哲学-死亡（二）

Value Theory

ethical or value questions

The badness of death

The deprivation account

• If we believe death is the end, how could death be bad for me?

  I don’t exist, it can’t be bad for me

• Death is bad for the survivors

  It means losing friends or family for the survivors

  —— Learning of a friend’s death is more terrifying than being separated from a friend

  —— It can’t be at the core in terms of what’s bad about death.

• The central badness of death

  How could it be true that death is bad for the person that dies?

  —— We’ve got to focus on my being dead rather than being afraid of dead.

• Physicalists: Once I die, I cease to exist. I don’t exist.

  How can nonexistence be bad for me?

• distinction between two different way in which something can be bad for me.

  1. In an absolute, robust intrinsic sense (Pain)

     Something we want to avoid for its own sake.

     —— They are bad by virtue of their very nature.

  2. comparatively sense

     While you’re doing this, you are not getting something better.

     Something can be bad comparatively, something can be bad because of what you are not getting while you get this bad thing.

     —— They are by virtue of “The opportunity costs”.

• The deprivation account of the evil or badness of death

  dead is bad because of the lack of the good things in life (in second sense)

• OBJECTION

  1. Timing of the badness of death

     If anything is true, any fact has to have a time when it’s true

     If dead is bad for me, it’s a fact, when is that fact true?

     Death can’t be bad for me now, because I’m alive. Death can’t be bad for me when I’m dead, because I’m no more.

     —— My death is bad for me during the time I’m dead. Because during that time I’m deprived of the good things in life.

     • Argument

       1. something can be bad for you only if you exist. - Existence requirement
       2. when you’re dead you don’t exist - Truth
       3. CONCLUSION: Death can’t be bad for you

     • Argument of existence requirement

       Nonexistence guarantee that you’re deprived of something

       —— death is bad by rejecting the existence requirement

       —— for the potential never-to-be-born people, a lot of people, that it’s a tragedy that they never get born, it’s a moral tragedy

     • Two version of Existence requirement

       1. Modest version: something can be bad for you only if you exist at some time or the other - Accepted
       2. Bolder version: something can be bad for you only if you exist at the same time as that thing

     • The Modest Existence requirement maybe the best possible view.

  2. Nonexistence before we born and after we die —— Lucretius’ puzzle

     • Common response

       The period after my death, I am no longer alive, I have lost my life

       In contrast, the period before my birth, although I’m not alive, I have not lost my life, I’ve never yet been alive. —— You cannot lost something you’ve never yet had.

     • Schmoss (尚无)

       The period before my birth, there’s no loss of life, but there’s a schmoss of life.

       —— What is it about the fact that we don’t have something that we used to, that makes it worse than that no having something that we’re going to?

       —— Why do we care more about not having what once upon a time we did, than we care about not having what once upon a time we will?

     • Arguments

       • Nagel’s answer

         The date of my death is a contingent fact about me, but the date of my birth is not a contingent fact about me.

         The date of my birth mean the time at which I come in to existence.

         That’s an essential moment in my life story.

         —— fertility clinic, not to be an adequate answer

       • Fred Feldman’s answer

         When we imagine being born earlier, we don’t imagine a longer life, we imagine shift my life forward.

         —— If I can born earlier, I can have a longer life for now

       • Derek Parfit ’s answer

         Why loss is worse than schmoss? Because we have of caring about the future in a way that we don’t care about the past. It’s a very deep fact about human caring.

         e.g.: We do want the pain to be in the past. We don’t want the pain in the future.

Immortality

• Question One

  Does consistency, does logic, require somebody who accepts the deprivation account believe immortality is a good thing? —— No

  Strictly speaking, what the deprivation account says is, death is bad insofar as you’re deprived of the good things.

  Dead is bad, when it’s bad, by virtue of the fact that it deprives you of the good things in life.

  • We’re not committed to the claim that death is always bad. We have to look and see, what would life actually hold out for us.
  • Things that are good for you in limited quantities can become bad for you if you get more and more of them.

• Question Two

  Even if logic doesn’t require that, is it true that immortality is a good thing?

  • What should we think about the prospect of living forever?

  • Older, weaker, discomfort.

    Death is blessing, because it puts an end to the pain and suffering and misery that afflict us in our old age.

  • Science fiction. Health and anything you want. Is it could be a good thing?

    • What kind of life can you imagine such that having that life forever would be good?

      —— No kind of life would be one that would be desirable and attractive forever. Every life would be eventually become tedious and worse.

      —— The fact of out mortality is good rather than bad.

    • To say that immortality is bad is not to say it’s a good thing that we die when we do. It could be bad that it comes too soon for all of us

  • Imagine a pleasure-making machine

    • Imagine we have a intense burst of pleasure going on forever.
    • Humans have ability to look down on their experiences, we can reflect on our first order or base level experiences.
    • “Is this all that there is to life?” That question would gnaw at you and sour and override the pleasure.
    • You would found that you were stuck in this rat-like existence. The human part of you is going to rebel at the unending parade of simple rat-like pleasures.

  • Imagine a cycling with the memory loss

    • Living immortality with a kind of amnesia, a kind of progressive lack of memory, or radical alterations of my memory.
    • Think about personal identity: What I want isn’t merely for somebody to be me, but to be sufficiently like me.

• Bernard Williams

  • Immortality wouldn’t be desirable. It would be a nightmare, something you would long to free yourself from.

Good life

The topic as the nature of wellbeing.

• Instrumentally valuable & Intrinsically valuable

  We need to separate between those things that are good only because of what they lead to and those things that are valuable for their own sake or in their own right.

  • What things are worth having for their own sake? Pleasure ↔ Pain

• Hedonism （享乐主义）

  • the only thing intrinsically valuable is pleasure, and the only thing intrinsically bad is pain.
  • Being well off is a matter of experiencing pleasure and avoiding the experience of pain.
  • Weight up the pleasures and pains in some appropriate way.

  BUT

  • I’m inclined to think there’s more to the best kind of life than just having pleasure and avoiding pain.
  • Would life on the experience machine be better than it is now? Does life on the experience machine give you everything worth having in life?

    experience machine is a thought experiment about the life of the best experience of existence given by the machine

  • Would you want your entire life to be spent hooked up to the experience machine? —— NO
  • If life on the experience machine isn’t all that’s worth wanting out of life, then there; more to the best possible life than getting the inside right.

Value of life

• Neutral container theory 中性容器理论
  • Being alive per se has no value.
  • Life itself is a container, which we fill with various good or bad. And deciding how valuable it is, how good it is for me to be alive is a matter of adding up the value of the contents of the live. (Add up the experiences and accomplishments and the particular details of your life.)
  • But container itself is a mere container, it has no value in and of itself.
• Valuable container theory 有价容器理论
  • Life per se is valuable.
  • Life itself if worth having. There’s a benefit to me above and beyond the question of what’s going on with in my life. I’m alive gives my life some value.
  • Being alive per se has some positive value.
  • Life may have value in and of itself, but it’s not mere life. What we want is the life of a human. —— life of a person per se that’s valuable.
  • Since we are adding extra positive points, for the fact that you’re alive, even if the contents subtotal of live is negative, the grand total could still be positive.
• Modest valuable container theory 适度有价容器理论
  • There’s a value to being alive, but it can be outweigh.
  • Although being alive per se is good, if the contents of your life is bad enough, that can outweigh the value of being alive.
• Fantastic valuable container theory 过度有价容器理论
  • Being alive per se is so incredibly valuable that no matter how horrible the contents are, the grand total can be always positive.

BUT

• Note that this assumption that the way to think about the value of the combination as just a matter of adding the goodness of life and the badness of death and just summing them that way, that may not be right.

  Sometimes the value of a combination is different than the value you would get by just thinking about each one of the parts in isolation and then adding them up.

  A kind of addition approach to value of wholes may not always be correct.

• Does the fact that death follows life, does that produce any interaction effects between the two, which need to be added into our formula as well?

  • Positive interaction effect

    the fact the life is precious, that it won’t endure could actually increase its value for us.

  • Negative interaction effect

    • “A Taste is Just a Tease” 玩笑体验

      This is one of the negative things about the human condition that we get a taste of life before it’s snatched away.

    • “How the Noble Have Fallen” 贵族落寞

      People are amazing. And we end up rotting. We end up corpses.

Other badness of death

depriving isn’t the only badness of death

• Inevitability 必然性

  • Individual question
    • Negative view: Powerless in the face of death. This sheer powerlessness about this central fact about the nature of my existence is an extra insult added to the injury.
    • Positive view: If we see that our death is inevitable and we really internalize that fact, perhaps that would reduce the badness of it.
    • It doesn’t help to say that it’s inevitable.
  • Universal question
    • Negative view: Everybody die make it worse
    • Positive view: “Misery loves company”

• Variability 差异性

  • Variability about how much live we get.

  • A further fact about human psychology that we care more about being short changed than we do about being overcompensated.

    People who have less than the average of something it hurts them more than it benefits the people who have more than the average of something.

    —— the extra bad of the fact that there’s variability and so some people get less than average that extra bad outweigh the extra benefit of some people having more than average.

• Unpredictability 不可预见性

  • You don’t know how much more time you’ve got.

  • Because of unpredictability, you can’t really know, it’s difficult to make the right kinds of plans and in particular it’s hard to know how to pace yourself.

  • The narrative arc of your life Matters. 生命叙事线

    In thinking about these points, in effect we’re suggesting that the overall shape of your life matters. We care about the overall shape and trajectory of our life.

    • Because of he unpredictability of death that our lives may not have the ideal shape.

  • Whether it would really, all things considered, be better to know how much time you had?

    Would knowing how much time you have be something that would allow you to actually embrace those choices, or would it instead just be a burden?

• Ubiquitous 普遍性

  • The possibility of death is ubiquitous. It’s pervasive.
  • What sorts of activities would you engage in if you knew that those activities carried with them the risk of dying?

Nature of death

Disregard the death

• What is it about the facts about life and death that seem to make it misguided to think we should just put them aside and pay no attention to them?

  Presumably because we’re led to the thought that nature of death should have an impact on how we live. The appropriate way to live gets shaped at least in past by the fact that we’re going to die. It seems as though there’d be something irrational and inappropriate about simply disregarding those facts.

• Two way in which facts could influence our behavior

  1. It could be that certain facts would cause you to behavior differently without actually giving you any reason to behave differently.
  2. The facts change your behavior by giving you a reason to behave differently. The facts would give you some good reason to change.

  The mere fact that they would change your behavior doesn’t yet tell you they’re reason-generating facts.

  If they’re mere causes and not reasons, then maybe it’s perfectly okay to disregard them.

  But what if someone said that we should always be thinking about the facts about death?

• There are times and places for thinking about the fact of death.

  What is the appropriate response to to the facts about life and death?

Response to death

• Is fear of death a rationally appropriate response?

  • What are the appropriateness conditions for fear?
    1. To be afraid of something it’s got to be bad.
    2. There’s got to be non-negligible change of the bad state of affairs happening.
    3. We need to have a certain amount of uncertainty in order to have fear be appropriate.
  • it doesn’t make fear appropriate if it’s obsessive fear, horrendous fear, tremendous fear.
    • Maybe some mild concern is all that’s appropriate if the chance are small.
    • The amount of fear needs to be proportioned to the size of the bad.

• What are we supposedly being afraid of when we are afraid of that? Perhaps two or three things need to be distinguished.

  1. Process of dying

     Some people find that the actual process at the end of their life is a painful and unpleasant one.

     The probability of death is low

  2. Being dead

     They are afraid of death itself, afraid of being dead.

     Is being dead intrinsically a bad thing? Being dead per se is not the sort of thing it makes sense to be afraid of, once you’ve concluded that death is the end.

  3. Unpredictability of death

     We are afraid of when we are going to die.

     It’s the unpredictability that leaves you in a position of not knowing whether death will come soon.or death will come late.

  • How much fear is appropriate?

    How great is the change that you’ll die too soon? Your fear needs to be proportioned to the likelihood.

• Most part fear of death does not make sense

• What about some of other possible emotions? What negative emotion does it make sense to feel about death itself, the fact that you’re going to die?

  Since we’ve argued that immortality would be bad, the fact that you will die is not actually bad. Because it saves you from the unpleasant aspect of the eternal, dreary, dreadful immortal existence. But we still said most of us die too soon.

  • Anger

    Anger itself has appropriateness conditions.

    1. It got to be directed at a person, an agent. It got to be directed at some thing that had some choice over what was doing to you.

       You get angry to some thing because you personified it. It doesn’t make sense.

    2. Anger makes sense only when the agent has wronged you, has treated you in a way that it was morally inappropriate for them to treat you.

    Does it make sense then to be angry at the fact we are going to die?

    • Who or what is it that you think is the cause of your morality?
      • God has condemned us to death.
      • Universe theory

    It doesn’t make sense either.

  • Sorrow

    The world is a wonderful place. It would be better to have more of it. I’m sad that I don’t get more.

    Although it’s pity I don’t get more, I’m extremely lucky to have gotten as much as I get.

• The right emotional response isn’t fear, anger, it’s gratitude that we’re able to be alive at all.

How should we live

How should we live in light of the fact we’re going to die?

• That fact that we’re mortal requires us to fact the fact that intuitively we can blow it.

  But it can’t be mortality, per se, that has this implication.

  Even if we live forever, we can still do it wrong.

• Two kinds of care that we have to take (we have a limited amount of time to do it over.)

  • We have to be careful in our aims
  • We have to be careful in out execution of our aims.

• It’s the fact that we have a relatively short span of life relative to how much there is worth aiming for, and how complicated and difficult it can be to get those things and get them right.

• What death forces us to do is be more careful.

• What kinds of contents should we try to fill our lives with?

  We haven’t got much time. Pack as much as you can into life. There two basic strategies about put that idea into practice.

  1. You should settle for the kinds of goals that you’re virtually guaranteed that you’ll accomplish.

  2. Some of more valuable things in life are things that don’t come to ready don’t come with guarantees of achieving them. These things are the most valuable things in our life.

     The life aiming for greater accomplishments, is also a life with a greater chance of failure.

  3. Mixture above two. So, what is the right mixture?

• Life quality can trump quantity

  Is quality only important insofar as it get folded into producing greater quantity? Or does quality matter in its own right as something that’s worth going for, even when it means a smaller quantity?

• Maybe a kind of immortality is worth going after

  Previously we’ve argued that genuine immortality unending life, would not be a good thing. But many of us aspire to this kind of semi-immortality.

  1. You take comfort in the thought that literally there are a parts of you will continue.

     This strikes me as a kind of desperate striving.

  2. Your accomplishments will continue to last after you.

     There are something worth doing about producing something that continues for a while. Even if my life here on earth is s short one, if something that I’ve accomplished continues, my life is the better for it.

• Common underlying belief:

  The way to deal with the fact that we live and then we’re dead is to try to make the life that you’ve got as good as possible as valuable as possible to pack as much into it as you can.

• Different approach

  It’s only horrible insofar as you think of life as something that it’s bad to lose. Buddhism.

Suicide

Question of rationality

• Could it ever be true that you’d be better off dead?

  If the existence they got is worse than not existing at all?

• Two-state Requirement 双态要求

  I kill myself, I don’t exist. There is no second state to compare. It’s got a logical mistake built right into it.

  You can’t even say you are better off staying alive. This is very hard to believe.

  Example like ‘Thank you for saving my life’ shows that two-state requirement isn’t a genuine requirement on the sort of evaluations.

• Whether or not there could be such lives depends on your view about what’s the correct account of well-being.

  There are philosophical differences of opinion with regard to whether or not a life could be so bad that it would be better for it to come to an end.

  According to the theory of the good, do all objective goods outweigh the bad? If the bad outweigh the good your life is not worth living.

• Namely, is life itself worth having? — valuable container theory

  • Suicide can never be rational because it’s never true that you’re better off dead. — Fantastic valuable container theory

  • Life has some finite intrinsic value, and in principle, even that could be outweigh if the contents get bad enough — Modest valuable container theory

    It vary from person to person.

• When would suicide make scene?

  It’s straight forward to say if your life is going to become worse than nothing and you have complete control over when you kill yourself, the precise moment at which suicide would become rational would be exactly that moment at which your life became not worth having.

  If only the person could recognize the facts and know for certainty that’s what their line was going to look like, suicide would at certain points be rational.

BUT

• Could it be rational for you to judge that your situation is one in which the line’s going to go below long enough so that on balance you’d be better off dead?

• Assume for the moment that you can think clearly about your situation.

  If you kill yourself, you’ve thrown any chance of recovery. — It doesn’t make sceneView above must be mistaken. In deciding whether to kill yourself what you doing is playing the odds, you’re gambling. But gambling is something we do all the time and indeed, there is no getting away from the fact.

  It’s just one of the facts of life about how we have to decide. We have to make your decisions under uncertainty.

• What about this point about thinking clearly?

  Anybody for whom it would be true would be have to be so emotionally distressed that they’re not able to think clearly, so they can’t have a judgment that’s trustworthy, so you should not trust it, so suicide could never turn out to be a rational opinion after all.

  Can’t there be cases where despite the fact that your thinking is clouded, it still reasonable to trust the decisions that you make within your clouded thinking?

  It can’t be a good argument. — Surgery case

  What does seem right is precisely because you’re working and deciding under the cloud of emotional stress and pain, that you should tink twice and third time, you should not make this decision in haste.

Conclude

• As long as we’re focused on the question of the rationality of suicide, ethics aside, the rationality of suicide under certain circumstances, suicide could be rationally justified.

Question of morality

• Some quick and dirty arguments

  1. Suicide is illegitimate because it’s thwarting God’s will.

     In this view, saving somebody is also thwarting God’s will? The God’s will argument cuts both ways which is to say it doesn’t give us any guidance.

  2. We’ve been given life and life pretty amazing so we have an obligation, a debt of gratitude to keep the gift.

     Pay attention to what exactly obligation of gratitude require us to do. In particular, it’s important to bear in mind that you owe the person who gives you a gift something only when what he’s giving you is a gift.

What is it that makes an action morally acceptable or morally forbidden?

1. The consequences of your action matter.（结果原则）

   • It affects themselves, family and loved ones

   • Utilitarianism（功利主义）

     Consequences matter and they are all that matters.

     It‘s the moral doctrine that says right and wrong is a matter of producing as much happiness for everybody as possible.

     It would be a moderate conclusion, in certain circumstances suicide will be morally justified.

2. the branch of moral theory as deontology （义务论）

   The factor of not just what was the upshot of your action , but how you produced that upshot. Not just what the results were, but what was your means of getting those result.

   And more particularly still, did you have to harm anybody to produce the results?（禁止伤害原则）

   • If we accept deontology

     Suicide is immoral because I kill myself, an innocent person. Killing an innocent person is morally wrong.

     The right to life outweighs the appeal to consequences.

   • Response

     Morality is only about how I treat others. It’s not about how I treat myself.

     The right to life only cover how I treat others. It doesn’t have any implications for how I treat myself.

   • It seems to me more plausible to say morality includes not only governing how I treat others but also how I treat myself.

   • There is a deontological prohibition against harming innocent people but what it’s really a prohibition against, is leaving them worse off overall.

3. I’ve obviously got my own agreement when I suicide. I have my own consent to what I’m doing.（同意原则）

   We should have some relevant conditions to put into a proper version of the consent principle.

   Suppose we’ve got some kind of modified consent principle, what should we say about suicide then?

   Where somebody rationally assesses their situation, see that they’re better off dead, think the case through, doesn’t rush into it, make an informed and voluntary decision with good reason behind it in a situation like that it seems to me the consent principle might well come into play.

• So suicide will again be acceptable in some cases, though not in all.