The Philosophy of Death by Luper Steven

Author:Luper, Steven [Luper, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780511594809
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2009-05-27T16:00:00+00:00

Pearl Harbor was attacked on December 7, 1941.

Contrast the following propositions: There are two boxes in Joe Smith's garage.

Pearl Harbor has been attacked.

These are not eternal truths. They are true only on various occasions. For example, the second, asserted prior to 1941, is false. By contrast, even if asserted prior to 1941 it would be true that Pearl Harbor was attacked on December 7, 1941.

Feldman claims that it is eternally true that Lindsay's death was bad for her, in that it is eternally true that her life would have been intrinsically better if she had we not died when she did. He suggests that death is bad when a certain relation holds between two possible lives, and that, if this relation holds, it is an eternal truth that it holds. He also suggests that this amounts to an answer to the question, “When does Lindsay incur mortal harm?” What should we make of Feldman's response?

Well, as a solution to the timing puzzle, as we have understood it, Feldman's suggestion is quite puzzling. It is difficult to believe that, eons before her birth, all during her life, and centuries after she died, Lindsay was worse off, because of her death, than she would have been had she not died.

Several critics (including Neil Feit 2002 and Ben Bradley 2004) have argued that Feldman's response is not an answer to Epicurus' timing puzzle at all. Suppose I stubbed my toe yesterday. If we ask when the stubbing is bad for me, what exactly do we want to know? There are two possibilities. First, we might be asking: “At which times T is it true that I incurred harm at T?” The answer to this question is something like: “The stubbing harms me at all and only those times it hurt.” But there is something else we might be asking: “At what times is it true that the stubbing harms me?” Here the answer may well be: “Eternally.” That is, perhaps “the stubbing harmed me” is true no matter when it is asserted, but I incur the salient harm only while my toe throbs. The same ambiguity arises when we ask about the timing of death's harmfulness. Consider the question, “When is Lincoln's death bad for him?” The question can mean: “At which times T is it true that Lincoln incurs mortal harm at T?” But Feldman seems to take the question to mean: “When is it true that Lincoln's death is bad for him?” His answer to this question makes good sense: eternally, if ever. This is to say that death is timelessly harmful. However, according to Feldman's critics it is the first version of the question that concerns us when we ask about the timing of death's harmfulness. Yet Feldman appears to have answered the second version, not the first. Perhaps the charitable reading is that Feldman did not mean to offer a solution to the timing puzzle at all; he did not accept eternalism, and meant only to assert that death may be timelessly harmful.

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