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    To die is to lose the capacity to engage in vital activit... — Carmelics
    Home/Afterlife & Death
    HistoryEditSee Inverse

    To die is to lose the capacity to engage in vital activities.

    Afterlife & Death
    ?Rate how convincing each reason is below to see the overall strength.
    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.Being alive consists in having the capacity to engage in vital activities.
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    • 2.Death is the loss of this capacity.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Lucretius and Epicurus argued death is not a state the subject enters but a permanent absence of any subject to whom loss could accrue.
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    • 2.If death is the loss of capacity, there must be a persisting subject who undergoes that loss, but the very cessation of vital processes eliminates the subject who could be said to have lost anything.
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    • 3.Fred Feldman's deprivationism requires that death be bad for the one who dies, yet the loss-of-capacity account conflates the process of dying with the state of being dead, smuggling in a subject where none exists.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Persistent vegetative state patients lack capacity for vital activities yet are not classified as dead by most philosophical and medical criteria.
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    • 2.If loss of capacity for vital activities were sufficient for death, we would be committed to the counterintuitive view that deeply comatose patients are already dead.
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    Afterlife & Death

    Related

    Being alive consists in having the capacity to engage in vital activities.Death is the loss of this capacity.Fred Feldman's deprivationism requires that death be bad for the one who dies, y...If death is the loss of capacity, there must be a persisting subject who undergo...
    +3 moreShow less
    If loss of capacity for vital activities were sufficient for death, we would be ...Lucretius and Epicurus argued death is not a state the subject enters but a perm...Persistent vegetative state patients lack capacity for vital activities yet are ...

    Similar

    Being dead consists in unviability (the loss of the capacity to deploy...82%To cease to be alive is to die.79%When we say that something is dead, we mean to emphasize that the capa...79%Being alive consists in having the capacity to engage in vital activit...79%

    Source

    AI-extracted3/3 agreementValid
    SEP: death
    loss of life account of death
    View source passageHide passage
    It is one thing to have the capacity to engage in vital activities and another actually to engage in them, just as there is a difference between having the ability to run and actually running. Being alive seems to involve the former. It consists in having the relevant capacity. To die is to lose this capacity. We can call this the loss of life account of death.
    Extraction notes

    Validity: The premises are directly stated in the passage and logically support the conclusion, since if being alive consists in having the capacity to engage in vital activities, then dying (ceasing to be alive) is losing that capacity.

    Confidence: High confidence; this follows directly from the account presented.

    Details

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