Ethics is fundamentally concerned with the movement between different experiences. Now in this topic we must talk about death, so that word loses so meaning. Therefore I'll simply refer to different consequences, results, the world as the way it is, etc. as differing "states".

There is no rational foundation for evaluating states independently of other states, which means giving states moral value within themselves. We can easily construct an infinite number of hypothetical states we could be in, and have a spectrum of preference between them. Since there is no border to such a spectrum we can infinitely improve or degrade a state, and so there is no state to designate as a center for good or bad. Hence, we can only provide the basis of value for a state when it's in relation to another.

This means the initial question is in need of being specified since death cannot be bad independently. So the question should transform to "Is the transition from life to death, negative?". If you didnt mean this then please feel free to correct me.

The reason I specify this is to compare it to a similar but completely seperate question.

"Is the state of existence preferable to someone who does not exist?"

The answer here is clearly no, at least if you believe in subjective values. There is no being and so there are no values to judge whether existence would be preferable. This answer is preferable towards anti-natalists, as there is no moral reason to bring a being into existence, for the sake of that being. (This doesnt mean theres no moral reason at all though, and I myself am not an anti-natalist).

However, a person who is currently alive has a set of values, and so when they die, while they no longer exist, we can use those values to suggest that the action that lead to their death was bad.

If someone wishes to continue existing, and yet dies, it means the state has transitioned to one less preferable. Hence, according to that persons values, it is bad.

However, if someone wishes to stop existing, and dies, it means the state has transistioned to one more preferable. Hence, according to that persons values, it is good.

You cannot judge the concept of death within itself as bad if value is subjective. If you believe value to be objective then you must create an argument to prove that. However, what is clearly true is that death means no improvement of state, eternally. Suffering is not an argument for death because it can be outweighed with a potential gain in wellbeing, a point anti-natalists seem to not find any value in.

Death is not bad, it’s neutral. What would be bad is either someone dying that has a bad effect on the living, or the way the dead person having experienced some other thing along with dying (pain, regret etc.)

Interestingly enough, one definition of death is "to exist cease living (in a meaningful way to the majority)" and as such, is the only way many can find life or escape the constrictive confines of those who "lived" to dictate the meaning of what "life" is, a meaning birthed solely in valuation of devaluation of life itself. So, it's a conundrum at the end of the day, to say the least.

Edit: "to cease 'living' ", where 'living' is defined not strictly by a biological state but rather a societal expectation. Not sure why that didn't come out as coherently as it did in my own thoughtsphere at the time. :confused:

I don’t think the badness of something is necessarily dependent on a conscious mind being aware of it or experiencing it in some way. — Captain Homicide

I agree, but some animals such as the octopus die soon after it has become a parent so that its offspring can eat the remains of its body and thus increase their chance of survival. Seems like death is good in some situations.

Contrast death with life which can not end--living forever--in this world, not in some afterlife.

I view death as either unfortunate (if it happens too soon and is brought about by accident) or a release (if it happens to old people who are ready to die).

I'm 77; I'm not quite ready to die yet, but my brother (83) is in hospice and will be released from multiple sufferings. I expect that in due time I will be in the same boat. If I should die suddenly (heart attack, stroke, run over by truck, etc.) I do not view the prospect as regrettable -- I've lived a reasonably long, reasonably good life.

All life ceasing to exist is a matter of vastly greater weight than our individual death. I'm in favor of life. The anti-natalists are welcome to not reproduce if that's what makes them happy.

Of course one consideration is the quality of the life one misses in being dead. Hence euthanasia. Death is not always undesirable.

Death, to a human, is nonexistance. Nonexistance for a human is normal. You were nonexistent for 13.7 billion years, you existed for less than one hundred years, then you'll be nonexistent until the end of time. Why sweat the details about an infinitesimally small fraction of your total time?

Is the end of life, or the beginning of life for that matter, not a necessary part of life? In that case, the end of life cannot have a different value to to life itself. We who live, can celebrate the end of a life as we can celebrate the beginning. One can yearn for a child that does not yet exist, and one can mourn a child that has died.

But when philosophers ask the wrong question, they get into a muddle, and opposing life and death as though they are separable is the beginning such a muddle.

For a person to die is to cease being a person for whom anything could possibly be "bad". 'Your death' irreversibly decomposes you for you. I think death is the ineluctable, or ultimate, gift that liberates each one of us finally from suffering.

:death: :flower:

I agree with you on the fact that death can be harmful to us without our direct experience of it. Something can still be harmful to us despite our lack of knowledge of it, like a cancer that hasn't been spotted yet. This also opens up the possibility of us being harmed after our death. The various projects we have in our lives can be transcendental. If the well-being of my son is something that's important to me, wouldn't any harm coming to him be harmful to me in a way? Death would also get in the way of us completing our projects, which is why a life cut short is seen as bad.

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anasthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house. — Philip Larkin

I agree that death is a tragedy for many. You spend an entire life improving yourself. Gaining wisdom. Learning how things work. And you can only pass on a portion of it. Realistically though, we are too successful as a species and reproduce too much for the planet to sustain lives that would exist much longer. Also, some people shouldn't live forever. Pain, tragedy, mental imbalances, and just plain evil people would not benefit from living longer than they do.

Would I choose to live forever? Yes. I say this because I have the right make up for it. I do not get bored. I do not seek to cause strife or excess resource drain in life. I constantly seek to improve as a person. I mention this because I have another deeper question for you. What type of person do you think should live forever, and which type of person should not?

I got into a debate with someone elsewhere about Antinatalism and the badness/evil of all life in the universe ceasing to exist. I think it would be obviously bad because I think sentient life is objectively intrinsically valuable and death is bad for the being that dies even if they’re not technically around to experience it. As explained in detail in the thread linked at the bottom death is bad because of the deprivation and opportunity cost. To me saying “But a dead person can’t experience or want anything” is just restating what makes it so bad to begin with. I don’t think the badness of something is necessarily dependent on a conscious mind being aware of it or experiencing it in some way. — Captain Homicide

So this is going to be a round about way of answering contra your view on death using antinatalism as a counterpoint...

Antinatalism is a decision that can only be made from the parents' perspective. Though it is considering a person who potentially could exist in X future time (that is only contingent on X circumstances that lead up to the event of X future time, including the decision to procreate), it can never be from the perspective of a non-existent person. This key point is why the Benatar asymmetry works so well. That is to say, non-existent people can never experience good, and that is neither good nor bad because there is no "one" there to even be deprived. Happiness is not obligatory, whereas preventing suffering is. Because the same thing applies you might say, "no one" is around to experience the benefit of "non-harm". True, but from the parents' perspective, all that matters is the obligatory stance of non-harm took place rather than the non-obligatory "happiness promotion".

So all this is just a prelude to illustrate that indeed, only from the perspective of the people who already/still exist would it matter about X's death being "bad". However, the death itself was neither "good nor bad" from the perspective of the person dead. So if we are to look at death as an impending moment that ends all one's positive projects, death can be considered bad. From the perspective of the already dead person, it is neither good nor bad, because they are not deprived of anything. Only whilst alive, is death (and then only as a concept of end to benefits) a bad. Once dead, death is neutral. It turns from a bad (for the amount of time alive) to a neutral (once dead), from the perspective of the person who died. It may be perceived as a bad from the people already alive, but being that this is only a concept in the minds of others and not affecting the person in question who is already dead, it is irrelevant except as a talking point about the X person dead. The actual harm is the person in question, not the people who feel X, Y, Z on behalf of that person.

Unlike the procreation scenario, where another person DOES count in one's perspective, because it would be something that affects (very profoundly) another person, the death scenario of people left to regret someone's death is irrelevant, as it does not affect the person who died. They are already dead.

Would I choose to live forever? Yes. I say this because I have the right make up for it. I do not get bored. I do not seek to cause strife or excess resource drain in life. I constantly seek to improve as a person. I mention this because I have another deeper question

Really? Have you seen how infirm a 100 year old person is? I can barely imagine how incredibly decrepit a 200 year old you would be, let alone 300. And you have to exist at that level (and worse), for eternity? Just shoot me in the head.

Let alone, trying to make your retirement savings last for eternity. So you'd end up the most feeble person you've ever seen, living by the side of the road. Not for me.

Really? Have you seen how infirm a 100 year old person is? — LuckyR

Age is degradation, or the slow march towards death. If you didn't die, you wouldn't degrade.

Age is degradation, or the slow march towards death. If you didn't die, you wouldn't degrade.

Well, since immortality is a fictional fantasy, it can actually be anything one can imagine. Most simplistically (over simplistically, IMO), presume they'd be in perfect health and ignore completely how they'd finance living forever, which essentially rules out retirement, ie working at your (potentially deadend) job forever.

What age makes the break off point by which we can say: "I've lived 62 years - that's more than most intelligent creatures will ever get." Or "I'm 62, I've still got plenty to look forward to."?

What accounts for those cases in which a young person commits suicide or an old person is more energetic and excited for future prospects? These are all questions that can be discussed for a very long time, and answers will vary depending on personalities, viewpoints, etc.

As for the issue at hand, as I understand the issue, once the person is dead it is no harm or evil on said person. This is quite irrespective of how much they could have lived regardless of accident or an unfortunate situation.

The issue then is how those who are still around feel about him/her. I don't see how we can imbue anything "after the moment of death" with anything like feeling bad for this person. It's a problem for us.

But you could insert an exotic religious belief that complicates the matter.

I like Unamuno for insisting upon the difference between continuing to live versus a nice severance deal when it stops.

I don't want to die today or any day soon. But if it happens, I am ready. My affairs are in order. My death won't matter in the wider context of life on Earth. But I don't want to die and so if I did, my death would go against my plans and hopes. This would be bad. But I would be oblivious once dead, so there's that. It's a minor paradox.

I don’t think the badness of something is necessarily dependent on a conscious mind being aware of it or — Captain Homicide

I agree.

And yet, I also think the "badness" of something is necessarily dependent on a conscious mind, to begin with. That is, though we might argue differently, it seems to already be "the experience" of conscious minds (collectively) that death is bad. So, is it only bad for conscious minds? And if so, once dead, does it cease to be bad for the deceased?

I'll admit, I may not have framed it well. Hopefully you can still find my point. Is being alive a necessary condition of death being bad?

I found that reply absolutely beautiful.
Succinctly jumping straight into a clear problem definition, let's put these value judgements over there for now, here's a framework that fits the problem with sufficient rigour, and bam, here are the possible answers depending only on the lens you choose. It's pleasing to read a rigorous argument written so efficiently.

I also want to echo the statement that nothing can ever be objectively "bad" - it's an intrinsically relative concept. Things can only be bad for someone/something, or more specifically (especially here) bad for some goal. You can't answer a question about whether something is "bad" without establishing the implied goal that it is bad (or good) for.

I know it might not be popular to reduce a philosophical question to a biological one, but I think this actually is a biological question at its heart. Death has no meaningful definition outside of its definition as a biological process. Death is "bad" because we generally don't want that process to happen to us. All life has evolved to seek continued existence because any kind of agent that seeks its own death clearly doesn't have much of a future. Life forms having a preference for life over death is something of a tautology.

Of course, there are plenty of examples of individual life forms that choose to die (including humans), but I think that a close examination of any of those reveals them to be examples of each individual's death being an effective path towards the propagation of their own genetic code (according to the information that is available to them, and input into their evolved programming). The most obvious examples include animals who sacrifice themselves to feed their young, like some spiders and octopodes, or whose bodies naturally don't survive reproduction, like salmon. But even the more borderline examples, like suffering leading to the desire for death, don't need much licence to interpret in the same way. We are communal animals, and have survived near-extinction as a species several times in our history, so it stands to reason that extreme sufferring would be an emotional reaction most closely linked to extreme or prolonged circumstances where we are close to death. Whether this circumstance is shared (like a food shortage affecting everyone), or individual (like an ailment that renders you unable to contribute to your community, but still in need of their help), historically, the survival of our families is often more likely if we die, and allow them to have greater resources to advance their own survival.

I know this last argument is not rock-solid, but I don't want to get bogged down in it - I just mentioned it because I knew it would be the most obvious "but what about this?" that might look like a hole in my overall argument.

Another example of death being a process used in service of life is in how telomeres work. For brevity, I'll skim over the details, but telomeres are the parts of our chromosomes that prevent copying errors whenever we make new cells. They get shorter as we age (or experience extended physiological stress), until they stop protecting us from DNA copy errors. The amount of time this takes is highly variable, but can be approximately labelled "old age". However, at this point, not only do they stop protecting us - when telomeres are very short, they start producing proteins that actively encourage cancer and other cellular disorders! What emphasises that this is not an inescapable problem, but an evolutionarily preferred outcome is the fact that telomeres are very, very easy to regenerate. Our sperm, egg, and platelet cells do it constantly, and most types of cancer cells switch on telomere regeneration as soon as they turn cancerous. Dying from old age is not a bug, but a feature.

Of course, evolution has no intention, but the result of this is that dying from old age is (in humans) most commonly at the point where you have lived long enough for your grandchildren to reproduce. And coincidentally, three generations is about the genetic distance where humans tend to stop seeing each other as family (even if we still see them as part of our community). How much of a difference is there to you between your second cousin and someone in your community that you're not related to? Genetically, there's very little. Of course, this doesn't mean that we want to lose our grandparents or that they want that either. Regardless of our DNA's machinations, we are still programmed to want to live.

And that is the key point (which I really just took the last four paragraphs to try and plug up any ostensible holes in). Death is only "bad" because as individuals, in most circumstances, we're programmed to seek life - to want to live. The death of all life is only "bad" because it's an extension of the preference for life over death.

On a larger scale than the individual, death is a process that is often used in the continuation of life, so even if we do take on board the value judgement that life is inherently good, this still means that death is not inherently bad (so long as it is not the death of literally all life).

But of course, the question here is about the individual and their individual goals. And I think that is another concept that becomes quite ill-defined in this context, and muddies the question. What's "good" for the individual? Following our programmed desire(s) for the proliferation and evolution of our genetic code? Following our conscious goals, whether they be towards life or death? Following some other hypothetical "purpose", in which case life or death are immaterial except for how they affect the achievement of that purpose?

I don't think there's any general case of the question where the answer is that death is necessarily good or bad, and the tendency towards answers that "death is necessarily bad" always seems to come from some smuggled-in assumption that death is bad, based on little more than it being quite common to feel that we would rather not have it happen to us.

Death is an event that can shape the future. the live has more meaning on the future than your death, but nevertheless your impact will echo into the future in some minute form or another.

It is more a question of asking if life has meaning. If you believe you create meaning then you are more than likely stating that life has meaning beyond its cessation.

I also think the "badness" of something is necessarily dependent on a conscious mind, to begin with. That is, though we might argue differently, it seems to already be "the experience" of conscious minds (collectively) that death is bad. So, is it only bad for conscious minds? And if so, once dead, does it cease to be bad for the deceased?

I'll admit, I may not have framed it well. Hopefully you can still find my point. Is being alive a necessary condition of death being bad?

Well, since "bad" is a subjective descriptor, there needs to be an observer to give an entity that label. But the observer need not be the person dying. It is true, though that whatever factor an observer evaluates to bestow the "bad" label, it likely preexisted the observation (and potentially the observer himself) and might postdate him as well (say, after his death).

and might postdate him as well (say, after his death). — LuckyR

But not necessarily "him" in any sense of that word. Right?

Well "dying" =/= death (i.e. being dead), so ...

If you mean: are my comments gender specific? Then, no.

Sorry. No. I mean, the presumably necessary conscious observer need not be the deceased individual whose experience of death we are "assessing". It simply needs to be [a] conscious observer.

You think so? In my mind dying is a process (of becoming dead), death is the last point of the process of dying and dead is one's state of being upon death.

Sorry for misunderstanding. Yes, exactly my point.