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    A person may be benefitted or harmed by things that happe... — Carmelics
    Home/Afterlife & Death
    HistoryEditSee Inverse

    A person may be benefitted or harmed by things that happen while she is dead (i.e., posthumous harm exists).

    Afterlife & Death
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    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.A man's life includes much that does not take place within the boundaries of his life.
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    • 2.There is a simple account of what is wrong with breaking a deathbed promise: it is an injury to the dead man.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Harm requires a subject who can experience or have interests frustrated at the time the harmful event occurs.
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    • 2.A deceased person lacks both sentience and active interests, and thus cannot constitute a subject of harm at any post-mortem moment.
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    • 3.Therefore, posthumous events may wrong the living (who held relational expectations) without harming the dead person herself.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Epicurus's symmetry argument establishes that the pre-natal and post-mortem states are relevantly identical: in neither does the person exist to be affected.
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    • 2.If deprivation before birth does not harm the non-existent person, there is no principled asymmetry that makes deprivation after death harmful to the deceased.
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    Afterlife & Death

    Related

    A deceased person lacks both sentience and active interests, and thus cannot con...A man's life includes much that does not take place within the boundaries of his...Epicurus's symmetry argument establishes that the pre-natal and post-mortem stat...Harm requires a subject who can experience or have interests frustrated at the t...
    +3 moreShow less
    If deprivation before birth does not harm the non-existent person, there is no p...There is a simple account of what is wrong with breaking a deathbed promise: it ...Therefore, posthumous events may wrong the living (who held relational expectati...

    Similar

    Posthumous events can harm their victims (i.e., posthumous harm is pos...87%Posthumous harm occurs when posthumous events change the value of a pe...86%A posthumous event cannot be intrinsically bad for the person because ...86%A posthumous event cannot be extrinsically (overall) bad for her becau...85%

    Source

    AI-extracted3/3 agreementValid
    SEP: death
    Nagel (1970)
    View source passageHide passage
    The belief Aristotle reported in this passage is that a person may be benefitted or harmed by things that happen while she is dead. Nagel (1970, p. 66) agrees; drawing upon his indefinitist approach he says that “a man's life includes much that does not take place within the boundaries … of his life” and that “there is a simple account of what is wrong with breaking a deathbed promise. It is an injury to the dead man.” If something that occurs while a person is dead is bad for her, let us say that it is responsible for posthumous harm. (But this way of speaking is potentially misleading, as th...
    Extraction notes

    Validity: The passage explicitly attributes these premises to Nagel as support for the conclusion (originally reported by Aristotle) that a person may be benefitted or harmed by things that happen while she is dead, and the premises do rationally support the conclusion by establishing that a person's interests extend beyond their lifetime and that violating those interests constitutes an injury.

    Confidence: The argument is clearly attributed to Nagel and explicitly stated in the text.

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit