The badness of death
an analysis of counterexamples to the time- relative interest account
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.4013/con.2024.203.05Keywords:
Death. Badness of death. Time-relative interests. Counterexamples; Jeff McMahan.Abstract
In this paper, I analyze three cases that have been proposed in the philosophical literature as counterexamples to the Time-Relative Interest Account of the badness of death, aiming to demonstrate how they can be answered. To this end, the text is divided into four sections. In the first, I introduce the main theses of the Time-Relative Interest Account about how bad death is for the one who dies, as formulated by Jeff McMahan (2002). In the following section, I elucidate two central assumptions of this account, namely, that personal identity is not what grounds our reasons for egoistic concern about the future and that psychological unity is among the relations that ground this concern. In the third section, I present the (possible) counterexamples, namely the Case of Future Death (Broome, 2004), the Case of the Tommy Horse Operation (Harman, 2011) and the Case of the Greater Evil (Cunha, 2023). In the final section, I argue that these cases can be answered based on the moral and prudential consideration of some future time-relative interests.
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