What Makes You You
6. Irrational Fears
I have thus far argued that being dead is not bad for you. The first premise, FD1, was that you cease to be conscious when you die, and I argued for this premise on the grounds that the human animal that’s where you are ceases to be conscious when you die, which in turn means that you cease to be conscious when you die (since you are that animal). The second premise, FD2, was that death is bad for you only if you continue to be conscious after you die; after all, the only things that are bad for you, ultimately speaking, are pains and things that lead to pain.
But the claim that being dead is not bad for you (FD3) is merely a subconclusion of the argument. The ultimate conclusion (FD5) is that you shouldn’t fear death, and for that we need one more premise.
The final premise of the Against Fearing Death argument, FD4, says that if being dead isn’t bad for you, then you shouldn’t fear death. To see why we should accept that, we need to think more generally about what makes a fear rational or irrational.
Suppose a tarantula crawls onto your hand. Really, it’s not all that dangerous. It’s pretty unlikely to bite you, and even if it did it actually wouldn’t be any more painful or harmful than an ordinary bee sting. But even knowing how harmless they are, you might still be utterly terrified of a tarantula crawling onto you.
And that would be irrational. Why? Because that amount of fear is disproportionate to the likelihood of something bad happening to you and how bad it would be if it did.
Still, it could bite you, so it’s rational to be a little bit afraid of the tarantula, just like it’s rational to be a little bit afraid of honeybees. But there are other things that it is irrational to fear to any degree. Take ablutophobia, the fear of bathing. Ablutophobia is completely irrational because bathing is not bad for you, not even a little bit. Or take lepidopterophobia, the fear of butterflies.
This is irrational too, and it’s irrational because having an encounter with a butterfly is not in any way bad for you. Or take podophobia, the fear of seeing feet (including one’s own). What makes all of these irrational fears so irrational is precisely that the object of the fear isn’t in any way bad for the person who fears it.
You shouldn’t fear things that aren’t bad for you. So, if indeed being dead isn’t bad for you, you shouldn’t fear it at all, just as FD4 says.
One might object that it’s unnatural to fear all these other things, whereas it’s completely natural to fear death. Fair enough.
I’m not denying that fearing death is natural. I’m denying that fearing death is rational. Just because it comes naturally to us to act or react in a certain way, that doesn’t mean it’s rational.
(Google ‘cognitive biases’, and you’ll see what I mean.) And in any case, it just isn’t true that all of those other fears are unnatural.
It’s entirely normal for people to experience excessive fear of spiders and other creepy crawlies. And we can all recognize, on
reflection, that this degree of fear is excessive and irrational, despite being our natural reaction.
Thus, I conclude that death isn’t bad for you and you shouldn’t fear it. This is a surprising result, but not necessarily a bad one. After all, fearfulness is emotionally painful, and if this argument helps you do without that pain, that’s good for you!
Reflection Questions
1. Can you think of any counterexamples to the hedonist principle HD* from section 2? Could such an example give us reason to prefer HD** from section 3?
2. Do the hedonist principles discussed in sections 2 and 3 imply that being born into this world was bad for you? Why or why not? If they do, can they be modified to avoid this implication?
3. Are you convinced by the Against Post-Mortem Consciousness argument in sections 4-5? In particular, are you convinced by the argument that you and Animal are one and the same thing?
4. In the final section, I suggested that it can never be rational to fear something that is not bad for you. Is that true? Can it be rational to fear something because it’s bad for others? Should we fear death because (and only because) of how our deaths will affect other people?
Sources
The argument advanced here originates with the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus, in his “Letter to Menoeceus.” See Fred Feldman’s Confrontations with the Reaper for a more in-depth discussion of philosophical questions about death, and in particular chapter 8 of his book for a defense of the idea that death is bad because it deprives one of good things. The Too Many Thinkers argument in section 5 is drawn from Eric Olson’s “An Argument for Animalism.” Here are some additional resources:
• Jorge Luis Borges: The Immortal
• Ben Bradley: Existential Terror
• Dorothy Grover: Posthumous Harm
• Lori Gruen: Death as a Social Harm
• A.A. Long and D.N. Sedley: The Hellenistic Philosophers vol 1 (sec 24)
• Shelley Kagan: Death (Open Yale courses)
• Thomas Nagel: Death
• Richard Rowland: Hedonism and the Experience Machine
• Lynne Rudder Baker: Death and the Afterlife
• Travis Timmerman: The Symmetry Argument Against the Badness of Death (youtube.com)
C
HAPTER5 No Freedom
Views and arguments advanced in this chapter are not necessarily endorsed by the author of the textbook, nor are they original to the author, nor are they meant to be consistent with arguments advanced in other chapters. Different chapters represent different philosophical perspectives.
1. Introduction
Do we ever do anything of our own free will? You might think it’s obvious that we do. It may seem obvious that your decision to read this chapter isn’t unfree in the way that, say, an action performed under hypnosis is. You thought about whether to start reading the chapter, you made the decision to read it, and then you did that very thing that you decided to do. What more could be required for your action to count as free?
In what follows, I will argue that more is needed for freedom and, moreover, nothing anyone ever does has what it takes to count as free. I admit that this is a radical thesis, with radical implications. For instance, our very practice of holding people morally responsible for their actions presupposes that those actions were performed freely. (You wouldn’t blame someone for kicking you when they’re under the control of a hypnotist.) Accordingly, my thesis that no one acts freely evidently implies that no one should be held responsible for anything they do. But just because it’s a radical thesis with radical implications, that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
I’ll present two arguments for my thesis that no one ever acts freely. The first turns on the idea that everything we do is a result of our desires, which are not under our control (sections 3-5). The second turns on the idea that everything we do is the inevitable result of things that happened long before we were even born (sections 6-9). Those who wish to stand by the intuitive idea that we do at least some things freely must find some flaw in each of the arguments.