Jeff Mcmahan The Ethics Of Killing Summary

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The purpose of this essay is to critically evaluate Jeff McMahan’s methods of analyzing death. In his book, ‘The Ethics of Killing,’ McMahan formulates a method for determining the ‘badness’ of a death, something our society lacks. We have an intuitive way of considering different deaths; we consider a child dying by accident worse than a criminal being executed, for example. But there are more complicated cases, and we cannot always rely on our intuition. We must have a method for determining the badness of different deaths, and McMahan gives us an option. In the essay I will be explaining his method, and then pointing out a flaw, finally suggesting a compromise between the two.
McMahan’s analysis of death begins with an analysis of what makes a death bad in the first place. To begin we must first assume that here is no afterlife, because if there is an afterlife, it would be “to imply that no one really dies” (McMahan 98). McMahan essentially states that if there were an afterlife, we would not die, but simply change form. Additionally, since death has no intrinsic properties it is “bad by comparison with what it excludes” (McMahan 98). Non-existence has no characteristics, so death, by itself, cannot be good bad. The alternative to death is not immortality, but continued life. So we know that death is …show more content…

In cases of murder, abortion, end of life care, or euthanasia (among others), we need to know just how bad death is before deciding to act. We have our intuition, but that’s only a rough guide, and can be confused by complicated cases. McMahan recognizes our inability to objectively measure badness, but his response to that problem is slightly lacking. What McMahan offers us is a method of objectively measuring the badness of death, but his method is slightly flawed because it is based on conjecture, that is, what we assume will happen in the

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