One's Own Death: Deprivation and Existential Value

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Since Plato, there has been a debate about the question of whether death is an 'evil' (i.e. has negative value) for the person concerned. According to Epicurus, it is not: since the person concerned no longer exists when death occurs, her death cannot be bad for her. Epicurus bases his argument on the premise that pleasure is the only good and pain the only evil. Proponents of the so-called deprivation account, which comes in various forms, dispute this "hedonistic" theory of value. They claim that death can be an evil for the person concerned by depriving her of goods that she would have had if she had lived longer – even if this deprivation is not accompanied by pain in the person concerned, since she is no longer alive when the deprivation occurs. In the current debate between the representatives of an Epicurean account and a deprivation account of ‘mortal harm’, the former rely on a broadly empiricist theory of value, which links values to actual or possible experience, while the latter reject this theory (with good reason) as too narrow. The overall aim of the project is to explore how much of an Epicurean attitude to death can be defended without presupposing a hedonistic or empiricist theory of value. This overarching goal is divided into two sub-goals, which correspond to two project parts. The first part of the project consists in a comprehensive critical examination of the deprivation account in its various forms. Among other things, it will be asked whether the deprivation caused by the death of a person P, even if it was an evil qua deprivation, can strictly speaking be an evil for P. The second part of the project aims at a partial defence of the Epicurean thesis that death is not an evil for the person concerned. In doing so, the Epicurean thesis is restricted to a certain type of value, which can be called 'existential value'. The central theses of this part of the project are: (1) death is not an existential evil for the person concerned; (2) this is compatible with death being an evil in other respects (e.g. qua deprivation); (3) but it implies that death is a lesser evil for the person concerned than is commonly assumed. Taken together, both parts of the project can thus lead to a far-reaching rehabilitation of the Epicurean position by showing that death itself is not an existential evil for the person concerned, that qua deprivation it is not in the narrow sense an evil for that person, and that one's own death is insofar a lesser evil than most people assume.