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Is death an evil?
On Death: Subjective and Objective Views
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14 responses to “On Death: Subjective and Objective Views”
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I sent this to a few friends. Should cause a discussion.
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Philoponus e-mails:
Excellent piece, Bill.
So you dont go there, but is there one kind of death that is an evil on both perspectives? Killing myself is monstrous annihilation of everything I know that is. I cant bear to say more on that right now. Now on the objective view, lets ask if suicide exists anywhere in the natural order? Leaves dont kill themselves. No animal I know but Homo sap arranges his own death. Maybe I’m wrong. Natural has not equipped any creature with a suicide gene. We have invented this unnatural ability!
So I guess my view is there is one kind of death that is unnatural and evil. What say you about murder? Is murder part of the natural order? I think I see your argument as implying natural deaths are not necessarily evil, and so death per se…Difficult, difficult topic. -
Bill,
This is a great post.
Perhaps I am wrong, but I find that even when viewed objectively, death can rationally be seen as evil. In saying this, I have in mind the unceasing eradication of sentient beings, with all the knowledge, skills, memories, aspirations, and sentiments that they, over the course of their lifetimes, have come to possess or, as with those dying young, would in time possess. Whatever subjective horror accompanies these deaths, the fated sweeping away of rational and sentiment minds, each genetically and experientially unique and hence irreplaceable, seems malevolent. Something more is involved here that the falling of leaves or the deaths of lower animals. (Whether the argument, here made for man, could be extended to the higher, non-rational but highly sentient mammals is another question, one that is at least worthy of consideration. But that is another matter.) Am I making any sense here?
Vito -
Hi Vito,
You are making plenty of sense. What you have shown me, however, is that I have failed to specify my thesis with the requisite precision.
First, my concern is with human beings alone, not with all sentient beings. Second, by an objective view of humans I mean one that views them as objects in nature, where nature is the space-time manifold and its contents. What I am asking is whether the dying of a human being, when a human being is viewed objectively, i.e., as a part of nature, is a bad thing. (I now say ‘bad thing’ because the word ‘evil’ will confuse some people.) Third, by dying I mean a natural process that issues in the state of being dead. I thus avoid the word ‘death’ which is ambiguous as between ‘dying’ which is a process and ‘being dead’ which is not a process, but a state. I assume, pace transhumanist fantasies, that we humans all must die where ‘must’ is to be cashed out in terms of nomological necessity.
Fourth, when I say that dying is a ‘bad thing’ I don’t mean that people who are dying are averse to or don’t like the process they are undergoing; I mean that the process of dying, insofar as it issues in the state of being dead, is a disvalue and that its being a disvalue is objectively the case. (Using ‘objectively’ to mean: not a matter of subjective, variable, opinion.)
When Wittgenstein was told that he had terminal cancer, he said, “Good!” He had had enough of life and was ready to ‘move on’ either UP or OUT (but presumably not DOWN). He was obviously not averse to becoming a dead man: he welcomed the prospect. And this despite his awareness that the process leading to the desired state was not going to be a pleasant one. But even in his case one can raise the question whether it is a bad thing to have to die.
Now my thesis is that, when human beings are viewed as parts of the natural world, there is nothing obviously bad or evil about their having to die even if their dying issues in their annihilation. The same holds for all living things, sentient or not. The dying of a living thing, when said thing is viewed as part of nature, is axiologically neutral.
It is only when we view ourselves ‘egocentrically’ as it were, as subjects for whom there is a natural world, as opposed to objects in the natural world, that the disvalue and indeed the horror of death becomes visible. It is the extinction of the person that is evil, not the extinction of a bit of nature’s fauna.
This is why in Christianity death of humans is viewed as a punishment. It makes sense to say that, whether or not it is true. But it makes no sense say of a cat that its having to die is a punishment. -
Phil,
It seems to me that you are bringing in extraneous ethical issues.
Homicide (with suicide as a special case of homicide, the case where the homo killed is oneself) is the killing of a man. If I kill a man, then he is dead. Your claim, I take it, is that the death that results from my killing a man is a bad thing both from the objective POV and from the subjective POV. Now I grant that the death (the being dead) that results when I kill a man is, from the subjective POV, a bad thing, a disvalue. It is a bad thing from his POV and from the POV of those who love him and thus view him not merely as a part of the natural world, but as a person.
But the death of the man killed is not a bad thing, a disvalue, when we consider merely the ceasing to exist of a bit of the Earth’s fauna.
Of course I grant that some homicide is morally wrong and also legally wrong (given our system of positive laws) but that is not the question here. The issue is whether the being dead of a man by my wrongful killing of him — “I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die” as in the J. Cash song — is, viewed objectively, a disvalue. I say that t is not.
Your ethical/moral questions are not relevant to what I am arguing. -
Hi, Bill. I hope your summer is going well. It’s hot and humid in my neck of the woods, and probably hot and dry in yours.
It seems to me that your paragraph ending in this line is vital:
“To borrow a thought from Josiah Royce, it is the loving attitude that first discloses the irreducible individuality, the haecceity and ipseity, of the beloved.”
You have astutely indicated that the human person, taken as unique subject of experience, has sufficiently high intrinsic value that the death of that person is objectively bad because it is the annihilation of something of such value. In proper cases of the loving attitude, we take that attitude toward persons because those persons are objectively worthy of that attitude. The leaves of deciduous trees lack such value, i.e., leaves are not objectively worthy of the loving attitude we properly have for persons, though each leaf is unique in the sense of being non-identical to any other leaf.
So, it seems to me that if one takes humans as mere objects in the natural world, then given that perspective, human death is no worse (axiologically speaking) than the death of a tree. That is a reasonable position if one assumes that humans are merely naturalistic objects. But if human persons are taken as subjects rather than mere objects – which is also a reasonable position – then human death is an objective disvalue because the destruction of a subject is the eradication of a bearer of intrinsic value, and such eradication is an objectively bad state of affairs.
Each view is rationally warranted. But it can’t be that each position is true. It can’t be both that humans are mere objects and that humans are not mere objects.
Whether or not death is an objective evil seems insoluble for us humans because we don’t know if humans are (a) mere objects or (b) intrinsically valuable subjects. I’m reminded of the significance of the Delphic “Know thyself.” -
Now, it seems obvious to me that human persons are subjects and not mere objects. I’m no zombie, and I doubt I’ve met one – though one wonders about the eliminativists :). It’s hard to avoid accepting the position that human persons are subjects – unless one is a hard-core materialist trying to make a hard-core materialistic point. And in such cases, I suspect the h-c materialist goes on viewing human persons as subjects as soon as he finishes writing his h-c materialistic article.
The question arises: do persons as subjects have intrinsic value such that their death is objectively bad?
I suspect it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the death of a human subject is objectively bad, something against which “the heart rebels” as Schopenhauer aptly put it. -
I am happy to receive your comments, Elliot. You understand very well what I am arguing. In particular you understand the key role that the uniqueness of the person plays in the argument.
To go back to my example of the deciduous tree and its leaves. A particular elm tree, say, has many healthy green leaves in late summer, but each of those leaves will fall from the tree and become nothing by late fall. Each of us can be likened to a ‘leaf’ on the ‘tree of life’ (arbor vitae). We too are fated to fall from this ‘tree’ and become nothing — assuming that we are just animated bodies whose mental and spiritual functioning depends on the physical functioning of the body (which of course includes the brain). Our falling from the arbor vitae is what we call dying, which necessarily issues in the state of being dead and thus nonexistent.
So what is the difference between me or you and leaves on a tree? A leaf is a mere token of a type (elm tree leaf, and high-order types such as leaf, living thing, etc.) But you and I are not mere tokens of a type, although we are of course tokens of a type, land mammal for example, two-legged land mammal, etc.)
What are we then? We are individuals in Royce’s sense where an individual is “essentially unique.” I explicate that notion in terms of ‘uniquely unique.’ Suppose there was only one elm leaf left in the universe. That leaf would be unique in the sense of ‘one of a kind.’ But that uniqueness would accrue to the leaf in question only accidentally. We are not accidentally unique, but essentially unique, which notion I unpack as *uniquely unique*: unique in such a way that there is no real difference between kind and instance of a kind, between type and token.
In that sense we are like God, who is uniquely unique. No God worth his salt could be a mere instance of the divine kind, even if he is the only instance of said kind, or even necessarily the only instance of said kind. That’s why, if you think theism though, it issues in DDS.
Does that make sense? -
Elliot,
Thanks for the second comment, which I just noticed. Will get to it later. -
>>Does that make sense?<< Yes, what you said about unique uniqueness makes sense. Given your point about the essential uniqueness of individuals, would you say that the value of person qua person/individual subject is grounded in that person’s unique uniqueness and thus essential irreplaceability?
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Bill,
Thanks for letting me know that I grasped the substance of your argument, which you kindly further explicate in your responses to my and Elliot’s comments. You speak of a human being as “uniquely unique,” that is, “unique in such a way that there is no real difference between kind and instance of a kind, between type and token.” If we put the suppositions of theism, such as a creator deity and a human soul, aside for a moment, what is (are) the criterium (criteria) that determine if a creature is uniquely unique? Is it rationality? Is that alone, or something more, such as a certain type of subjectivity, the dividing line between highly intelligent animals that give evidence of intentional thought, some emotional complexity, and enduring recall and human beings? In asking this, I do not mean to place such creatures on the same level as human beings, but rather wonder how we might classify them in terms of uniqueness, since perhaps some intermediate category is required so as to distinguish them from flora and lower forms of fauna. I am stumbling around here, so please ignore this question if it you judge it to be of little philosophical interest.
Vito -
Elliot @1:01: >>Given your point about the essential uniqueness of individuals, would you say that the value of a person qua person/individual subject is grounded in that person’s unique uniqueness and thus essential irreplaceability?<< Yes. A person qua dentist is replaceable by another dentist with the same skill-set. But not the person qua person. If I have an I-Thou relation with my dentist -- not impossible! -- this is not in respect of his or he being a dentist.
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Vito,
Your question is of considerable interest.
If your cat dies, you will grieve for a time. If a neighbor says, “Get another cat!” you will probably be slightly annoyed: a cat is not replaceable like a burned out light bulb even if the replacement cat has all the same attributes as the cat replaced. That is because you love your cat. Royce would say that your love confers individuality (essential uniqueness) upon your cat. The beloved cat is not just a replaceable token of a type.
Even worse would be if the neighbor says, “Get another wife!” on the occasion of your wife’s dying. Suppose your wife has an indiscernible twin. Could the twin replace your wife in your affections — assuming you love your wife? No. Your love of your wife confers individuality (essential uniqueness) upon her. She is irreplaceable. As a popular song has it, “I know I’ll never find another you.”
But what I really want to say is that a beloved spouse, child, friend has this essential uniqueness in himself, i.e., not as something conferred by the lover.
At this point I think God has to be brought into the picture. If I am an essentially unique person, then there is an essentially unique person who created me.
But then where does that leave the cats and dogs and octopusses? Do I really want to say that they too are persons?? And that their death is an unspeakable loss? Or that they have infinite worth? More later. Time for Mark Levin. -
Bill and Vito,
Thanks for the interesting comments.
Bill writes:
>>But what I really want to say is that a beloved spouse, child, friend has this essential uniqueness in himself, i.e., not as something conferred by the lover.<< That’s similar to what I want to say. I don’t deny that one can confer value on another by loving the other. But it seems to me that such value is extrinsic. I want to say that persons as such have intrinsic value, not merely extrinsic value. Suppose that the intrinsic value of a person is grounded in that person’s unique uniqueness. Is unique uniqueness a sufficient condition for having intrinsic value? Every uniquely unique thing has intrinsic value? Are there other sufficient conditions for possessing intrinsic value?
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