Death In Thomas Nagel: The End Of Death

When Thomas Nagel introduces how he understands death to be bad, he first makes a definition of what ‘death’ is assumed to be. He makes it clear that after death we are not to accept, for the purpose of the argument, that we, or our consciousness is to exist in an immortal form. We must accept death to be the end of ourselves and our conscious survival, a permanent death. Thus the question, if death is the permanent end of our existence, is it a bad thing? Before we look at an answer we must clarify one more thing, Nagel does not take into consideration the impact of death has on others, as it does not benefit the argument, Nagel wants to know why death is bad for the individual alone. In Nagel’s paper, he goes through eliminating reasons why death may be considered bad, in order to get to the

I will now look at Nagel’s two possible positions on the matter, and attempt to answer the question. In regards to (1), we can consider death as bad because even life has value when separated from the good or bad experiences within it. The bare experience of life is valuable in itself, and death is the end of it. Moreover, the value of life is not attached to just organic survival, surviving in a coma does not appeal to us. Nagel explains that the good of life can be multiplied by time, the more the better. Regarding (2), the state of being ‘dead’ or non-existent, is in itself evil and therefore cannot be what makes death bad. As death is not an evil that accumulates more evil the longer one is dead and we would not regard a temporary suspension of life a great misfortune, nor would we the long period of time before we were born be considered this way. If it is true that death is an evil because it stops the continuation of life, then we must understand that this is not an intrinsic feature of death, but a relational one. This is Nagel’s deprivation view of death, that death is relationally bad, as in relation to the continuation of life, death is