Abstract
Through the ages, many thinkers have worried that our death fears mar our lives. Sharing this worry, the Epicureans have argued that we can live well only if we see death for what it is: a mere “nothing” that it is ill-fitting to fear. I show how this argument depends on the assumption that a mental state theory of well-being is correct. If we give up this assumption, it can be fitting to fear death. Using my philosophical discussion of when and how it is fitting to fear death, I formulate three strategies for keeping our death-related fears in check. In this way, my paper follows the therapeutic tradition in philosophy, whose potential I urge effective altruists to explore.
1. Introduction
What is the main obstacle that keeps us from living good lives? Through the ages, many thinkers have argued that our unresolved death fears are one of the most important stumbling blocks on our way to individual happiness and societal flourishing.1 Their basic thought is that our death fears are so overwhelming that we start to repress them from an early age, paying scant attention to the fact that we are mortal. This is not, however, a productive way of dealing with our mortality, as our fears, even while repressed, continue to negatively impact our lives. According to the Epicureans, for example, our unresolved death fears give rise to pronounced feelings of sadness and anxiety that we have trouble placing. This drives us into a restless pursuit of worldly goods, which provide little satisfaction if we secure them. As Amélie Oksenberg Rorty puts it:
Epicurus argued that if we could conquer the fear of death . . . then a great deal of our lives would be more rational, calmer and happier. Our dreadful gravity towards fame, the endless trouble we take to secure ourselves by amassing worthless goods, our undignified servility to people whom we do not respect—all these indignities are, Epicurus thought, superstitious protections against the dangers that bring death.2
Various thinkers have proposed different solutions for dealing with our death-related fears and confronting our mortality, thus improving our lives. The Epicureans have argued that our death fears rest on a misapprehension of death. Once we see death for what it really is, it reveals itself as a mere “nothing” that it is ill-fitting to fear.3 Recognizing that our death fears are mistaken, the Epicureans moreover thought, suffices to allow us to get rid of them over time.
Throughout this paper, I assume that those who have worried about our death fears negatively impacting our lives were on to something. This is not to deny, of course, that it is bold to argue that our death fears are responsible for many personal and societal ills. From an empirical perspective, it is very difficult to establish, in a scientifically sound manner, to what extent such a diagnosis might be valid. There is, however, a strand of psychological research that attempts to do just this.4 It goes under the label of “Terror Management Theory,” and its published findings support the hypothesis that we manage our terror of death by repressing it and by seeking distraction in the unbounded pursuit of worldly goods. Even so, it remains infeasible to quantify, with any degree of accuracy, just how large a potential there exists for improving our lives by confronting our mortality in more productive ways. In this paper, I set these difficulties aside and simply grant that there are at least some benefits to be had from facing our death-related fears.
My main project in this paper is to argue that many of us fittingly fear their own deaths at least in light of the beliefs and the desires that they have. I show that the Epicurean claim that death is a “mere nothing” depends crucially on the assumption that how well our lives go is determined entirely by the mental states that we experience while alive. If we drop this Epicurean presumption in favor of mental state theories of well-being, death can threaten to reduce our well-being in a way that makes it a fitting object of fear. Importantly, I am not claiming that mental state theories of well-being ought to be rejected. I argue merely that there are plausible contenders to such theories according to which it can be fitting to fear death, and that many of us live our lives as if one of these contenders was true, thus fittingly fearing death.
While I argue that many of us fittingly fear our own deaths, I do not mean to suggest that we are powerless to guard against the possible negative impact of our death-related fears. Part of this paper is devoted to investigating how we might productively manage our death-related fears based on a philosophical understanding of what gives rise to them.
By asking explicitly how philosophical insights might help us improve our lives, I follow the therapeutic tradition within philosophy. This tradition was well-established in ancient Greece, and the Epicureans were important proponents of it.5 To date, effective altruists have failed to engage with it. This paper aims to demonstrate that this is a key oversight. If effective altruists—especially those trained in philosophy—started to seek philosophical clarification directly with an eye to making our lives go better, I believe that they could thereby tap into a wealth of opportunities for cost-effective improvements. Of course, many of the issues we can hope to address with philosophical therapy are difficult to quantify, both in terms of the negative effects that stem from living a non-reflective life, as well as in terms of the improvements we can hope to achieve by engaging with philosophical positions on the topic. This is an important downside, and it might help explain why effective altruists have not, to date, turned their attention to philosophical therapy. As a noteworthy upside, however, philosophical therapy is inexpensive. Philosophical research is not resource-intensive, and whatever insights philosophers arrive at can easily be disseminated widely, thereby turning them into a public good. While it might thus frequently be impracticable to quantify the potential benefits of philosophical therapy, making such therapy available should not detract significantly from our ability to, say, distribute malaria nets to those who need them. Philosophical therapy can thus complement more resource-intensive strategies for making the world a better place.
The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. In section 2, I clarify the notion of a fitting emotion. In section 3, I discuss the Epicurean argument in favor of the claim that it is ill-fitting to fear death. In section 4, I show how the Epicurean argument depends on the presumption that a mental state theory of well-being is correct. In section 5, I investigate how we might productively deal with our death-related fears. Section 6 concludes the essay.
2. The Notion of a Fitting Emotion
Philosophers of emotion conceptualize emotions as intentional mental states that typically have a phenomenological, a motivational, and an evaluative aspect.6 There is a phenomenological aspect to emotions because experiencing an emotion tends to feel a certain way, and because different emotions generally feel differently. There is a motivational aspect to emotions because experiencing them inclines us toward certain actions. Anger, for example, inclines us toward confronting the person we are angry with; fear activates a “fight, flight, or freeze” response. The emotions’ evaluative aspect is made possible by the fact that emotions are intentional, that is, directed at particular objects and, like beliefs, have a mind-to-world direction of fit. In this way, they involve judgments or perceptions about what the world is like.7 To feel grief, for example, involves judging that one has lost something of great value;8 to feel admiration for something means perceiving of it as excellent.
Their evaluative aspect implies that emotions can be fitting or ill-fitting, as the judgments or perceptions implied by an emotion can be correct or incorrect.9 If your mother's death means that you have lost something of great value, experiencing grief is fitting; if your teacher is not, in fact, skilled at their job, your admiration for them is ill-fitting. Importantly for our purposes, fearing something means perceiving of it as dangerous or threatening.10 It follows that we fittingly fear death if there is a coherent sense in which it is, in fact, dangerous or threatening.
We can distinguish between the fittingness of emotions in light of a person's beliefs, and their fittingness in light of the facts. If you believe that the animal in front of you is a viper, fearing it is fitting given your beliefs. If, contrary to your beliefs, the animal is a slow worm, fearing it is ill-fitting in light of the facts.
The just described epistemic rationality of our emotions—for which I use the term fittingness—can be distinguished from their prudential rationality.11 Experiencing a particular emotion on a particular occasion is prudentially rational if the experience makes a person better-off than they would otherwise have been. Consider the example of fear. While it is unpleasant to experience fear, fearing the barking dog in front of you might nevertheless be prudentially rational, namely, if it helps you react well. According to the Epicureans, a person's death fears are both ill-fitting and prudentially irrational—they imply a mistaken assessment of death as dangerous, and they do not help someone to live well.
3. How Not to Fear Death: The Epicurean Way
The Epicureans endorsed a mental state theory of well-being. More specifically, they were hedonists, believing that the only components of human well-being are pleasure (which is intrinsically good) and pain (which is intrinsically bad).12 In addition, they were materialists, arguing that there is no immaterial soul, and that we go out of existence when we die.13 Based on these two doctrines, they argued that death is not bad for the person who dies, both in the sense that it is neither intrinsically bad, nor accompanied by any intrinsically bad consequences. Where we fear death, the Epicureans thought, we mistakenly believe otherwise, for example, because we assume that we will survive our annihilation.14 Viewed properly, the Epicureans argued, “death is nothing to us,” and we all do well to “become accustomed to [this] belief.”15 Over time, this will help us face death with equanimity, thus clearing the way toward genuine flourishing, which consists in serene tranquility (ataraxia).
Modern commentators have shown that, contra the Epicureans, there is an intelligible sense in which a person's death can be bad for them. Absent further argument, we are thus no longer entitled to the Epicurean conclusion that it is ill-fitting to fear death. The sense in which a person's death can be bad for them is captured by the so-called Deprivation Account of the Badness of Death, which draws our attention to the fact that a person's death can make their life go worse than it would otherwise have gone.16 Imagine 20-year-old Fred, who is run over by a bus, dying on the spot. Had he not died young, Fred would have lived a full and happy life. Philosophers of death call Fred's death overall bad for him, as Fred's life would have gone better, on balance, had he not died the death that he did, in fact, die.
In two insightful contributions, Kaila Draper has argued that while those who defend a Deprivation Account of the Badness of Death are right to insist that our deaths can be overall bad for us, this fails to undermine what the Epicureans ultimately cared about, namely, that it is ill-fitting to fear death.17 Draper's key move is to argue that something is a threat or a danger, and thus a fitting object of fear, only if it is absolutely bad, that is, either intrinsically bad, or else tied to intrinsically bad consequences, either for ourselves or for others whom we care about.18 Where something is merely overall bad, that is, overall bad without also being absolutely bad, it will generally merit avoidance, and possibly negative emotions other than fear, but not fear.
Suppose, for example, that you have booked an appointment at the House of Swedish Massage, where you will receive an excellent treatment from Sven.19 Had you not been booked in with Sven, you would have received an even better massage from fellow therapist Björn. Receiving the massage from Sven is thus overall, but not absolutely, bad for you: while it prevents a superior alternative from occurring, it is in no other way bad for you (by assumption, receiving the massage is a wholly pleasant experience). Draper asserts, plausibly in my view, that you would reasonably feel mildly disappointed if, just before your appointment, you realized what was going on.20 It would also be prudentially rational for you to inquire whether switching massage therapists might be possible. Feeling frightened about the upcoming massage from Sven would, however, be very ill-fitting indeed.21 Fearing death is thus mistaken, Draper argues, because a person's death can at most be overall bad for them.
4. How to Fittingly Fear Death
While Draper's observations are doubtlessly insightful, she overlooks that there are theories of well-being that imply that a person's death can be absolutely bad for them. Defenders of a version of the Deprivation Account can easily accommodate such theories and argue—as they have, in fact, argued22—that a person's death can be overall bad for them according to a wide range of theories about what makes a person's life go well. Pace Draper, however, it will then not always be the case that a person's death is at most overall bad for them, or bad for them only in the way that the Deprivation Account highlights. The remainder of this section explicates these ideas.
4.1 Fearing Death as a Frustrator of Dependent Categorical Desires
Imagine a person—let us call her Sarah—who is in the process of writing a book that she is keen to finish. Sarah has bowel cancer, and her death is approaching quickly. Painkillers make her condition bearable, but she is nevertheless deteriorating. Every day, she works on her book project with as much dedication as her condition allows.
Many of us will find it intelligible that Sarah fears her death at least partly because it might keep her from finishing her book. For someone wedded to a mental state theory of well-being, Sarah's anxiety is quite puzzling, however. If Sarah manages to finish her book, her joy will, after all, be brief at best. And if she does not finish the book, she will not be around to lament this fact for long. Rushing to finish the book is thus quite clearly more trouble than it is worth.23 Sarah's concerns make more sense if we look at them either through the lens of desire fulfillment views or achievement views of well-being.
According to desire fulfillment views of well-being, it is intrinsically good for us if our (suitably idealized24 and appropriately self-regarding25) desires are fulfilled, and intrinsically bad for us to have such desires thwarted. Let us assume that Sarah's desire to finish her book is one that she would continue to hold under suitably idealized conditions (e.g., because writing the book is the best way, for Sarah, to share insights that she believes are genuinely important). The desire is appropriately self-regarding, as well. If a desire fulfillment view of well-being is correct, we thus seem entitled to conclude that Sarah's death would be absolutely bad for her if it kept her from finishing her book, as it would, in this way, frustrate a well-being relevant desire of hers.26 Draper's argument against the fittingness of our death-related fears would then fail to apply to Sarah.
We can reach a very similar result if we focus not on desire fulfillment views, but on achievement views27 as a subset of objective list theories of well-being. Objective list theories contend that how well a person's life goes cannot be reduced either to the mental states that the person experiences over the course of their life, nor to the extent that the person's suitably idealized and appropriately self-regarding desires are fulfilled. Instead, there are further factors that contribute to, or detract from, a person's well-being. Achievement views of well-being28 contend that successfully completing valuable projects adds to the value of our lives, whereas putting in “wasted” effort with respect to projects that never come to fruition detracts from the value of our lives. According to achievement views, if Sarah's death keeps her from completing her book,29 her death is, for this reason, absolutely bad for her,30 and Draper's argument against the fittingness of fearing it thus fails to apply. May we thus conclude that on a significant range of theories about what makes a person's life go well, it can be fitting to fear one's own death?
The answer is no, we may not, at least not yet. For one thing, Draper claims only that absolute badness is a necessary condition for fitting fear, not that it is sufficient. There are, moreover, some absolutely bad things that it seems ill-fitting to fear. For one thing, some absolutely bad things are only trivially bad, and fearing them seems over the top.31 Suppose, for example, that I have a desire always to get the best available massage therapist for my Sunday afternoon massage. From the standpoint of desire fulfillment views, this desire might well be relevant to my welfare. It is, after all, appropriately self-regarding, and we have no obvious reason to suppose that it would not survive a process of idealization. If, at the House of Swedish Massage, I then get a massage from Sven, while his slightly more skilled colleague Björn takes a break, the massage from Sven is absolutely bad for me if a desire fulfillment view of well-being is correct. Outrightly fearing Sven's massage for not being the best that I might have secured would seem excessive, however—it would be akin to breaking out in a cold sweat at the prospect of one's annual flu jab. To put the same point differently, some things, though absolutely bad, are simply not sufficiently bad to warrant a full-blown fear response. In sum, then, fear—at least in its pronounced manifestations—is fitting only if there is a threat of significant absolute badness.
In addition, it is questionable whether we can coherently fear something if we fail to have the relevant desires. Consider again Sarah, and suppose that since being diagnosed with bowel cancer, she has become depressed, and has, at least for now, lost all interest in trying to finish her book. Let us suppose, though, that not finishing her book remains intrinsically bad for Sarah according to the correct theory of well-being. It would be very strange for Sarah, downcast as she is, to insist that she fears her death for keeping her from completing her book. This holds true even if, on reflection, she believes that not finishing the book is bad for her. What is missing for intelligible fear is a manifest desire to finish the book. Where such a desire is missing, it seems appropriate to say that it would be prudentially rational for Sarah to try to re-acquire or reactivate the relevant desire, roughly because having the desire would improve her chances of actually finishing the book. Once Sarah does desire to finish her book (and has a corresponding aversion to not finishing it), it then becomes fitting for her to fear death as being capable of frustrating the desire. If this is correct, we fittingly fear something only if it threatens significant absolute badness that we have a manifest desire to avoid. This, it seems to me, captures both the necessary and the sufficient conditions for fitting fear. I thus propose the following:
Fitting fear in light of the facts: a person fittingly fears something in light of the facts if, and only if, the object of her fear threatens significant absolute badness that the person has a manifest desire to avoid.
Based on a seminal discussion by Bernard Williams, Steven Luper has suggested the term dependent categorical desires for desires that our death is capable of thwarting.32 A desire is dependent if its fulfillment depends on my continued existence. My desire that some distant stranger should be happy is not a dependent desire; my desire to run the New York Marathon next year is. A desire is categorical if I have it not only on condition that I continue to exist. If I desire to eat tomorrow on condition that I am still alive tomorrow, my desire to eat is conditional, not categorical. If, by contrast, my desire to eat at a fabulous new restaurant provides me with a reason to stay alive, the desire counts as categorical. In Williams's memorable phrase, dependent categorical desires “propel”33 us forward into life. According to my just-proposed definition of fitting fear, however, it is also true that such desires turn death into a veritable enemy, that is, into something we fittingly fear, at least in cases where our desires track what is genuinely of prudential value.
It is, of course, possible that our dependent categorical desires fail to track what makes our lives go well. If hedonism is correct, for example, then Sarah's dependent categorical desire to finish her book does not track what is genuinely valuable for her. Sarah then fittingly fears her death in light of her desires, but her fear is ill-fitting in light of the normative facts. To return to the analogy introduced in section 2, in such a case, Sarah's death is akin to a slow worm that she mistakes for a venomous viper. It is possible, as well, that Sarah has recalcitrant desires that fail to align with her beliefs. Sarah might be a committed hedonist, for example, and she might in vain have tried to stop feeling dedicated to her book project after receiving her cancer diagnosis.34 In such a case, Sarah fittingly fears her death in light of her desires, but not in light of her considered beliefs.
There is one final complication, at least for desire fulfillment views of well-being. The problem is this: throughout our lives, we tend to hold at least some desires that we subsequently abandon. Often, these desires remain unfulfilled, not least because we have abandoned them. But where we abandon a desire, it is not clear that it makes our lives worse from the standpoint of desire fulfillment theories if the desire remains unfulfilled. This presents a problem for our discussion because a person's death threatens to frustrate only desires that the person will abandon in dying. If lack of desire fulfillment is not intrinsically bad if we have abandoned the non-fulfilled desire, it would thus turn out that our deaths cannot, after all, be absolutely bad for us. And if death cannot be absolutely bad, fearing it cannot be fitting.
Steven Luper has argued that lack of desire fulfillment is not intrinsically bad if, and only if, we at some point voluntarily abandon the relevant desire.35 Consider Luca, who has an unfinished book project that he put aside after reconsidering his priorities. According to Luper, nothing bad happens to Luca if he never finishes his book, even though he used to have a desire to see his book published. Things look different if Luca lost his desire to finish his book because Luca's nemesis spiked Luca's drink to rid him of his desire to publish his book.36
What happens to us when we die sits somewhere between these two extremes. To die means to lose all of one's desires, but not by voluntarily abandoning them. But nor are the dying person's desires taken away from them by meddling others. The way in which a dying person abandons their desires is best described as “avoluntary,” comparable to losing a desire while asleep. According to Luper, lack of desire fulfillment that is tied to such an avoluntary loss of desire is bad.37
It seems to me that Luper is right to group the avoluntary loss of desires together with their involuntary loss. He fails to make sufficiently clear, however, why this grouping is appropriate. Remember that the desires relevant for well-being from the standpoint of desire fulfillment theories are always idealized desires. Very roughly speaking, idealized desires are desires that are in line with, and—at least to the extent that they are also actual—help us pursue what we deem reflectively important. If we avoluntarily lose such a desire, we lose it without a relevant change in our value system that would have led us to reconsider and adjust our desires. Finding that you have lost an important desire in your sleep is thus likely to be a deeply alienating experience, and you will look for ways to reactivate the lost desire. The exception to this is a situation where, on reflection, you decide that the desire was no longer well-aligned with your considered values anyway, in which case you come to voluntarily endorse what was originally an avoluntary loss of desire. In sum, then, lack of desire fulfillment is bad from the standpoint of desire fulfillment theories because something that is important to us does not come to fruition. Where we have involuntarily or avoluntarily lost the relevant desire, it continues to be true that if the lost desire is not fulfilled, something that is important to us does not come to fruition. The tight connection between “lack of desire fulfillment” and “something personally important does not come to fruition” is severed only in cases of voluntary desire abandonment, as we voluntarily abandon an (idealized!) desire if, and only if, it ceases to be well-aligned with our considered values. It follows that lack of desire fulfillment due to death is intrinsically bad for us from the standpoint of desire fulfillment theories, even though we (avoluntarily) lose all of our desires when we die. The general thought might be clearest if we focus on posthumous harms and benefits. Consider again Sarah, who dies shortly before sending her final manuscript to the publisher, working frantically until the day of her death. After her death, her partner sees to it that Sarah's book is published. According to desire fulfillment theories, what her partner does makes Sarah's life go better because it ensures that something that was personally important to Sarah comes to fruition. As Sarah never changed her mind about the importance of her book, it is good for her if her desire to publish her book is fulfilled. For a desire fulfillment theorist, Sarah's situation is structurally similar to Luca's, if we imagine that Luca loses his desire to finish his book after consuming a spiked beverage, but where a good friend of Luca's makes an effort to see Luca's book through to publication (without Luca ever finding out).
5. Managing Our Death-Related Fears
In this section, I formulate some hands-on advice about how to manage our death-related fears that takes its cue from the discussion in section 4.
5.1 Taking Stock of Your Death-Related Exposure
In a first step of philosophical therapy, you, as the “patient,” might consider what significant dependent categorical desires you have. As laid out in section 4, these desires make it fitting for you to fear death in light of your desires. What are the plans, projects, and ambitions that give you a reason to live and that “propel you forward” into life?
Next, try to gain some clarity about what you think makes a person's life go well. What does a flourishing life look like, for you? What should be present within it? What detracts from a good life? Then, ask yourself what role your dependent categorical desires play within your ideas of the good life. Are there some that, on reflection, appear to you misguided or unnecessary? Do some play an important role in orienting you and providing you with meaning? In this way, you clarify whether there is a gap between fittingly fearing death in light of your actual desires and fittingly fearing it in light of your considered beliefs.
With at least tentative answers to these questions, you will be able to consider, in a second step, to what extent it makes sense for you to reduce your death-related exposure, and the fitting fears that accompany it, by weeding out and pruning your desires (if such a thing is psychologically feasible).
5.2 Pruning Your Dependent Categorical Desires
For an Epicurean, the best possible life for a human being is a life of tranquility or ataraxia.38 A state of ataraxia is reached once all mental disturbances in a person are eliminated, and this is achieved partly by the person's renunciation of all ambition and aspiration. In many ways, the Epicurean's tranquil life is monastical, characterized by simple and repeatable pleasures, as well as by withdrawing from worldly affairs and intimate relationships with aspects of dependency. It is thus quite reasonable to ascribe to the Epicureans the position that to reach ataraxia, we are required to give up all of our dependent categorical desires.39 To put the same point differently, the Epicureans are correct that it is ill-fitting to fear death for a person who is living her life entirely in accordance with the Epicurean ideal of the good life. If, on reflection, the Epicurean ideal of the good life strikes you as attractive, it might be a promising strategy to work toward giving up all of your dependent categorical desires. For as long as you retain some such desires, you will fittingly fear death in light of your desires, but you will no longer identify with these desires, and it will be ill-fitting to fear death in light of your considered normative beliefs. If our desires tend to adjust to our beliefs, you will, over time, eliminate your death-related exposure.
Against this, philosophers such as Williams and, especially forcefully, Luper and Martha Nussbaum, have argued that cultivating dependent categorical desires is part of what makes us human and renders our lives worthwhile.40 Giving up all of our dependent categorical desires might make it ill-fitting to fear death, but the resulting peace of mind comes at too steep a price—namely, by taking away substantially from the richness and value of our lives. In Williams's memorable phrases, dependent categorical desires make us “want to live more” and “propel us forward” into our lives;41 as Luper puts it, only a “rather cold-hearted and passionless” person could live without such desires.42 Nussbaum agrees, arguing that most of the things that are of value in a human life are tied to activities that are drawn out over time, and that, thereby, give rise to dependent categorical desires.43
Suppose that, on reflection, you are inclined to agree with Williams, Luper, and Nussbaum—the Epicurean ataraxia appears to you too detached. There are, then, nevertheless a number of promising ways in which you might work toward limiting, though not completely eliminating, your exposure to the threat posed by death.
First, you might work toward making your dependent categorical desires less dependent on your continued existence. Consider the charge that someone without any dependent categorical desires would be rather coldhearted. To illustrate this claim, Luper comes up with the example of an “Epicurean mother” who is concerned about “whether her children will survive” only if she “assumes that she too will survive. Her conditional desires leave her completely indifferent to [her children's] welfare if she assumes that she will die.”44 I agree with Luper that the Epicurean mother so specified exhibits a deeply unsettling pattern of concern. Luper fails to make it clear, however, that we might equally well specify a different Epicurean mother who has a categorical desire that her children should flourish, but who does not believe that this desire will be fulfilled only if she survives. This mother might reasonably believe that her children will be well cared for by other trusted guardians in the case of her demise. The general point is that you can frequently take steps to ensure that your dependent categorical desires will likely—or to a significant extent—be fulfilled even if you are no longer around. If you have a desire that your children should flourish, you can make a conscious effort to ensure that there are adults other than yourself who are healthily present in your children's lives. If, as a cancer researcher, you care greatly about curing cancer, you can keep track of your ideas and findings, ideally by working in a team where ideas and findings are continuously shared.
This is not to say, of course, that you can make all your desires completely independent of your continued existence, if you think that the claims of Williams, Nussbaum, and Luper are to the point. Where we cultivate close ties to other people, we reasonably assume that they would be devastated by our deaths, and would thus be worse-off, temporarily at the very least, if we happened to no longer be around. To cultivate intimate relationships with other people just is to play an important part in their lives, while wanting these lives to go well. Being in caring relationships therefore necessarily creates some attachment to life. Similarly, it is possible that working toward a cure for cancer imbues a cancer researcher's life with meaning and purpose only if that person considers themselves not entirely replaceable.
Second, you might be able to limit your exposure to the threat posed by death by making at least some of your dependent categorical desires conditional. For a subset of our desires, this seems appropriate. Suppose, for example, that swimming currently propels you into life: you want to keep swimming indefinitely, and you are deeply disturbed by the fact that there will be a day where your death will bring your swimming to an end. On reflection, you might agree that there is something greedy about this—it is stubbornly unaccepting of the fact that your time here on earth is limited, in a way that would seem to give rise to unnecessary anguish.45 Desiring a nice swim for each remaining day of your life seems, at least to me, a much more appropriate pattern of concern.46
In combination, these two strategies are very powerful. Where there are values at play in our dependent categorical desires that go beyond our personal enjoyment (the flourishing of one's children, say, or finding a cure for cancer), it seems quite right to aim at ensuring that these values will be promoted to some extent independently of our own survival. And where what is at stake is primarily our personal enjoyment, conditionalizing the relevant desires is appropriately accepting of our mortality.
A third and final strategy for reducing your death-related fears is to actively keep in mind that your death will not frustrate any desires you will continue to have. This strategy will be most helpful if you are a committed mental state theorist who considers dependent categorical desires prudentially irrational, and who is working toward giving them up. In such a case, you think that, on reflection, death is a harmless slow worm, and you are working toward not being startled into mistaking it for a viper. The strategy will also be of some help if you are drawn to mental state theories, but are unwilling to give up at least some of your dependent categorical desires because you think that cultivating them—somewhat paradoxically47—helps you live a maximally good life. In such a case, it is your considered opinion that death is a harmless slow worm, but you think that the benefits of non-reflectively mistaking it for a viper outweigh the costs. Finally, the strategy might help alleviate your death-related fears even if you are either drawn to desire fulfillment views or achievement views. On such views, death remains a viper even though it leads you to abandon the desires that it frustrates. Having said that, where we fear death as a frustrator of our desires, we might sometimes fear it partly because we mistakenly conceptualize the frustration of our desires as something that will lead to disappointment or sadness after we learn of what has happened. To the extent that we conceptualize death in this way, meditating on the fact that desire frustration through death will not make us feel bad might help cut our death fears to whatever size we reflectively consider appropriate.
In conclusion, the philosophical therapy to reduce our death-related fears proceeds by encouraging the “patient” to first take stock of her dependent categorical desires, and to carefully cut them to size in a second step. The dependent categorical desires that remain after this pruning exercise continue to make it fitting for the patient to fear death, but her death fears might be significantly reduced. In addition, the patient will now be aware of the source of her death fears and will be able to see how these fears are closely connected to her attachment to life, an attachment that she reflectively endorses. In this way, the patient might be less drawn toward mindlessly pursuing worldly goods in an effort to distract herself from a deep anxiety that she has trouble placing. After all, her desires, and how they give rise to death-related fears, will now be much more transparent to her.
6. Summary and Outlook
In this paper, I have argued that we fittingly fear death as a frustrator of our dependent categorical desires. To the extent that we have such desires, we fittingly fear death given our desires; to the extent that the fulfillment of such desires adds to the value of our lives, we fittingly fear death in light of the facts about what makes a person's life go well.
Throughout the ages, thinkers from diverse backgrounds have worried that our death fears mar our lives. I have suggested that we can manage our death-related fears and their possible negative consequences by first taking stock of the dependent categorical desires that we have, and by carefully pruning them in a second step.
The project that I have pursued in this paper remains importantly incomplete, as we—fittingly and ill-fittingly—fear death in more than one way. For example, in addition to fearing it as a frustrator of our desires, or quite separately from this, many of us fear death as something unknown: we are unable or unwilling to accept the assumption that a person's death will end their existence. A comprehensive therapy of our death-related fears can thus be formulated only once we have investigated all the different ways in which we tend to fear death. In addition, as not everyone seems plagued by the same death fears, philosophical therapists need to ensure that their advice can be tailored to different “fear profiles.”
A key aim of this paper has been to highlight the promise of philosophical therapy for effective altruism. To date, effective altruists have paid scant attention to the therapeutic tradition in philosophy. This might partly be due to the fact that the potential benefits of philosophical therapy are hard to quantify. On the plus side, however, philosophical therapy is not a resource-intensive endeavor, and can thus neatly complement more resource-intensive efforts at improving people's lives. All we have to do, as effective altruists who are also philosophers, is to reflect on the practical guidance that can be derived from our philosophical work and to share our ideas widely. We can do this even as dyed-in-the-wool analytic philosophers. Contrary to initial appearances, the rigorous and technical discussions that we prize might nevertheless frequently give rise to practically useful counsel, as this essay has attempted to illustrate.
Notes
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at Humboldt University of Berlin, the University of Bern, and at a workshop organized by Theron Pummer. I thank the individuals present at these occasions for the stimulating discussions that I greatly enjoyed. I also thank an anonymous referee for their helpful feedback.
In this paper, I discuss how philosophers of the Epicurean school of thought have thought about this issue (see, in particular, Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus; Lucretius, The Way Things Are). Examples of thinkers other than the Epicureans include Tibetan Buddhists (see, e.g., Rinpoche, How to Face Death), the sixteenth-century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne (Complete Works, 62–81), the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (Concept of Anxiety), the twentieth-century American anthropologist Ernest Becker (Denial of Death), and the twentieth-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger (Being and Time).
Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus; Lucretius, The Way Things Are, Book III.
For an introduction and overview, see Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski (Worm at the Core).
See, for example, Nussbaum (Therapy of Desire).
See, for example, Deonna and Teroni (The Emotions).
Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 30–31.
See, for example, Naar (“Fittingness of Emotions,” 13601–02).
See, for example, Oksenberg Rorty (“Fearing Death”). Oksenberg Rorty uses the term “functional” for “prudentially rational.”
See, for example, Long and Sedley (Hellenistic Philosophers, 121–25).
See, for example, Long and Sedley (Hellenistic Philosophers, 70–72). The Epicurean assumption that we cease to exist when we die is an assumption that most contemporary philosophers of death share. In this essay, I question this assumption only in the concluding paragraphs.
See, for example, Lucretius (The Way Things Are, Book III, lines 873–933).
Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus.
See, for example, Nagel (“Death”); Feldman (“Some Puzzles”).
See also Draper (“Disappointment, Sadness, and Death”).
See, for example, Feldman (“Some Puzzles”).
The “paradox of hedonism” claims that we tend to enjoy most net pleasure over the course of our lives if we do not aim at maximizing net pleasure, but pursue other plans and projects for their own sake instead. A committed hedonist might take the lesson behind this paradox to heart and might thus carefully cultivate their propensity for caring about things other than pleasure and pain for their own sake. If we look at Sarah through the lens of hedonism, we might speculate that something along these lines could hold true for Sarah, as well, and that her book project—adopted not for the sake of net pleasure maximization—is thus not something that she can simply cast aside once a hedonic calculus recommends that she do so.
The classical place for this is Brandt (Theory of the Good).
See, for example, Parfit (Reasons and Persons, 494) and Portmore (“Desire Fulfillment,” 28–29).
If Sarah dies without finishing her book, it seems correct to say that her death kept her from finishing her book at least in a case where she would have finished the book in the closest possible world in which her token death does not occur. See also Luper (“Posthumous Harm,” 67).
I borrow the term from Portmore (“Desire Fulfillment,” 38n8).
Achievement views are defended, for example, by Scanlon (What We Owe, 119–23) and Keller (“Welfare and the Achievement”).
This holds true at least if she would have finished the book in the closest possible world in which her token death did not occur.
I thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.
Luper-Foy, “Annihilation,” 239. See also Williams (“Makropulos Case,” 86).
See footnote 23.
See, for example, Luper-Foy (“Annihilation”); Nussbaum (Therapy of Desire, chap. 6).
Lucretius argues that it is appropriate to accept that life, like a banquet, is of limited duration. As he puts it in The Way Things Are (Book 3, lines 941–947), speaking through the voice of Nature:
In “Annihilation,” Luper refers to the first and second strategies just presented here as “Epicureanising” one's desires. He proposes to make one's death innocuous by adopting one or both of these strategies for all of one's desires once one reaches one's life expectancy. Doing it before this point would be rather foolish, as it would take the sting out of death at too high a price, namely, by detracting significantly from the potential value of our lives. As I see it, we can conditionalize or make less dependent many of our desires without flattening our lives, and doing this throughout our lives will help us keep our death fears at bay during all the different stages of our lives. Luper might well be right, however, that we do well to “Epicureanise” more of our dependent categorical desires as the likelihood that they will be thwarted by our death increases.
See endnote 23.
