical Study of the Nature and Value of Death (Oxford University Press, 1992), Pleasure and the Good Life: On the Nature, Varieties, and Plausibility of Hedonism (Oxford University Press, 2004), What Is This Thing Called Happiness? (Oxford University Press, 2010) and several other books and more than seventy-five papers in professional journals.

Jens Johansson is Associate Professor of Practical Philosophy at Uppsala University. He has published a number of essays on the philosophy of death, personal identity, and related issues, and co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death (2013; with Ben Bradley and Fred Feldman).

Published: 28 December 2012
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This chapter discusses the theme of this book, which is the philosophical aspect of death. The book answers questions about what death is and why it matters that help define the growing interdisciplinary subfield of philosophy of death. It analyzes the views of ancient Greek philosophers including Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurus about death; investigates how death is related to various concepts including disintegration of personality, personal identity, and pleasure; and explores the concept of immortality, the wrongness of killing, and the significance of death for animals.

The philosophy of death spans many subdisciplines of philosophy. It is “intersubdisciplinary.” Perhaps in part for that reason, philosophy of death is not typically recognized as a distinct subfield of philosophy. If you look at Brian Leiter’s Philosophical Gourmet Report specialty rankings in philosophy, you will not find a specialty ranking for philosophy of death. If you are on a search committee in a philosophy department, you might have no applicants who list philosophy of death as an area of specialization or competence. Yet many philosophers are working on the philosophy of death even if they don’t think of their work in that way. As we will see, what we say about many well-known questions of philosophy will have implications for what we think about death.

The first philosophical question to ask about any X is “what is X?” Thus our handbook begins with the question “what is death?”—or, as Cody Gilmore puts it, “when does a thing die?” (chapter 1 ). It is natural to say that to die is to cease to be alive. But there seem to be cases in which a thing ceases to be alive without dying. These include cases of suspended animation, where life processes stop but could be restarted, and fission, where a living being divides into two new living beings. One of the main challenges in understanding death is to understand the difference between cases where fission involves death and cases where it does not. Gilmore provides a novel account of this difference; he suggests that fission entails death unless it involves what he calls “generative division.”

Among the oldest philosophical questions are questions about personal identity. What is a person? What are the persistence conditions for people? The answers to these questions bear on the question of what happens to us when we die. Most nonphilosophers seem to believe that each person has a nonphysical soul that continues to exist after the death of the body, perhaps in heaven, hell, or purgatory. But this view is not widely held by philosophers, because the existence of a nonphysical soul is usually thought to be problematic. The most popular views about what we are include the view that we are, fundamentally and essentially, animals—the biological view—and the view that we are essentially psychological entities—the psychological view. If the biological view is true, then what we say about our persistence conditions should mirror what we say about the persistence conditions of other biological organisms such as trees. If we are essentially psychological entities, and our persistence conditions are determined by relations of psychological connectedness over time, it would seem we go out of existence at or before biological death (unless, perhaps, another organism stands in the appropriate psychological relations). Fred Feldman defends the view that we continue to exist after death, either as dead people or as dead things that were once people (chapter 2 ). Eric Olson gives objections to this view, but concludes that all views about what happens to us when we die are beset with problems (chapter 3 ). In chapter 4 , Dean Zimmerman argues that the view that it is possible to survive one’s death is defensible on a variety of metaphysical views (which is not to say that we in fact do survive our deaths).

Philosophical questions about time have been thought to be relevant to questions about death. In various ways, it has been thought to matter whether the past and future are real. If the future is not real, perhaps we should not be afraid of our future deaths, since they are not real. If the past is not real, perhaps death cannot be bad for us, since once we die and are purely past, we will in no way exist to be the subject of harm. Ted Sider argues that we need not adopt any particular view about the metaphysics of time in order to hold that death is bad (chapter 5 ). According to Sider, we must be careful to distinguish whether we are making ordinary claims, such as that the table is hard, or claims about fundamental reality, such as that there are no tables but only simples arranged tablewise. The claim that death is bad is an ordinary claim, while views about the reality of the past and future are views about the underlying nature of reality; the ordinary claim about death could be underwritten by a variety of metaphysical views but might not be undermined by any of them. Lars Bergström suggests another way in which facts about time might affect how we should think about our deaths (chapter 6 ). If time is not linear but circular, then we will, in some sense, live again one day. Perhaps accepting this view about time should to some degree temper our sadness about our deaths.

As Gareth Matthews and Phillip Mitsis explain in chapters 7 and 8 , the great Ancient Greek philosophers (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus) typically argued that we should not fear death, because it is not bad for us. Most of these arguments do not strike contemporary philosophers as compelling. For example, Socrates’s suggestion that death is like a dreamless sleep (how refreshing!) seems hard to take seriously. But Epicurus’s arguments, and those of his Roman admirer Lucretius, have continued to engage us; a few are convinced by them, and even those who think them unsound have different views about where they go wrong. Two arguments have received the most attention. The timing argument goes like this: there is no time at which death could harm me, since, as I go out of existence at the moment of my death, I do not overlap in time with my own death; thus death cannot be bad for me. The symmetry argument goes like this: there is no reason to be afraid of my own future nonexistence, because future nonexistence is no more to be feared than past nonexistence, and I neither fear nor have any reason to fear (or have any negative attitude toward) my own past nonexistence. Roy Sorensen and Jens Johansson address these arguments at length in chapters 10 and 11 , and they are also addressed in several other chapters.

Epicurus seemed to think that since a person goes out of existence when she dies, death cannot be bad because the dead person can have no painful experiences. But those who think death is bad are not moved by this line of reasoning. The standard way to account for the badness of death is to endorse some sort of deprivation account. According to the deprivation account, death is bad for someone if, and to the extent that, it deprives that individual of a more valuable life. Thus it is possible for death to be bad without involving any painful postmortem experiences. Deprivation accounts are defended in the two papers that did the most to restart the contemporary philosophical discussions of death: Thomas Nagel’s “Death” (1970) and Bernard Williams’s “The Makropulos Case” (1973). John Broome provides a careful statement of the deprivation account in chapter 9 .

Some have wondered whether the fact that death deprives its victim of the goods of life is sufficient for death to be a genuine misfortune for its victim. Kai Draper has argued that other mere deprivations, such as failing to find Aladdin’s lamp, do not seem like genuine misfortunes, because it is inappropriate to feel bad about them. In chapter 13 he takes up the question of what attitude it is appropriate to take toward one’s death. Christopher Belshaw also argues that mere deprivation is insufficient for death to be a misfortune. Rather, he says (chapter 12 ), the victim must also have had a desire to live.

There is another desire-based view of the badness of death that has found a number of adherents. Joel Feinberg and George Pitcher claimed that death is bad in virtue of the fact that it frustrates the interests, that is, the desires, of the deceased (Feinberg, 1984 ; Pitcher, 1984 ). When death frustrates an interest, it is bad for the individual who had that interest, and moreover, it is bad for her at the time she had the interest. Thus we would seem to have an answer to the timing problem: death is bad for its victim at times before she died. This view enables us to account for posthumous harm in the same way we account for the harm of death: events occurring after one’s death can frustrate interests one had while alive. Steven Luper defends a version of this view of posthumous harm in chapter 14 .

Williams’s 1973 paper sparked much interesting discussion of immortality: would it be a good thing to live forever? Williams claimed that one would eventually run out of reasons to live, and then death would cease to be a misfortune. His arguments for these claims were suggestive but cryptic. John Fischer and Connie Rosati criticize those arguments in chapters 15 and 16 . Fischer argues that a certain sort of immortal life might well be worth having, while Rosati appeals to facts about agency to explain why we want to extend our existence.

One reason we might care about these questions about the badness of death is that we care about justifying the claim that killing is wrong, and the wrongness of killing seems to have something to do with how bad death is for the victim. If death weren’t bad, we might think our attitudes toward murder were unjustified. But it seems wrong to say that the degree of wrongness of killing someone depends on how bad it is for that person to die, because even if death would not be very bad for its victim (perhaps because he is very old and does not have long to live anyway), it would still be seriously wrong to murder that person. Matthew Hanser attempts to explain this in chapter 17 by appeal to a respect-based view of the wrongness of killing.

While killing another person is normally seriously wrong, there are some cases of killing about which it is not so obvious what to say. What, if anything, might make it permissible to kill fetuses, nonhuman animals, combatants, murderers, or the terminally ill? Some of these topics are taken up in the final four chapters.

Sometimes there is controversy over the wrongness of killing certain individuals at least in part in virtue of controversy over whether death is bad for those individuals. For example, it is sometimes argued that death is not bad for nonhuman animals or human fetuses in virtue of the fact that they lack relevant desires, or have insufficient psychological connectedness over time. Don Marquis and Alastair Norcross criticize these arguments concerning animals (Norcross, chapter 20 ) and fetuses (Marquis, chapter 18 ).

Sometimes there is little controversy that death is bad for an individual, but there are reasons to think that killing that individual might be justified in any case. Frances Kamm takes up the case of killing in war (chapter 19 ), while Torbjörn Tännsjö considers the case of killing convicted murderers (chapter 21 ).

In various ways, and from different perspectives, all these essays might be thought to answer one or both of the following questions: what is death, and why does death matter? These are the questions that define the growing intersubdisciplinary field of philosophy of death.

Feinberg, Joel . 1984 . Harm to Others . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Nagel, Thomas . 1970 . “ Death. ” Noûs 4: 73–80.

Pitcher, George . 1984 . “ The Misfortunes of the Dead. ” American Philosophical Quarterly 21: 183–188.

Williams, Bernard . 1973. “The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality.” In his Problems of the Self, pp. 82–100. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Montaigne on Death and the Art of Living

By maria popova.

In one of his 107 such exploratory essays, titled “That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die,” Montaigne turns to mortality — the subject of one of this year’s best psychology and philosophy books — and points to the understanding of death as a prerequisite for the understanding of life, for the very art of living .

Montaigne examines our conflicted relationship with dying:

Now, of all the benefits that virtue confers upon us, the contempt of death is one of the greatest, as the means that accommodates human life with a soft and easy tranquillity, and gives us a pure and pleasant taste of living, without which all other pleasure would be extinct. […] The end of our race is death; ’tis the necessary object of our aim, which, if it fright us, how is it possible to advance a step without a fit of ague? The remedy the vulgar use is not to think on’t; but from what brutish stupidity can they derive so gross a blindness? They must bridle the ass by the tail: ‘Qui capite ipse suo instituit vestigia retro,’ [‘Who in his folly seeks to advance backwards’ — Lucretius, iv. 474] ’tis no wonder if he be often trapped in the pitfall. They affright people with the very mention of death, and many cross themselves, as it were the name of the devil. And because the making a man’s will is in reference to dying, not a man will be persuaded to take a pen in hand to that purpose, till the physician has passed sentence upon and totally given him over, and then betwixt and terror, God knows in how fit a condition of understanding he is to do it. The Romans, by reason that this poor syllable death sounded so harshly to their ears and seemed so ominous, found out a way to soften and spin it out by a periphrasis, and instead of pronouncing such a one is dead, said, ‘Such a one has lived,’ or ‘Such a one has ceased to live’ … provided there was any mention of life in the case, though past, it carried yet some sound of consolation. … I make account to live, at least, as many more. In the meantime, to trouble a man’s self with the thought of a thing so far off were folly. But what? Young and old die upon the same terms; no one departs out of life otherwise than if he had but just before entered into it; neither is any man so old and decrepit, who, having heard of Methuselah, does not think he has yet twenty good years to come. Fool that thou art! who has assured unto thee the term of life? Thou dependest upon physicians’ tales: rather consult effects and experience. According to the common course of things, ’tis long since that thou hast lived by extraordinary favour; thou hast already outlived the ordinary term of life. And that it is so, reckon up thy acquaintance, how many more have died before they arrived at thy age than have attained unto it; and of those who have ennobled their lives by their renown, take but an account, and I dare lay a wager thou wilt find more who have died before than after five-and-thirty years of age. … How many several ways has death to surprise us?

Rather than indulging the fear of death, Montaigne calls for dissipating it by facing it head-on, with awareness and attention — an approach common in Eastern spirituality:

[L]et us learn bravely to stand our ground, and fight him. And to begin to deprive him of the greatest advantage he has over us, let us take a way quite contrary to the common course. Let us disarm him of his novelty and strangeness, let us converse and be familiar with him, and have nothing so frequent in our thoughts as death. Upon all occasions represent him to our imagination in his every shape; at the stumbling of a horse, at the falling of a tile, at the least prick with a pin, let us presently consider, and say to ourselves, ‘Well, and what if it had been death itself?’ and, thereupon, let us encourage and fortify ourselves. Let us evermore, amidst our jollity and feasting, set the remembrance of our frail condition before our eyes, never suffering ourselves to be so far transported with our delights, but that we have some intervals of reflecting upon, and considering how many several ways this jollity of ours tends to death, and with how many dangers it threatens it. The Egyptians were wont to do after this manner, who in the height of their feasting and mirth, caused a dried skeleton of a man to be brought into the room to serve for a memento to their guests: ‘Omnem crede diem tibi diluxisse supremum Grata superveniet, quae non sperabitur, hora.’ ‘Think each day when past is thy last; the next day, as unexpected, will be the more welcome.’ — [Hor., Ep., i. 4, 13.] Where death waits for us is uncertain; let us look for him everywhere. The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; he who has learned to die has unlearned to serve. There is nothing evil in life for him who rightly comprehends that the privation of life is no evil: to know, how to die delivers us from all subjection and constraint. Paulus Emilius answered him whom the miserable King of Macedon, his prisoner, sent to entreat him that he would not lead him in his triumph, ‘Let him make that request to himself.’ — [ Plutarch, Life of Paulus Aemilius, c. 17; Cicero, Tusc., v. 40. ] In truth, in all things, if nature do not help a little, it is very hard for art and industry to perform anything to purpose. I am in my own nature not melancholic, but meditative; and there is nothing I have more continually entertained myself withal than imaginations of death, even in the most wanton time of my age.

One of Montaigne’s most timeless and timeliest points strikes at the heart of our present productivity-culture, reminding us that the whole of life is contained in our inner life , not in the checklist of our accomplishments:

We should always, as near as we can, be booted and spurred, and ready to go, and, above all things, take care, at that time, to have no business with any one but one’s self: — ‘Quid brevi fortes jaculamur avo Multa?’ [‘Why for so short a life tease ourselves with so many projects?’ — Hor., Od., ii. 16, 17.]

He presages the “real artists ship” mantra Steve Job made famous five centuries later:

A man must design nothing that will require so much time to the finishing, or, at least, with no such passionate desire to see it brought to perfection. We are born to action: ‘Quum moriar, medium solvar et inter opus.’ [‘When I shall die, let it be doing that I had designed.’ — Ovid, Amor., ii. 10, 36.] I would always have a man to be doing, and, as much as in him lies, to extend and spin out the offices of life; and then let death take me planting my cabbages, indifferent to him, and still less of my gardens not being finished.

The essence of his argument is the idea that learning to die is essential for learning to live:

If I were a writer of books, I would compile a register, with a comment, of the various deaths of men: he who should teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live. […] Peradventure, some one may object, that the pain and terror of dying so infinitely exceed all manner of imagination, that the best fencer will be quite out of his play when it comes to the push. Let them say what they will: to premeditate is doubtless a very great advantage; and besides, is it nothing to go so far, at least, without disturbance or alteration? Moreover, Nature herself assists and encourages us: if the death be sudden and violent, we have not leisure to fear; if otherwise, I perceive that as I engage further in my disease, I naturally enter into a certain loathing and disdain of life. I find I have much more ado to digest this resolution of dying, when I am well in health, than when languishing of a fever; and by how much I have less to do with the commodities of life, by reason that I begin to lose the use and pleasure of them, by so much I look upon death with less terror. Which makes me hope, that the further I remove from the first, and the nearer I approach to the latter, I shall the more easily exchange the one for the other.

With a philosophical lens fringing on quantum physics, Montaigne reminds us of the fundamental bias of the arrow of time as we experience it:

Not only the argument of reason invites us to it — for why should we fear to lose a thing, which being lost, cannot be lamented? — but, also, seeing we are threatened by so many sorts of death, is it not infinitely worse eternally to fear them all, than once to undergo one of them? … What a ridiculous thing it is to trouble ourselves about taking the only step that is to deliver us from all trouble! As our birth brought us the birth of all things, so in our death is the death of all things included. And therefore to lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago. … Long life, and short, are by death made all one; for there is no long, nor short, to things that are no more.

He returns — poignantly, poetically — to the meaning of life :

All the whole time you live, you purloin from life and live at the expense of life itself. The perpetual work of your life is but to lay the foundation of death. You are in death, whilst you are in life, because you still are after death, when you are no more alive; or, if you had rather have it so, you are dead after life, but dying all the while you live; and death handles the dying much more rudely than the dead, and more sensibly and essentially. If you have made your profit of life, you have had enough of it; go your way satisfied.

Half a millennium before Carl Sagan, Montaigne channels the sentiment at the heart of Pale Blue Dot :

Life in itself is neither good nor evil; it is the scene of good or evil as you make it.’ And, if you have lived a day, you have seen all: one day is equal and like to all other days. There is no other light, no other shade; this very sun, this moon, these very stars, this very order and disposition of things, is the same your ancestors enjoyed, and that shall also entertain your posterity.

He paints death as the ultimate equalizer:

Give place to others, as others have given place to you. Equality is the soul of equity. Who can complain of being comprehended in the same destiny, wherein all are involved?

The heart of Montaigne’s case falls somewhere between John Cage’s Zen philosophy and the canine state of being-in-the-moment :

Wherever your life ends, it is all there. The utility of living consists not in the length of days, but in the use of time; a man may have lived long, and yet lived but a little. Make use of time while it is present with you. It depends upon your will, and not upon the number of days, to have a sufficient length of life.

He concludes with an admonition about the solipsistic superficiality of death’s ritualization:

I believe, in truth, that it is those terrible ceremonies and preparations wherewith we set it out, that more terrify us than the thing itself; a new, quite contrary way of living; the cries of mothers, wives, and children; the visits of astounded and afflicted friends; the attendance of pale and blubbering servants; a dark room, set round with burning tapers; our beds environed with physicians and divines; in sum, nothing but ghostliness and horror round about us; we seem dead and buried already. … Happy is the death that deprives us of leisure for preparing such ceremonials.

Michel de Montaigne: The Complete Essays is now in the public domain and is available as a free download in multiple formats from Project Gutenberg .

Public domain illustrations via Flickr Commons

— Published December 12, 2012 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/12/12/montaigne-on-death-and-the-art-of-living/ —

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Heidegger on Death: A Critical Theological Essay

George Pattison, Heidegger on Death: A Critical Theological Essay , Ashgate, 2013, 170pp., $34.95 (pbk), ISBN 9781409466957.

Reviewed by Jeffrey L. Kosky, Washington and Lee University

George Pattison describes his book as a critical theological reflection on death in the wake of modernity. It reflects on the meaning death can have today in human existence in general and Christian existence more particularly. But it is just as much a reflection on life and the meaning human being might or might not possess when confronted with the peculiar forms of the modern determination of death.

To conduct these reflections, Pattison proposes to meditate seriously on the thinker who perhaps more than any modern philosopher "articulate[s] something central to the modern conception of being human" (4): Martin Heidegger. What makes Heidegger's reflection on the human condition distinctive for Pattison is "the persistent rigor with which [it] thinks through the human condition in the perspective of its thrownness toward death" (4). In Heidegger, the modern dismissal of belief in life after death achieves consummate expression in a philosophy that is prepared to contemplate, without flinching, "the scandal of the entire annihilation of self and world" (5).

Pattison has chosen his interlocutor wisely.

The scandal raised by this conception of the human condition is, of course, the utter ruin of every enterprise of meaning-making. The threat of nihilism seems to run high when every aspiration begins in the contingency of thrown being-in-the-world and ends in the nothingness of death. But Heidegger is not easily positioned as a nihilist, and his philosophy resists easy characterization as a "philosophy of death." While Pattison does not make either charge in those exact terms, his account might invite such a reading. Readers should keep this in mind. Abandoning an otherworldly aspiration or divine telos of human existence does not destroy the phenomenon of the world, and much of Heidegger's thinking is an effort to recall this phenomenon of world and with it the human being that inheres in it. In this way, it provides a leading example of what could be called a secular turn of human thought and existence, a turn to the world or saeculum , as distinct from a turn away from the world often associated with certain forms of theological otherworldliness or otherworldly theology.

Heidegger's secular turn re-discovers something like the question of the significance of existence. Being-in-the-world, he shows, is structured in such a way that the question of significance is inhabited when existence takes up its being in the world authentically. This authentic taking up of existence thrown toward death happens in anticipatory resoluteness, the Macquarrie-Robinson translation of vorlaufende Entschlossenheit, which Pattison frequently renders, not unreasonably, though not inconsequentially either, as "resolute running ahead toward death." On Pattison's reading, then, Heidegger represents the distinctly modern condition in which the aspiration to eternal life with God has been replaced by resolutely running toward death as the realization of authentic human selfhood. For Heidegger, the existence of such a self, though void of divine aspiration, is not without significance; indeed hearing the call to authentic existence represents a turning toward the networks of significance that Heidegger believed was the world and human inherence in it. Pattison, in opposition, does not believe that this determination of selfhood allows for the question of meaning or authenticity to be answered in a satisfying way.

This is where Pattison's reading of Heidegger becomes critical. His objections purport to target not the determination of death as nothingness, but rather the form of human existence characterized by the primacy Heidegger accords to resolute running ahead toward death. They can be summarized, I believe, in this way: authentic existence in Heideggerian terms is without hope or gratitude, overly heroic or self-determined, and, most significantly, incapable of love or ethical regard for others.

Readers should understand what is implied in these claims. For if what is distinctive about Heidegger's philosophy is its secular turn, then Pattison is in effect suggesting that love is a secular impossibility, that hope is a secular impossibility, that authentic being with others is impossible to work out within the horizon opened by a resolutely secular turn, especially as such a turn is exemplified in Heidegger's thought of being in the world.

Pattison's objections are made from two perspectives or points of view, each of which, it is worth noting, appears to give him access to the same charges.

The first perspective is confessedly Christian. It forms the expressed intention of the book's critical thrust. What are "the objections that a Christian response to Heidegger must make if it is to be true to its sources and its hope" (4)? This then gives voice to the constructive intention of the book as it "works its way towards the hope and gratitude with which a Christian response to death must begin" (7). The specifically Christian perspective and the constructive intention that proceeds from it is marked further by declarations such these: "Read in the perspective of Christian ethics, this is problematic" (94), and "For Christian faith such words of faithfulness and hope also anticipate and are, in their own way, expressive of another Word" (125).

Such phrases indicate that Pattison is speaking from a position already defined by truths presented in Christianity. This gives him secure truths by which to measure and assess the Heideggerian account of human existence, and in this assessment, the Heidggerian account just doesn't measure up. Pattison's invocation of Christianity thus affords him a fair amount of critical leverage and power, as it gives him knowledge and terms in which to level such a critique.

I have no objections to speaking from a perspective, and I have no criticism to make of Christian truths. I want only to point out how Pattison's book performs or enacts, I would say, a difference between, on one hand, a certain form of the secular turn, in which existence comes into and remains a question, and, on the other hand, a certain form of Christian belief, in which the question of existence has been settled or resolved. Someone lacking in Pattison's commitment to established truths, or someone who does not have secure access to knowledge of what it means to be a Christian or, more generally, of what it means to be, finds herself in want of the language and knowledge that would settle, put to rest, or resolve the question as it is raised by Heidegger.

Pattison's Christian response is developed largely through readings of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Martin Luther and Søren Kierkegaard, in particular Luther's pastoral works and Kierkegaard's edifying discourses. Pattison notes that these Christian authors are the ones Heidegger was reading in the early formative years when he developed the account of human existence as "mortal anxiety" (85-6). The theologians' account of the sinful condition of human existence culminating in death provided Heidegger with ontic evidence for developing his own account of human being-in-the-world as abandonment to death. But, Pattison contends, Heidegger omits from his reading of these authors precisely what would make the meditation on death and human nothingness into a transformative event, one generative of human meaning. These omissions concern chiefly reference to the divine and a theology of Creation, making for what Pattison calls "a secularized version of radical Protestant theology" (86) -- evidence again of Heidegger's secular turn.

More particularly, what Pattison finds in the theologians is that a confrontation with the nothingness of the human self is managed not by the encounter with death as it is in Heidegger, but by the self's being before God, coram deo . Confrontation with the divine creator brings the self to realize its own nothingness as a creature entirely and forever dependent on an other for its existence. Creature status, then, undoes the autonomy of the existential self more radically than does confrontation with thrownness toward death because the creature will never be able to overcome the passivity of its creation, whereas existing Dasein, Pattison contends (similarly to Emmanuel Levinas), does transform the passivity of its thrownness toward death into the basis for existential comprehension when it takes up this passivity in resolutely running ahead toward death. This change in the event in which authentic selfhood is realized has important consequences for the determination of the fundamental mood of human being: whereas the resolute taking up of human existence as Dasein thrown toward death happens in a mood of anxiety (Heidegger), the authentic realization of the human condition as creature happens in a mood of hope and gratitude (Luther, Kierkegaard, and Pattison), for the creature realizes her own nothingness in the face of the one who saves her and to whom she is therefore thankful. This, I think, makes the realization of authentic nothingness somewhat convenient in that it is at once redeemed.

At least for the Christian it is, but Heidegger's secular turn has omitted from his reading of Christian sources precisely what Pattison contends makes it possible for existence to be affected in such hopeful and thankful ways. This difference is at the heart of Pattison's theological critique of Heidegger: existence thrown toward death gives no ground for hope, while Christian existence created by and for God does include hope.

But is hope really a secular impossibility? And is hope (Christian or otherwise) so sure of its future? To my ears, the hope Pattison describes sounds at times more like the expectation of what it knows will come -- a future present, indeed a good one (life after death, a God who saves, and so on), expected with certainty because founded on an encounter already experienced (the God who saved). The worry or anxious concern that accompanies hope often seems pressed out of Pattison's account. But one might want to distinguish hope from expectation and contend that hope becomes meaningful when the future is unknown and indeterminate, that the nothingness of death is therefore the ground of hope, not its opposite but what calls for it: only a being aware of future nothingness hopes to be. Dasein's resoluteness, then, would not be desperate or despairing running-ahead-to-death, but in anticipating the nothingness of death, would expose us to that which makes hope a meaningful existential possibility.

The second perspective from which Pattison objects to Heidegger is not explicitly theological or religious, but aspires to a phenomenological legitimacy that would be of general or perhaps universal human significance. "A closer phenomenological reading of our relations to the dead than Heidegger himself offers" (125), Pattison claims, shows that in assigning being toward death the exclusive role in determining authentic understanding of human existence, Heidegger fails to portray correctly "the defining characteristics of human Dasein in the here and now" (14).

The failed characterization of "human Dasein in the here and now" revolves around Heidegger's account of resoluteness ( vorlaufende Entschlossenheit ). Pattison points out that the resolution required for taking up our thrown existence in running ahead toward death is rare, indeed foreign to our human condition. The far more authentically human response is cowering, sticking your head in the sand, and crying -- "crying his very I out" as Franz Rosenzweig put it (56). We come to authentic existence not in running ahead toward our own death, but in our desire "just to remain, to stay alive" (57) and in the love and pity we show to our fellow men who suffer the same fear and share the same desire. Human weakness in the face of death does not condemn existence to inauthenticity and insignificance, according to Pattison, for our being is constituted most fundamentally in connection with others whose pain we feel as ours and whose death we suffer as our own loss. Works of love, rituals of grieving, and words of consolation in which the existence of the self is bound up with others thus realize authentic selfhood, according to Pattison, without demanding the heroism of the isolated, reticent I running ahead resolutely toward death without the community of others.

Accounts of the trials of faith offer far better testimony to authentic human existence, Pattison contends, than does Heidegger's account of Dasein'sheroic resoluteness. For what religious life teaches us is that "even life's decisive moments turn out to be not so decisive after all" (75). Life remains to be lived after the moment of decision, and the temptations to stray must be resisted again and again. Dostoyevsky's Alyosha must confront doubts that arise with the rotting corpse of the beloved holy man, Father Zossima, and Abraham can always turn back as he ascends Mount Moriah. And, Pattison adds, "the same might be said of the face to face with death" (75). He intends this remark to be critical of Heidegger -- who Pattison claims argues that, in resolute anticipation of death, Dasein gains "a conclusive view of its own life" (54) and comes to be itself finally and definitively, as it truly is as a whole. This supposed Heideggerian selfsame self-constancy, being-as-a-whole, is not true to life or human existence, Pattison objects, for resoluteness will always unravel in time, leaving Dasein doomed to inauthentic existence. There is no triumphant act of resolution in which I would decide myself once and for all and then maintain myself as myself throughout the whole of my life. Indeed such a resolution would be ethically dangerous insofar as it would make for a selfsame self closed to otherness and unaffected by others.

Now all this might hold as critique of Heidegger's existential analysis if it were really his position. I don't believe it is. The problems focus on the interpretation of anticipatory resoluteness. Pattison is, I acknowledge, in good company in offering the reading he does of the resoluteness of conscientious Dasein. His objections parallel those of Jean-Luc Marion, who interprets anticipatory resoluteness as 'autarky' and a form of self-possession, and they are heard in Levinas, who argues that in converting existential thrownness into project, anticipatory resoluteness makes existence a self-grounding principal unalterable and closed to the other. But it is far from clear to me that these readings of anticipatory resoluteness convey Heidegger's thought about the human condition.

One could object to Pattison, first of all, by stressing that anticipatory resoluteness gives possibility to existence: in opening Dasein to a possibility (death) that always remains outstanding so long as Dasein is, anticipatory resoluteness renders all that is actual not final or definitive. In this sense, anticipatory resoluteness means mutability and exposure to change; it does not mean constantly remaining the same, but openness – indeed, vulnerability to what always affects us, the world, overwhelming and altering us. If this is how authentic selfhood is realized, then far from offering the promise of disclosing the truth of our being permanently and as a whole, authentic existence entails the impossibility of Dasein picturing itself to itself in its entirety. Pattison, failing to grant this, interprets resoluteness as something like a strong-willed resolution, one made by a person of great enough willpower to keep it, a certain resolve that therefore produces a self-identical self. I, on the other hand, read it as something more like an openness that demands re-solving, repeatedly, the problems of an ever-new situation, again and again, each time. The whole that appears to resoluteness, Heidegger emphasizes, is a whole that can be and is always again taken back. [1] This makes Heidegger's concern for presenting Dasein as a whole something other, and less problematic, than Pattison contends it is.

Next, one could point out that Heidegger knows very well that authenticity unravels in time -- in fact, he makes such unraveling intrinsic to the being of Dasein when he shows how anticipatory resoluteness turns Dasein toward what turns it back to the inauthenticity of everyday absorbed concern. That is, the resoluteness that takes up existence authentically also takes up the possibility of the straying, falling, and inauthentic existence that flees the nothingness disclosed by resolute anticipation of death. Far from describing the extraction from or triumph over everyday concern, then, what Heidegger has described is something like the genesis of its characteristic traits and the inevitability of our fall into it. Dasein is not as heroic as Pattison contends, if it finds itself in its ever falling into inauthenticity when it turns toward being-in-the-world in authenticity. [2] Nor is it so triumphant, so capable of maintaining the willpower necessary to make the moment of decision a finally decisive moment of extraction from the failures associated with immersion in the everydayness of concern. [3] Anticipatory resoluteness concerns a specific way to take up this everydayness, not our extraction from it. This is why Heidegger insists, time and again, that authentic existence is a modification of everydayness, a different way to be in the everyday, not an escape or evasion of it.

Why then does Pattison think it necessary to turn from Heidegger to Kierkegaard's edifying discourses to conclude that "death's decisiveness is how it turns us around so as to see what is really decisive, namely, what we are doing in and with our lives" (89)? Does he think that Heidegger is talking only about death, that all Heidegger's talk about the resolute anticipation of death does not aim to uncover a possible way to be of existence? When Pattison claims that "anxiety in the face of death is a natural human response to ceasing to be, but the ethical and religious way of dealing with this anxiety is to turn away from the vision of death itself to what should be engaging us in our lives" (103), does he think resolute anticipation of death does not give Dasein a new way of life and that, if it does, this way of life does not include ethical engagement and love of others?

Yes, that is what he thinks, especially the last point: love and ethics are foreclosed by the resolute running ahead toward death in which Dasein realizes authentic selfhood. This point is argued throughout the book, but is the focus of chapters four and five. Most telling is a footnote in which Pattison rejects efforts made by Thomas Carlson to work out a thought of love in Heideggerian terms. Though recognizing that Carlson "attributes to Heidegger a view very similar to that which [Pattison himself develops] against Heidegger," Pattison objects that Heidegger's "work, especially Being and Time , [contains] elements that, so to speak, suppress it [ viz . developing an account of authentic being with others in terms of love] at birth" (126). These elements are chiefly the privilege Heidegger grants running ahead toward death in determining authentic human existence: a self that realizes its authentic human existence in running ahead toward death is incapable of love, and it cannot be with others authentically because it cannot love. Repeating the solipsism of idealism's ego in existential terms, Dasein does not need others to realize authentic selfhood and is too consumed by its anticipation of death to have any time to give to others. In short, resolute running ahead toward death produces a "hyper-individualized anxiety" (125), caring too much for itself to care for others.

I have already indicated my own suspicion that resoluteness in Heidegger does not mean what Pattison makes it out to imply. This has important consequences for understanding the ethical possibilities of being-in-the-world. Sometimes, not always, Pattison's reading of anticipatory resoluteness makes it sound like something done to the exclusion of other dealings with which I might be concerned, as if I was busy obsessing about death and couldn't help others. But resolute anticipation of death is not something done to the exclusion of other concerned dealings of existence. [4] It is what lets Dasein take up authentically being-in-the-world, which includes as a structural item being-with-others. Authenticity, Heidegger insists, is not an extraction from the everyday, but a modification of it: it is a way to be in the everyday of existence, which includes publicness. More specifically, the issue is how to inhabit being-in-the-world and the everyday as something that matters, that is at-issue, that I care about, or else as something whose mattering is lost. With particular regard to being-with-others and publicness, then, the question posed by Heidegger is: How can my dealings with others be taken up authentically and in a way that these others matter?

To elaborate the possibility that Pattison says cannot be, a secular possibility of being-in-the-world, one would have to reconsider the sense of anticipatory resoluteness. This I take to be Carlson's project. [5] He asks: What would it mean for running ahead toward death to be the condition that opens the possibility of authentic being-with-others? Dasein's being-in-the-world, its secularity, Heidegger emphasizes again and again, includes being-with-others; the latter is a constitutive element of the former, separable for purposes of analysis, but not in reality. The issue is how to be in the world authentically such that the being-with-others constitutive of being-in-the-world also is authentic. Heidegger's point is that authentic being-with-others has to include an enactment of the distinction that differentiates self and other lest being-with be leveled down to indifference, rendering the other not different from myself, nor myself from her. The difference of separation is enacted in my resolute running ahead toward death, understood existentially as my own most nonsubstitutable possibility. In existing toward my death, I become an isolated individual, inhabiting being in such a way that it matters to me, and thereby able to be with the other authentically -- that is to say, without taking over her being or confusing mine with hers. This would be the beginning of the secular possibility of love. Pattison does not think such a possibility possible.

However one might take this review, I enjoyed Pattison's book and recommend reading it. Clearly written, well illustrated with abundant instances of literary figures that make the account poignant and salient, it should be read for the wealth of discussion it ought to provoke -- but discussion can be maintained only so long as we do not agree too quickly to the positions and interpretations of our interlocutors, or assume that their perspectives are our own. Philosophical discussion is the squabble of lovers, a squabble I have tried to keep open in pointing out the positions, interpretations, and perspectives that belong uniquely to the author of this fine book.

[1] " What then does the certainty which belongs to such resoluteness signify ? Such certainty must maintain itself in what is disclosed by the resolution. But this means that it simply cannot become rigid as regards the Situation . . . The certainty of such resolution signifies that one holds oneself free for the possibility of taking it back . . . [This] is authentic resoluteness which resolves to keep repeating itself " ( Being and Time , 355).

[2] "Anticipatory resoluteness gives Dasein at the same time the primordial certainty that it has been closed off. In anticipatory resoluteness, Dasein holds itself open for its constant lostness in the irresoluteness of the 'they'" ( Being and Time , 356).

[3] "In the moment of vision, indeed, and often just 'for that moment', existence can even gain mastery over the everyday; but it can never extinguish it" ( Being and Time , 422).

[4] Translating vorlaufende Entschlossenheit as "resolutely running ahead (toward death)" contributes to the mistaken portrayal of Heideggerian philosophy as a philosophy of death, and of being-towards-death as a practice of life done alongside of, and therefore to the exclusion of, other practices and activities. A major problem with employing "resolutely running ahead towards death" is that the phrase makes active what I think is more passive. It achieves this sense by rendering the adjective vorlaufende as a nominal phrase, "running ahead", and the noun Entschlossenheit as an adjective or adverb. "Anticipatory resoluteness" makes more palpable the sense in which the activity at issue, if indeed it is an activity, is at best the act of patience or waiting. This becomes clear in Heidegger's later use of Entschlossenheit as nearly synonymous with Gelassenheit .

[5] See Thomas A. Carlson, "Notes on Love and Death in Augustine and Heidegger," Medieval Mystical Theology 21.1 (2012): 9-33. The possibility that a Heideggerian conception of authentic being-with-others founded on anticipatory resoluteness might be thought in terms of love is also explored by Christian Sommer in Heidegger, Aristote, Luther: Les sources aristtotéliciennes et néotestamentaires d'Etre et Temps (274ff).

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Philosophy of Death, Essay Example

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Nagel and Epicurus have two opposing arguments suggesting how death should be viewed by the common man. Each argument proposes a different philosophical element that is crucial to the ultimate understanding of whether death should be viewed as a positive element or a negative element. These differences are an important subject for debate surrounding a very controversial issue. The power of argument is clearly seen and just as in a classic boxing bout, only one philosopher can be the victor.

Nagel begins by arguing that just because a person is not directly aware of what is happening behind his back, it does not mean that this does not cause him pain, discomfort or force upon him negative living conditions. Therefore, Nagel opposes the argument that what a person does not know cannot hurt them and provides the example of a man that has been berated and ridiculed behind his back – what the man does not know may not hurt him, but this is not necessarily a pleasant circumstance for anyone. He also uses the argument multiple times that whenever options and opportunities are taken away from a person, it is negative. Therefore, as death is directly taking away any hopes, dreams and aspirations that the person may have had for their life, it directly removes their opportunities and is a negative experience for the person. Although these arguments are at times very convincing, the philosopher Epicurus uses other arguments in opposition of Nagel’s point-of-view.

First of all, Epicurus believed that death was not a negative experience. He first believed that most people fear death because it supposes that there is an end to life and brings upon it a great many unknown factors. People are afraid of the unknown, but Epicurus believes that because all people are inevitably going to die they must learn to accept it and not to fear death because of its uncertainties. Epicurus also argues that all people are either alive or dead, so to belong to one of those states is to be fundamentally human. Death does not remove our humanity; instead, it simply transitions the physical body into a different human status. Finally, among many other arguments, Epicurus believed that death does not cause suffering for the deceased or for the family or friends associated with the individual. Instead, death is a release from sickness or physical and mental pain associated with the suffering of life. Once a person is deceased the family is able to productively mourn his or her passing and is no longer able to carry the burden of their unfortunate circumstances which led to their death.

Nagel would have many counter-arguments for Epicurus. Most importantly, he would argue that Epicurus’ argument is flawed because many people do suffer from a person’s death. If a husband who is the sole provider for a family passes away, the family suffers because it is no longer able to live under their current lifestyle. This can even lead to evictions and for some people, it may mean being homeless. These are not ideal circumstances and many people would consider this lifestyle suffering. Both Nagel and Epicurus appeared to believe that there was no specific evidence that there was an afterlife. Although death is an end of life and causes many people to fear death, Nagel would argue that death is a reminder for anyone close to the person that their time will soon come. Death is inevitable and this fear can cause suffering and torment.

Although both philosophers raise excellent points, Nagel is not very convincing that death is a bad thing. If his argument suggested that there is an afterlife, perhaps he could have opposed Epicurus in a better fashion. In addition, Nagel argues that death strips the person of any further living opportunity as well as their hopes, dreams and aspirations. Although this may be true, the person is no longer alive. Nagel’s argument would be better received if there were an afterlife because it may suggest that the person regrets not living life to the fullest or is haunted by what he or she could not accomplish. Instead, if the person is no longer alive and has no further cognitive functions, the loss of opportunity would not appear to be a major explanation of how death is negative. The deceased would likely not care if they failed to accomplish something due to no longer having any cognitive abilities. Nagel’s counter-arguments are strong in relation to the original arguments he opposes, but he does not successfully convince his readers that death is truly a negative experience.

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Journal of Practical Ethics

A journal of philosophy, applied to the real world.

The Death Penalty Debate: Four Problems and New Philosophical Perspectives

Masaki Ichinose

The University of Tokyo

This paper aims at bringing a new philosophical perspective to the current debate on the death penalty through a discussion of peculiar kinds of uncertainties that surround the death penalty. I focus on laying out the philosophical argument, with the aim of stimulating and restructuring the death penalty debate.

I will begin by describing views about punishment that argue in favour of either retaining the death penalty (‘retentionism’) or abolishing it (‘abolitionism’). I will then argue that we should not ignore the so-called “whom-question”, i.e. “To whom should we justify the system of punishment?” I identify three distinct chronological stages to address this problem, namely, “the Harm Stage”, “the Blame Stage”, and “the Danger Stage”.

I will also identify four problems arising from specific kinds of uncertainties present in current death penalty debates: (1) uncertainty in harm, (2) uncertainty in blame, (3) uncertainty in rights, and (4) uncertainty in causal consequences. In the course of examining these four problems, I will propose an ‘impossibilist’ position towards the death penalty, according to which the notion of the death penalty is inherently contradictory.

Finally, I will suggest that it may be possible to apply this philosophical perspective to the justice system more broadly, in particular to the maximalist approach to restorative justice.

1. To whom should punishment be justified?

What, exactly, are we doing when we justify a system of punishment? The process of justifying something is intrinsically connected with the process of persuading someone to accept it. When we justify a certain belief, our aim is to demonstrate reasonable grounds for people to believe it. Likewise, when we justify a system of taxation, we intend to demonstrate the necessity and fairness of the system to taxpayers.

What, then, are we justifying when we justify a system of punishment? To whom should we provide legitimate reasons for the system? It is easy to understand to whom we justify punishment when that punishment is administered by, for example, charging a fine. In this case, we persuade violators to pay the fine by bringing to their attention the harm that they have caused, harm which needs to be compensated. (Please note that I am only mentioning the primitive basis of the process of justification.) While we often generalise this process to include people in general or society as a whole, the process of justification would not work without convincing the people who are directly concerned (in this case, violators), at least theoretically, that this is a justified punishment, despite their subjective objections or psychological opposition. We could paraphrase this point per Scanlon’s ‘idea of a justification which it would be unreasonable to reject’ (1982, p.117). That is to say, in justifying the application of the system of punishment, we should satisfy the condition that each person concerned (especially the violator) is aware of having no grounds to reasonably reject the application of the system, even if they do in fact reject it from their personal, self-interested point of view.

In fact, if the violator is not theoretically persuaded at all in any sense—that is, if they cannot understand the justification as a justification—we must consider the possibility that they suffer some disorder or disability that affects their criminal responsibility.

We should also take into account the case of some extreme and fanatical terrorists. They might not understand the physical treatment inflicted on them in the name of punishment as a punishment at all. Rather, they might interpret their being physically harmed as an admirable result of their heroic behaviour. The notion of punishment is not easily applied to these cases, where the use of physical restraint is more like that applied to wild animals. Punishment can be successful only if those who are punished understand the event as punishment.

This line of argument entirely conforms to the traditional context in philosophy concerning the concept of a “person”, who is regarded as the moral and legal agent responsible for his or her actions, including crimes. John Locke, a 17th-century English philosopher, introduced and established this concept, basing it on ‘consciousness’. According to Locke, a person ‘is a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider it self as it self, the same thinking thing in different times and places; which it does only by that consciousness’ (1975, Book 2, Chapter 27, Section 9). This suggests that moral or legal punishments for the person should be accompanied by consciousnesses (in a Lockean sense) of the agent. In other words, when punishment is legally imposed on someone, the person to be punished must be conscious of the punishment as a punishment; that is, the person should understand the event as a justified imposition of some harm. 1

However, there is a problem here, which arises in particular for the death penalty but not for other kinds of punishment. The question that I raise here is ‘to whom do we justify the death penalty?’ People might say it should be justified to society, as the death penalty is one of the social institutions to which we consent, whether explicitly or tacitly. This is true. However, if my claims above about justification are correct, the justification of the death penalty must involve the condemned convict coming to understand the justification at least at a theoretical level. Otherwise, to be executed would not be considered a punishment but rather something akin to the extermination of a dangerous animal. The question I want to focus on in particular is this: should this justification be provided before administering capital punishment or whilst administering capital punishment?

2. ‘Impossibilism’

Generally, in order for the justification of punishment to work, it is necessary for convicts to understand that this is a punishment before it is carried out and that they cannot reasonably reject the justification, regardless of any personal objection they may have. However, that is not sufficient, because if they do not understand at the moment of execution that something harmful being inflicted is a punishment, then its being inflicted would simply result in mere physical harm rather than an institutional response based on theoretical justification. The justification for punishment must be, at least theoretically, accepted both before and during its application. 2 This requirement can be achieved with regard to many types of punishment, such as fines or imprisonment. However, the situation is radically different in the case of the death penalty, for in this case, when it is carried out, the convict, by definition, disappears. During and (in the absence of an afterlife) after the punishment, the convict cannot understand the nature and justification of the punishment. Can we say then that this is a punishment? This is a question which deserves further thought.

On the one hand, the death penalty, once executed, logically implies the nonexistence of the person punished; therefore, by definition, that person will not be conscious of being punished at the moment of execution. However, punishment must be accompanied by the convict’s consciousness or understanding of the significance of the punishment, as far as we accept the traditional concept of the person as a moral and legal agent upon whom punishment could be imposed. It may be suggested that everything leading up to the execution—being on death row, entering the execution chamber, being strapped down—is a kind of punishment that the convict is conscious of and is qualitatively different from mere incarceration. However, those phases are factors merely concomitant with the death penalty. The core essence of being executed lies in being killed or dying. Therefore, if the phases of anticipation were to occur but finally the convict were not killed, the death penalty would not have been carried out. The death penalty logically results in the convict’s not being conscious of being executed, and yet, for it to be a punishment, the death penalty requires the convict to be conscious of being executed. We could notate this in the form of conjunction in the following way in order to make my point as clear as possible:

~ PCE & PCE

(PCE: ‘the person is conscious of being executed under the name of punishment’)

If this is correct, then we must conclude that the concept of the death penalty is a manifest contradiction in terms. In other words, the death penalty should be regarded as conceptually impossible, even before we take part in longstanding debates between retentionism and abolitionism. This purely philosophical view of the death penalty could be called ‘impossibilism’ (i.e. the death penalty is conceptually impossible), and could be classified as a third possible view on the death penalty, distinct from retentionism and abolitionism. A naïve objection against this impossibilist view might counter that the death penalty is actually carried out in some countries so that it is not impossible but obviously possible. The impossibilist answer to this objection is that, based on a coherent sense of what it means for a punishment to be justified, that execution in such countries is not the death penalty but rather unjustified lethal physical violence .

I am not entirely certain whether the ‘impossibilist’ view would truly make sense in the light of the contemporary debates on the death penalty. These debates take place between two camps as I referred to above:

Retentionism (the death penalty should be retained): generally argued with reference to victims’ feelings and the deterrence effects expected by execution.

Abolitionism (the death penalty should be abolished): generally argued through appeals to the cruelty of execution, the possibility of misjudgements in the trial etc.

The grounds mentioned by both camps are, theoretically speaking, applicable to punishment in general in addition to the death penalty specifically. I will mention those two camps later again in a more detailed way in order to make a contrast between standard debates and my own view. However, my argument above for ‘impossibilism’, does suggest that there is an uncertainty specific to the death penalty as opposed to other types of punishment. I believe that this uncertainty must be considered when we discuss the death penalty, at least from a philosophical perspective. Otherwise we may lose sight of what we are attempting to achieve.

A related idea to the ‘impossibilism’ of the death penalty may emerge, if we accept the fact that the death penalty is mainly imposed on those convicted of homicide. This idea is related to the understanding of death proposed by Epicurus, who provides the following argument (Diogenes Laertius 1925, p. 650-1):

Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer.

We can call this Epicurean view ‘the harmlessness theory of death’ (HTD). If we accept HTD, it follows, quite surprisingly, that there is no direct victim in the case of homicide insofar as we define ‘victim’ to be a person who suffers harm as a result of a crime. For according to HTD, people who have been killed and are now dead suffer nothing—neither benefits nor harms—because, as they do not exist, they cannot be victims. If this is true, there is no victim in the case of homicide, and it must be unreasonable to impose what is supposed to be the ultimate punishment 3 —that is, the death penalty—on those offenders who have killed others.

This argument might sound utterly absurd, particularly if it is extended beyond offenders and victims to people in general, as one merit of the death penalty seems to lie in reducing people’s fear of death by homicide. However, although this argument from HTD might sound bizarre and counterintuitive, we should accept it at the theoretical level, to the extent that we find HTD valid. 4 Clearly, this argument, which is based on the nonexistence of victims, could logically lead to another impossibilist argument concerning the death penalty.

There are many points to be more carefully examined regarding both types of ‘impossibilism’, which I will skip here. However, I must stop to ponder a natural reaction. My question above, ‘To whom do we justify?’, which introduced ‘impossibilism’, might sound eccentric, because, roughly speaking, theoretical arguments of justification are usually deployed in a generalised way and do not need to acknowledge who those arguments are directed at. Yet, I believe that this normal attitude towards justification is not always correct. Instead, our behaviour, when justifying something, focuses primarily on theoretically persuading those who are unwilling to accept the item being justified. If nobody refuses to accept it, then it is completely unnecessary to provide its justification. For instance, to use a common sense example, nobody doubts the existence of the earth. Therefore, nobody takes it to be necessary to justify the existence of the earth. Alternatively, a justification for keeping coal-fired power generation, the continued use of which is not universally accepted due to global warming, is deemed necessary. In other words, justification is not a procedure lacking a particular addressee, but an activity that addresses the particular person in a definite way, at least at first. In fact, it seems to me that the reason that current debates on the death penalty become deadlocked is that crucial distinctions are not appropriately made. I think that such a situation originates from not clearly asking to whom we are addressing our arguments, or whom we are discussing. As far as I know, there have been very few arguments within the death penalty debate that take into account the homicide victim, despite the victim’s unique status in the issue. This is one example where the debate can be accused of ignoring the ‘whom-question’, so I will clarify this issue by adopting a strategy in which this ‘whom-question’ is addressed.

3. Three chronological stages

Following my strategy, I will first introduce a distinction between three chronological stages in the death penalty. In order to make my argument as simple as possible, I will assume that the death penalty is imposed on those who have been convicted of homicide, although I acknowledge there are other crimes which could result in the death penalty. In that sense, the three stages of the death penalty correspond to the three distinct phases arising from homicide.

The first stage takes place at the time of killing; the fact that someone was killed must be highlighted. However, precisely what happened? If we accept the HTD, we should suppose that nothing harmful happened in the case of homicide. Although counterintuitive, let’s see where this argument leads. However, first, I will acknowledge that we cannot cover all contexts concerning the justification of the death penalty by discussing whether or not killing harms the killed victim. Even if we accept for argument’s sake that homicide does not harm the victim, that is only part of the issue. Other people, particularly the bereaved families of those killed, are seriously harmed by homicide. More generally, society as a whole is harmed, as the fear of homicide becomes more widespread in society.

Moreover, our basic premise, HTD, is controversial. Whether HTD is convincing remains an unanswered question. There is still a very real possibility that those who were killed do suffer harm in a straightforward sense, which conforms to most people’s strong intuition. In any event, we can call this first stage, the ‘Harm Stage’, because harm is what is most salient in this phase, either harm to the victims or others in society at large. If a justification for the death penalty is to take this Harm Stage seriously, the overwhelming focus must be on the direct victims themselves, who actually suffer the harm. This is the central core of the issue, as well as the starting point of all further problems.

The second stage appears after the killing. After a homicide, it is common to blame and to feel anger towards the perpetrator or perpetrators, and this can be described as a natural, moral, or emotional reaction. However, it is not proven that blaming or feeling angry is indeed natural, as it has not been proven that such feelings would arise irrespective of our cultural understanding of the social significance of killing. The phenomenon of blaming and the prevalence of anger when a homicide is committed could be a culture-laden phenomenon rather than a natural emotion. Nevertheless, many people actually do blame perpetrators or feel anger towards them for killing someone, and this is one of the basic ideas used to justify a system of ‘retributive justice’. The core of retributive justice is that punishment should be imposed on the offenders themselves (rather than other people, such as the offenders’ family). This retributive impulse seems to be the most fundamental basis of the system of punishment, even though we often also rely on some consequentialist justification favor punishment (e.g. preventing someone from repeating an offence). In addition, offenders are the recipients of blame or anger from society, which suggests that blaming or expressing anger has a crucial function in retributive justice. I will call this second phase the ‘Blame Stage’, which extends to the period of the execution. Actually, the act of blaming seems to delineate what needs to be resolved in this phase. Attempting to justify the death penalty by acknowledging this Blame Stage (or retributive justification) in terms of proportionality is the most common strategy. That is to say, lex talionis applies here—‘an eye for an eye’. This is the justification that not only considers people in general, including victims who blame perpetrators, but also attempts to persuade perpetrators that this is retribution resulting from their own harmful behaviours.

The final stage in the process concerning the death penalty appears after the execution; in this stage, what matters most is how beneficial the execution is to society. Any system in our society must be considered in the light of its cost-effectiveness. This extends even to cultural or artistic institutions, although at first glance they seem to be far from producing any practical effects. In this context, benefits are interpreted quite broadly; creating intellectual satisfaction, for example, is counted as a benefit. Clearly, this is a utilitarian standpoint. We can apply this view to the system of punishment, or the death penalty, if it is accepted. That is, the death penalty may be justified if its benefits to society are higher than its costs. What, then, are the costs, and what are the benefits? Obviously, we must consider basic expenses, such as the maintenance and labour costs of the institution keeping the prisoner on death row. However, in the case of the death penalty, there is a special cost to be considered, namely, the emotional reaction of people in society in response to killing humans, even when officially sanctioned as a punishment. Some feel that it is cruel to kill a person, regardless of the reason.

On the other hand, what is the expected benefit of the death penalty? The ‘deterrent effect’ is usually mentioned as a benefit that the death penalty can bring about in the future. In that case, what needs to be shown if we are to draw analogies with the previous two stages? When people try to justify the death penalty by mentioning its deterrent effect, they seem to be comparing a society without the death penalty to one with the death penalty. Then they argue that citizens in a society with the death penalty are at less risk of being killed or seriously victimised than those in a society without the death penalty. In other words, the death penalty could reduce the danger of being killed or seriously victimised in the future. Therefore, we could call this third phase the ‘Danger Stage’. In this stage, we focus on the danger that might affect people in the future, including future generations. This is a radically different circumstance from those of the previous two stages in that the Danger Stage targets people who have nothing to do with a particular homicide.

4. Analogy from natural disasters

The three chronological stages that I have presented in relation to the death penalty are found in other types of punishment as well. Initially, any punishment must stem from some level of harm (including harm to the law), and this is a sine qua non for the issue of punishment to arise. Blaming and its retributive reaction must follow that harm, and subsequently some social deterrent is expected to result. However, we should carefully distinguish between the death penalty and other forms of punishment. With other forms of punishment, direct victims undoubtedly exist, and those convicted of harming such victims are aware they are being punished. In addition, rehabilitating perpetrators in order for them to return to society—one aspect of the deterrent effect—can work in principle. However, this aspect of deterrence cannot apply to the death penalty because executed criminals cannot be aware of being punished by definition, and the notion of rehabilitation does not make sense by definition. Only this quite obvious observation can clarify that there is a crucial, intrinsic difference or distinction between the death penalty and other forms of punishment. Theories about the death penalty must seriously consider this difference; we cannot rely on theories that treat the death penalty on a par with other forms of punishment.

Moreover, the three chronological stages that have been introduced above are fundamentally different from each other. In reality, the subjects or people that we discuss and on whom we focus are different from stage to stage. In this respect, one of my points in this article is to underline the crucial need to discuss the issues of the death penalty by drawing a clear distinction between those stages. I am not claiming that only one of those stages is important. I am aware that each stage has its own significance; therefore, we should consider all three. However, we should be conscious of the distinctions when discussing the death penalty.

To make my point more understandable, I will suggest an analogy with natural disasters. Specifically, I will use as an analogy the biggest earthquake in Japan in the past millennium—the quake of 11 March 2011 (hereafter the 2011 quake). Of course, at first glance, earthquakes are substantially different from homicides. However, there is a close similarity between the 2011 quake and homicides, because although most of the harm that occurred was due to the earthquake and tsunami, in fact people were also harmed and killed during the 2011 quake at least partially due to human errors, such as the failure of the government’s policy on tsunamis and nuclear power plants. Thus, it is quite easy in the case of the 2011 quake to distinguish between three aspects, all of which are different from each other.

(1) We must recognise victims who were killed in the tsunami or suffered hardship at shelters. 5 This is the core as well as the starting point of all problems. What matters here is rescuing victims, and expressing our condolences.

(2) Then we will consider victims and people in general who hold the government and the nuclear power company responsible for political and technical mistakes. What usually matters here is the issue of responsibility and compensation.

(3) Finally, we can consider people’s interests in improving preventive measures taken to reduce damages by tsunami and nuclear-plant-related accidents in the future. What matters in this context is the reduction of danger in the future by learning from the 2011 quake.

Nobody will fail to notice that these three aspects are three completely different issues, which can be seen in exactly the same manner in the case of the death penalty. Aspects (1), (2), and (3) correspond respectively to the Harm Stage, the Blame Stage, and the Danger Stage. Undoubtedly, none of these three aspects should be ignored and they actually appear in a mutually intertwined manner: the more successful the preventive measures are, the fewer victims will be produced by tsunami and nuclear-plant accidents in the future. Those aspects affect each other. Likewise, we must consider each of the three stages regarding the death penalty.

5. Initial harm

The arguments thus far provide the basic standpoint that I want to propose concerning the debates on the death penalty. I want to investigate the issue of the death penalty by sharply distinguishing between these three stages and by simultaneously considering them all equally. By following this strategy, I will demonstrate that there are intrinsic uncertainties, and four problems resulting from those uncertainties, in the system of the death penalty. In so doing I will raise a novel objection to the contemporary debate over the death penalty.

Roughly speaking, as I have previously mentioned, the death penalty debate continues to involve the two opposing views of abolitionism and retentionism (or perhaps, in the case of abolitionist countries, revivalism). It seems that the main arguments to support or justify each of the two traditional views (which I have briefly described in section 2 above) have already been exhausted. What matters in this context is whether the death penalty can be justified, and then whether—if it is justifiable—it should be justified in terms of retributivism or utilitarianism. That is the standard way of the debate on the death penalty. For example, when the retributive standpoint is used to justify the death penalty, the notion of proportionality as an element of fairness or social justice might be relevant, apart from the issue of whether proportionality should be measured cardinally or ordinally (see von Hirsch 1993, pp. 6-19). In other words, if one person has killed another, then that person too ought to be killed—that is, executed—in order to achieve fairness. However, as other scholars such as Tonry (1994) have argued, it is rather problematic to apply the notion of proportionality to the practice of punishment because it seems that there is no objective measure of offence, culpability, or responsibility. Rather, the notion of parsimony 6 is often mentioned in these contexts as a more practical and fairer principle than the notion of proportionality.

However, according to my argument above, such debates are inadequate if they are simply applied to the case of the death penalty. Proportionality between which two things is being discussed? Most likely, what is considered here is the proportionality between harm by homicide (where the measured value of offence might be the maximum) and harm by execution. However, I want to reconfirm the essential point. What specifically is the harm of homicide? Whom are we talking about when we discuss the harm of homicide? As I previously argued, citing Epicurus and his HTD, there is a metaphysical doubt about whether we should regard death as harmful. If a person simply disappears when he or she dies and death is completely harmless as HTD claims, then it seems that the retributive justification for the death penalty in terms of proportionality must be nonsense, for nothing at all happens that should trigger the process of crime and punishment. Of course, following HTD, the execution should be similarly regarded as nonsensical. However, if that is the case, the entire institutional procedure, from the perpetrator’s arrest to his or her execution, must be considered a tremendous waste of time, labour, and money.

Some may think that these kinds of arguments are merely empty philosophical abstractions. That may be. However, it is not the case that there is nothing plausible to be considered in these arguments. Consider the issue of euthanasia. Why do people sometimes wish to be euthanised? It is because people can be relieved of a painful situation by dying. That is to say, people wishing to be euthanised take death to be painless, i.e. harmless, in the same manner as HTD. This idea embedded in the case of euthanasia is so understandable that the issue of euthanasia is one of the most popular topics in ethics; however, if so, Epicurus’s HTD should not be taken as nonsensical, for HTD holds in the same way as the idea embedded in the case of euthanasia that when we die, we have neither pain nor any other feeling. What I intend to highlight here is that we must be acutely aware that there is a fundamental problem concerning the notion of harm by homicide, if we want to be philosophically sincere and consistent 7 .

In other words, I assert that the contemporary debate over the death penalty tends to lack proper consideration for the Harm Stage in which victims themselves essentially matter, although that stage must be the very starting point of all issues. We must understand this pivotal role of the Harm Stage before intelligently discussing the death penalty. Of course, in practice, we can discuss the death penalty in a significant and refined manner without investigating the Harm Stage. For example, according to Goldman, one of the plausible positions regarding the justification for punishment in general is a position that combines both retributivism and utilitarianism. Mentioning John Rawls and H. L. A. Hart, Goldman writes (1995, p. 31):

Some philosophers have thought that objections to these two theories of punishment could be overcome by making both retributive and utilitarian criteria necessary for the justification of punishment. Utilitarian criteria could be used to justify the institution, and retributive to justify specific acts within it.

Goldman argues, however, that this mixed position could result in a paradox regarding how severe the punishment to be imposed on the guilty should be, even though this position avoids punishing the innocent (ibid., p.36):

While the mixed theory can avoid punishment of the innocent, it is doubtful that it can avoid excessive punishment of the guilty if it is to have sufficient effect to make the social cost worthwhile.

This argument is useful in providing a moral and legal warning to society not to punish offenders more severely than they deserve, even if that punishment is more effective in deterring future crimes. I frankly admit that Goldman’s suggestion goes to the essence of the concept of justice. However, I must also say that if his argument is applied to the death penalty, then it has not yet touched the fundamental question that forms the basis of the whole issue: whose harm should we discuss? Is it appropriate not to discuss the Harm Stage? Alternatively, I am raising the following question: who is the victim of homicide? At the very least, I think we should admit that this very question is the crucial one constituting the first problem on the death penalty, the Uncertainty of Harm.

6. Feeling of being victimised

Next, I will examine another kind of uncertainty that is specific to the Blame Stage; the idea of retribution matters here. As far as the Japanese context for the death penalty is concerned, according to statistical surveys of public opinion, people tend to strongly support the death penalty in the case of particularly violent homicides in which they are probably feeling particularly victimised. If the death penalty were abolished, it seems that the abolition would be extremely unfair to victims of homicide, as the rights of victims (i.e. rights of life, liberty, property, and so on) would be denied by being killed, whereas those of perpetrators would be excessively protected. Obviously, the notion of retributive proportionality or equilibrium is the basis for this argument. To put it another way, this logic of retribution aims at justifying the death penalty in terms of its achieving equilibrium between the violated rights of victims and the deprived rights of perpetrators in the name of punishment. Is this logic perfectly acceptable? Emotionally speaking, I want to say yes. We Japanese might even say that perpetrators should gallantly and bravely kill themselves to take responsibility for their actions, as we have a history of the samurai who were expected to conduct hara-kiri when they did something shameful. However, theoretically speaking, we cannot accept this logic immediately, because there are too many doubtful points. Those doubts as a whole constitute the second problem concerning the death penalty.

First, we must ask, as well as in the previous section, on the issue of feeling victimised, whom are we discussing? Whose feelings and whose rights matter? Direct victims in the case of homicide do not exist by definition. Then a question arises: why can substitutes (prosecutors and others) or the bereaved family ask for the death penalty based on their feelings rather than the direct victim’s feeling? How are they qualified to ask for such a stringent punishment when they were not the ones killed? The crucial point to be noted here is that the bereaved family is not identical with the direct victim. Second, even if it is admitted that the notion of the victim’s emotional harm are relevant to sentencing (and at least in the sense of emotional harm the bereaved family’s suffering I would agree that this makes them certainly the principal victims even if not the direct victim), it must be asked: can we justify an institution based on a feeling? This question is a part of the traditional debate concerning the moral sense theory. We have repeatedly asked whether social institutions can be based on moral sense or human feeling, when such sense or feeling cannot help but be arbitrary because those, after all, are subjective. The question is still unanswered. Third, if the feelings of being victimised justify the death penalty, then could an accidental killing or involuntary manslaughter be included in crimes that deserve the death penalty? Actually, the feelings of the bereaved family in the case of accidental killing could be qualitatively the same as in the case of voluntary homicide. However, even countries which adopt the death penalty do not usually prescribe that execution is warranted for accidental killing. Fourth, I wonder whether the bereaved family who feel victimised always desire the execution of the killer. It could be that they consider resuming their daily lives more important than advocating the execution of the murderer who killed their family member. As a matter of practical fact, executions of perpetrators need have nothing to do with supporting bereaved families. Fifth, if we accept the logic in which the death penalty is justified by the bereaved family’s feeling of being victimised, how should we deal with cases where the person who was killed was alone in the world, with no family? If there is no bereaved family, then no one feels victimised. Is the death penalty unwarranted in this case? In any case, as these questions suggest, we should be aware that retributive justification based upon the feeling of being victimised is not as acceptable as we initially expected. Once again, there is uncertainty here. Uncertainty of blame leads to the second problem concerning the death penalty.

7. Violation and forfeiture

Of course, the retributive justification for the death penalty does not have to depend upon the feeling of being victimised alone, even if the primitive basis for it might lie in human emotion. The theoretical terminology of human rights themselves (rather than emotional feeling based on the notion of rights) could be used as justification: if a person violates another’s rights (to property, freedom, a healthy life, etc.), then that person must forfeit his or her own rights in proportion to the violated rights. This can be regarded as a formulation of the system of punishment established in the modern era that is theoretically based upon the social contract theory. The next remark of Goldman confirms this point (1995, p.33):

If we are asked which rights are forfeited in violating the rights of others, it is plausible to answer just those rights that one violates (or an equivalent set). One continues to enjoy rights only as long as one respects those rights in others: violation constitutes forfeiture . . . Since deprivation of those particular rights violated is often impracticable, we are justified in depriving a wrongdoer of some equivalent set, or in inflicting harm equivalent to that which would be suffered in losing those same rights.

However, the situation is not so simple, particularly in connection with the death penalty. In order to clarify this point, we have to reflect, albeit briefly, on how the concept of human rights has been historically established. I will trace the origin of the concept of human rights by referring to Fagan’s overall explanation. According to Fagan (2016, Section 2):

Human rights rest upon moral universalism and the belief in the existence of a truly universal moral community comprising all human beings . . . The origins of moral universalism within Europe are typically associated with the writings of Aristotle and the Stoics.

Followed by the remark:

Aristotle unambiguously expounds an argument in support of the existence of a natural moral order. This natural order ought to provide the basis for all truly rational systems of justice . . . The Stoics thereby posited the existence of a universal moral community effected through our shared relationship with god. The belief in the existence of a universal moral community was maintained in Europe by Christianity over the ensuing centuries.

This classical idea was linked during the 17th and 18th centuries to the concept of ‘natural law’ including the notion of ‘natural rights’ that each human being possesses independently of society or policy. ‘The quintessential exponent of this position was John Locke . . . Locke argued that natural rights flowed from natural law. Natural law originated from God’ (ibid.). Fagan continues (ibid.):

Analyses of the historical predecessors of the contemporary theory of human rights typically accord a high degree of importance to Locke’s contribution. Certainly, Locke provided the precedent of establishing legitimate political authority upon a rights foundation. This is an undeniably essential component of human rights.

Although, of course, we should take post-Lockean improvement including Kantian ideas into account to fully understand contemporary concepts of human rights, we cannot deny that Locke’s philosophy ought to be considered first.

As is well known, Locke’s argument focuses on property rights. He put forth the idea that property rights were based on our labour. Thus, his theory is called ‘the labour theory of property rights’. Let me quote the famous passage I have in mind (Locke 1960, Second Treatise, Section 27):

Though the Earth, and all inferior Creatures be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Works of his Hands, we may say, are properly his.

This idea could cover any kind of human rights such as those for living a healthy life, liberty, and property, because human rights are supposed to be owned by us. For example, H. L.A. Hart once argued that legal rights are nothing but legal powers to require others to meet correlative obligations, and then pointed out that; ‘we also speak of the person who has the correlative right as possessing it or even owning it’ (Hart 1982, p.185). If this is the case, we can make property rights representative of all human rights.

However, if we follow Locke’s theory (and many countries, including Japan, still do), then it logically follows that what we cannot gain by our labour by definition cannot be objects of human rights. How does Locke’s idea apply to our life itself (rather than simply living a healthy life)? Are we able to acquire our life itself by our labour? No, we cannot. We can realise a healthy life by making an effort to be moderate, but we cannot create our lives. We are creatures or animals; therefore, our lives are not something that we ourselves made by our labour. Locke uses the concept of power (as Hart does) when he discusses various aspects of property rights. Among those, we should pay particular attention to the following (Locke 1960, Second Treatise, Section 23):

For a Man, not having the Power of his own life, cannot, by Compact, or his own Consent, enslave himself to any one, nor put himself under the Absolute, Arbitrary Power of another, to take away his Life, when he pleases.

Locke also wri tes (1960, Section 24):

No Man can, by agreement, pass over to another that which he hath not in himself, a Power over his own life.

Obviously, Locke assumes that we have no property rights over our own lives or bodies themselves, or more precisely, no property rights in controlling and destroying our own lives as a whole; therefore, we cannot alienate those rights to others. We cannot alienate or forfeit what we do not have. If this is the case and we presuppose the formulation of the system of punishment introduced above in terms of violation and forfeiture, what would result? The answer is clear. Our lives themselves are conceptually beyond the terminology of human rights, and thus, if the death penalty is defined as a punishment requiring the forfeiture of the perpetrator’s right to life, the death penalty should be regarded as conceptually contradictory or impossible. We cannot lose tails, as we do not have tails. Likewise, we cannot own our lives (i.e. we have no property rights in our life itself), so we cannot lose our lives, at least in such a sense as forfeiture of human rights. This is the third route to an ‘impossibilist’ view of the death penalty. This argument depends heavily on Locke’s original theory. Nevertheless, as long as we have to consider Locke’s classical view seriously in order to discuss the relation between punishment and human rights, we must be aware that we could be involved in theoretical uncertainty in justifying the death penalty through the notion of human rights in a retributivist flavour, as the argument thus far suggests. This is the very puzzle that I want to propose as the third problem concerning the death penalty debates.

Moreover, we must acknowledge that retributive ideas in the Blame Stage usually include a kind of evaluation of the psychological state of the agent’s behaviour at the time of the crime as a matter of legal fact. In other words, rationality, freedom, or mens rea are usually needed for agents to be judged guilty. However, from a strictly philosophical perspective, we should say that it is far from easy in principle to confirm those states in the past. Indeed, this psychological trend seems to cause controversy in court proceedings, as seen, for example, in the American context known as ‘battered-woman syndrome’. If a woman who has been routinely battered by her partner suddenly fights back and kills her partner, American courts often find her not guilty. People wonder whether such an evaluation concerning battered women could be correctly made without arbitrariness. Additionally, philosophical debates on free will and the development of the brain sciences must be considered. Some philosophers assert that we have no free will because our personality and actions are intrinsically governed by external factors, such as our environments or biological conditions, which are definitely beyond our control. This philosophical standpoint is often called ‘hard incompatibilism’ (see Strawson 2008). In this respect, my analogy to a natural disaster could be seen as appropriate, as our actions might be taken to be just natural phenomena at the end of the day. 8 Furthermore, brain sciences often provide shocking data to suggest that our will may be controlled by brain phenomena occurring prior to our consciousness, as shown by Benjamin Libet. In view of such contemporary arguments, we have little choice but to say that we cannot be perfectly certain whether a given perpetrator who committed homicide is truly guilty, as long as we adopt the present standard for judging the psychological states of offenders in court. To sum up, the third problem for the death penalty is the difficulty in knowing whether someone has property in their life itself as well as uncertainty about the mental state of the accused, this is the Uncertainty of Rights Violation.

8. The deterrent effect

Finally, I will examine some problems in the Danger Stage. What matters in this context is the utilitarian justification for the death penalty; I will focus on what is called the ‘deterrent effect’. Firstly, I would like to say that the death penalty undoubtedly has some deterrent effect. This is obvious if we imagine a society where violators of any laws, including minor infractions such as a parking ticket or public urination, must be sentenced to death. I believe that the number of all crimes would dramatically reduce in that society, although it would constitute a horrible dystopia. The argument for the deterrent effect of the death penalty probably arises from the same line of ‘common sense’ thinking. For example, Pojman says, ‘there is some non-statistical evidence based on common sense that gives credence to the hypothesis that the threat of the death penalty deters and that it does so better than long prison sentences’ (Pojman 1998, pp. 38-39). Specifically, this deterrent effect presupposes the utility calculus that a human being conducts, whether consciously or unconsciously, in terms of ‘weighing the subjective severity of perceived censure and the subjective probability of perceived censure against the magnitude of the desire to commit the offence and the subjective probability of fulfilling this desire by offending’ (Beyleveld 1979, p. 219). Therefore, if we presuppose the basic similarity of human conditions, it may be plausible to state the following about the deterrent effect of punishment: ‘this can be known a priori on the basis of an analysis of human action’ (ibid., p. 215). However, in fact, the death penalty in many countries is restricted to especially heinous crimes, such as consecutive homicides (although some countries apply the death penalty to a wider range of crimes), which suggests that we must conduct empirical studies, case by case, if we want to confirm the deterrent effect of the death penalty. Therefore, the question to be asked regarding the deterrent effect is not whether the death penalty is actually effective, but rather how effective it is in restricted categories of crimes. What matters is the degree.

There are many statistical surveys concerning this issue. In particular, an economic investigation by Ehrlich is often mentioned as a typical example. After examining detailed statistical data and taking into account various factors, such as race, heredity, education, and cultural patterns, Ehrlich suggest s (1975, p. 414):

An additional execution per year over the period in question [i.e., 1935-1969] may have resulted, on average, in 7 or 8 fewer murders.

Of course, this estimate includes too many factors and presumptions to be perfectly correct. Ehrlich himself is aware of this and thus says (ibid.):

It should be emphasized that the expected tradeoffs computed in the preceding illustration mainly serve a methodological purpose since their validity is conditional upon that of the entire set of assumptions underlying the econometric investigation … however … the tradeoffs between executions and murders implied by these elasticities are not negligible, especially when evaluated at relatively low levels of executions and relatively high level[s] of murder.

Ehrlich’s study drew considerable criticism, most of which pointed out deficiencies in his statistical methodology. Therefore, at this moment, we should say that we are able to infer nothing definite from Ehrlich’s study, although we must value the study as pioneering work.

Van den Haag proposes an interesting argument based upon uncertainty specific to the deterrent effect of the death penalty. He assumes two cases, namely, case (1), in which the death penalty exists, and case (2), in which the death penalty does not exist. In each case there is risk or uncertainty. On the one hand, in case (1), if there is no deterrent effect, the life of a murderer is lost in vain, whereas if there is a deterrent effect, the lives of some murderers and innocent victims will be saved in the future. On the other hand, in case (2), if there is no deterrent effect, the life of a convicted murderer is saved, whereas if there is a deterrent effect, the lives of some innocent victims will be lost in the future (Van den Haag 1995, pp. 133-134). Conway and Pojman explain this argument using the following table, ‘The Best Bet Argument’, which I have modified slightly, having DP stand for the death penalty, and DE the deterrent effect:

Following this table, Conway assumes (after Van den Haag’s suggestion that the life of a convicted murderer is not valued more highly than that of the unknown victims) numerical values about each case (each numerical number stands for not a number of people but a hypothetical value for a person to be saved or killed) :

a murderer saved +5

a murderer executed -5

an innocent saved +10

an innocent murdered -10

Moreover, he assumes that for each execution, only two innocent lives are spared (i.e. he assumes the deterrent effect to be almost the minimum). Then, consequently, executing convicted murderers turns out to be a good bet (Conway 1995, pp. 265-266; Pojman 1998, pp. 40-41).

9. Negative causation and where to give priority

Van den Haag’s ‘Best Bet Argument’ sounds quite interesting. However, Conway has already proposed a fundamental challenge to this argument: it mistakenly regards the actual death of convicted murderers as being on a par with the possible death of innocent victims in the future (Conway 1995, pp. 269-270). This is confusing or possibly a rhetorical sleight of hand. I think that Conway’s reaction to Van den Haag’s argument is a reasonable one.

As I approach my conclusion, I will propose two problems with Van den Haag’s argument. First, I want to acknowledge that any arguments, including Van den Haag’s, supporting the death penalty in terms of its deterrent effect seem to presuppose a causal relationship between the existence of the death penalty and people not killing others. For example, Pojman writes, ‘the repeated announcement and regular exercise of capital punishment may have deep causal influence’ (1998, p. 48). However, epistemologically speaking, that presupposition is extremely hard to confirm, because the effect of this causal relationship is not a positive, but rather a negative event, which is the event of not killing others. This has something to do with the philosophical problem of how to understand negative properties. By negative properties we mean that, for example, my room is not full of seawater; my room does not consist of paper; my room is not melting us, etc. Such descriptions by negative properties can be made almost endlessly. In other words, one identical event described by a positive property (e.g., this room is well lit) can be re-described in infinite ways in terms of negative properties. Take the example that I am now at my computer in Tokyo, writing a paper. This event can also be described as ‘I am not eating’, ‘I am not sleeping’, ‘I am not killing others’ (!), etc. The positive event, ‘I am writing a paper now’, can be understood through a causal relationship. The event was most likely caused by my intention to do so, which was caused by my sense of duty as a professor, etc. How, then, could we understand the negative description of my action, ‘I am not killing others’? Was this caused by the existence of the death penalty in Japan?

Perhaps I was completely unaware of the existence of the death penalty in Japan when I wrote a paper without killing others. Could the death penalty be its cause? Could the negative event ‘I am not killing others’ be an effect of the death penalty? It is hard to say so.

This problem is the same as the problem of ‘causation by absence’ or ‘omission-involving causation’. Generally, causation by absence is usually examined in the form of answering a question about whether nothingness can cause something. For example, David Lewis discusses a question about how a void (understood as being entirely empty or nothing at all, differing from a vacuum) is regarded as a cause of something (Lewis 2004). He says, ‘If you were cast into a void, it would cause you to die in just a few minutes. It would suck the air from your lungs. It would boil your blood. It would drain the warmth from your body. And it would inflate enclosures in your body until they burst’ (ibid., p.277). However, the problem is that the void is nothing. ‘When the void sucks away the air, it does not exert an attractive force on the air’ (ibid.). Furthermore, another, perhaps harder problem would arise. We can say, ‘If I defended you from being cast into a void, you would not die’. Namely, my omission to defend you would cause you to die. However, should only my omission matter? What of your brother’s omission to defend you? Or the Prime Minister of the UK’s omission to defend you? Are not all of those qualified to be the cause of your death, as least as long as we adopt a common-sense counterfactual analysis of causation? As this argument suggests, in the context of the current debate on this problem, the most troublesome phase is that ‘too many’ absences can be supposed to cause a particular effect. I quote Menzies, who says (2004, p.145):

I am writing this essay at my computer. If, however, there were nerve gas in the air, or I were attacked with flamethrowers, or struck by a meteor shower, I would not be writing the essay. But it is counterintuitive to say that the absence of nerve gas, flamethrower attack, and meteor strike are causes of my writing the essay.

This example takes the issue of absence as a cause, but simultaneously his example refers to the case of effect as absence (not writing the essay). As this shows, the current debate on the problem of causation by absence could extend to the case of effect as absence. In any case, what matters is a possibility that ‘too many’ absences can cause something, and something can cause ‘too many’ absences (Menzies calls this problem ‘the problem of profligate causation’ (ibid., pp.142-145). Then the deterrent effect of the death penalty is definitely classified as a case of absence as effect rather than cause. In other words, the absence of homicide (as effect) matters, whereas in this case execution (as cause) is presupposed to exist. It seems that the current debate on causation by absence is highly likely to contribute to discussing the problem of the deterrent effect.

Of course, someone may counter my argument by saying that what matters in this context is a statistical correlation between the number of executions and the number of homicides, which could be confirmed in an empirical way. I admit that the statistical correlation plays a crucial role here, even though we must simultaneously acknowledge that what is called ‘randomized controlled trial’, the most reliable, statistical methodology to confirm causal relations, is unfeasible due to the nature of the problem. Actually, this kind of correlation is too rough to predict the causal relationship between those, although the causation really matters. Causes of a reduction or increase in the number of homicides can be interpreted or estimated in various ways, considering confounding factors, such as education, economic situation, urban planning, and so on. Therefore, in principle, there always remains the possibility that the apparent correlation between the death penalty and the reduction of homicides is merely accidental. For example, there may be another, common cause, that brings about both people’s tendency to support the death penalty and the reduction of homicides 9 . We should recognise that there is intrinsic uncertainty here. These difficulties concerning causal relations give rise to a fourth problem related to the death penalty debates – the Uncertainty of Causal Consequences.

Incidentally, let me now return to my distinction of the three stages regarding the death penalty. Obviously, the issue of the deterrent effect belongs primarily to the Danger Stage. Yet it is vital to consider the Harm Stage. How can the deterrent effect affect the Harm Stage? I must say that the retentionist’s argument, in terms of the deterrent effect of the death penalty, completely dismisses this essential point. We need only recall the analogy of the 2011 quake in Japan. ‘Retentionism’ based upon the deterrent effect corresponds to aspect (3), where the improvement of the preventive system matters. This is important, of course, but cannot be a priority. Priority lies in the issues of how to deal with the actual harm that the victims have already suffered (specifically referring to the bereaved family or others in the case of homicide and the death penalty). Without consideration of how to cope with the harm, even if the theory seriously considers the innocent victims in the future, the retentionists’ theory can hardly be persuasive.

It is true that the retentionists’ theory based on the deterrent effect appropriately considers the person harmed in the process of punishment. For example, Walker considers such a phase in the process of punishment as one of the possible objections against retentionism based on the deterrent effect by saying: ‘if the benefit excludes the person harmed this too is nowadays regarded by many people as morally unacceptable’ (Walker 1980, p. 65). However, as the context clearly shows, by ‘the person harmed’ he means the person punished. He does not mention the initial harm suffered by victims. This problem is concerned with my previous claim; that is, we have to consider the ‘whom-question’ when we discuss the justification of punishment. Whom are we discussing? Whose benefit do we consider? In the face of victims before our eyes, can we emphasise only the improvement of preventive systems for the future? Evidently, actual victims are the first to be helped, although obviously it is not at all bad to simultaneously consider the preventive system in the future. It is necessary for us to respect basic human rights and the human dignity of perpetrators and innocent people in the future; however, that respect must be in conjunction with our first taking care of actual victims. We ought not to get our priorities wrong.

10. Prospects

I have indicated that the debates on the death penalty are inevitably surrounded by four problems over specific kinds of uncertainties: uncertainty concerning the victim of homicide, uncertainty in justifying the death penalty from the feeling of being victimised, uncertainty in justifying the death penalty on the basis of human rights, and uncertainty over negative causation. In the course of examining these problems, I have proposed the option of developing an ‘impossibilist’ position about the death penalty, which I am convinced, deserves further investigation. However, being surrounded by theoretical problems and uncertainties might be more or less true of any social institution. My aim is only to suggest how the death penalty should be understood as involving uncertainties from a philosophical perspective. Most likely, if there is something practical that I can suggest based on my argument, then what we might call a ‘Harm-Centred System’ may be introduced as a relatively promising option instead of, or in tandem with, the death penalty. What I mean by this is a system in which we establish as a priority redressing actual harm with regard to legal justice, where ‘actual harm’ only implies what the bereaved family suffer from, as the direct victims have already disappeared in the case of homicide. In other words, I think that something akin to the maximalist approach to restorative justice 10 or some hybrid of the traditional justice system and the restorative justice system should be seriously considered, although we cannot expect perfect solutions exempt from all of the above four problems. It is certainly worth considering whether some element of restorative justice can play a significant role in the best theory of punishment.

In any case, my argument is at most a philosophical attempt to address problems. How to apply it to the practice of the legal system is a question to be tackled in a future project.

Bazemore, G. and Walgrave, L. 1999 (1). ‘Introduction: Restorative Justice and the International Juvenile Justice Crisis’. In Restorative Juvenile Justice: Repairing the Harm of Youth Crime , eds. G. Bazemore and L. Walgrave, Criminal Justice Press, 1-13.

———. 1999 (2). ‘Restorative Juvenile Justice: In Search of Fundamentals and an Outline for System Reform’. In Restorative Juvenile Justice: Repairing the Harm of Youth Crime , eds. G. Bazemore and L. Walgrave, Criminal Justice Press, 45-74.

Beyleveld, D. 1979. ‘Identifying, Explaining and Predicting Deterrence’. British Journal of Criminology 19:3, 205–224.

Calvert, B. 1993. ‘Locke on Punishment and the Death Penalty’. Philosophy 68:264,, 211–229.

Collins, J., N. Hall, and L. A. Paul. 2004. Causation and Counterfactuals. MIT Press.

Conway, D. A. 1995 (originally 1974). ‘Capital Punishment and Deterrence: Some Considerations in Dialogue Form’. In Punishment: A Philosophy and Public Affairs Reader , eds. J. Simmons, M. Cohen, J. Cohen, and C. R. Beitz. Princeton University Press, 261–273.

Diogenes Laertius. 1925. Lives of Eminent Philosophers. Vol. 2. Trans. R. D. Hicks. Loeb Classical Library. William Heinemann Ltd.

Ehrlich, I. 1975. ‘The Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment: A Question of Life and Death’. American Economic Review 65:3, 397–417.

Fagan, A. 2016. ‘Human Rights’. In Chase B. Wrenn, The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ISSN 2161-0002. Available from http://www.iep.utm.edu/hum-rts/#H2 [Accessed 12 June 2017]

Fischer, J. M., ed. 1993. The Metaphysics of Death . Stanford University Press.

Goldman, A. H. 1995 (originally 1979). ‘The Paradox of Punishment’. In Punishment: A Philosophy and Public Affairs Reader , eds. J. Simmons, M. Cohen, J. Cohen, and C. R. Beitz. Princeton University Press, 30–46.

Hart, H. L. A. 1982. Essays on Bentham: Jurisprudence and Political Theory . Oxford University Press.

Ichinose, M. 2013. ‘Hybrid Nature of Causation’. In T. Uehiro, Ethics for the Future of Life: Proceedings of the 2012 Uehiro-Carnegie-Oxford Ethics Conference , the Oxford Uehiro Center for Practical Ethics, University of Oxford, 60-80.

———. 2016. ‘A Philosophical Inquiry into the Confusion over the Radiation Exposure Problem’. Journal of Disaster Research 11: No.sp, 770-779.

Lewis, D. 2004. ‘Void and Object’. In J. Collins, N. Hall, and L. A. Paul, Causation and Counterfactuals . MIT Press, 277–290.

Locke, J. 1960. Two Treatises of Government , ed. P. Laslett, Cambridge University Press.

———. 1975. An Essay concerning Human Understanding , ed. P. H. Nidditch. Oxford University Press.

Menzies, P. 2004. ‘Difference-Making in Context’. In J. Collins, N. Hall, and L. A. Paul, Causation and Counterfactuals . MIT Press, 139–180.

Pojman, L. P., and J. Reiman. 1998. The Death Penalty: For and Against. Rowman &Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Scanlon, T. M. 1982. ‘Contractualism and utilitarianism’. In A. Sen and B. Williams, Utilitarianism and Beyond . Cambridge University Press, 103-128.,

Simmons, A. J. 1994. ‘Locke on the Death Penalty’. Philosophy 69:270, 471–477.

Strawson, G. 2008. ‘The Impossibility of Ultimate Moral Responsibility’. In Real Materialism. Oxford University Press, 319–331.

Tonry, M. 1994. ‘Proportionality, Parsimony, and Interchangeability of Punishments’. In A Reader on Punishment , eds. A. Duff and D. Garland. Oxford University Press, 133–160.

Van den Faag, E. 1995 (originally 1969). ‘On Deterrence and the Death Penalty’. In Punishment and the Death Penalty: The Current Debate , eds. R. M. Baird and S. E. Rosenbaum. Prometheus Books.

Von Hirsch, A. 1993. Censure and Sanctions. Oxford University Press.

Walen, A, 2015. ‘Retributive Justice’. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2015 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). Available from http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2015/entries/justice-retributive/ [Accessed 12 June 2017]

Walker, N. 1980. Punishment, Danger and Stigma: The Morality of Criminal Justice . Barnes & Noble Books.

1. Strangely, few Locke scholars have seriously tried to understand the Lockean meaning of punishment, which is developed in his Second Treatise ,(Locke 1960), in the light of his theory of personal identity based upon ‘consciousness’, which is discussed in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding . Taking into account the fact that ‘person’ appears as the key word in both works of Locke, we must bridge the gap between his two works by rethinking the universal significance of ‘person’ in his arguments. There were, however, some controversies concerning how Locke evaluates the death penalty. See Calvert (1993) and Simmons (1994).

2. There is an additional question about whether justification is needed after the execution when the convict is no longer around, in addition to ‘before’ and ‘during’. According to my understanding of justification, the process of justification must begin with making each person concerned understand what there is no reason to reject, but that is just a starting, necessary point. Justification must go beyond the initial phase to acquiring general consent from society. In this sense, justification seems to be needed even ‘after’ the execution. Actually, if there is no need for justification after the execution, that sounds less like punishment based on a system of justice than merely physical disposal.

3. Is it true that the death penalty is the ultimate punishment? Can we not suppose that the death penalty is less harmful than a life sentence or very lengthy incarceration? However, this view regarding the death penalty as less harmful than a lifelong sentence could lead to a paradox. If this order of severity as punishment is valid, it may be possible to reduce the lifelong sentence (due to an amnesty, some consideration on the prisoner’s rehabilitation, or something like that) to the death penalty. If this is the case, prisoners given the lifelong sentence will not make an effort at all to rehabilitate themselves, due to fear of the sentence being reduced to the death penalty. In addition, if a person is likely to be sentenced to death, the person might try to commit a more heinous crime, perhaps even in the court in order to be given a more severe sentence, i.e. a life sentence in prison. That is a paradox drawn from human nature.

4. On the current debates on ‘HTD’ of Epicurus, see Fischer (1993). Of course, there are lots of objections against the Epicurean view. The most typical objection is that death deprives people of their chance to enjoy life, and therefore death is harmful. However, it seems to me that “whom-question” must be raised again here. To whom is the deprivation of this chance harmful? In any case, the metaphysics of death is a popular topic in contemporary philosophy, which should involve not only metaphysical issues but also ethical and epistemological problems.

5. In fact, the hardships suffered by those forced to flee to shelters constituted the main problem resulting from the nuclear power plants accident. In general, radiation exposure is the most well-known problemarising from nuclear power plant accidents, but it is not always the case. In particular in the case of the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident in Japan, the overestimation of the danger of radiation exposure, and evacuation activities resulting from that overestimation, caused the biggest and the most serious problems including many of the deaths. We always have to take the risk-tradeoff into account. Radiation exposure is just one risk, and is not the only risk to be considered. See Ichinose (2016).

6. The notion of parsimony was newly offered to avoid a fundamental drawback of the standard retributive system, whether based on cardinal or ordinal proportionality: the standard system tends to inflict excessive, cruel punishment, as its criterion of measuring wrongness is not exempt from being arbitrary. In contrast, the newly offered system could hold inflicted punishment ‘as minimally as possible, consistent with the vague limits of cardinal desert’ (Walen 2015) in terms of introducing an idea of parsimony. The notion of parsimony could make the retributive system of punishment more reasonable and humane while retaining the idea of retribution.

7. Roger Crisp kindly pointed out that it is worth considering an institutional justification according to which punishment wouldn’t have to be tailored to a particular case. In this view, it is sufficient that death is generally bad for both victims and perpetrators. I do not deny the practical persuasiveness of this view. However, from a more philosophical point of view, we should propose a question ‘how can we know that death is generally bad for victims of homicide?’ Following HTD, which is certainly one possible philosophical view, death is not bad at all, regardless of whether we talk about general issues or particular cases, as an agent to whom something is bad or not disappears by dying by definition. Of course, as long as we exclusively focus upon harm which the bereaved family or the society in general suffer, the institutional justification could make good sense, although in that case the issue of direct victims killed would remain untouched.

8. Additionally, my analogy with natural disasters, particularly the case of the 2011 quake, could be re-confirmed to be appropriate in the sense of presenting a similar kind of uncertainty to the case of the death penalty. The danger of constant exposure to low doses of radiation for long periods involves some uncertainty, as far as we now know. Fortunately, however, the dose of radiation to which the people of Fukushima were exposed as a result of the 2011 quake, internally and externally, was low enough for us to be certain, based upon past epidemiological research, that no health problems will arise in the future. Regarding radiation exposure, everything depends upon the level of dose. The smaller the dose, the less dangerous it is.

9. On negative causation and the possibility of common cause, see Ichinose (2013). In particular, my argument on negative causation concerning the death penalty rests on my argument of Ichinose (2013).

10. According to Bazemore and Walgrave, ‘restorative justice is every action that is primarily oriented towards doing justice by repairing the harm that has been caused by a crime (Bazemore and Walgrave 1999 (2), p.48). Restorative justice, that is to say, is a justice system that mainly aims at restoring or repairing the harm of offences rather than punishing offenders as the retributive justice system does. Initially, restorative justice has been carried out by holding ‘a face-to-face meeting between the parties with a stake in the particular offense’ (ibid.) like victim, offenders, or victimised communities. However, this type of justice system works only in a complementary way to the traditional system of retributive justice. Then, the maximalist approach to restorative justice was proposed, which seeks to develop ‘restorative justice as a fully-fledged alternative’(Bazemore and Walgrave 1999 (1). Introduction. P.8) to retributive justice. This approach ‘will need to include the use of coercion and a formalization of both procedures and the relationship between communities and society’ (ibid., p.9.)

Essay Example on Death

December 25, 2022

Essay on Death: Philosophy

Essay on Death: Introduction

Death is one of the drastic concepts that have been discussed from the start of civilization. In the past, many philosophers discussed the concept of death. In the history of humanity, people have been believed to the fact that death was a bad thing. Today, many people still believe that death is bad because it separates our loved ones from us and life. However, death is a controversial subject, and it is subjective for each one of us. One can highlight that it is an exaggerated topic as people put so many meanings to it, which means that a dead person can no longer feel, talk, and think. Her life ends, and she slowly disappears from memories and rots in her grave. In this sense, it cannot be bad because a dead person no longer worries about her life and other materialistic things. In the 21st century, people are obsessed with richness, hard work, show off their expensive materials to other people. They forgot the true meaning of happiness, and therefore they create illusionary fear about losing materials and their lives. However, life is full of possibilities, and all the sorrow and struggle will come to an end. After all, this paper argues that death is not a bad thing, and people find eternal peace in their graves as they do not worry about anything anymore.

Body Paragraphs

Death is an inevitable result for everyone, and when we are born, we have a self-protective instinct that creates a perception that death is a bad thing. More specifically, it is affecting our ideas about being cautious and keeping us away from trouble. For instance, when we drive at high speed, our self-protective instinct tells us to slow down and be careful, or when we want to do extreme sports, it tells us that we should not do it because there is a risk of death. Therefore, it is a needed emotion for us as it annihilates unexpected death possibilities.

We usually learn death when we are younger, but our brains cannot fully understand it because it is an intangible concept for us. More specifically, any parent would not choose to tell their children death until somebody dies around them or in their family. When this happens, they try to tell us what it is, and we become aware of the possibility of dying. Our brains finally notice that there is an end to this life, and we start thinking about what happens after it; where will we go, are we still able to think and feel? However, there are no specific answers to these questions because nobody knows what will happen; we are only predicting what it will be. At this point, sacred books come to rescue us from the uncertainty, and it tells us there are a heaven and hell, and good people will go to heaven and bad ones will go to hell. However, their answers are not satisfying enough because their reality is not actually proven. Therefore, our anxiety about death never stops until we are gone.

When somebody is gone, usually his loved ones mourn him and feel the sadness because he is no longer in their lives, and they are not going to see him anymore. In this sense, his loved ones choose to think that his soul is gone somewhere good and find peace. However, there is no proof that we have souls, and when we die, maybe our souls go to heaven or hell. Therefore, the best idea for all of us to get used to nothingness. More specifically, there is comfort in the concept of nothingness because it means that everything stops, and we find eternal peace by not thinking, feeling, and living.

We usually start fearing death in our 20s because we have dreams, ambitions, and goals. More specifically, we fear it because our lives are not fully completed yet, and we keep living, enjoying life, and working hard to achieve our dreams. At this point, death sounds like a bad thing when it is not. Also, we have a responsibility to our loved ones, and our parents want us to be safe. However, there is not any particular time for death, and it can happen anytime. For instance, when we go out for a walk and a robber can stab us, and we die, or when we drive safely, some drunk driver can lost his car's control and hits us at high speed, and we die. Therefore, the concept of death is full of possibilities, and we cannot live our lives constantly fearing it because we do not know how many days we have left.

Discussing the death appeared in literature with Ancient Greek philosophers. Socrates searched for the true meaning of life and death, and when he was in the verge of dying, he welcomed death with peace and comfort. Many others that came after Socrates searched for what was life and death. Every philosopher brought their interpretation to the topic, and between 20th and 21st century, many directors had questioned what death is and how we react to it. For instance, The Seventh Seal (1956) was directed by Ingmar Bergman, and there was a knight who tried to escape death. More specifically, the knight played chess with death, and he knew that he could not win, but he did everything in his power to escape it (“Svensk Filmindustri,” 1956). The movie reflects modern people against the inevitable result. They try everything to live longer, and they are in constant fear and horror from the possibility of it.

On the contrary, some people believe that death is a good thing, and ending your life is something honorable. For example, Michael Haneke is one of the most famous independent movie directors of the 20th and 21st century, and he constantly had questioned death. In the Seventh Continent (1989), there was a bourgeois European family who was tired of materialist ambitions of life, and they committed suicide with their 8-year-old daughter. The family made this decision together (“Der Siebente Kontinent,” 1989). The movie reflects the other half of the modern people because they believe that materialist pleasure cannot bring eternal peace and comfort. Therefore, they think that death is not a bad thing, and it is a way out of materialist ambitions, and these people even consider committing suicide. However, life is precious, and one should live a long life. After all, death is not a bad thing, but people should not commit suicide.

The only bad thing about death is the way of dying, and nobody wants to die painfully. For instance, drowning is one of the most painful types because the lungs fill up with water and then explode. Also, dying at a young age from cancer and other diseases is terrible because you have not lived the fullest life during these periods. However, dying in really old age is kind of good because you complete your mission, goals, and dreams. Death becomes the final step to reborn in another life if that exists. Also, beliefs like regeneration are comforting, and it helps you overcome the fear of death. After all, you no longer live in constant anxiety and fear.

Essay on Death: Conclusion

Consequently, this paper focuses on the investigation of death and the answer “is death a bad thing.” It is one of the most argued topics in human history because it comes with the package when we have born. Life and death are inseparable from each other, and nobody can change the ultimate result. Arguable, maybe in the future, science can find solutions to eternal life by transforming our consciousness to another body. However, this is an imaginary solution, and in the near future, this cannot be done because people are still investigating the existence of the soul. Many people in society try to do everything to live longer. In my opinion, death is not a bad thing because everything stops, and we find eternal peaches in their graves as they do not worry about anything anymore. On the contrary, our loved ones suffer from our death and become sad because it is hard for them to process that we are gone and what happened to us. Therefore, they are holding on to the idea that we will reborn or go to heaven. Eventually, it is essential to living the fullest life because we can never know when we die.

Der siebente Kontinent (Seventh Continent). (1989). France.

Svensk Filmindustri. (1956). The seventh seal. Sweden.

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Philosophy of Death and Dying

Introduction, description of death, effect on family, works cited.

For quite a long period of history, issues related to death and dying were within the scope of the church’s professional competences. Representatives of Christian denominations explained the afterlife to the common people and took care of the dying. With the development of a natural-scientific view, the monopoly of talking about death has slowly moved from church to the medical community. In recent decades, however, the medical opinion on mortality also has serious competition. Now, new groups, such as funeral entrepreneurs or psychologists, are increasingly talking about death and dying.

The person whose death I had to face a decade ago was my beloved sister named Jo Ann Rose. She was 52, and by that time, she had been fighting ovarian cancer for four years with surgery and chemotherapy. In the United States, it is the fifth most common cause of women’s cancer deaths (Brazier paras. 5-6). This malignant tumor is difficult to diagnose in the early stages, it quickly metastases, and advanced stages are poorly treated.

The words “you have cancer” from the mouth of a doctor is any patient’s fear – his or her life is splintering into two parts, and the second will be shorter than the first. The first period of chemotherapy was awful: vomiting, spasms, temperature. Drinking and eating were impossible, and due to strong pain, she was lost. One of the worst things here is the inability to help your beloved person. In Jo Ann Rose’s treatment, the most intimidating for her was the loss of strength. Suddenly becoming helpless and physically powerless is something that people find difficult to accept. Chemotherapy took away a lot of physical and spiritual forces, joints started to hurt so that in the morning there was no strength to get up, and her hair fell out.

Understanding that all people are mortal, and there can be no exceptions here comes gradually. In my sister’s case, all ideas, expectations and opinions about life instantly turned over. Her life used to be full of plans: meeting friends, going to the cinema and many other activities. Then, under the oppression of the disease, all these plans did not seem important. However, even being confused and upset, my sister still tried to streamline her life. It helped not deep in the disturbing thoughts that stressed her. Later, my sister decided to accept her life as it was. Jo Ann Rose desired not to be angry and offended, but to enjoy even the last days. Poor psychological attitudes can nullify any effort to prolong life. My sister wanted to spend the last days with comfort, next to specialists who at any moment could provide professional assistance. She chose a hospice with professional and caring staff. Such employees are very important, as they help not to lose a positive attitude and more comfortable to perceive physically unpleasant moments.

My sister’s decision to live in a hospice a few months had a positive impact on her mental state. The activities of hospices and their medical staff are closely intertwined with the Glaser-Strauss theory about death awareness. These researchers studied patients with fatal diagnoses who knew and who did not know that their disease was threatening (Attig, p. 7). On the basis of this research, they highlighted an open and closed awareness of impending death. In the case of my sister, only open awareness was possible. Thanks to the Glaser-Strauss theory, modern medical staff is well educated on how to work with different types of awareness. As a result, skills of effective communication with patients and their families develop.

Thus, in the last days of my sister’s life, it is possible to track dimensions of coping with death suggested by Charles Corr, which are physical, psychological, social and spiritual (Corr 5). The fact that she could accept the reality and enjoyed its remains speak about her strong spirit and ability to see hope. Furthermore, psychologically it helped her cope with fear and concern. It was not easy, but she overcame anxiety and could inspire all our family and me. Moreover, she continued to control life and make important decisions, for example, to spend the last months in a hospice. In the social sphere, she could hold relations with family at a stable level. Of course, there were specific difficulties for everyone – worries, nervous breakdowns, but we did not give up thanks to Jo Ann Rose.

My sister was convinced we were in this world to create something. It may even be little things, but the main thing is to put own heart in it. It is essential to make even small things – though nobody sees and will not appreciate it. Jo Ann Rose put her soul and love into her family, so it was hard for us to cope with the loss when she passed.

Someone who is sick – no matter whether it is oncology or a simple flu – needs psychological support. Pills and procedures are, of course, essential, but nothing will replace the understanding look of a sister, friend, or a loved one. However, the first feeling of the sick and their loved ones when they learned of such a diagnosis is not fear, horror, or despair. The confusion comes first – people are disoriented and do not know what to do.

During the period of treatment, our family faced many obstacles. Unfortunately, there was very little useful and available information about cancer treatment which made us afraid even more. Someone ignores their diagnosis, and does want to not start treatment. The main thing that we understood is if a cancer diagnosis is made – it is not necessary to panic but to take actions. First, people need to approach it like any other disease – start treating. Many people pretend that dangerous illnesses occur only with others, but will not affect them personally. However, it can happen to anyone, and it is worth taking care of regular medical screenings. It is crucial to educate people, to give access to information.

In our family’s actions, the Doka’s stages of life-threading illness is traced. At acute and chronic stages, we tried our best to fight the disease, treat my sister (Corr, p. 5). Moreover, at the chronic stage, the sister has already accepted her illness, trying to realize the fact of impending death. The final stage for Jo Ann Rose took place in a hospice, and her family wanted to support her and use the time to say the most important thing. After her death the long stage of recovery came. We tried to cope with the loss and discovered a lot of new in our views on life.

When facing death, everything people keep inside rises: all fears, all phobias generate horror. However, it often happens that awareness of own mortality makes it possible to feel the fullness of life and makes people appreciate it more (Tomer, p. 525). A person, afraid of death, tries to control his/her own life, manage tomorrow’s day, and other things that are beyond control. The future is disturbing because people do not know what will happen or how. We fear to make mistakes and try to insure ourselves in all spheres of activity, and it prevents us from enjoying a happy and full life.

To say goodbye to my sister, our family arranged a classic funeral. That day, we tried not to think about our loss, but about the time we were able to spend together. I wanted to honor pleasant memories – I chose photos that reminded me of Jo Ann Rose. I also selected songs my sister loved and did a slide show. In this way I shared my memories with loved ones, and it seemed like she was around too – enjoying the favorite tunes and being nostalgic. According to Hoy, sharing memories at funerals is one of the most frequent and powerful components of the loss acceptance (48). After that, the whole family gathered at the table at my nephew’s house.

Although it has been quite a while since Jo Ann Rose died, I still miss her now. For this reason, I visit my sister frequently at her burial site whenever it is possible. On her birthdays and every Christmas, I pick beautiful flowers and carry a bouquet to her grave. I also visit her on Memorial Day and tidy the place. These visits are vital for me because, in this way, I feel our bonds with the sister and her support.

Death has always been a significant theme of religious practices, philosophy, medicine, and art. They all turn to the specific features of the process of dying and the state that characterizes death. Moreover, they give significance to eternal themes: the fate concept, the existence of God, the search for a place in life, and so on. Death is frightening with its inevitable devotion to everyone and, at the same time, its infinite strangeness. Some people are afraid not only to talk about death but to think about it too. Denial of mortality creates the illusion of its distance, delay: if not to think of it, then it also will not come.

At present, there is no single definition of the concept of loss, as each person defines this event in own way, investing unique meaning in it. Many scientists are studying the condition of a person, approaching death, as well as people who suffered a loss. Although each person’s grief is unique, they were able to identify some patterns and stages. For example, most people who have suffered the death of a close person agree that this loss has characteristics such as irreversibility and significance. Similar researches and discoveries help people go through such a terrible experience with the support of loved ones and professionals. On the example of personal experience, I can also find evidence of these studies. My sister Jo Ann Rose could meet the death with dignity, and we, her family, thanks to mutual support, were able to honor her justly.

Attig, Thomas. “Seeking Wisdom about Mortality, Dying, and Bereavement.” Death, Dying, and Bereavement: Contemporary Perspectives, Institutions, and Practices , edited by Thomas Attig, and Judith M. Stillion, Springer Publishing Company, 2014, pp.1-14.
Brazier, Yvette. “ What is ovarian cancer? ” Medically reviewed by YaminiRanchod, PhD, MS. Medical News Today , 2019. Web.
Corr, Charles A. “The ‘Five Stages’ in Coping with Dying and Bereavement: Strengths, Weaknesses and Some Alternatives.” Mortality, vol.24, no.4, 2019, pp. 405-417.
Hoy, William G. Do Funerals Matter? The Purposes and Practices of Death Rituals in Global Perspective. Routledge, 2013.
Tomer, Adrian. “Life Events.” Macmillan Encyclopedia of Death and Dying , edited by Robert Kastenbaum, Thomson Gale, 2003, pp. 523-525.

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Conclusion. Death has always been a significant theme of religious practices, philosophy, medicine, and art. They all turn to the specific features of the process of dying and the state that characterizes death. Moreover, they give significance to eternal themes: the fate concept, the existence of God, the search for a place in life, and so on.

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