Before the death of the great Babylonian sage Ravina, there was a discussion of what would be said at his funeral. Bar Avin, who was known as a talented eulogizer, suggested this:
מועד קטן כה, ב
בְּכוּ לָאֲבֵלִים וְלֹא לָאֲבֵידָה, שֶׁהִיא לִמְנוּחָה וְאָנוּ לַאֲנָחָה
Cry for the mourners and not for that which was lost, as that which was lost [i.e., the soul of Ravina,] has gone to its eternal rest, while we, the mourners, are left with our sighs.
In these few words, Bar Avin hinted at a philosophical debate that has endured for millennia. What, exactly is bad about death?
What bad about death?
The German poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724-1803) suggested that the badness of death is losing your friends, which he descries in his poem Separation:
You turned so serious when the corpse
was carried past us;
are you afraid of death? “Oh, not of that!”
Of what are you afraid? “Of dying.”
I not even of that. “Then you’re afraid of nothing?”
Alas, I am afraid, afraid…”Heavens, of what?”
Of parting from my friends.
And not mine only, of their parting too.
That’s why I turned more serious even
than you did, deeper in the soul,
when the corpse
was carried past us.
But the Yale philosopher Shelly Kagan believes there is much more to the badness of death than just losing contact with your friends, sad as that is. In his terrific book death (small d), Kagan suggests that we cannot think about the badness of death by thinking of the survivors. Instead “ we have to think about how it could be true that death is bad for the person that dies…what is it about being dead that is bad for me?” And this is harder to do than you might have thought. The Greek philosopher Epicurus (341- 270 BCE) outlined the problem in his Letter to Menoeceus:
Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer.
So according to Epicurus, death is not bad, and by extension we have no reason to fear it. (A) something can be bad for you only if you exist; (B) when you’re dead you don’t exist; so (C) death can’t be bad for you.
Here is Kagan (p.210) explaining the Epicurean problem:
Isn’t it clear that nonexistence is bad for me? Pretty quickly, however, that answer can come to seem pretty unsatisfactory. How could nonexistence be bad for me? After all, the whole idea about nonexistence is that you don’t exist! And how could anything be bad for you when you don’t exist? Isn’t there a kind of logical requirement that for something to be bad for you, you’ve got to be around to receive that bad thing? A headache, for example, can be bad for you. But of course, you exist during a headache. Headaches couldn’t be bad for people who don’t exist. They can’t experience or have or receive headaches. How could anything be bad for you when you don’t exist? And in particular then, how could nonexistence be bad for you when you don’t exist?
Kagan (or Shelly, as he asks his Yale students to call him), has a terrific chapter (“The Badness of Death”) in which considers this thorny question, and focuses on this aspect, known as The Deprivation Account. Death is bad because it deprives me of something. But that cannot be right because you cannot deprive someone who is dead of anything. Perhaps then we should reject (A) above, which is the existence requirement. Perhaps, Kagan suggests, “for certain kinds of bads you don’t even need to exist in order for those things to be bad for you.”
But then we run into another problem. If you don’t need to exist (because you are dead) in order for a bad to happen to you, “then nonexistence could be bad for somebody who never exists. It could be bad for somebody who is a merely possible person, someone who could have existed but never actually gets born.” These potential people are the billions and billions of people who don’t get born when a particular egg fails to get fertilized by a particular sperm. If we get rid of the existence requirement “then we have to say of each and every single one of those billions upon billions upon billions upon billions upon billions of possible people that it’s a tragedy that they never get born, because they’re deprived of the goods of life. If we do away with the existence requirement, then the plight of the unborn possible people is a moral tragedy that simply staggers the mind. The worst possible moral horrors of human history don’t even begin to be in the same ballpark as the moral horror of the deprivation for all of these unborn possible people.”
“What’s bad about death is that when you’re dead, you’re not experiencing the good things in life. Death is bad for you precisely because you don’t have what life would bring you if only you hadn’t died. ”
But most of us don’t consider the non-actualization of potential people to be a moral tragedy (though we’ve discussed the attitude of the rabbis to the this question here). We don’t think billions and billions of potential people are harmed because they were never actualized. This leads us to tweak the existence requirement to what Kagan calls a more modest version: “Something can be bad for you only if you exist at some time or other.” This modest requirement doesn’t require that I exist at the same time as the bad thing, and so this allows us to say that death is bad for me. And it is bad for me because I am being deprived of the good things in life, however those are measured.
According to Bar Avin, death is not actually bad for the deceased (in this specific case, Ravina), for he was “at rest.” One might have expected him to say that although Ravina was being deprived of the good things in life had he lived longer, this was more than made up for by the rewards that he is getting in the afterlife. But he didn’t, and his phrasing reminds us that in both ancient and modern philosophy, there is an interesting argument that death cannot be bad for the person who died. Indeed, Bar Avin’s eulogy reminds us that the greatest pain is felt by those who are left behind with nothing but their sighs.
