A Defense of Epicurius

You did What? To Whom? When? A defense of Epicurius.

There have been many attempts at formulating a theory that accounts for our intuitions regarding the harm of death. Most theories attempt to account for this intuition by attributing the harm of death to a deprivation of some sort. That is a person is harmed when she dies because she is deprived of some good thing. This paper is a defense of Epicurius's argument regarding death as a response to deprivation theories.

Before I enter into the argument proper, two statements should be made. First, I do not intend to defend hedonism in this paper. Although, I am uncomfortable defending any particular thing as having intrinsic value, I am inclined to say there must be some things other than pleasure that have intrinsic value (and the converse). However, this rejection of hedonism is in no way relevant to my defense of this argument, because the loss of goods has no bearing on death, regardless of what exactly the goods are. Second, I will define death as follows: the permanent end to existence. Since existence is a binary property (either there exists something that corresponds to x or there does not), this means that death must be instantaneous. For at any given moment one could ask, "Does Kai exist?" and receive an answer, we can narrow the time of death to an instant. Thus, death mimics a function of the form: f(x) = 1 if x < 1; f(x) = 0 if x > 1. The idea is that at every point after 1 you are dead, but at every point up to and including 1 you are alive. In other words, there is no point at which you are not either alive or dead and no point at which you are both.

Now that's done. Epicurius's argument is essentially that there is no point at which we are harmed by death, and therefore death is not bad. Specifically, he formulates his argument in the following way:

1. Death is not bad for the victim before death.

2. Death is not bad for the victim after death.

3. Thus, there is no time at which death is bad for the victim.

4. Thus, death cannot be bad for the victim.

A defense of Premise (1) is not hard. Since my death has not yet occurred it is impossible for it to act as a cause of anything that is occurring now.