Less Good but not Bad: In Defense of Epicureanism about the Badness of Death


Συγγραφέας: Aaron Smuts


Aaron Smuts: Less Good but not Bad: In Defense of Epicureanism about the Badness of Death (pdf, 31 pages)
In this paper I defend innocuousism—a weak form of Epicureanism about the badness of death. I argue that if we assume both mental statism about wellbeing and that death is an experiential blank, it follows that death is not bad for the one who dies. I defend innocuousism against the deprivation account of the badness of death. I argue that recent defenses of the deprivation account, such as those offered by Fred Feldman and Ben Bradley, rest on a suspect notion of extrinsic badness—a notion that erroneously confuses events whose outcomes merely could have been better with those that are bad. In reply, I defend an alternate account according to which something is extrinsically bad if and only if it leads to states that are intrinsically bad. On my view, sometimes dying may be less good than living, but it is never bad to die.