4th Global Conference
Wednesday 12th July - Friday 14th July 2006
Mansfield College, Oxford
Session 6B: Moral and Philosophical Insights
Chair: Asa Kasher
Don't Fear the Reaper: An Epicurean Answer To Puzzles about Death
and Injustice
Simon
Cushing
Department of Philosophy,
University of Michigan-Flint,
Flint, MI, USA
The Epicurean position on death (that it cannot be bad
for the one who dies because she no longer exists) has struck many people
as specious, for two main reasons: that it is a commonly-held intuition
that death is the worst thing that can happen to one, and that the Epicurean
position appears to negate the wrong of killing. However, rejecting
the Epicurean position requires meeting a tripartite challenge: specifying who is
wronged by death (surely not the dead person), what is the harm
(surely not suffering of any kind), and when does the harm take
place (surely not before death, because you’re not dead yet, and
surely not after death, because you’re not around any more).
In
section one of my paper, I sketch two main alternatives to the Epicurean
position, and show how they attempt to answer the three questions. The
first, defended by Bernard Williams, is the frustration account:
the view that death is bad for the one who dies because it frustrates
certain desires of central importance to her personhood. The second,
variants of which have been rigorously defended by Thomas Nagel, Jeff
McMahan and Fred Feldman, is the deprivation account. On
this view, one who dies is harmed to the extend that the death has deprived
them of goods they would otherwise have had.
In section two I argue that
these views have implications that are less intuitive that the intuitions
that motivated the rejection of the Epicurean view. In particular,
the frustration account limits the harm of death to those who have the
right kind of desires, the deprivation account requires that we be forever
harmed by being deprived things we do not currently know we want.
In
section three, I outline a neo-Epicurean position that explains the wrong
of death in terms other than the harm to the victim (you can be wronged
without being harmed in this case) and show how it is possible to defend
intuitions about injustice that depend on counterfactual reasoning that
appears similar to the kind I reject in rejecting the deprivation account.
Death as a Language-Game: A Metaphorical
Method of Insight
Warren
Shibles
Department of
Philosophy,
University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, USA
The
analysis given here presupposes the view that language has epistemological
primacy, much as does Wittgenstein's Philosophical
Investigations. We are in a linguo-centric epistemological predicament
in regard to our understanding of death. This means that we can play
language-games with death, but that error arises when we unwittingly
mix them up, use words in the wrong language-games, or imagine that we
can go outside the language—into an extra-linguistic, realistic
world or mentalistic world of "thinking" in "concepts" to
render death. Death is not there, but within the language. Critical "thinking" is
critical speaking. On this view, we cannot go beyond or get outside of
our language. Rather, we may say that whatever is known is said about "death." As
there are as many meanings of "death" as there are language-games,
it is easy to equivocate. We speak of "death" as if it were
merely the living pain of dying. We fear death as we fear things in life,
think death is darkness because we fear darkness. Our fears of death
are in this way ordinary fears of life experiences, rather than fear
of something beyond. Wittgenstein said that death is not an event in
life. However, when he adds, "We do not live to experience death," his
statement itself becomes a contextually living statement.
Misuse of language creates faulty views about
dying. Most of what we "know" about death may be false. There are
no ultimate explanations although we may play a language-game of explaining,
describing, of questioning, etc. It is only to play one language-game or another.
The question of death raises the question of the limits of knowledge—i.e.,
of language. What I call the "Metaphorical Method" (the rhetoric
of death) we may explore these language-games: juxtapose, reduce to absurdity,
create new insight, create analogies and reversals, etc., and in these ways
expand the possibilities of language to its limits. For the average person
there is nothing extraordinary about death. The Metaphorical Method helps us
to make death extraordinary.
Our Obligations to Past People
Liz
McKinnell
Department of Philosophy, University of Durham, United Kingdom
Much has usefully been written about our moral obligations to future people, those who do not yet exist (e.g. Parfit 1984, Golding 1972). In this piece I look at the separate but related area of our obligations to past people (those who have died). Past people have some potentially morally relevant similarities to future people. Neither group of people exists at the present time. There are also some interesting differences: We can do things that affect the identities of future people, but this is not so with dead people; and we can do things which affect the conscious experiences of future people (even if our lives do not overlap with theirs) but again this is not the case with the dead. I address the question of whether there can be a wrong done against someone when we cannot affect his conscious experiences. I conclude that this does not present us with a major obstacle to having obligations to the dead, and identify the biggest problem as lying in the fact (if it is a fact) that the dead do not presently exist, and therefore do not meet the ‘existence condition‘ for harm (Feldman 1991). After exploring a number of responses to this problem, I conclude that we can wrong the dead, but by a process of ‘backward signification’ (distinct from backward causation) we wrong them while they are still alive.
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