The Negative Aspects Of Death

Death Death is believed to be the end of all and the great equalizer. People accept and reject death for different reasons. “There is conspicuous disagreement about the matter: some people think death is dreadful; other have no objection to death per se, though they may hope their own will be neither premature nor painful.” (Nagel). Which then a question need to be asked is “Is death bad for the one that is in the state of being dead”? Nagel believes that death can be bad for the dead on the assumption that there is no afterlife, death is permanent and you will no longer exist after death. “So death, the most frightening of bad things, is nothing to us; since when we exist, death is not yet present, and when death is present, then we do not

If you’re dead there is nothing bad that can be targeted at something that no longer exist and experience. Therefore Epicurus thinks death is neither good nor bad. Nagel want to prove that death could be bad (do not have to be). Nagel thinks that life is good because of its positive feature and death is bad because it ends all the positive feature of life. And if death is bad it is not because of its positive feature but rather its negative feature. It is not death itself is bad, but rather the deprivation of life. There is some problem that Nagel have to address to support his thesis, first problem is that can something be bad without the person experience it? For example if someone spread rumor about you, and no one believes it and you are not affected by it, is it still bad? Second problem is that you need an object to be assign misfortune to, and if the person is no longer around how can you assign misfortune to somethings that does not exist? The last problem is a continuation of the previous problems. “…difficulty concerns the asymmetry, mentioned above, between our attitudes to posthumous and prenatal nonexistence. How can the former be bad if the latter is not?”