What Makes You You
3. The Argument from Hedonism
With HD* in hand, we can now run an argument for FD2 of the Against Fearing Death argument.
The Argument from Hedonism
(AH1) If you cease to be conscious when you die, then being dead doesn’t result in more pain than you would otherwise have had
(AH2) Something is bad for you if and only if it results in more pain than you would otherwise have had (FD2) So, if you cease to be conscious when you die, then
being dead isn’t bad for you
Premise AH1 is trivial. Pain is a conscious state, so if you aren’t conscious while you’re dead, then you don’t have any pain while you’re dead. And the second premise is just our modified hedonist principle, HD*. Accordingly, one might try to resist the argument by attacking HD*. I’ll consider three sorts of attacks.
First, one might point to people who suffer from congenital analgesia, a rare condition which involves an inability to experience pain. While this may at first seem like a good thing, it’s easy to see on reflection why this is actually very bad for those who have it. They might, for instance, inadvertently place their hand in a fire and not realize it before their hand is irreparably damaged. But (the idea goes) HD* seems to entail that this condition can’t be bad for those who have it, nor for that matter can anything bad ever befall them, since nothing can be painful for them.
In response, I deny that HD* entails any such thing.
Remember that ‘pain’ isn’t restricted to unpleasant physical sensations. It also includes the sort of emotional distress that one would have from irreparably damaging one’s hand, and those suffering from this condition are entirely capable of experiencing these sorts of psychological pains.
Second, one might object to HD* on the grounds that something can be entirely pleasurable and yet still be a bad thing to do. Consider the following case:
STOLEN CRUISE
Brendan is about to go on a week-long cruise. His girlfriend, Pieper, serves him undercooked chicken, in hopes that he’ll get food poisoning and will let her go in his place. Pieper’s plan succeeds, and she has a great time on the cruise. She comes back refreshed, relaxed, and feeling no remorse whatsoever.
What Pieper did is bad, and yet it didn’t lead to her having any unpleasant sensations.
Is that a problem for HD*? No. One must be careful to distinguish between something being bad for you and something being bad to do. HD* is only about the former and has nothing to say about the latter. If giving Brendan food poisoning doesn’t end
up being unpleasant for Pieper, then it isn’t bad for Pieper that Brendan got food poisoning. But that’s not at all to deny that deliberately giving him food poisoning was a bad thing to do (which of course it was).
Now for the third objection to HD*. Here the idea is to grant that hedonism is basically right, but to insist upon further changes to its formulation. Specifically, one might suggest that something can be bad for you not just by giving you painful sensations but also by depriving you of pleasant sensations:
(HD**) Something is bad for you if and only if it results in more pain or less pleasure than you would otherwise have had
In short, the idea is that what’s bad for you is what—in one way or another—makes you worse off in terms of pleasure and pain.
If HD** is right, then we won’t be able to get the Argument from Hedonism off the ground. After all, it’s true (for most people) that they would have had more pleasure had they not died when they did, in which case HD** entails that being dead is bad for them.
The problem with HD** is that it is open to counterexamples like the following:
UNREAD MAIL
Carly meets Evan, and they immediately fall in love. Because things are going so well with Evan, Carly stops checking her online dating app. They have a long and entirely happy life together. It so happens that Jami had sent Carly a message shortly after Carly met Evan. If she hadn’t met Evan, she would have seen Jami’s message, fallen in love with her, and she and Jami would have had a long and happy life together.
As a matter of fact, she would have been a little tiny bit happier with Jami than with Evan.
Carly would have been a tiny bit better off if she hadn’t met Evan.
Does that mean that it was bad for her that she met Evan? Of course not. Yet HD** wrongly implies that it is bad for her that she met Evan. After all, she would have had more pleasure in her life had she not met him.
This gives us a compelling argument against HD**:
The Unread Mail Argument
(UM1) Carly would have had more pleasure had she not met Evan
(UM2) If Carly would have had more pleasure had she not met Evan, then: if HD** is true, then meeting Evan was bad for her
(UM3) Meeting Evan was not bad for her (UM4) So, HD** is false
Thus, one shouldn’t prefer HD** to my formulation of the principle of hedonism, HD*, and we have not found any good reason to reject HD*, the second premise of the Argument from Hedonism.