Author: Bill Vallicella

Fission and Zygotes

This post adds nuance to what I said earlier.  I continue to uphold the Potentiality Principle.  I have never seen a good argument against it.  But there is a question about when the principle first finds purchase.  Certainly not before conception.  At conception?  Later on?  Considerations of 'moral safety' suggest we say 'at conception.'  But consider the following argument:

Consider a spatiotemporal (S/T) particular such as an amoeba, or a star, or to take a 'meso-particular,' a  drop of water. The drop D, existing at time t1, divides at time t2 (t2 > t1) into two discrete nontouching droplets, E and F. Suppose E and F are 'identical twins.'  That is to say, E and F, though numerically distinct, are indiscernible with respect to all monadic properties. The question arises: Does D cease to exist when it divides into E and F? Or does D continue to exist after the division or fission? There are exactly four possibilities. 

P1. D ceases to exist at the moment of division. Where there was (at t1) one S/T particular, there are now (at t2) two, but neither of the two is diachronically identical to D.

On Bukowski

Some write because they like the idea of being a writer.  It's romantic or 'cool' or something.  Others write to say something that they need to express.  Most combine these motivations.  The better the writer, the stronger the need to express something that not just needs expression for the psychic health of the writer, but that is worthy of expression. 

Charles Bukowski wrote from genuine need.  (See so you want to be a writer?) It was his therapy. He could not have believed in the early days of his scribbling  that he would ever be able to make a living from it.  But from what I have read of him so far, what he wrote is not worth reading except in the way that his writing was worth doing for him.  What do I mean?

His writing was self-therapeutic; our reading is motivated by something like the pathologist's interest.  We read him to learn about diseases of the mind and spirit.

Am I being fair?  Fair enough for a blog post.

 

Silenian and Epicurean Sources of “Death is Not an Evil”

Clarity will be served if we distinguish the specifically Epicurean reason for thinking death not an evil from another reason which is actually anti-Epicurean. I'll start with the second reason.

A. Death is not an evil because it removes us from a condition which on balance is not good, a condition which on balance is worse than nonexistence.  This is the wisdom of Silenus, reported by Sophocles (Oedipus at Colonus, ll. 1244 ff.) and quoted by Nietzsche in The Birth ofTragedy, section 3:

There is an ancient story that King Midas hunted in the forest a long time for the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, without capturing him.  When Silenus at last fell into his hands, the king asked what was the best and most desirable of all things for man.  Fixed and immovable, the demigod said not a word, till at last, urged by the king, he gave a shrill laugh and broke out into these words:  "O wretched ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing.  But the second best for you is — to die soon."

Silenus B.  Death is not an evil for the one who dies because when death is, one is not, and when one is, death is not.  My being dead is not an evil state of affairs because there is no such state of affairs (STOA) as my being dead.  Since there is no such STOA, there is no bearer of the property of being evil.  If this property has a bearer it cannot be an individual or a property but must be a STOA.

And so the Epicurean line is consistent with life affirmation. The Epicurean is not saying that being dead is good and being alive evil; he is saying that being dead is not evil because axiologically neutral.  The Epicurean is therefore also committed to saying that being dead is not a good.

The first reason is axiological, the second ontological.  The Silenian pessimist  renders a negative value verdict on life as a whole:  it's no good, better never to have been born, with  second best being to die young.  By contrast, the Epicurean's point is that the ontology of the situation makes it impossible for death to be an evil for the one who has died. 

This reinforces my earlier conclusion that there is nothing nihilistic about the Epicurean position. 

The Dead and the Nonexistent: Meinong Contra Epicurus

Are there nonexistent objects in the sense in which Meinong thought there are? One reason to think so  derives from the problem of reference to the dead. The problem can be displayed as an aporetic tetrad:

1. A dead person no longer exists.
2. What no longer exists does not exist at all. 
3. What does not exist at all cannot be referred to or enter as a constituent into a state of affairs.
4. Some dead persons can be referred to and can enter as constituents into states of affairs.  (For example, 'John Lennon' in 'John Lennon is dead' refers to John Lennon, who  is a constituent of the state of affairs, John Lennon's being dead.)

Despite the plausibility of each member, the above quartet is logically inconsistent.  The first three propositions entail the negation of the fourth.  Indeed, any three entail the negation of the remaining one.  Now (1) and (4) count as data due to their obviousness.  They are 'datanic' as opposed to 'theoretical' like the other two.  Therefore, to relieve the logical tension we must either reject (2) or reject (3).

To reject (2) is to reject Presentism according to which only temporally present items exist.  One could hold that both past and present items (tenselessly) exist, or that past, present, and future items (tenselessly) exist.  Such anti-presentist theories break the two-way link between existence and temporal presentness: what is temporally present exists, but what exists need not be temporally present.

But another option is to reject (3).   One could adopt the view of Alexius von Meinong according to which there are items that stand jenseits von Sein und Nichtsein, "beyond being and nonbeing."  These items have no being whatsoever.  Meinong's examples include the golden mountain (a possible object) and the round square (an impossible object).  His doctrine was misunderstood by Russell and generations of those influenced by him.  The doctrine is not that nonexistent objects have a mode of being weaker than existence, but that they have no being whatsoever. And yet they are not nothing! They are not nothing inasmuch as we can refer to them and predicate properties of them.  They are definite items of thought possessing Sosein but no Sein, but are not mere accusatives of thought.  A strange view, admittedly, and I do not accept it.  (See my A Paradigm Theory of Existence, Kluwer 2002, pp. 38-42.)  But distinguished philosophers have and do: Butchvarov, Castaneda, T. Parsons, Routley/Sylvan, et al.)

So Meinongianism is a theoretical option.  The Meinongian line gives us a way to answer Epicurus.  For Epicurus death is not an evil because when we are, death is not, and when death is, we are not.  The point is that at no time is there a subject possessing the property of  being dead.  When I am alive, I am not dead.  And when I am dead, I do not exist.  It is not just that when I am dead I no longer presently exist, but that I do not exist at all.  (Presentism seems part and parcel of the Epicurean position.)  And because I do not exist at all when I am dead, I cannot have properties.   (Anti-Meinongianism  is also part and parcel of the Epicurean position: existence is a necessary condition of property-possession.)  But then I cannot, when dead, have the property of being dead, in which case there is no state of affairs of my being dead. And that gives us a deep ontological reason for denying  that death is an evil:  if there is no state of affairs of my being dead, then there is nothing to possess the property of being evil.  (Note that it is not the property of being dead that is evil, or me the individual, but the putative state of affairs of my being dead.)

As I read Epicurus, his position on death, namely, that being dead  is not an evil for the one who is dead,  requires both Presentism and Anti-Meinongianism.   If that is right, then one can answer Epicurus either by rejecting Presentism or by accepting Meinongianism.

Anti-Presentism breaks the two-way link between existence and temporal presentness, while Meinongianism breaks the two-way link between existence and property-possession.  The anti-presentist faces the challenge of giving a coherent account of tenseless existence, while the Meinongian owes us an explanation of how there can be items which actually have properties while having no being whatsoever.  Epicureanism maintains both links  but flies in the face of the powerful intuition that death is an evil.

A good solution eludes us.  And so once  again we end up in good old Platonic fashion up against the wall of an aporia.

Potentiality, Abortion, Contraception

This interesting missive just over the transom.  My responses in blue.

I have been pondering your application of the Potentiality Principle to the question of abortion. It is undoubtedly the case that a one year old child has the potential to become an adult possessing rights-conferring properties. It is also undoubtedly the case, for much the same reasons, that a foetus in the third trimester of pregnancy possesses that same potential. However, as we move back along the chain of causality from childhood to birth to pregnancy and before, at some point we no longer have a potential person.

I agree that at some point we no longer have a potential person.  Neither a sperm cell by itself, nor an unfertilized egg cell by itself, nor the unjoined pair of the two is a potential person.  See 'Probative Overkill' Objections to the Potentiality Principle.  This post refutes the notion that one committed to the Potentiality Principle is also committed to the notion that spermatazoa and unfertilized ova and various set-theoretical constructions of same are also  potential persons.

Continue reading “Potentiality, Abortion, Contraception”

Life-Death Asymmetry: An Aporetic Triad

Let us consider a person whose life is going well, and who has a reasonable expectation that it will continue to go well in the near term at least.  For such a person

1. A longer being-alive is better than a shorter being-alive.

2. A longer being-dead is not worse than a shorter being-dead. (Equivalently: A shorter being-dead is not better than a longer being-dead.

3. If a longer being F is better than a shorter being F, then a shorter being non-F is better than  a longer being non-F.

I claim that each limb of the triad has a strong claim on our acceptance.  And yet they cannot all be true: (1) and (3) taken together entail the negation of (2).  Indeed, the conjunction of any two limbs entails the negation of the remaining one.  To solve the problem, then, one of the limbs must be rejected.  But which one?  Each is exceedingly plausible.

Consider (1).  Surely a longer life is better than a shorter one assuming that (i) one's life is on balance good, and (ii) one has a  reasonable expectation that the future will be like the past at least for the near future.  Suppose you are young, healthy, and happy.  It is obvious that five more years of youth, health, and happiness is better than dying tomorrow.  (In these discussions, unless otherwise stated, the assumption is the Epicurean one that that bodily death is annihilation of the self or person — an assumption that is by no means obvous.)

From discussions with Peter Lupu, I gather that he would grant (1) even without the two assumptions.  He digs being alive and consciousness whether or not the contents of his life/consciousness are good or evil:  just being alive/conscious is for him a good thing.  My life affirmation doesn't go quite that far.  Whereas his life affirmation is unconditional, mine is conditional upon the contents of my experience.

Now consider (2).  John Lennon has been dead for 30 years.   Is it worse for him now than it was 10 years ago or 20 years ago?  Does it get worse year by year?  I mean for him alone, not for Yoko Ono or anyone else.  Intuitively, no.  Ceteris paribus, the longer we live the better; but it is not the case that the longer we are dead, the worse.  (Note that the second independent clause needs no ceteris paribus qualification.)

John F. Kennedy has been dead longer than Richard M. Nixon.  But Kennedy is no worse off than Nixon in precise point of being dead. (2), then, seems intuitively evident.

As for (3), it too seems intuitively evident.  If being respected (treated fairly, loved, provided with food, etc.) for a longer time is better than being respected (treated fairly, etc.)  for a shorter time — and surely it is — then being disrespected (treated unfairly, etc.) for a shorter time is better than being disrespected for a longer time.  And so if being-alive longer is better than being-alive shorter, then being non-alive shorter is better than being non-alive longer — in contradiction to  (2).

One solution would be to reject (2), not by affirming its negation, but by maintaining that neither it nor its negation are either true or false.  If there is no subject of being dead, as presumably there is not assuming that death is anihilation, then one cannot answer the question whether it is worse to be dead for a longer time than for a shorter.

Again we are brought back to the 'problem of the subject.'

 

Being Dead and Being Nonexistent, or: How to Cease to Exist without Dying

In general, being dead and being nonexistent are not the same 'property' for an obvious reason: only that which was once alive can properly be said to be dead, and not everything was once alive.  Nevertheless, it might be thought that, for living things, to be is to be alive, and not to be is to be dead.  But I think this Aristotelian view can be shown to be mistaken.

1. A human person cannot become dead except by dying.

2. But a human person can become nonexistent without dying in at least four ways. 

2a. The first way is by entering into irreversible coma.  Given that consciousness is an essential attribute of persons, a person who enters into irreversible coma ceases to exist.  But the person's body remains alive.  Therefore, a human person can cease to exist without dying. 

2b. The second way is by fission.  Suppose one human person A enters a Person Splitter and exits two physically and behaviorally and psychologically indiscernible persons, B and C.  B is not C.  So A is not B and A is not C.  What happened to A?  A ceased to exist.  But A didn't die.  Far from the life in A ceasing, the life in A doubled!  So human person A became nonexistent without dying.

2c.  The third way is by fusion.  Two dudes enter the Person Splicer from the east and exit to the west one dude.  The entrants have ceased to exist without dying.

2d.  The fourth way is theological.  Everything other than God depends on God for its very existence at every moment of its existence.  If God were to 'pull the plug' ontologically speaking on the entire universe of contingent beings, then at that instant all human persons would cease to exist without dying.  They would not suffer the process or the event of dying  but would enter nonexistence nonetheless.  Because they had not died, they could not be properly said to be dead.

Therefore, pace the Peripatetic,

3.  Being dead and being nonexistent are not the same  — not even for living things.

(Time consumed in composing this post: 40 minutes. )

Death: Distinctions, Terminology, Questions

To think clearly about death we need to draw some distinctions, fix some terminology, and catalog the various questions that can arise. Herewith, a modest contribution to that end.

1. Process, event, state.  There is first of all the process of dying and that in which it culminates, the event of dying.  Both are distinct from the 'state' of being dead.  The inverted commas signal that there is a question whether there is such a state.  A state is a state of something which is 'in' the state. Call it the subject of the state.  But if bodily death is annihilation of the self, then it is arguable (though not self-evident) that there is no subject of the state of being dead, and hence no such state.  And if there is no such state, then it cannot be rationally feared.

The process of dying can be so short as to be indistinguishable from the event of dying, but no one can be in the 'state' who has not suffered the event.  You cannot become dead except by dying.

2. All three (process, event, state) can be objects of fear.  But it does not follow that each is an object of rational fear.  It is clearly sometimes rational to fear the process of dying.  But it is a further question whether it is ever rational to fear the 'state' of being dead.

3. Fear is an intentional state whose object is a future harm, evil, or 'bad.'  Process/event and state are rationally feared only they are indeed evils.  So the axiological questions are logically prior to the empirical-psychological question of fear and the normative-psychological question of the rationality of fear.

4.  Ontological questions would seem to be logically prior to the axiological questions.  Whether death is good, bad, or neutral depends on what it is.  For example, the 'state' of being dead cannot be evil unless there is such a state.  A state is a state of something.  But if death is annihilation, then there is no subject after death which seems to imply that there is no state of being dead.  If so, it cannot be an evil state.  And if being dead is not an evil state, then it cannot be rationally feared.

5. This raises the question whether bodily death is indeed annihilation of the self.

6. And what exactly is it for an animal to die?  One will be tempted to say that x dies at time t iff x ceases being alive at t.  But an animal that enters suspended animation at t ceases to be alive at t without dying!  Or suppose a living thing A splits into two living things B and C.  Since B and C are numerically distinct, neither can be identical to A.  So A ceases to exist at the time of fission.  Ceasing to exist, A ceases to be alive.  But one hesitates to say that A is dead.  Similarly with fusion.

Defining 'dies' is not easy.  See Fred Feldman, Confrontations with the Reaper (Oxford 1992, ch. 4).

7.  Mortality.  In addition to the question whether being dead is evil and the question whether dying (process or event) is evil, there is also the question whether it is evil to be subject to death.  This is a question about the axiological status of mortality: is being mortal good, bad, or neutral?  If mortality is evil, then, given that we are mortal, we cannot fear it, fear being future-oriented, but we can, for want of a better word, bemoan it.  And so the question arises whether it it rational to bemoan our mortality.  Is mortality perhaps a punishment for something, for Original Sin perhaps?

But we need to think more carefully about what it is to be mortal.  First of all, only things that are alive or once were alive can be properly said to be mortal.  My car is not mortal even if it 'dies.'  It is also worth noting that being mortal is consistent both with being alive and with being dead.  My dead ancestors have realized their mortality; I have yet to realize mine.  But my mother did not cease being mortal by dying.  (Or did she?  If she is now nothing, how can she have any property including the property of being mortal?) For a living thing to be mortal is for it  to be subject to death. But this phrase has at least two senses, one weak the other strong.

WEAK sense: X is mortal =df x is able to die, liable to die, has the potential to die. Mortality as posse mori.

STRONG sense: X is mortal =df X has to die, is subject to the necessity of dying, cannot evade death by any action of its own, is going to die, will die in the normal course of events. Mortality as necessitas moriendi.

Correspondingly, there are strong and weak senses of 'immortal':

STRONG sense: X is immortal =df x is not able to die.

WEAK sense: X is immortal =df x is able to die, but is kept alive forever by a factor distinct from x.

For example, in Christian theology God is strongly immortal: he cannot die, so 'deicide' is not an option for him.  The immortal souls of humans, however, are weakly immortal, not immortal by 'own-power' but by 'other-power.'  Prelapsarian Adam was weakly, not strongly, mortal whereas postlapsarian Adam and his descendants are strongly, not weakly, mortal.

Christian theology aside, we are strongly mortal: we are subject to the necessity of dying whether this necessity be nomological or a metaphysical. Is our mortal condition evil?  Or is mortality perhaps a condition of life's having meaning and value?

8. Mortality and Brevity.  Related question: Is the brevity of life a condition of its meaningfulness, as many maintain?  Mortality is not the same as brevity because (i) one could be mortal in the weak sense even if one lived forever and (ii) a short life is consistent with the necessity of dying.

9.  Why is sooner worse than later? So far we have distinguished the following questions: Is dying (whether process or event) evil?  Is being dead evil?  Is being subject to death evil?  Is the brevity of life evil?  But there is also the question why, if dying is evil, dying sooner is worse than dying later.  Intuitively, dying at 20 is worse than dying at 60 ceteris paribus.  But why?  Because the one who dies at 20 'misses out on more' than the one who dies at 60?  But how can the one who dies at 20 miss out on anything if death is annihilation?  The dead cannot be deprived of their future because they are not there to be deprived of anything.

 

The Epicurean Death Argument and Nihilism

Epicurus1 A reader suggests that the "Epicurean argument leads to nihilism. Why live if death is not an evil to you? (assuming there is no one to grieve you)."

In Letter to Menoeceus, Epicurus makes the point that death is ". . . of no concern to us; for while we exist death is not present, and when death is present we no longer exist.  It is therefore nothing either to the living or the dead since it is not present to the living, and the dead no longer are." (125)

If this is the Epicurean argument, then I do not see how it leads to nihilism, if 'leads to' means 'entails' and if nihilism is the view that life is not worth the trouble.  The Epicurean point is not that death is good but that it is axiologically neutral: neither good nor bad.  This follows from his assumption that ". . . all good and evil lie in sensation and sensation ends with death."  If being dead were good, then I think one could reasonably infer nihilism.  For if being dead were good, then being alive would be either bad or neutral, both of which are forms of nihilism.

But the Epicurean view is that being dead is value-neutral whence it follows that being alive is either good or bad, and only one of these is nihilism.  Therefore, the Epicurean position does not entail nihilism.

It is worth noting that the historical Epicurus had a therapeutic end in view: he wanted to relieve us of our fear of death.  This soteriological motive is at the back of his claim that death is nothing to us.  Because it is nothing to us, we have nothing to fear from it.  So if you accused him of nihilism he would probably respond with au contraire or rather the Greek equivalent.  He would probably say that his purpose is a life-affirming one.  His aim is to make men happy by removing from them the fear of death.

To clear Epicurus of the charge of nihilism is of course not to pronounce his position probative.

The Evil of Death and the Rationality of Fearing It

Is death an evil?  Even if it is an evil to the people other than me who love me, or in some way profit from my life, is it an evil to me?  A few days ago, defying Philip Larkin, I took the Epicurean position that death cannot be an evil for me and so it cannot be rational for me to fear my being dead: any fear of death is a result of muddled thinking, something the philosopher cannot tolerate, however things may stand with the poet.  But I was a bit quick in that post and none of this is all that clear. A re-think is in order.  Death remains, after millenia, the muse of philosophy.

My earlier reasoning was along the following Epicurean-Lucretian lines.  (Obviously, I am not engaged in a project of exegesis; what exactly these gentlemen meant is not my concern.  I'll leave scholarship to the scholars and history to the historians.)  

1. Either bodily death is the annihilation of the self or it is not.
2. If death is annihilation, then after the moment of dying there is no self in existence, either conscious or unconscious, to have or lack anything.
3. If there is no self after death, then no evil can befall the self post mortem.
4. If no evil can befall the self post mortem, then it is not rational to fear post mortem evils.
5. If, on the other hand, death is not annihilation, then one cannot rationally fear the state of nonbeing for the simple reason that one will not be in that 'state.'
Therefore
6. It is not rational to fear being dead.

The argument is valid, but are the premises true?  (1) is an instance of the the Law of Excluded Middle. (2) seems obviously true: if bodily death is annihilation of the self, then (i) the self ceases to exist at the moment of death, and (ii) what does not exist cannot have or lack anything, whether properties or relations or experiences or parts or possessions.  (ii) is not perfectly obvious because I have heard it argued that after death one continues as a Meinongian nonexistent object — a bizarre notion that I reject, but that deserves a separate post for its exfoliation and critique. 

Premise (3), however, seems vulnerable to counterexample.  Suppose the executor of a will ignores the decedent's wishes.  He wanted his loot to go to Catholic Charities, but the executor, just having read Bukowski, plays it on the horses at Santa Anita.  Intuitively, that amounts to a wrong to the decedent.  The decedent suffers (in the sense of undergoes) an evil despite not suffering (in the sense of experiencing) an evil.  And this despite the fact, assuming it to be one, that the decedent no longer exists. But if so, then (3) is false.  It seems that a person who no longer exists can be the subject of wrongs and harms no less than a person who now exists.  Additional examples like this are easily constructed.

But not only can dead persons have bad things done to them, they can also be deprived of good things. Suppose a 20 year old with a bright future dies suddenly in a car crash.  In most though not all cases of this sort the decedent is deprived of a great deal of positive intrinsic value he would have enjoyed had he not met an untimely end.  Or at least that is what we are strongly inclined to say.  Few would argue that in cases like this there is no loss to the person who dies.  Being dead at a young age is an evil, and indeed an evil for the person who dies,  even though the person who dies cannot experience the evil of being dead because he no longer exists.

So we need to make a distinction between evils that befall a person and are experienceable by the person they befall, and evils that befall a person that are not experienceable by the person they befall.  This distinction gives us the resources to resist the Epicurean-Lucretian thesis that death is not an evil for the one who dies.  We can grant to Epicurus & Co. that the evil of being dead cannot be experienced as evil without granting that being dead is not an evil.  We can grant to Epicurus et al. that, on the assumption that death is annihilation, being dead cannot be experienced and so cannot be rationally feared; but refuse to grant to them that dying and being dead are not great evils.

In this way, premise (3) of the above argument can be resisted.  Unfortunately, what I have just said in support of the rejection of (3) introduces its own puzzles.  Here is one.

My death at time t is supposed to deprive me of the positive intrinsic value that I would have enjoyed had I lived beyond t.   Thus I am a subject of an evil at times at which I do not exist.  This is puzzling.  When I exist I am of course not subject to the evil of death. But when I do not exist I am not anything, and so how can I be subject to goods or evils?  How can my being dead be an evil for me if I don't exist at the times at which I am supposed to be the subject of the evil?

We will have to think about this some more.