Killing coiled and straight snakes

Suppose a woman crushes the head of a very long serpent. If the snake all dies instantly when its head is crushed, then in some reference frame the tail of the snake dies before the woman crushes the head, which seems wrong. So it seems we should not say the snake dies instantly.

I am not talking about the fact that the tail can still wiggle a significant amount of time after the head is crushed, or so I assume. That’s not life. What makes a snake be alive is having a snake substantial form. Death is the departure of the form. If the tail of the headless snake wiggles, that’s just a chunk of matter wiggling without a snake form.

What’s going on? Presumably it’s that metaphysical death—the separation of form from body—propagates from the crushed head to the rest of the snake, and it propagates at most at the speed of light. After all, the separation is a genuine causal process, and we are supposed to think that genuine causal processes happen at the speed of light or less.

So we get a constraint: a part of the snake cannot be dead before light emitted from the head-crushing event could reach the part. But it is also plausible that as soon as the light can reach the part, the part is dead. For a headless snake is dead, and as soon as the light from the head-crushing event can reach a part, the head-crushing event is in the absolute past of the part, and so the part is a part of a headless snake in every reference frame. Thus the part is dead.

So death propagates to the snake exactly at the speed of light from the head-crushing, it seems. Moreover, it does this not along the snake but in the shortest distance—that’s what the argument of the previous paragraph suggests. That means that a snake that’s tightly coiled into a ball dies faster than one that is stretched out when the head is crushed. Moreover, if you have a snake that is rolled into the shape of the letter C, and the head is crushed, the tail dies before the middle of the snake dies. That’s counterintuitive, but we shouldn’t expect reality to always be intuitive.

Aquinas' argument for the immortality of the soul

Aquinas argues that because the human soul has a proper operation—abstract thought—that does not depend on the body, the soul would survive the destruction of the body.

I’ve never quite understood this argument. It seems to show that there could be a point to the soul surviving the destruction of the body, but that doesn’t show that it will.

It seems that by the same token one could say that because my fingers have an operation independent of my toes, my fingers would survive the destruction of the toes. But that need not be true. I could simultaneously have my toes and fingers crushed, and the fingers’ having an operation independent of the toes would do nothing to save them. In fact, in most cases, fingers perish at the same time as toes do. For in most, though not all, human lives, fingers perish when a person dies, and the toes do so as well. So the argument can’t be that strong.

Still, on reflection, there may be something we can learn from the fingers and toes analogy. We shouldn’t expect the fingers to perish simply as a metaphysical consequence of my toes perishing. By analogy, then, we shouldn’t expect the soul to perish simply as a metaphysical consequence of the body perishing. That’s not the immortality of the soul, but it’s some progress in that direction. After all, the main reason for thinking the soul to perish at death is precisely because one thinks this is a metaphysical consequence of the body perishing.

And I am not denying that there are good arguments for the immortality of the human soul. I think there may be an argument from proper operation that makes even more progress towards immortality, but I’ll leave that for another occasion. Moreover, I think the immortality of the human soul follows from the existence of God and the structure of human flourishing.

Improving the Epicurean argument for the harmlessness of death

The famous Epicurean argument that death (considered as leading to nonexistence) is not a harm is that death doesn’t harm one when one is alive and it doesn’t harm one when one is dead, since the nonexistent cannot be harmed.

However, the thesis that the nonexistent cannot be harmed is questionable: posthumous infamy seems to be a harm.

But there’s a neat way to fix this gap in the Epicurean argument. Suppose Bob lives 30 years in an ordinary world, and Alice lives a very similar 30 years, except that in her world time started with her existence and ended with her death. Thus, literally, Alice is always alive—she is alive at every time. But notice that the fact that the existence of everything else ends with Alice does not make Alice any better off than Bob! Thus, if death is a harm to Bob, it is a harm to Alice. But even if it is possible for the nonexistent to be harmed, Alice cannot be harmed at a time at which she doesn’t exist—because there is no time at which Alice doesn’t exist.

Hence, we can run a version of the Epicurean argument without the assumption that the nonexistent cannot be harmed.

I am inclined to think that the only satisfactory way out of the argument, especially in the case of Alice, is to adopt eternalism and say that death is a harm without being a harm at any particular time. What is a harm to Alice is that her life has an untimely shortness to it—a fact that is not tied to any particular time.

The Epicurean argument on death

The Epicurean argument is that death considered as cessation of existence does us no harm, since it doesn’t harm us when we are alive (as we are not dead then) and it doesn’t harm us when we are dead (since we don’t exist then to be harmed).

Consider a parallel argument: It is not a harm to occupy too little space—i.e., to be too small. For the harm of occupying too little space doesn’t occur where we exist (since that is space we occupy) and it doesn’t occur where we don’t exist (since we’re not there). The obvious response is that if I am too small, then the whole of me is harmed by not occupying more space. Similarly, then, if death is cessation of existence, and I die, then the whole of me is harmed by not occupying more time.

Here’s another case. Suppose that a flourishing life for humans contains at least ten years of conversation while Alice only has five years of conversation over her 80-year span of life. When has Alice been harmed? Nowhen! She obviously isn’t harmed by the lack of conversation during the five years of conversation. But neither is she harmed at any given time during the 75 years that she is not conversing. For if she is harmed by the lack of conversation at any given time during those 75 years, she is harmed by the lack of conversation during all of them—they are all on par, except maybe infancy which I will ignore for simplicity. But she’s only missing five years of conversation, not 75. She isn’t harmed over all of the 75 years.

There are temporal distribution goods, like having at least ten years of conversation, or having a broad variety of experiences, or falling in love at least once. These distribution goods are not located at times—they are goods attached to the whole of the person’s life. And there are distribution bads, which are the opposites of the temporal distribution goods. If death is the cessation of existence, it is one of these.

I wonder, though, whether it is possible for a presentist to believe in temporal distribution goods. Maybe. If not, then that’s too bad for the presentist.

Brain snatching is not a model of life after death

Van Inwagen infamously suggested the possibility that at the moment of death God snatches a core chunk of our brain, transports it to a different place, replaces it with a fake chunk of brain, and rebuilds the body around the transported chunk.

I think that, were van Inwagen’s suggestion is correct, it would be correct to say that we die. If not, then it is a seriously problematic view given the Christian commitment that people do, in fact, die. Hence van Inwagen's model is not a model of life after death.

Argument: If in the distant future all of a person’s body was destroyed in an accident except for a surving core chunk, and medical technology had progressed so much that it could regrow the rest of the body from that chunk, I think we would not say that the medical technology resurrected the person, but that it prevented the person’s death.

Objection: The word “death” gets its meaning ostensively from typical cases we label as cases of “death”. In these cases, the heart stops, the parts of the brain observable to us stop having electrical activity, etc. What we mean by “death” is what happens in these cases when this stuff happens. If van Inwagen’s suggestion is correct, then what happens in these cases is the snatching of a core chunk. Hence if van Inwagen’s suggestion is correct, then death is divine snatching of a core chunk of the brain, and we do in fact die.

Responses: First, if death is divine snatching of a core chunk of the brain, then jellyfish and trees don’t die, because they don’t have a brain. I suppose, though, one might say that “death” is understood analogously between jellyfish and humans, and it is human death that is a divine snatching of a core chunk of the brain.

Second, it seems obvious that if God had chosen not to snatch a core chunk of Napoleon’s brain, and allowed Napoleon’s body to rot completely, then Napoleon would be dead. Hence, not even the death of a human is identical to a divine snatching.

Third, I think it is an important part of the concept of death is that death is something that is in common between humans and other organisms. People, dogs, jellyfish, and trees all die. We should have an account of death common between these. The best story I know is that death is the destruction of the body. And the van Inwagen story doesn’t have that. So it’s not a story about death.

Yet another argument against physician assisted suicide

Years ago, I read a clever argument against physician assisted suicide that held that medical procedures need informed consent, and informed consent requires that one be given relevant scientific data on what will happen to one after a procedure. But there is no scientific data on what happens to one after death, so informed consent of the type involved in medical procedures is impossible.

I am not entirely convinced by this argument, but I think it does point to a reason why helping to kill a patient is not an appropriate medical procedure. An appropriate medical procedure is one aiming at producing a medical outcome by scientifically-supported means. In the case of physician assisted suicide, the outcome is presumably something like respite from suffering. Now, we do not have scientific data on whether death causes respite from suffering. Seriously held and defended non-scientific theories about what happens after death include:

1. death is the cessation of existence

2. after death, existence continues in a spiritual way in all cases without pain

3. after death, existence continues in a spiritual way in some cases with severe pain and in other cases without pain

4. after death, existence continues in another body, human or animal.

The sought-after outcome, namely respite from severe pain, is guaranteed in cases (a), (b) and (d). However, first, evidence for preferring these three hypotheses to hypothesis (b) is not scientific but philosophical or theological in nature, and hence should not be relied on by the medical professional as a medical professional in predicting the outcome of the procedure. Second, even on hypotheses (b) and (d), the sought-after outcome is produced by a metaphysical process that goes beyond the natural processes that are the medical professional’s tools of the trade. On those hypotheses, the medical professional’s means for assuring improvement of the patient’s subjective condition relies on, say, a God or some nonphysical reincarnational process.

One might object that the physician does not need to judge between after-life hypotheses like (a)–(d), but can delegate that judgment to the patient. But a medical professional cannot so punt to the patient. If I go to my doctor asking for a prescription of some specific medication, saying that I believe it will help me with some condition, he can only permissibly fulfill my request if he himself has medical evidence that the medication will have the requisite effect. If I say that an angel told me that ivermectin will help me with Covid, the doctor should ignore that. The patient rightly has an input into what outcome is worth seeking (e.g., is relief from pain worth it if it comes at the expense of mental fog) and how to balance risks and benefits, but the doctor cannot perform a medical procedure based on the patient’s evaluation of the medical evidence, except perhaps in the special case where the patient has relevant medical or scientific qualifications.

Or imagine that a patient has a curable fracture. The patient requests physician assisted suicide because the patient has a belief that after death they will be transported to a different planet, immediately given a new, completely fixed body, and will lead a life there that is slightly happier than their life on earth. A readily curable condition like that does not call for physician assisted suicide on anyone’s view. But if there is no absolute moral objection to killing as such and if the physician is to punt to the patient on spiritual questions, why not? On the patient’s views, after all, death will yield an instant cure to the fracture, while standard medical means will take weeks.

Furthermore, the medical professional should not fulfill requests for medical procedures which achieve their ends by non-medical means. If I go to a surgeon asking that my kidney be removed because Apollo told me that if I burn one of my kidneys on his altar my cancer will be cured, the surgeon must refuse. First, as noted in the previous paragraph, the surgeon cannot punt to the patient the question of whether the method will achieve the stated medical goal. Second, as also noted, even if the surgeon shares the patient’s judgment (the surgeon thinks Apollo appeared to her as well), the surgeon is lacking scientific evidence here. Third, and this is what I want to focus on here, while the outcome (no cancer) is medical, the means (sacrificing a kidney) are not medical.

Only in the case of hypothesis (a) can one say that the respite from severe pain is being produced by physical means. But the judgment that hypothesis (a) is true would be highly controversial (a majority of people in the US seem to reject the hypothesis), and as noted is not scientific.

Admittedly, in cases (b)–(d), the medical method as such does likely produce a respite from the particular pain in question. But that a respite from a particular pain is produced is insufficient to make a medical procedure appropriate: one needs information that some other pain won’t show up instead.

Note that this is not an argument against euthanasia in general (which I am also opposed to on other grounds), but specifically an argument against medical professionals aiding killing.

The inappropriateness of matter explanation of death

A standard Aristotelian explanation of when an organism dies—when its form separates from the body—is that this happens precisely when the organism’s body is no longer “fit” for the form, say because it completely fails to support the basic functions of the type of organism that the form specifies.

If I am right in my series of posts about pointy beginnings and ends (starting with this one), this is a problematic idea. For according to the arguments in the posts, in almost every reference frame, towards the very end of my life, my form (which is my soul) informs a tiny subatomic bit of matter. But no subatomic piece of my matter is supportive of the distinctive functioning of a human being: it is equally supportive of an oak tree, a frog, a human, or just a particle. If I survive until a moment when I am reduced to such a tiny organism, then the “fitness” criterion seems rather meaningless or at best trivial—for as far as this criterion goes, I could survive even if everything was destroyed in me other than a subatomic piece of my left little toe, since the subatomic pieces of my left little toe are no different from the subatomic pieces of any other part of me.

I still suspect that fitness of the body for the form plays some sort of a role in determining the time of death. Plausibly the causal powers of an organism, grounded in the form, are such that when the body stops being capable of supporting the functioning of the organism, the organism’s power to sustain its existence starts to fade, and the organism shrinks (as per my pointiness posts) and dies. However that shrinking is gradual, and not necessitated simply by the unfitness of the matter, but by the unfitness of the matter and the form’s causal powers which explain how quickly the unfitness of the matter is followed by death.

But maybe there is a way out of this argument using this line of thought.

A Thomistic argument for the possibility of an afterlife for animals

1. Accidents are more intimately dependent on substance than substantial forms on matter.

2. If (1) is true and God can make accidents survive without the substance, then God can make forms survive without matter.

3. If God can make forms survive without matter, then God can ensure life after death for animals by making their forms survive and restoring their matter.

4. God can make accidents survive without the substance.

5. So, God can ensure life after death for animals.

The most controversial claim here is (4), but that follows from the Thomistic account of the transsubstantiation.

Of course, there is a great gap between the possibility of an afterlife for an animal and its actuality. And the above argument works just as well for plants and fungi.

Pascal's Wager for humans at death's door (i.e., all of us)

Much of the contemporary analytic discussion of Pascal’s Wager has focused on technical questions about how to express Pascal’s Wager formally in a decision-theoretic framework and what to do with it when that is done. And that’s interesting and important stuff. But a remark one of my undergrads made today has made think about the Wager more existentially (and hence in a way closer to Pascal, I guess). Suppose our worry about the Wager is that we’re giving up the certainty of a comfortable future secular life for a very unlikely future supernatural happiness, so that our pattern of risk averseness makes us reject the Wager. My student noted that in this case things will look different if we reflect on the fact that we are all facing the certainty of death. We are all doomed to face that hideous evil.

Let me expand on this thought. Suppose that I am certain to die in an hour. I can spend that hour repenting of my grave sins and going to Mass or I can play video games. Let’s suppose that the chance of Christianity being right is pretty small. But I am facing death. Things are desperate. If I don’t repent, I am pretty much guaranteed to lose my comfortable existence forever in an hour, whether by losing my existence forever if there is no God or by losing my comfort forever if Christianity is right. There is one desperate hope, and the cost of that is adding an hour’s loss of ultimately unimportant pleasures to the infinite loss I am already facing. It sure seems rational to go for it.

Now for most of us, death is several decades away. But what’s the difference between an hour and several decades in the face of eternity?

I think there are two existential ways of thinking that are behind this line of thought. First, that life is very short and death is at hand. Second, given our yearning for eternity, a life without eternal happiness is of little value, and so more or less earthly pleasure is of but small significance.

Not everyone thinks in these ways. But I think we should. We are all facing the hideous danger of eternally losing our happiness—if Christianity is right, because of hell, and if naturalism is right, because death is the end. That danger is at hand: we are all about to die in the blink of an eye. Desparate times call for desparate measures. So we should follow Pascal’s advice: pray, live the Christian life, etc.

The above may not compel if the probability of Christianity is too small. But I don’t think a reasonable person who examines the evidence will think it’s that small.

Ill-suited matter, form, and immortality

A question I haven’t seen explored much by contemporary neo-Aristotelian metaphysics is that of matter ill-suited to the form. Is it metaphysically possible for a bunch of molecules arranged like a normal oak tree to have the form of a pig? It would be, of course, a very unfortunate pig. Or is some minimal amount of match between the actual arrangement of the molecules and the form needed?

On light-weight neo-Aristotelianism, on which forms are simply structural properties, the answer has got to be negative.

But on heavy-weight neo-Aristotelianism, on which forms are irreducible entities, it seems like there should be no such restrictions. Why couldn’t God unite the form of a pig with a body as of an oak tree, or the form of an oak tree with a body as of a human?

However, supposing that we take such a liberal view on which there is no such thing as matter metaphysically incompatible with a form (presumably pace historical Aristotelians), we then have a puzzle. If it would be metaphysically possible for a pig form to be united to a bunch of organic gases, why is it that when pigs are vaporized, they (we assume) invariably die? Here is my story. Assume for simplicity time is discrete. At each time t, a pig—in virtue of its form—has a causal power to continue existing at the next time. But causal powers have activation conditions. The activation condition for the causal power to continue existing at the next time is an appropriate arrangement of the pig’s body. When the pig’s body becomes so distorted that this activation condition is no longer satisfies, the pig loses the power to go on living. And so it dies. However, of course, God could make it keep on living by a miracle: a miracle can supply what the causal powers of a thing are incapable of.

This account has one somewhat implausible prediction. Suppose that some powerful being instantaneously scatters the molecules of an ordinary pig across the galaxy, so that at t₁ we have an ordinary pig and at the next time, t₂, the pig molecules are scattered. Because at t₁ the pig has a causal power of continuing to exist conditionally on its molecules being appropriately arranged at t₁, and this condition is indeed satisfies at t₁, the pig will live one moment in scattered condition at t₂—and then perish at the next moment, t₃.

On this account, external causes do not directly destroy an object. Rather, they destroy the activation condition for the object’s power to continue existing. When that activation condition is destroyed, the object (barring a miracle) ceases to exist. But it has that one last existential hurrah before it falls into nonbeing.

Does it follow that on a heavy-weight Aristotelianism with my story about death, a pig metaphysically could survive the annihilation of its body? I am not sure, but I am inclined to think so. Indeed, I am inclined to think that if we had a normal pig at t₁, and then at t₂ the matter of the pig were annihilated, the pig would still exist—reduced to an abnormal immateriality—for that one instant of t₂, and then, barring a second miracle, it would slide into non-being at t₃.

What about us? Well, Aquinas argues for our soul’s natural immortality on the grounds that the human soul has a proper operation that does not depend on the matter, namely pure thought. I have never before been impressed by the move from a proper operation independent of matter to natural immortality, but in my above (neo-Aristotelian but not very Thomistic) setting I see it having significant force. First, we have this question: What are the activation conditions for the human’s power-to-continue-existing? It makes sense that for a being whose only non-existential operations are material, the activation conditions should be purely material. But if a being has a proper operation not dependent on the matter, then it makes perfect sense for the activation conditions of its power-to-continue-existing not to include material conditions. In fact, something stronger can be said. It seems absurd for a thing to have a power to continue thinking whose activation conditions outstrip its power to continue existing. It would be like a power to play soccer without a power to move. So, it seems, if Aquinas is right that we have an immaterial operation, then we have the power to continue existing even absent a body. Of course, God can stop cooperating with any power we have, and if he stopped cooperating with our power-to-continue-existing, then we would stop existing (unless God miraculously sustained us in existence independently of that power!), but naturally we would continue to exist. Assuming, of course, Thomas is right about us having a proper operation that does not depend on matter, which is a different question.

(And unlike Thomas, I think we have immortality, not just our souls.)

Aquinas and Descartes on substance dualism

Roughly, Aquinas thinks of a substance as something that:

1. is existentially independent of other things, and

2. is complete in its nature.

There is a fair amount of work needed to spell out the details of 1 and 2, and that goes beyond my exegetical capacities. But my interest is in structural points. Things that satisfy (1), Aquinas calls “subsistent beings”. Thus, all substances are subsistent beings, but the converse is not true, because Aquinas thinks the rational soul is a subsistent being and not a substance.

Descartes, on the other hand, understands substance solely in terms of (1).

Now, historically, it seems to be Descartes and not Thomas who set the agenda for discussions of the view called “substance dualism”. Thus, it seems more accurate to think of substance dualists as holding to a duality of substance in Descartes’ sense of substance than in Aquinas’.

But if we translate this to Thomistic vocabulary, then it seems we get:

3. A “substance dualist” in the modern sense of the term is someone who thinks there are two subsistent beings in the human being.

And now it looks like Aquinas himself is a substance dualist in this sense. For Aquinas thinks that there are two subsistent beings in Socrates: one of them is Socrates (who is a substance in the Thomistic sense of the word) and the other is Socrates’ soul (which is a merely subsistent being). To make it sound even more like substance dualism, note that Thomas thinks that Socrates is an animal and animals are bodies (as I have learned from Christopher Tomaszewski, there are two senses of body: one is for the material substance as a whole and the other is for the matter; it is body in the sense of the material substance that Socrates is, not body in the sense of matter). Thus, one of these subsistent beings or substances-in-the-Cartesian-sense is a body and the other is a soul, just as on standard Cartesian substance dualism.

But of course there are glaring difference between Aquinas’ dualism and typical modern substance dualisms. First, and most glaringly, one of the two subsistent beings or Cartesian substances on Aquinas’s view is a part of the other: the soul is a part of the human substance. On all the modern substance dualisms I know of, neither substance is a part of the other. Second, of the two subsistent beings or Cartesian substances, it is the body (i.e., the material substance) that Aquinas identifies Socrates with. Aquinas is explicit that we are not souls. Third, for Aquinas the body depends for its existence on the soul—when the soul departs from the body, the body (as body, though perhaps not as matter) perishes (while on the other hand, the soul depends on the matter for its identity).

Now, let’s move to Descartes. Descartes’ substance dualism is widely criticized by Thomists. But when Thomists criticize Descartes for holding to a duality of substances, there is a danger that they are understanding substance in the Thomistic sense. For, as we saw, if we understand substance in the Cartesian sense, then Aquinas himself believes in a duality of substances (but with important structural differences). Does Descartes think there is a duality of substances in the Thomistic sense? That is not clear to me, and may depend on fine details of exactly how the completeness in nature (condition (2) above) is understood. It seems at least in principle open to Descartes to think that the soul is incomplete in its nature without the body or that the body is incomplete in its nature without the soul (the pineal gland absent the soul sure sounds incomplete) or that each is incomplete without the other.

So, here is where we are at this point: When discussing Aquinas, Descartes and substance dualism we need to be very careful whether we understand substance in the Thomistic or the Cartesian sense. If we take the Cartesian sense, both thinkers are substance dualists. If we take the Thomistic sense, Aquinas clearly is not, but it is also not clear that Descartes is. There are really important and obvious structural differences between Thomas and Descartes here, but they should not be seen as differences in the number of substances.

And here is a final exegetical remark about Aquinas. Aquinas’ account of the human soul seems carefully engineered to make the soul be the sort of thing—namely, a subsistent being—that can non-miraculously survive in the absence of the substance—the human being—that it is normally a part of. This makes it exegetically probable that Aquinas believed that the soul does in fact survive in the absence of the human being after death. And thus we have some indirect evidence that, in contemporary terminology, Aquinas is a corruptionist: that he thinks we do not survive death though our souls do (but we come back into existence at the resurrection). For if he weren’t a corruptionist, his ontology of the soul would be needlessly complex, since the soul would not need to survive without a human being if the human being survived death.

And indeed, I think Aquinas’s ontology is needlessly complex. It is simpler to have the soul not be a subsistent being. This makes the soul incapable of surviving death in the absence of the human being. And that makes for a better view of the afterlife—the human being survives the loss of the matter, and the soul survives but only as part of the human being.

An argument that the moment of death is at most epistemically vague

Assume vagueness is not epistemic. This seems a safe statement:

1. If it is vaguely true that the world contains severe pain, then definitely the world contains pain.

But now take the common philosophical view that the moment of death is vague, except in the case of instant annihilation and the like. The following story seems logically possible:

2. Rover the dog definitely dies in severe pain, in the sense that it is definitely true that he is in severe pain for the last hours of his life all the way until death, which comes from his owner humanely putting him out of his misery. The moment of death is, however, vague. And definitely nothing other than Rover feels any pain that day, whether vaguely or definitely.

Suppose that t₁ is a time when it is vague whether Rover is still alive or already dead. Then:

3. Definitely, if Rover is alive at t₁, he is in severe pain at t₁. (By 2)

4. Definitely, if Rover is not alive at t₁, he is not in severe pain at t₁. (Uncontroversial)

5. It is vague whether Rover is alive at t₁. (By 2)

6. Therefore, it is vague whether Rover is in severe pain at t₁. (By 3-5)

7. Therefore, it is vague whether the world contains severe pain at t₁. (By 2 and 6, as 2 says that Rover is definitely the only candidate for pain)

8. Therefore, definitely the world contains pain at t₁. (By 1 and 7)

9. Therefore, definitely Rover is in pain at t₁. (By 2 and 8, as before)

10. Therefore, definitely Rover is alive at t₁. (Contradiction to 5!)

So, we cannot accept story 2. Therefore, if principle 1 is true, it is not possible for something with a vague moment of death to definitely die in severe pain, with death definitely being the only respite.

In other words, it is impossible for vagueness in the moment of death and vagueness in the cessation of severe pain to align perfectly. In real life, of course, they probably don’t align perfectly: unconsciousness may precede death, and it may be vague whether it does so or not. But it still seems possible for them to align perfectly, and to do so in a case where the moment of death is vague—assuming, of course, that moments of death are the sort of thing that can be vague. (For a special case of this argument, assume functionalism. We can imagine a being of such a sort that the same functioning constitutes it as existent as constitutes it as conscious, and then vagueness in what counts as functioning will translate into perfectly correlated vagueness in the moment of death and the cessation of severe pain.)

The conclusion I’d like to draw from this argument is that moments of death are not the sort of thing that can be non-epistemically vague.

Note that 1 is not plausible on an epistemic account of vagueness. For the intuition behind 1 depends on the idea that vague cases are borderline cases, and a borderline case of severe pain will be a definite case of pain, just as a borderline case of extreme tallness will be a definite case of tallness. But if vagueness is epistemic, then vague cases aren't borderline cases: they are just cases we can't judge about. And there is nothing absurd about the idea that we might not be able to judge whether there is severe pain happening and not able to judge whether there is any pain happening either.

Faith and fear

Every so often I worry that my fear of death (which, I have to confess, is more a fear of non-existence than a fear of hell) shows that I lack faith in the afterlife. I think this is a mistaken worry.

I regularly climb our 53-foot climbing wall. One can “rainbow” climb, using whatever holds one sees fit, or one can follow a route, with a broad range of route difficulties. On the easiest routes, at least if I am not tired and am wearing climbing shoes, I know I will succeed. On the hardest routes, I know I would fail. Of course I always use proper safety equipment (rope belay, and there are also mats around the base), and usually I am not scared, because on the basis of good empirical data I trust the safety setup.

Now imagine that all the safety equipment was gone, but that to save someone’s life I needed to climb to the top. Once at the top, I’d be safe, let’s suppose (maybe there would be an auto-belay there that I could clip into for the descent). I could choose the side of the wall and the holds. Without safety equipment, I would be terrified. (The mere thought experiment literally makes my hands sweat.) But you could would be quite correct in telling me: “Alex, you know you will succeed.”

Here’s the simple point. When much is at stake, knowledge of success is compatible with great fear. But if knowledge is compatible with great fear, why shouldn’t faith be as well?

Evidence that I am dead

I just got evidence that I am dead, in an email that starts:

Dear expired [organization] member,

You might think this is pretty weak evidence. Maybe "expired" doesn't mean "dead" here. But the email continues:

Thank you for your past support of [organization]. Your membership has recently expired, and we would like to take this opportunity to urge you to renew your membership.

But last year I acquired a life membership...

Sorry, I couldn't resist sharing this.

Death, harm and time

For the sake of this post, stipulate death to be permanent cessation of existence. Epicurus famously argues that death is not a harm to one, because the living aren’t harmed by death while the dead do not exist.

As formulated, the argument appears to require presentism—the view that only presently existing things exist. If eternalism or growing block is true, the dead would exist, albeit pastly. This would give us a nice little argument against presentism:

1. If presentism is true, the Epicurean argument is sound. (Premise)

2. The conclusion of the Epicurean argument—namely, that death is not a harm—is absurd. (Premise)

3. So, presentism is false.

But things aren’t quite so simple, because one can reconstruct an Epicurean argument without presentism.

4. One is intrinsically harmed by x iff there is a time t at which one is intrinsically harmed by x. (Premise)

5. One is intrinsically harmed at t by x only if one exists at t. (Premise)

6. One is not intrinsically harmed by death at any time at which one exists. (Premise)

7. One is not intrinsically harmed by death at any time. (5 and 6)

8. One is not intrinsically harmed by death. (4 and 7)

This argument distinguishes intrinsic from extrinsic harm. Here’s an illustration of the distinction I have in mind: if I lose a finger, that’s an intrinsic harm; if people say bad things about me behind my back, that’s an extrinsic harm—unless it causally impacts me in some negative way. Epicurus didn’t seem to think there was such a thing as extrinsic harm, so he formulated his argument in terms of harm as such. But, really, his argument was only plausible with respect to intrinsic harm, in that a no longer existent person certainly could suffer extrinsic harms, say by losing reputation or having loved ones suffer harm. And the conclusion that death is not an intrinsic harm is implausible enough. Death seems to be among the worst of the intrinsic harms. (In particular, I think my little argument against presentism remains a good one even if we weaken the conclusion of the Epicurean argument to say that death is not an intrinsic harm.)

Of course, the conclusion (8) is still false! So which premise is false?

Here is a pretty convincing argument for (5):

9. One is intrinsically harmed at t by x only if has or lacks an intrinsic property at t because of x. (Premise)

10. One does not have or lack any intrinsic properties at times when one doesn’t exist. (Premise)

11. So, (5) is true.

Premise (6) is also pretty plausible.

Premise (4) is also plausible.

But there is a way out of the argument. If four-dimensionalism is true, we have a good way to reject (4). Consider first the spatial analogue of (4):

12. One is intrinsically harmed by x if and only if there is a point z in space at which one is intrinsically harmed by x.

But (12) is implausible. Consider a spherical plant that suffers the harm of being made cylindrical. To be distorted into an unnatural shape seems to be an intrinsic harm. But it need not an intrinsic harm locatable at any point in space. At any point in space where the plant is not, surely it’s not harmed. At points where the plant is, it might be harmed—say, by the stresses induced by the unnatural shape—but it need not be. We could, in fact, suppose that the plant is nowhere stressed, etc. The harm is simply the intrinsic harm of being deformed. For another example, suppose materialism is true, and consider an animal in pain. The pain is an intrinsic harm, plausibly, but there is no harm at any single point of the brain—only at a larger chunk of the brain.

What the examples show is that spatially extended objects can be intrinsically harmed in respect of properties that cannot be localized to a single point. If four-dimensionalism is true, we are also temporally extended. We should then expect the possibility of being intrinsically harmed in respect of properties that cannot be localized to a single instant of time, and hence we should not believe (4). And death seems to be precisely such a case: one is harmed by having only a finite extent in the temporally forward direction. This could be just as much an intrinsic harm as being spatially distorted.

In fact, once we see the analogy between harm not located at a point of space and harm not located at a point of time, it is easy to find other counterexamples to (4). Consider a life of unremitting boredom. Suppose someone lives from t₁ to t₂ and is bored at every time. At every time t between t₁ and t₂ she suffers the intrinsic harm of being bored; but she has the additional temporally non-punctual intrinsic harm of being always bored. Or suppose that materialism is true. Then just as pains do not happen in respect of properties at a single spatial point, they probably do not happen in respect of properties at a single instant either: pain likely requires a sequence of neural events.

In fact, the multiplication of examples is sufficiently easy that even apart from the more abstruse question of the harms of death, someone whose theory of time or persistence forces her to endorse (4) is in trouble.

But on reflection, the moves against three-dimensionalism and maybe even presentism were too quick. Maybe even the presentist can say that we have intrinsic properties which hold in virtue of how we are over a temporally extended period of time.

Life in the interim state and the nature of time

Assume this thesis:

1. We go out of existence at death and return to existence at the resurrection.

Suppose, further, that:

2. There is a last moment t₁ of earthly life and a first moment t₂ of resurrected life.

Then:

3. If there are no intervening moments of time between t₁ and t₂, one is never dead.

4. Whether there are any intervening moments of time between t₁ and t₂ depends on what happens to things other than one.

5. So, whether one is ever dead depends on what happens to things other than one.

6. So, whether one is ever dead is extrinsic to one.

But that’s absurd in itself, plus it implies the absurdity that death is only an extrinsic harm. So, we should reject 1. We exist between death and the resurrection.

There are two controversial assumptions in the argument: 2 and 4. Assumption 4 follows from an Aristotelian picture of time as consisting in the changes of things. Since one doesn’t exist between t₁ and t₂, those changes would have to be happening to things other than oneself. If one doesn’t accept the Aristotelian picture of time, it’s much harder to argue for 4.

Assumption 2 is obviously true if time is discrete. If time is continuous, it might or might not be true. For instance, it could be that one lives from time 0 to time 100, both inclusive, in which case t₁ = 100, but it could also be that one lives from time 0 to time 100, non-inclusive, in which case t₁ doesn’t exist. Similarly, one could be resurrected from time 3000, inclusive, to time infinity, non-inclusive, in which case t₂ = 3000, but it could also be that one is resurrected from time 3000, non-inclusive, in which case t₂ doesn’t exist.

However, even in the continuous case the argument has some force. For, first of all, it’s obvious that death is an intrinsic harm to us, and that obviousness does not depend on obscure details about whether the intervals of one’s life include their endpoints. Second, it is at least metaphysically possible for 1 to hold. But then in a world where 1 were to hold, our death would be merely an extrinsic harm to us, which would still be absurd.

Informed organs surviving the death of an individual

In my last post, I offered a puzzle, one way out of which was to accept the possibility of informed bits of an animal surviving the death of the animal. But the puzzle involved a contrived case--a snake that was annihilated.

But I can do the same story in a much more ordinary context. Jones is lying on his back in bed, legs stretched out, with healthy feet, and dies of some brain or heart problem. How does the form (=soul) leave his body? Well, there are many stories we can tell. But here's one thing that's clear: the form does not leave the toes before leaving the rest of the body. I.e., either the toes die (=are abandoned by the form) last or they die simultaneously with the rest. But in either case, then Special Relativity and the geometry of the body (the fact that one can draw a plane such that one or more toes are on one side of the plane, and the rest of the body is on the other) imply that there is a reference frame in which the form leaves one or more of the toes last. Thus, there will be a reference frame and a time at which only toes or parts of toes are informed. It is implausible to think that one is alive if all that's left alive are the toes. So organs can survive death while informed by the individual's form.

Snake annihilation and partial death

The following five principles seem to be rationally incompatible:

1. Every part of a living organism is informed by its form.

2. If any part of an organism is informed by its form, the organism is alive.

3. An snake would be dead if everything but the tailmost one percent of its length were annihilated.

4. Simultaneity is relative, as described by Special Relativity.

5. Being informed by a form is not relative to a reference frame.

To see the incompatibility, consider this case. A snake of ordinary proportions is lying stretched out in a line and is then instantaneously completely annihilated. Notice an interesting fact about this snake:

6. Every bit of this snake is informed by the form of the snake whenever it exists.

This follows from (1) and the setup of the situation. Note that (6) will not be true in the case of snakes that meet a more ordinary end than by complete instant annihilation: those snakes leave behind parts that are no longer informed (they may be parts only in a manner of speaking, but I think nothing in my argument hangs on this). It is to make (6) true that I supposed the snake annihilated instantaneously.

Now, by (4), the claim that the snake is must have been said with respect to some reference frame F₁. But it follows from Special Relativity and the geometry of linear snakes that there will be a reference frame F₂ relative to which the snake is annihilated gradually from the head to the tail rather than simultaneously. There will thus be a time t₂ such that relative to F₂ at t₂ the snake has been annihilated except for the tailmost one percent. At t₂ relative to F₂, that tailmost one percent is informed by the form of the snake by (5) and (6). By (2), the snake is alive at t₂ relative to F₂. But by (3), it is dead at t₂ relative to F₂. So, the snake is both alive and dead at t₂ relative to F₂, which is absurd.

I am not sure what to do about this argument. I feel pushed to deny (2). Perhaps something could be dead simpliciter but still have living parts. But that’s an uncomfortble position.

Death, dignity and eternal life

One way to look at the difference between the deaths of humans and brute animals is to say that the death of a human typically deprives the human of goods of rational life that the brute animal is not deprived of. While it is indeed an important part of the evil of typical cases of death in humans that they are deprived of such goods, however, focusing on this leads to a difficulty seeing what is distinctively bad about the death of humans who are not deprived of such goods by death, say elderly humans who have already lost the distinctive goods of rational life.

Sure, one can say that the death of a human is the death of a being that normally has the goods of rational life. But it is unclear why the death of a being that normally has the goods of rational life but actually lacks them is worse than the death of a being that actually and normally lacks the goods of rational life.

(Of course, not everybody shares the normative view that there is something distinctively bad about the death of a human being even when the goods of rational life have already been lost. A significant number of people think that euthanasia in such cases is morally licit. But even among those who think that euthanasia in such cases is morally licit, I think many will still think that there is something particularly morally bad about killing such human beings against their clear prior wishes, and those may find something plausible about what I say below.)

How, then, do we explain the distinctive bad in the death of human beings, even ones that lack the distinctive goods of rational life? In the end, I think I would like to invoke human dignity here, but to a significant degree that’s just giving a name to the problem. Instead of invoking and trying to explain human dignity, I want to explore a different option, one that I think in the end will not succeed, but perhaps there is something in the vicinity that can.

Here is a hypothesis:

• It is the nature of human beings to live forever and never die, but the nature of brute animals is to have a finite life.

If this is true, then death always constitutes a mutilation of the human being. It is what directly deprives the human being of the normative diachronic shape of its life. And killing a human mutilates the human being.

Objection 1: If a murderer didn’t kill her victim, the victim would still have died at some later point.

Response: The murderer is still the proximate cause of the victim’s not living forever. And such proximate causation matters. Suppose that my brother murdered Sally’s brother, and to avenge her brother, in true Hammurabic fashion, Sally seeks to kill me. When she finally comes upon me, I am already falling off a cliff. A moment before I would have hit the ground, Sally shoots and kills me. Sally has murdered me, a grave evil. She is the proximate cause of my death. And that matters, even though it would make little difference to my life if Sally hadn’t killed me.

Objection 2: Even if it is the nature of brute animals to have a finite life, it is not the nature of brute animals to die young. But it is not wrong to kill a brute animal when it is young, even though doing so mutilates the brute animal in much the same way that killing a human mutilates the human by causing her life to be finite if the hypothesis is true.

Response: Agreed: it does mutilate the brute animal to kill it when it is young. But to foreshorten the life of a human being from infinity to a finite amount is much worse—in a sense, infinitely worse—than to foreshorten the life of a brute animal from a longer finite length to a shorter finite length.

Objection 3: Christian faith holds that humans will be resurrected. Thus, killing a human being does not succeed in causing the human being to lose infinite life.

Response: Yes, but according to the hypothesis it is not only the nature of human beings to have an infinite future life but it is also the nature of human beings to have a death-free infinite future life.

Objection 4: Imagine an otherwise unremarkable shrub which has a very special nature: it is supposed to live forever, undying. Destroying this shrub would feel distinctively bad as compared to destroying an ordinary shrub, but still not bad in the same way that killing a human being is. Hence, reference to the normativeness of an infinite future life is not enough to explain the distinctive badness of killing humans.

Response: I think that this objection is decisive. Mere invocation of the normativeness of an infinite deathless life is not enough to solve the problem of the distinctive badness of human death. One still needs something like a story about the special dignity of human beings. But it might be that the hypothesis still helps: it multiplies the synchronic dignity of the human being by something like infinity. So less needs to be accomplished by the dignity part of the account.

Can destruction be good for something?

It is good for a mouse to occupy a limited region of space: if a mouse were cat-sized, it would be incapable of excellent engagement in many of its characteristic behaviors (scurrying around in narrow passages). If time is relevantly like space, we would expect that there be things for which it is good that they occupy a limited interval of time--i.e., it is good for them to die, or at least good for them to die in a particular way. (It is good for a mouse to be spatially bounded--but only certain kinds of spatial bounds, those delimited by healthy skin and fur, are good for the mouse.)

One category of things whose destruction is a part of their flourishing is things whose purpose is to give rise to something else. For instance, sperm and egg are destroyed in giving rise to a zygote, and that it is their flourishing to be destroyed in this manner. But that's not the only category. It may be a part of the flourishing of a skin cell that it perish in order to make way for a newer skin cell. Both of these categories are subsumed in the category of things directed at the good of something other than themselves.

But I think human beings are not like that.