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    It might be possible to make death not bad for us by suit... — Carmelics
    Home/Afterlife & Death
    HistoryEditSee Inverse

    It might be possible to make death not bad for us by suitably preparing ourselves.

    Afterlife & Death
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    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

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    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.If some form of preferentialism is true, then something is bad for us only if it impairs our interests (i.e., thwarts our desires).
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    • 2.By altering our desires, we could cease to have any interests that dying would impair.
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    • 3.We might 'thanatize' our desires by abandoning all desires that death might thwart and replacing them with conditionalized versions (e.g., replacing 'let my project succeed' with 'should I live on, let my project succeed').
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.Thanatizing desires does not eliminate the badness of death but merely prevents the subject from recognizing that badness, analogous to how a patient rendered incapable of feeling pain is not thereby unharmed by injury.
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    • 2.On the deprivation account (Nagel, Feldman), death is bad because it forecloses goods the person would otherwise have enjoyed, a fact that obtains independently of what desires the person currently holds.
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    • 3.A theory of welfare that makes wellbeing entirely hostage to manipulable desire-sets collapses the distinction between making one's life go well and merely arranging not to care that it goes badly.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Epictetus and the Stoics endorsed desire-modification as liberation from fear of death, yet even within that tradition Seneca acknowledged that what is extinguished by death—the rational agent itself—cannot be treated as merely one contingent interest among others.
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    • 2.The self that survives thanatization is not the same self whose death is under evaluation; by eliminating future-directed desires one has effectively ended the psychologically continuous person, making the 'preparation' itself a form of ante-mortem death.
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    Topics

    Afterlife & Death

    Related

    A theory of welfare that makes wellbeing entirely hostage to manipulable desire-...By altering our desires, we could cease to have any interests that dying would i...Epictetus and the Stoics endorsed desire-modification as liberation from fear of...If some form of preferentialism is true, then something is bad for us only if it...
    +5 moreShow less
    If we thanatize our desires, dying would not interfere with any of our remaining...On the deprivation account (Nagel, Feldman), death is bad because it forecloses ...Thanatizing desires does not eliminate the badness of death but merely prevents ...The self that survives thanatization is not the same self whose death is under e...We might 'thanatize' our desires by abandoning all desires that death might thwa...

    Similar

    If we thanatize our desires, dying would not interfere with any of our...78%Death may be bad for those who die, even if they do not experience dyi...77%Whenever death comes, it would have been good to live longer, so it is...75%We could survive indefinitely after death by arranging to have our cor...74%

    Source

    AI-extracted2/3 agreementValid
    SEP: death
    Even if death is usually bad for those of us who die, perhaps it need not be bad for us, if we prepare ourselves suitably.
    View source passageHide passage
    Even if death is usually bad for those of us who die, perhaps it need not be bad for us, if we prepare ourselves suitably. This might be possible if some form of preferentialism is true, and if, by altering our desires, we could cease to have any interests that dying would impair. For then we might be able to thanatize our desires, in this sense: we might abandon all desires that death might thwart. Among these are desires we can satisfy only if we live on for a few days, but also desires we cannot possibly satisfy within the span of a normal lifetime, and the desire for immortality itself. In...
    Extraction notes

    Validity: The premises faithfully capture the passage's conditional reasoning: if preferentialism is true and we can thanatize our desires, then death need not be bad for us, which directly supports the conclusion that suitable preparation might make death not bad for us.

    Confidence: The argument is clearly laid out in the passage as a conditional chain: if preferentialism is true and we can thanatize desires, death need not be bad for us.

    Details

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