Immortality and the Philosophy of Death (1St Edition)
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Immortality and the Philosophy of Death Immortality and the Philosophy of Death Edited by Michael Cholbi London • New York Published by Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB www.rowmaninternational.com Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd. is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and Plymouth (UK) www.rowman.com Selection and editorial matter © Michael Cholbi 2016 Copyright in individual chapters is held by the respective chapter authors. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: HB 978-1-78348-383-9 PB 978-1-78348-384-6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Immortality and the philosophy of death / edited by Michael Cholbi. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-78348-383-9 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-78348-384-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-78348-385-3 (electronic) 1. Death. 2. Immortality. I. Cholbi, Michael, editor. BD444.I46 2015 128’.5—dc23 2015032338 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America Contents Introduction vii PART I: IS DEATH BAD FOR THOSE THAT DIE? 1 1 Victims 3 Christopher Belshaw 2 Reconsidering Categorical Desire Views 21 Travis Timmerman 3 Epicureanism, Extrinsic Badness, and Prudence 39 Karl Ekendahl and Jens Johansson 4 Lucretius and the Fear of Death 53 Frederik Kaufman 5 The Harms of Death 67 Duncan Purves 6 Seeds: On Personal Identity and the Resurrection 85 Sophie-Grace Chappell PART II: LIVING WITH DEATH 99 7 Fearing Death as Fearing the Loss of One’s Life: Lessons from Alzheimer’s Disease 101 David Beglin 8 Constructing Death as a Form of Failure: Addressing Mortality in a Neoliberal Age 115 Beverley Clack v vi Contents 9 Love and Death 135 Dan Werner 10 Learning to be Dead: The Narrative Problem of Mortality 157 Kathy Behrendt 11 Love and Death: The Problem of Resilience 173 Aaron Smuts PART III: THE VALUE OF AN IMMORTAL LIFE 189 12 Immortality, Identity, and Desirability 191 Roman Altshuler 13 Resources for Overcoming the Boredom of Immortality in Fischer and Kierkegaard 205 Adam Buben 14 Immortality and the Exhaustibility of Value 221 Michael Cholbi Index 237 About the Contributors 241 Introduction Many attempts have been made to define human nature—to identify the characteristics that distinguish us Homo sapiens from other beings, particu- larly our animal brethren. The capacity for language; a moral sensibility; an enjoyment of art, play, or other activities, seemingly for their own sake; sci- entific rationality; a religious impulse; claims have been made on behalf of all of these as the factor that renders us uniquely human. Arguably though, the defining feature of human existence is our relationship to death. Every creature must die, and perhaps some nonhuman animals have some inchoate awareness of their imminent death. But only humans, both individually and collectively, grasp their mortality and are thereby compelled to confront their own deaths. As Ernest Becker, author of the bestselling classic The Denial of Death, explains it: This is what has made it so simple to shoot down whole herds of buffalo or elephants. The animals don’t know that death is happening and continue grazing placidly while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one’s dreams and even the most sun-filled days—that’s something else.1 Here Becker obliquely refers to a facet of death that human beings are likely to be uniquely aware of. Death, Shelly Kagan points out, is ubiquitous: There is no time at which we are completely immune from dying.2 The common human fear of death thus does not stem simply from its being ultimately unavoidable. It seems also to stem from its being omnipresent. vii viii Introduction Of course, one of the themes of Becker’s work, and the work of the “terror management theorists” he has inspired,3 is that the human fear of death is an omnipresent motivator behind our cultural strivings, driving us to establish religions, build monuments to our accomplishments, and defend (even with persecution or violence) the worldviews that define our cultural outlooks, all in an effort to “deny” death and achieve symbolic immortality. But even these efforts at death denial nevertheless corroborate the claim that humans are dis- tinctive in having to address death as a problem in living. For if Becker and his ilk are correct, then many of us “address” death not so much by engaging it but by unwitting efforts to circumvent it or nullify its effects on us. Philosophy is part of human culture too. And while Western philosophers’ interest in addressing death has waxed and waned over the centuries, they have not hidden from death or avoided scrutinizing death’s implications. The first “golden age” of philosophical inquiry into death occurred in the ancient Mediterranean world. For philosophers in the post-Socratic tradition, especially the Roman Stoics and Epicureans, philosophy’s purposes were both theoretical and practical. Successful philosophical inquiry, on their conception of that enterprise, enables us to negotiate life’s perils and adversi- ties, death included. Plato went so far as to declare that the true philosopher pursues philosophy as preparation for death. I would suggest that we are living through a second “golden age” of philosophical inquiry into death. This renaissance of philosophical interest in death traverses many traditions and methodologies, encompassing European “Continental” thinkers (Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre) and Anglo- American thinkers (Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel). The changing nature of the death experience has also contributed to this renaissance. Those in advanced industrialized cultures now routinely live well into “old age,” with death oftentimes preceded by a period of prolonged physical decline or senescence. As a result, most of us now have more time with which to confront the reality of our own deaths. The same technological developments that have extended life into old age have also put death more within our hands than ever before. Indeed, one of the principal factors that drove the rise of clinical medical ethics as a distinct field of inquiry in the twentieth century was the question of whether, if at all, it is ethically defensible to take death into our own hands by intentionally shortening or ending our lives. Concur- rently, some believe that technological advances are nigh that will make it possible to transcend or overcome death, through radically increasing the human lifespan, ending or slowing the aging process so as to achieve physi- ological immortality, or preserving our psychologies in digital form. Contemporary philosophers are wrestling with the metaphysical and ethical implications of these developments, even as they continue to look to ancient thinkers such as Epicurus and Lucretius for insight into such matters. Introduction ix In so doing, they continue the ancient tradition, inviting us to interrogate the aspects of our existence that are most puzzling or unsettling. The purpose of this volume is to represent the cutting edge of contemporary philosophical inquiry into death. The chapters collected here engage with three central areas of philosophical concern. The first area of concern is death’s purported badness. The common human fear of death seems rational only on the condition that death is worthy of being feared, that is, if there is something bad about death (where by “death” here we intend the state of being dead, rather than the process of dying). But it is not obvious that there is something bad about death. As Epicurus famously argued, if death is a state of non-being—not a state that we ever experience—then death should be seen as “nothing to us.” Yet, it is hard to shake the intuition that death is not nothing to us—that death is often bad for the person who dies. The chapters in Part I undertake the challenge of explaining how, if at all, this can be so. Christopher Belshaw (“Victims”) defends a claim regarding a condition on death’s being bad: “Death can only be bad for beings with sufficiently sophisticated psychologies to count as persons.” Persons, according to Belshaw, have beliefs regarding the future and desires pertaining to what occurs in the future. Thanks to these beliefs and desires, persons can want to continue living, and death is bad, Belshaw argues, only for those who want to live. It follows from Belshaw’s position that death cannot be bad for zygotes, fetuses, or nonhuman animals whose psychologies lack the beliefs and desires necessary for personhood. Such entities lack categorical desires, desires we have that give us reason to continue living, not simply reasons to want our lives to go well so long as we live (e.g., the desire to live without pain). In “Reconsidering Categorical Desire Views,” Travis Timmerman develops two hypothetical examples that raise difficulties for views like Belshaw’s that appeal to such desires.