Death Is Inevitable

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Death is scary to most people because they fear the uncertainty that comes with it since they know they are going to die but do not know exactly at what point in time. Additionally, it is scary to most people because they are afraid that at the time of their death, they will not have much to show for the life they lived or as if they had not accomplished everything they set out to do. However, this fear should dissolve once a person comes to terms with the fact that death is inevitable, and it seems like there should be no logical reason for them to fear death anymore since it will happen regardless of their own personal feelings towards it. Nevertheless, many people remain fearful of their deaths even if they do not believe in the possibility …show more content…

If a friend of mine was to ask whether her dread at the prospect of her death is rational, even if she did not believe in an afterlife and recognized that death is unavoidable, I would reply that it is rational to fear death in the sense of your death being premature and coming too soon before you can finish all your goals and aspirations, but it is irrational to fear death in and of itself because once you are dead, there is nothing else you can do about being dead.
There are two camps that have debated this issue; those who believe that it is rational to fear death because it takes away future possibilities and projects away from you and those who believe that it is irrational to fear death because at that point there is no “you” left for it to impact. The former point of view is highlighted in the classic article “Death” by Thomas Nagel in which he argues that “death, no matter how inevitable, is an abrupt cancellation of indefinitely extensive possible goods” (Nagel 80). Nagel shares the common view that death deprives us of life and of things we want, thus, making death bad for us. However, he raises …show more content…

In this letter, Epicurus said, “So death, the most terrifying of ills, is nothing to us; but when death comes, then we do not exist. It does not concern either the living or the dead, since the former it is not, and the latter are no more” (Epicurus 1). The epicurean view establishes that death cannot intelligibly be claimed to be an evil for the person who dies and is “nothing to us” because the evil of death lacks a subject. Essentially, Epicurus brings up an important question, how can death be bad if at death you do not exist to be the subject of badness? Although Nagel addressed this concern in his own article, it was not a sufficient enough response to satisfy present-day Epicureans, those who adopted the same views of

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