North American Philosophical Publications Lucretian Death: Asymmetries and Agency Author(s): Stephen Hetherington Source: American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 3 (Jul., 2005), pp. 211-219 Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of the North American Philosophical Publications Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20010202 . Accessed: 23/02/2014 13:41 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . University of Illinois Press and North American Philosophical Publications are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Philosophical Quarterly. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 181.118.153.57 on Sun, 23 Feb 2014 13:41:27 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
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North American Philosophical Publications
Lucretian Death: Asymmetries and AgencyAuthor(s): Stephen HetheringtonSource: American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 3 (Jul., 2005), pp. 211-219Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of the North American PhilosophicalPublicationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20010202 .
Accessed: 23/02/2014 13:41
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
.
University of Illinois Press and North American Philosophical Publications are collaborating with JSTOR todigitize, preserve and extend access to American Philosophical Quarterly.
http://www.jstor.org
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any benefits that one might, alternatively, have received if not for beginning one's life
at that particular time.5
4.
However, Nagel is not clearly correct in de?
scribing that putative asymmetry as he does.
He treats birth as the beginning of life; and
he claims that there is almost no correlative
leeway in the precise time at which one's life
begins.6 Birth is thus to be contrasted with
death (Nagel will say): In general, there is
much greater leeway as to when one's dying can occur (and hence we have to acknowl?
edge ?3's Nagelian asymmetry). But those
claims are misleading. The leeway that there
is in one's precise time of birth might not be
so insignificant, relative to the length of the
preceding pregnancy. In numerical terms, an
extra year of life at a life's end could stand
to the preceding lifespan much as being born
a few days earlier would stand to the time
between your being conceived and your otherwise being born. For example, to die at
81 rather than at 80 is to lengthen one's life
by 1.25 percent; and to be born four days
prematurely is to shorten one's mother's
pregnancy by approximately 1.48 percent. In these relevantly relative terms, therefore,
there is not the fundamental constitutive
asymmetry between prenatal nonexistence
and posthumous nonexistence that Nagel believes there to be.
5.
Still, could Nagel strengthen his argument for that metaphysical asymmetry's obtaining,
by talking of conception rather than of birth?
Presumably, he would then be comparing
posthumous nonexistence with preconceptive nonexistence. And the possible strengthening of the argument might be due to his justifying this shift on independent Kripkean grounds.
As part of his investigation into the nature of
metaphysical modality, Saul Kripke argued that it is essential to each person to have
originated in the particular egg and sperm from which in fact she came.7 Would this
Kripkean thesis?if it is true?show that (as
Nagel claims) you could not have existed any earlier than you did?
Even that Kripkean analysis will not help
Nagel, and adapting ?4's argument explains
why that is so. Presumably, the same egg
might have been fertilized by the same sperm at a slightly different time, such as 1.5-per cent-of-one-second later. And obviously?
when considered in relation to the relevant
range of times within which that particular
egg and that particular sperm might have met
and interacted8?some such leeway in timing could be similar, in percentage terms, to the
possible leeways described in ?4. That is, the
leeway might be of a similar percentage, in
relation to the available period within which
a life could have begun via that specific egg and that specific sperm.
And thus the Lucretian challenge per?
sists?being merely postponed, not evaded,
by the Kripkean suggestion. The timing?not the material involved?remains that which
is pivotal to the Lucretian challenge. Even if
we agree that only the actual sperm and egg that initiated you could have done so (with
any different combination of egg and sperm
generating someone else), this does not es?
tablish the Nagelian?anti-Lucretian?claim
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sidered just as an agent, in principle a person can sometimes control or evade details of her
dying?details such as the time, the place, the method. It is to anything lying temporally
beyond those details?such as, notably, her
subsequently being dead?that her agency fails to extend. Hence, she cannot do any?
thing to control aspects of her being dead. It
is true that, while alive, she might be able to
control aspects of her living that will affect, for example, what her dead body will later
look like and how both it and the memory of
her will be treated by other people. But even
this would not be her controlling her being dead as such. For the state of her being dead
is present only after she has died?at which
time, she is no longer controlling anything, and (equally) nothing is still being controlled
by her.20
Thus, in a sense, a person's being dead car?
ries nothing of her?and, more specifically,
nothing of her agency?into or within it. My
being dead is beyond my reach qua agent;
your being dead is beyond you qua agent. Once a given person is dead, there is no more
that-person-agency. This remains so, even if
the dying is itself an act of agency (as occa?
sionally it is, most notoriously in some cases
of suicide).21 Once she is dead, the person qua
agent has been left behind. Correlatively, we
might even regard any instance of being dead
per se as metaphysically of a piece with any other instance of being dead per se. No one's
state of being dead will be at all different from
anyone else's. (In this sense and respect, we
merge metaphysically into each other.) And that signifies a metaphysical difference
between dying and being dead. Particular
instances of dying are personally distinc?
tive; cases of being dead are not. (Distinct instances of dying are distinct due to their
details?of time, place, method.) And in?
stances of dying at least can express or cur?
tail?affect?agency, whereas cases of being dead cannot. Accordingly, granting agency an
explanatory centrality in our attempt to un
derstand this issue allows us to leave open the
possibility that one's dying can harm one (by
harming one qua agent) even if one's being dead cannot.22 Qua agent, it can be rational
to fear losing that agency?to fear ceasing to
be what, most fundamentally in that mode, one is.23 Nevertheless, this does not entail that
it is rational, even qua agent, to fear having lost the agency or to fear having ceased to
be an agent. To have lost the agency is to
have lost the categorial basis?namely, one's
metaphysical status as an agent?upon which
it was rational to fear losing the agency in the
first place. A person can be harmed by losing the agency, by her life ending?even if she is
never harmed by having lost the agency and
by the life having ended. And the pertinence of these distinctions follows from its being the
person qua agent about whom the question of
death's possible harm ever arises.
12.
Lucretius denied only that being dead?not
that dying?could harm one. This paper has
found a way to supplement his reasoning. The supplementation includes (1) a refine?
ment of what Lucretius was noticing, which
is that there is no relevant metaphysical
asymmetry between prenatal nonexistence
and posthumous nonexistence, along with (2)
part of what Nagel was seeking to explicate, which is that there is a relevant metaphysical
asymmetry between prenatal nonexistence
and posthumous nonexistence.
Is there an insuperable tension in endorsing both (1) and (2)? Can this combination be coherent? This paper has sought to bypass that tension, by qualifying each of (1) and (2),
along the following lines. The asymmetry to
which attention should be paid is not what
Nagel claimed to describe?which concerned
the essentiality or accidentality to a person as such of her prenatal nonexistence and of
her posthumous nonexistence. Rather, the
vital asymmetry is in how those two states
are related to the person qua agent. One of
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them?via birth?gives way to the agent; but this gaining of agency as such cannot be
a harm to the agent as such. The agent?via
dying?gives way to the other of those two
states; and this losing of agency as such can
be a harm to the agent as such. Conversely, insofar as we are not agents (either prenatally or posthumously) there is indeed a Lucretian
symmetry?the one he described himself. And
there is a consequent lack of harm to us, too.
We can be harmed by death, therefore, only insofar as it can affect us as agents?which
is to say, by our dying and by our agency
thereby ending. Otherwise, insofar as we are
not agents, death?specifically, our being dead?cannot harm us. A strengthened argu?
ment for Lucretius's core conclusion is thus
derived: Being dead cannot harm one (even if dying can). This paper's agency analysis reveals what kind of harm there can be?and
what kind of harm there cannot be?in one's
death. The harm is the ending of one's ability to perform actions?to do things.24
University of New South Wales
NOTES
The editor and two referees made many very helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.
1. It is to be found in De rerum natura. See the selections in A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley, The Hel?
lenistic Philosophers, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), at p. 151.
2. For an attempt to defend the most distinctive component in Epicurus's reasoning, see Stephen Heth
erington, "Deathly Harm," American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 38 (2001), pp. 349-362.
3. And?we might wish to say, extending Lucretius's reasoning?if neither of these was or will be
bad for you when you were not, or will not be, alive, then neither of them is bad for you while you are
alive.
4. "Death," in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 1-10, at pp. 7-8. This paper's otherwise unattributed page references will be to Nagel's essay.
5. Frederik Kaufman uses a memory criterion of personal identity in order to support this strategy of
Nagel's: "An Answer to Lucretius' Argument Against the Fear of Death," Journal of Value Inquiry, vol. 29 (1995), pp. 57-64; "Death and Deprivation; Or, Why Lucretius' Symmetry Argument Fails," Australasian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 74 (1996), pp. 305-312. Kaufman's general point in "Death and Deprivation" (pp. 308-309) is that, in thinking about this issue, a psychological rather than merely biological criterion of personal identity is what matters. The suggestion to be developed in this paper is consistent with that recommendation.
6. This use of "almost" accommodates what Nagel calls "the brief margin permitted by premature labor" (p. 8).
7. For Kripke's argument concerning this example, see Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 112-113.
8. Here, for simplicity and for the sake of argument, the relevant details of timing that are involved in the actual act of sexual intercourse that brought that sperm into contact with that egg are being held constant. The same is true of the competing presence of those other sperm that that act brought into the vicinity of that egg. Otherwise?without those assumptions?there is even more leeway in when this sperm and this egg might have met and interacted. For example, it should not be forgotten that even with that same egg and same sperm, a method such as in-vitro fertilization will allow the time of
conception to be delayed greatly.
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9. This paper will therefore continue to follow Lucretius (and, for that matter, Nagel) in formulating the Lucretian challenge in terms of birth rather than those of conception.
10. Indeed, for an argument against its being true, see Stephen Hetherington, "Deathly Harm," pp. 356-358.
11. Others to have noticed this include Anthony Brueckner and John Martin Fischer, "Why is Death
Bad?" Philosophical Studies, vol. 50 (1986), pp. 213-223.
12. It is a simple asymmetry, too. Part of Nagel's worry about his own time-directed and asymmetry based deprivation analysis is "that it is too sophisticated to explain the simple difference between our
attitudes to prenatal and posthumous nonexistence" (p. 8 n.).
13. Perhaps at first it is not very much agency. Then again (and unfortunately), in many instances the
same is true of a person just before she dies, as her capacities and opportunities wither. Those are ways in which we often speak about agency. And is the concept of agency therefore gradational, so as to
accommodate these ways of speaking? Can a person's agency wax and wane in strength? This paper's
argument will not require that question to be answered.
14. The "or in recognition of our being" covers the possibility that our fear is involuntary?and therefore
not a manifestation of agency as such.
15. We can even fear an aspect of our agency itself, as it impels us towards the end of our agency.
16. Consequences of those past events might do so, as Walter Glannon would observe: "Temporal
Asymmetry, Life, and Death," American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 31 (1994), pp. 235-244, at pp. 239-241. But in that case it is these new events that are now causally active, not the previous ones.
17. Such interaction need not be initiated by her. One's being an agent can include one's being acted
upon or affected (being a subject)?so long as one has an associated capacity to act in at least one way that somehow (even if unwittingly) reflects that experience. A newly born child will generally possess some such capacity. A coma victim probably lacks it.
18. This future-directedness is metaphysical, not merely attitudinal. An agent need not be thinking
about the future in order to be acting into it. On the supposed asymmetry in people's respective attitudes
towards past, and towards future, suffering, see Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1984), at pp. 165-167. On that supposed agency, as applied to the case of death considered as a
potential future harm, see Brueckner and Fischer, "Why is Death Bad?" For criticism of their respective
arguments, see Glannon, "Temporal Asymmetry, Life, and Death," at pp. 237-238.
19. Epicurus talked of the person fs being no more. This is generally called the problem of the subject?the
conceptual difficulty of locating a continuing subject both to have been alive and, subsequently, to be
harmed by being dead. If this paper is right, Epicurus's challenge might usefully be renamed?so as to
be referred to instead as the problem of the agent.
20. Her agency, while ever it exists, can set in motion various actions which will?after her dying?result in her legal will and her 'dying wishes,' say, being acted upon. But whenever those actions are occur?
ring, she is not thereby controlling them. Her agency, while she is alive, is necessary without being sufficient for such posthumous occurrences.
21. "Doesn't your treating the loss of agency as being tantamount to the loss of life commit you to the
implausible idea that a person who is placed into an irreversible coma?thereby losing all agency?is, in effect, dead? Doesn't this also commit you to the implausible claim that such a person is not harmed
by being in a coma?" It is common to say that there is harm in such a case. But suppose we know with
total certainty that a particular person's coma is irreversible. And suppose that another person?upon
dying?is neither buried nor cremated, instead remaining in a bed, connected to the same sort of equip? ment as is keeping the coma victim both alive and visibly whole (non-decayed). Should we regard
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these two people as being in substantially different states? It is not obvious that we should. The person in the coma is in a state of living death (it might be said, and often is, perhaps regrettably reflecting some possible conceptual confusion and at least indecision). There is harm insofar as there is living; yet there is no harm insofar as there is a state of being dead; which, if either, is it to be? Do we know? This paper's argument entails that entering a coma can be harmful, but that being in a coma is harmful
only insofar as the person is still an agent.
22. It is manifest that painful, or unwanted and noticed, dying can harm one. But this paper is talking just about dying that is painless, and unexpected or unannounced?while asking whether that sort of
dying can harm one. For an answer related to the one being advocated here, see Stephen Hetherington, Reality? Knowledge? Philosophy! (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), pp. 59-60.
23. That fundamentality is why this paper's analysis focuses upon agency in particular, from among the various other benefits that there can be in living. Qua agent, a person can fear dying. Qua lover-of chocolate-cakes or qua writer-of-philosophy, too, she can fear dying. In general, however, agency is more
explanatorily fundamental to people's attitudes to death than is chocolate-cake-adoration or a desire to
continue writing philosophy. A person will rationally fear dying, because it will end her capacity to do or experience X, only insofar as she is an X-capable agent in the first place. Agency is the underlying categorial feature whose presence allows these more specific features to flourish. (In any case, this paper's agency analysis does not imply that only agency per se, abstracted from its potential exemplifications, reveals to us that dying can?while being dead cannot?harm one. The agency analysis implies that, if
anything more specific reveals this, then agency as such also does so. Whenever it is talking generally of agency, this paper's analysis may also be applied to particular actions or experiences, so long as these are understood to be manifestations of agency per se. Agency as such is just the pertinent explanatory category or determinable.)
24. Can other animals, too, be harmed in that way by dying? Yes, insofar as they have agency. Beyond that observation, though, the agency analysis is leaving this open for now (just as the corresponding question is standardly left open by discussions of the deprivation analysis).
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