{"id":4834,"date":"2018-01-24T07:01:54","date_gmt":"2018-01-24T07:01:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2018\/01\/24\/death-and-deprivation\/"},"modified":"2018-01-24T07:01:54","modified_gmt":"2018-01-24T07:01:54","slug":"death-and-deprivation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2018\/01\/24\/death-and-deprivation\/","title":{"rendered":"Death, Deprivation, and Property-Possession"},"content":{"rendered":"

Vlastimil asks, "In which sense exactly IS it bad FOR the young person to BE deprived AT the time he NO longer exists? It's a nice sentence to say but I just don't know what it is supposed to mean."<\/span><\/p>\n

We are assuming mortalism, the view that the body's death is the death of the person in toto<\/em>. When physical death supervenes, the person will cease to exist even if his body continues to exist for a while as a corpse.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Grim<\/a>The question is: Is it bad to be dead for the person who is dead? (Typically, it will be bad for others, but that is not the question.) And let's be clear that we are speaking of the 'state' of being dead, and not the process of dying, or the hora mortis<\/em>, the time of transition from dying to being dead. I grant that the process is bad, and that the hora mortis<\/em> is as well. (The hora mortis<\/em> is where the true horror mortis<\/em> resides.) <\/span><\/p>\n

How then can being dead be bad? If death is the utter annihilation of the subject of experience, then, after death, there will be nothing left of me to experience anything and indeed nothing to be in a state whether I experience it or not.  Clearly, a state is a state of a thing in that state.  No thing, no state.<\/span><\/p>\n

It seems reasonable to conclude that being dead cannot be bad. Of course it is not good either. It is axiologically indeterminate, to coin a phrase.<\/span><\/p>\n

But now consider a person, call him Morty, well-situated, full of promise, who dies young.  Dying young, he is deprived of all the goods he would have had had he not died young. Suppose these goods outweigh the future bads of which he will also be deprived. Don't we think that, on balance, it is bad for such a person to be dead?<\/span><\/p>\n

Now when is it bad for him to dead? Not before he dies, obviously, and not at the time of transition, but after he dies. So, when he no longer exists, he is in the 'state' of being dead, a state made bad by his being in a 'state' of deprivation.  Does this makes sense? Vlastimil says No.<\/span><\/p>\n

Vlastimil is assuming that<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

(V) Nothing can have a property unless it exists at the time it has the property.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

So Morty can't be deprived unless he exists at the time he is deprived. But Morty does not exist at the time at which he is said to be deprived; hence Morty is not deprived.<\/span><\/p>\n

But isn't it true that Morty is dead? I should think so. So Morty has the property of being dead at times at which he does not exist. If so, it is false that nothing can have a property unless it exists at the time it has the property. But then Morty can be deprived and be in a bad way at times at which he does not exist.<\/span><\/p>\n

It seems that what is true is not (V) but<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

(V*) Nothing can have a property unless it exists at the times it has it, or existed at earlier times.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

(V*) preserves our anti-Meinongian intuition that a thing cannot have properties unless it exists. It is just that a thing that did exist can have properties at times at which it no longer exists.<\/span><\/p>\n

Above I said that a state is a state of a thing in that state: no thing, no state. But now it appears that, while this is true, we should add the codicil: a thing can be in a state when it does not exist provided there were earlier times at which it did exist.<\/span> <\/p>\n

I don't deny that this way of looking at the matter raises problems of its own. Before Morty came to be he was, arguably, nothing at all, not even a possibility. (There was, before he came to be, the possibility that someone having his properties come to be, but no possibility that he<\/em>, that very individual, come to be. He did not pre-exist his coming to be as a merely possible individual.) After he passed away, however, he did not revert to being nothing at all. After all, he was<\/em>, and his name, so to speak, remains inscribed on the Roster of the Actual. <\/span><\/p>\n

There is singular<\/em> reference to wholly past individuals in the way there is no<\/em> singular reference to wholly future individuals.  Pace<\/em> Meinong, however, there is no reference to the nonexistent. So past individuals, though not present, in some sense are. This seems to show that presentism cannot be true. I mean the view that only what exists in the temporal present exists, full stop.  When a man dies he does not go from actual to merely possible; he remains actual, though no longer present.<\/span><\/p>\n

Compare a merely possible past individual such as Schopenhauer's only son Will Schopenhauer with Schopenhauer.  The latter has a rather higher ontological status than the former. The latter, though no longer present, once was present and remains actual. The former never was present and never was actual.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vlastimil asks, "In which sense exactly IS it bad FOR the young person to BE deprived AT the time he NO longer exists? It's a nice sentence to say but I just don't know what it is supposed to mean." We are assuming mortalism, the view that the body's death is the death of the … Continue reading “Death, Deprivation, and Property-Possession”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[184,397],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4834","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-death-and-immortality","category-epicureanism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4834","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4834"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4834\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4834"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4834"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}