What Harm Does Death Do to the Decedent?

Abstract

The vast majority of people believe that death harms the person who dies. After all, it seems to be common sense that death is a bad thing, and bad things happening to people are generally injurious in some direct way to those individuals; therefore, death must harm the people who undergo it. The trouble with the common sense view is that it fails to recognize that in order to be injured a person must exist. Since death annihilates the person by destroying an essential characteristic the person has, then no person can ever experience her own death, and if she cannot experience it, then it cannot harm her. In what follows, I examine various ways that philosophers and others have argued that death harms the person who has the misfortune of dying (Calling it a misfortune assumes the common sense view is correct without critical evaluation of it). Firstly, options incorporating an afterlife are found wanting. Secondly, Cambridge changes , Priorism , and other attempts to show that a person is injured when she dies are considered. These attempts are shown to be either based on fundamentally flawed reasoning that creates the illusion of existence when all that actually exists are ideas and reflections in the survivors’ minds, or the entity that is harmed is not that which common sense says is injured.