Is Death Bad or Just Less Good? (Part 4)

Tweet

(Part One, Part Two, Part Three)

This is the final part in my series of posts looking at the badness of death. The series works off the article by Aaron Smuts entitled “Less Good but Not Bad: In Defense of Epicureanism about Death”. In the article, Smuts defends a position he calls innocuousism, which holds that death is not bad for the one who dies.

The argument behind this is called the Dead End Argument (DEA). This argument holds that death is neither intrinsically nor extrinsically bad because it is an experiential blank. When one is dead one has no mental experiences, and only mental experiences carry value. The key premise of the DEA sets forth something Smuts calls the “causal hypothesis”:

(4) Causal Hypothesis: An event is extrinsically bad if and only if it leads to intrinsically bad states of affairs.

The causal hypothesis is challenged by defenders of the deprivation account (DA). The DA holds that death is bad because it deprives the person of the good experiences they would have had if they had remained alive. In the previous post, we saw how Smuts rejected the DA. He did so on two, interrelated, grounds. First, because it leads to absurd conclusions, such as that a person whose life is filled with positive experiences is actually living a bad life because things would have been better (however marginally) if they had made different choices. Second, because it confuses a state of affairs’ being less good with its being bad.

Despite this rejection of the DA, Smuts’s argument is not home and dry. There are three question marks still hanging over it. First, there is a worry that the causal hypothesis itself leads to absurd conclusions. Second, there is a worry that the DEA as whole would alter our attitude toward the wrongness of killing. And third, there is a worry that the DEA is incompatible with our seemingly well-founded fear of dying.

In this post, we’ll see how Smuts responds to each of these worries.


1. Is it bad to deny anaesthesia?
A long time ago — all the way back in part two — I put forth the following thought experiment (taken from Smuts):

Denying Anaesthesia: Suppose a person is undergoing surgery that will alleviate some serious condition. The surgery clearly leads to an intrinsically good state of affairs. But the surgery itself can be performed in two ways: (a) with anaesthetic; or (b) without. If it is performed without anaesthetic, the person will not die, but will be in considerable pain. If it is performed with anaesthetic, this is avoided.

I then asked the question: would it be bad (extrinsically) to deny anaesthesia to the person undergoing this surgery? Or, rather, would it be good (extrinsically) to administer the anaesthetic? The answer seems obvious: Of course it would!

This is where the causal hypothesis runs into trouble. In the scenario just described, the result of the surgery is the same irrespective of whether it is performed with anaesthetic or without. So administering an anaesthetic does not lead to an intrinsically better or worse state of affairs. Thus, it would seem that, under the causal hypothesis, denying anaesthetic is not bad and administering it is not good. Surely this is absurd?

Smuts, as I read him, offers two replies. First, he notes that whether the anaesthetic leads to intriniscally good states of affairs or not, depends on how fine-grained an analysis of the scenario you undertake. True, the outcome of the surgery is the same. But the person undergoing that surgery will be in great pain (presumably), while it is ongoing, if they are denied the anaesthetic. Experiences of great pain are intrinsically bad, and so denying anaesthetic would be extrinsically bad since it would causally contribute to such experiences. Thus, even under the causal hypothesis, denying anaesthetic would be bad. Absurdity avoided.

Second, Smuts argues that maybe administering anaesthetic is not all that good. Rather, it is far (far) less bad. He admits that this position seems counterintuitive at first glance but enjoins us to give it a chance. It’s not too bad once you get to know it. The reasoning is as follows: any state of affairs in which the administration of such anaesthetic is needed to avoid pain must be itself bad (i.e. you must be sick or dying). So is it not true to say that you’d rather not have to be anaesthetised in the first place? It’s just that, given your predicament, the surgery is necessary and so undergoing the surgery with anaesthesia is far less bad than undergoing it without.

This second point is not trivial. For one thing, it tracks the kinds of distinctions (between less good and bad, and less bad and good) that the DA failed to track. This was a major factor in the patent absurdity of the DA. Furthermore, it might explain why we have a moral duty to anaesthetise a person (if we are, say, the surgeon). Duties, Smuts argues, tend to be oriented toward preventing the bad not toward promoting the good. If administering anaesthesia is understood as promoting the good, not just as preventing the bad, then it would be less likely for us to have a duty to do it. But we do have a such a duty. So, since under his account the administration of anaesthesia is about preventing a far worse situation not about promoting a good one, we seem to have an additional reason to support the causal hypothesis.


2. The Wrongness of Killing
So much for the causal hypothesis. How about the conclusion of the DEA itself. As you recall from part one, the argument concludes that:

(7) Therefore, death is not prudentially bad for the person who dies.

Is this conclusion not wildly at odds with our views about the wrongness of killing? If it turns out that death is not bad for the one who dies, then what’s so bad about people going around and randomly euthanising other people? But isn’t that just insane?

Consider the process of reasoning here. First, one accepts the logic of the DEA. Then, one realises the clash between it and one’s beliefs about the wrongness of killing. Then one reasons: my belief in the wrongness of killing is about as solid as any belief I could possibly have (after all, it’s the foundation of every ethical theory and every human society). My belief in the DEA is rather less solid. So if the DEA clashes with my belief about the wrongness of killing, the DEA itself must be wrong.

This is tempting line of thought. Is there anything that a defender of the DEA can say in response? Smuts is somewhat cagey, but he suggests two possible lines of counterargument.

The first line highlights the distinction between something being prudentially bad and something being morally bad. An event is prudentially bad if it reduces the welfare of the person who is subject to it; an event is morally bad if it breaches some morally principle or causes some moral disvalue. The DEA is an argument about prudential badness not moral badness. The two are only equivalent under the normative position known as welfarism, which reduces all normative claims to claims about individual welfare. But welfarism is rejected by many. So it's not clear that the DEA entails that killing is okay.

The second line suggests that, even if welfarism is true, the morality of killing might be more complex than our initial gloss on it suggests. Under the DEA, death is not deemed prudentially neutral; it is deemed less good. If it were prudentially neutral, then the permissibility of killing might follow, but since it is not, it may not. We might still have an obligation to prevent less good states of affairs and so the DEA need not entail an absurdity.

Smuts accepts there is more to be said, but he leaves it there. Others have taken up this topic in more depth and I hope to look at their arguments at a later stage.


3. The Fear of Death
A final problem (for now) with the DEA is the implications it has for our fear of death. Like our beliefs about the wrongness of killing, our fear of death and dying seem pretty solid. That is to say, we seem to have good grounds for fearing our deaths. But if the DEA is true then our death is not bad for us, so why should we fear it?

There are a lot of things to be said about this. First of all, one must distinguish between death and dying. The process of dying might be painful and drawn out, i.e. riddled with intrinsically bad states of affairs, and so we might have good reasons for fearing that. Additionally, there is the fact that Epicureanism about death, at least as traditionally conceived, was all about removing the fear of death. If that’s one of the implications of the DEA, so be it.

Nevertheless, Smuts thinks there probably are good reasons to be anxious or saddened by one’s demise (though perhaps not stricken with fear at the prospect). Death may prevent us from completing our projects, or cut us down before we reach our potential. These are things to be deeply regretted. The DEA does not deny the appropriateness of such emotions. So while it may not encourage fear, it may not be all that counterintuitive.


4. Conclusion
To sum up, this series of posts has looked at Aaron Smuts’s defence of innocuousism. This is the view that death is not bad for the one that dies. Innocuousism relies on the causal hypothesis, according to which an event is extrinsically bad if and only if it leads to an intrinsically bad state of affairs. Since being dead is not intrinsically bad (because it is an experiential blank), it follows from the causal hypothesis (and some other premises) that death is not bad for the one who dies.

The causal hypothesis is challenged by defenders of the deprivation account of the badness of death. According to them, death is bad because it deprives us of states of affairs that could have been good. But as we saw in part two, the deprivation account has some absurd implications. Primarily, this is because it fails to track the distinction between less good and bad. The causal hypothesis tracks this distinction and so is to be preferred.

Nevertheless, as we saw in this post, the causal hypothesis, and innocuousism more generally, have troubling implications of their own. However, each of these can be neutralised. The upshot is that death is not bad, but it may be less good. Defenders of life extension policies will no doubt be encouraged by this, but at the same time they need not fear death as much as they might.

A Request

Tweet

,

I don't really like to do much work promoting this blog or my own academic work. Something within me recoils at the thought. But at the same time, lurking beneath my veneer of modesty, there is an ego longing for attention and acclaim. And while I'd probably continue writing blog posts even if no one read them, part of me would like to have (a few) more readers. Also, part of me knows that promotion of this sort is necessary in my line of work.

Consequently, I'd like to issue a mild plea for people to share my blog posts - if they like them - on the various social media outlets included in the buttons on this blog. I know it's not difficult since I do it myself all the time. The buttons are there on each blog post, and pretty much everyone is active on some social network these days. If you did, I would be most appreciative. And I'd like to thank all the people who do this already. I may not get the chance to thank you all personally, but I really am grateful.

Finally, I'd also like to draw people's attention to the fact that you can follow the blog on twitter, facebook and google plus (which makes sharing posts even easier). The links are all in the sidebar. You can also follow my actual academic work on academia.edu (link is in the sidebar again). I haven't updated my page on academia.edu in a while. But I will definitely be doing so quite soon. I have quite a number of works in progress at the moment, and will be uploading them in due course.

Anyway, that's enough of a plea for the time being. I may be engaging in other shameful acts of self-promotion before the end of the summer. You have been forewarned.

Is Death Bad or Just Less Good? (Part 3)

Tweet

(Part One, Part Two)

This brief series of posts is looking at the supposed badness of death. The series is working off Aaron Smuts’s article “Less Good but not Bad: In Defence of Epicureanism About Death”. In the article, Smuts defends a position he calls innocuousism. This is a specific version of the Epicurean position that death is not bad for the one who dies.

Smuts uses the Dead End Argument (DEA) to support innocuousism. According to the DEA, death is not bad because it is an experiential blank, and only experiential states can be good or bad. The centrepiece of the DEA is the so-called causal hypothesis:

(4) Causal Hypothesis: An event is extrinsically bad if and only if it leads to intrinsically bad states of affairs.

This hypothesis allows Smuts to reach the conclusion that death is neither intrinsically nor extrinsically bad for the one who dies. But this thesis is challenged by defenders of the Deprivation Account (DA) of the badness of death. According to the DA, death is bad because it deprives you of good experiences that you might otherwise have had.

In the previous post, we looked at a variety of thought experiments and arguments that are used by defenders of the DA. These thought experiments were designed to pump the intuition that counterfactual assessments of goodness — that is, comparative assessments of the value of different possible worlds close to our own — are relevant when determining whether what happens is actually good or bad. This was summed up in the OVT (overall value thesis), which read:

OVT: The overall value of a state of affairs P for a subject S at a time T in a world W is equal to the intrinsic value of T for S at W, minus the intrinsic value of T for S at the nearest world to W at which P does not obtain. 

In this post, we’ll look at how Smuts responds to defenders of the OVT. In essence his argument boils down to the following: the OVT is wrong because it leads to absurd conclusions. To be more precise, the OVT is wrong because it conflates a state of affairs’ being less good with its being bad (all things considered).


1. Counterfactual Thought Experiments and Less Goodness
Recall from part two, the Joe College thought experiment. In this thought experiment we are invited to imagine the choices facing Joe before he goes to college. He can choose between college A and college B. If he goes to A, he will study accounting, become a reasonably successful accountant, and live a generally happy life. If he goes to B, he will study philosophy, discover a deep passion for the subject, become a world-renowned philosopher at a top university, and live a much happier life.

According to proponents of OVT, if Joe chooses to go to A his life will be bad, all things considered. This is because his state of well-being in that world will be less than his state of well-being in the world in which he chooses to go to B. And since the OVT forces us to determine overall value by a comparison between these two worlds, it follows that A is bad because B is better.

But is this really credible? Consider a structurally similar example where the differences between college A and college B are rather more trivial.

Joe Coffee: Joe has a choice between two colleges, A and B. If he goes to A, he will major in math, go to graduate school and land a great job at a research university. There he will live out a comfortable and intellectually stimulating existence. If he goes to B, he will major in philosophy, go to graduate school and land a great job at a university. There he will live out a comfortable and intellectually stimulating existence. Joe would find philosophy equally as fulfilling as mathematics, and his general life circumstances would be equivalent. However, if he became a math professor he would be in a department with a great cappuccino machine, whereas the philosophy department would have a lousy coffee machine. (taken from p. 208)

Now suppose Joe went ahead and chose college B, would his life be bad, all things considered? Surely not. Surely the mere fact that he chose a rewarding career in philosophy (+ bad coffee) over a rewarding career in mathematics (+ good coffee) does not make his life bad. It might make it (very marginally) less good but that’s a different matter.

Here is where the absurdity of the OVT reveals itself. If the OVT is true, then the conclusion that Joe’s life in college B would be bad (all things considered), merely due to the absence of the cappuccino machine, would seem to follow. After all, OVT enjoins us to determine value based on the comparative assessment of worlds. Since the value of the world in which Joe goes to B subtracted from the value of the world in which he goes to A is negative, it follows that his life in that world is bad. But this cannot be right since nothing bad actually happens to him in that world. In fact, most of what happens to him is very good.

This gives us the following argument against OVT (and its ilk):

• (13) Suppose: Joe has a choice between going to college A and college B. His life after choosing college B would roughly be equivalent in value to his life after choosing A, with the sole exception being that his life in A would come with better coffee. Joe chooses college B and misses out on the good coffee. 

• (14) If OVT is true, then Joe’s life is bad, all things considered. 

• (15) In no sense could Joe’s life be deemed bad (all things considered) after going to college B (he has a successful and rewarding career and a comfortable, well-heeled existence after all). 

• (16) Therefore, OVT must be false.

At this point, I should say that Smuts’ supports this criticism of OVT (and the deprivation thesis more generally) with several other thought experiments. These, while structurally similar to Joe Coffee, might be more persuasive to you so I urge you to check them out. I chose Joe Coffee because I thought it was the starkest and most ridiculous of them all; the one that brings into clearest relief the problems with OVT. The above argument could be tweaked to incorporate your preferred thought experiment.



2. Whither then the Deprivation Thesis?
One could legitimately wonder why the OVT goes off the rails like this. After all, when we looked at some of the thought experiments in the previous post the OVT looked pretty compelling. Two reasons might account for this.

The first is that the comparativism at the heart of the OVT is an intrinsically fuzzy and problematic way of assessing value. The actual world will turn out in some particular way. We could compare the value of that actual world to any number of possible worlds. Depending on how we do this, the actual world may look very bad or very good. After all, every outcome is bad measured against some set of alternative outcomes and good measured against another set of alternative outcomes. If there are no real restrictions on which set of alternative outcomes can be included — and the OVT provides no such restrictions beyond the fact that the comparator world must not be one in which the event under consideration in the actual world occurred — the comparison is meaningless. One could tweak the conditions of the thought experiment however one liked to pump the desired intuition. This is not a good way to reach philosophical conclusions.

The other explanation for why the OVT seems compelling is that it might work quite well for guiding decision-making, but not for assessing overall value. When we are reasoning about what we ought to do, consideration of relevant counterfactuals is important. We want to make the best possible decision, and so we rule out possible choices on the grounds that they lead to worse outcomes. We deem these decisions “bad” as a result. But this does not mean that our lives are bad if we make the wrong decision. Our lives could still be quite good, even if our decision were “bad”.

So the OVT is wild of the mark when it comes to the assessment of the overall value of a state of affairs. What implications does this have? Does the causal hypothesis win simply because the OVT does not? Not exactly. Smuts’s argument reveals that the OVT misses an important distinction, namely: the distinction between a bad state of affairs and one that is less good. The positive argument in favour of the causal hypothesis is that it properly tracks this distinction.

We can see this if we apply the causal hypothesis to the Joe Coffee example. According to the causal hypothesis, Joe’s life after choosing college B cannot be deemed bad because it neither leads to, nor consists in, an intrinsically bad state of affairs. In fact, quite the opposite: the states of affairs in that world look to be intrinsically and extrinsically good. At the same time, the causal hypothesis respects the fact that Joe’s life after choosing college A would be have been (however marginally) better. Thus, the causal hypothesis avoids conflating less good with bad.


3. What Next?
So things are looking up for the DEA. The causal hypothesis was the crucial link in the chain and, now that the deprivation thesis has been knocked down, it looks to be solid. But this does not mean the DEA is out of the woods.

As we saw in part two, the causal hypothesis looks like it too leads to an absurd conclusion — viz. it suggests that denying anaesthetic to someone undergoing an operation is not bad. Furthermore, it looks like the conclusion of the DEA might have some counterintuitive implications of its own. In particular, it looks like it might warrant a more lacklustre prohibition (if any) against gratuitous killing and a less anxious attitude toward one’s demise. We’ll see how Smuts deals with these three problems in the final part of the series.

Eyewitness Enhancement and the Common Good

Tweet

I am going to briefly interrupt my series on the badness of death to look at an argument on human enhancement. I’ll get back to musing about death and immortality over the weekend. I find weekends are conducive to such things.

A while back, I took a look at an argument by a pair of philosophers (Anton Vedder and Laura Klaming) proposing that enhancement technologies might be used for the common, not just the personal, good. To be more precise, the authors argued that transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) might be used to enhance eyewitness memory and recollection, and that this is turn might serve a common set of interests in identifying those who are guilty of crimes (and exonerating those who are innocent).

Vedder and Klaming would be the first to admit that their argument is speculative in nature. The memory-enhancing effects of targeted TMS are only recently discovered and are still poorly understood. But nevertheless they submit that the argument they use to support its (speculative) use could significantly alter the landscape of the enhancement debate.

This is for two reasons. First, traditional debates over the merits of enhancement often hinge on an (arguably meaningless) distinction between treatment (which is okay) and enhancement (which is contested). Justifying enhancement in the name of the common good has the nice effect of sidestepping this distinction. The treatment-enhancement distinction matters at the individual level, since what counts as treatment and what counts as enhancement is indexed relative to the “normal” capacities of the individual. But it does not matter from the perspective of the common good. From that perspective, all that matters is whether an intervention serves a common end. Any indexing to “normal” and “supernormal” capacities falls away. In addition to this, focusing on the common good has the nice effect of sidestepping some traditional arguments against enhancement, which tend to highlight the self-regarding and self-interested nature of enhancement.

But Vedder and Klaming’s argument has been criticised by a number of people. I examined Hauskeller’s criticisms in my earlier post. In this post, I want to take a look at another criticism which comes from the inauspiciously titled article “Is Invading the Sacred for the Sake of Justice Justified?”, by Pepe Lee Chang and Diana Buccafurni. I say this is “inauspicious” since the use of the word “sacred” is both unnecessary and off-putting, to me at any rate.

Nevertheless, the article is not a total wash (it’s only three pages!) and it does present a mildly interesting objection to Vedder and Klaming’s proposal. I want to set out that objection here in formal terms and briefly consider possible replies to it. I won’t, unfortunately, go into much detail on the possible replies since a fuller reply will feature as a (small) part of a longer academic article I am currently working on. It’s not that I’m being secretive, it is just that this reply is not completely formulated in my mind right now.


1. The Argument from the Diminishment of Individual Worth
The objection that Chang and Buccafurni offer works from the premise that the neurocognitive enhancement of eyewitness memory (NEEM, as they call it) could undermine the worth of the individual. Consequently, I call it the argument from the diminishment of individual worth (ADIW for short). (Aren’t philosophical acronyms — or rather initialisms — wonderful?)

The ADIW is compactly expressed in one paragraph of Chang and Buccafurni’s article, which I shall quote here in full:

If cognitive capacity manipulation is accepted because it benefits the common good, this would mean that it is also accepted that individual good is worth sacrificing for the common good. We define individual good not simply as the absence of physical or psychological pain but as the presence of respect for cognitive capacities as an intrinsically valuable end in itself. If respect for human cognitive capabilities is treated as an end in itself, then accepting the manipulation of these capacities for the common good is a violation of this respect. In other words, accepting that the individual good is worth sacrificing for the common good violates the intrinsic value of the individual. As a result, the worth of the individual is diminished.

Let’s try to unpack all of this. In essence, Chang and Buccafurni are pointing to a deep tension between the common good — in this case represented by the desire to prosecute the guilty and exonerate the innocent — and the individual good. The former is about achieving desirable social ends, the latter is about respecting intrinsic personal properties like autonomy and cognition. Because of this tension, pursuing enhancement for the common good undermines respect for the individual. The individual is seen as a mere means to a particular social end, not as an end in him- or her-self.
The argument could be formalised in the following manner:

• (1) If a proposal advocates the manipulation of a cognitive capacity in order to achieve a socially desirable end, instead of respecting that capacity for its intrinsic value, then it treats a person as a mere means to an end, not as an end in their own right. 

• (2) Vedder and Klaming’s NEEM-proposal advocates the manipulation of a cognitive capacity in order to achieve a socially desirable end. 

• (3) Therefore, the NEEM proposal treats people as means to an end, not as ends in their own right. 

• (4) It is bad to treat people as a means to an end because it diminishes their self-worth. 

• (5) Therefore, the NEEM proposal is bad.

There are several complaints one may have about this argument. For starters, one may wonder how exactly individual self-worth is diminished. There is probably an answer to this. And that answer could be sketched as follows. If an individual sees themselves as a mere cog in a machine — i.e. just one manipulable contributor to the efficiency of the justice system — then they begin to lose the sense of themselves as autonomous creators and pursuers of their own conception of the good. And the more the impression of being a cog in a machine is reinforced, the more this sense is lost. But that sense is essential to self-worth, hence if it is lost self-worth is diminished.

That seems fair enough to me, but it looks like there another, bigger complain about the argument. This is that it assumes there is always a tension between the common good and the individual good. If the common good is seen as the aggregation of individual good, and not as some emergent sui generis property, then there is no necessary tension between the two. It is perfectly possible that the individual good could serve the common good, and vice versa. The notion that one has to be sacrificed to save the other might be illusory. Of course, this is something that has to be proven in the particular case of NEEM, but I think this is possible and is something I am currently trying to develop.


2. Informed Consent and Individual Worth
There’s another thing too. The criticism that Vedder and Klaming’s proposal could lead to tensions between common interests and individual interests seems quite obvious. So obvious in fact that you’d expect Vedder and Klaming to anticipate it and offer some kind of response. As a matter of fact they do exactly that. And, as another matter, Chan and Buccafurni respond to their suggestion. I’ll close by briefly considering both

Vedder and Klaming note that NEEM could be in tension with certain individual rights such as privacy and autonomy. Their solution is to adopt an informed consent model for the use of NEEM. In other words, to only allow those eyewitnesses who offered informed consent to the use of TMS would to undergo the enhancement. Informed consent is a popular way to solve potential autonomy violations in medicine and other fields, so this looks like a promising solution.

But as Chan and Buccafurni note, there are at least three problems with it. First, there is the fact that many statutes, in many parts of the world, make the obstruction of justice an offence. Arguably, if what is stopping people from helping the police in their investigations is the fact that they have not undergone NEEM, they are obstructing justice. The penalties associated with this could have a coercive effect and undermine the informed consent model. Second, there is the fact that since the common good is at stake, it would be difficult for one individual to subvent it. In other words, the fact that NEEM was recognised as being in the common interest would create a coercive social pressure which would limit effective consent. Finally, there is the problem of unintended consequences, which might undermine the “informed” nature of the consent. As the authors note, memories are complex and sometimes traumatic and painful. If NEEM leads to the general improvement of memory, it could lead to these painful memories being dredged up to. We may think a general warning to this effect would be sufficient to satisfy the requirements of informed consent, but Chan and Buccafurni dispute this.

I think Chan and Buccafurni are on somewhat more solid ground with these criticisms. In particular, I agree that enhancement technologies can create social pressures, and that these social pressures can be coercive. I just don’t think that this is necessarily the case and I think this can be shown by pursuing my earlier line of criticism, which would highlight a deep constitutive relationship between personal and common goods. Developing this line of criticism is something I plan to do quite soon.

Is Death Bad or Just Less Good? (Part Two)

Tweet

(Part One)

This post is the second part in a brief series looking at the infamous Epicurean argument that death is not bad for the one who dies. The series is working off Aaron Smuts’s recent article “Less Good but not Bad: In Defense of Epicureanism about Death”. In the article, Smuts defends the innocuousist position, which holds that death is not prudentially bad because it is an experiential blank, i.e. it cannot be bad because no positive or negative experiential states are associated with it.

The argument that Smuts uses to defend this conclusion is called the Dead End Argument (DEA). This was outlined in full in part one. The DEA relies on a number of controversial premises, but the most controversial is the so-called causal hypothesis which states (numbering taken from the DEA in part one):

(4) Causal Hypothesis: An event is extrinsically bad if and only if it leads to intrinsically bad states of affairs.

The causal hypothesis is based on the idea that if an event is not in itself intrinsically good or bad, it can only derive its goodness or badness from its causal contribution to an event or state of affairs that is intrinsically good or bad. This is controversial because it contradicts a popular thesis about the badness of death, the so-called Deprivation Thesis. We’ll be refining this thesis later in this post, but for now the following formulation will do:

Deprivation Thesis: Life is prudentially good because it is associated with enjoyable and pleasant experiences. The state of non-being (death) is bad because it deprives you of those states.

The deprivation thesis depends on a counterfactual claim. This is inimical to the causal hypothesis. The deprivation thesis tells us that death is bad, even if it is an experiential blank and even if an experiential blank is not intrinsically bad, because it deprives us of something that would have been valuable if it had been the case, namely: continued existence. In this post we will look at some of the arguments advanced by defenders of the deprivation thesis. In the next post we’ll look at Smuts’s responses to these arguments.


1. Joe College and the Taliban Girl
The most popular way to defend the deprivation thesis and reject the causal hypothesis is through the use of thought experiments. These thought experiments are designed to pump our intuitions about when something is extrinsically (or intrinsically) good or bad. Reflection on those intuitions is supposed to reveal the flaws in the causal hypothesis. We’ll be looking at three such thought experiments here. Two suggesting that the causal hypothesis has the wrong account of extrinsic badness, and one looking at the other side of equation and suggesting that the causal hypothesis has the wrong account of extrinsic goodness.

We start with the two dealing with extrinsic badness. Consider the following (from Feldman a defender of the deprivation thesis):

Joe College: Joe is admitted to two colleges (A & B). If he goes to A he will study accounting, become a moderately successful accountant and live a reasonably good life. If he goes to B, he will study philosophy, discover a passion for the subject, and pursue a highly successful and fulfilling career at a top university. His life would be better if he went to B rather than A.

Suppose Joe decides to go to A. Was this a bad decision? Feldman think it undeniably so. In fact, he thinks that because going to B would have been better than going to A, going to A is extrinsically bad: it leads to a worse state of affairs. This, in effect, is the counterfactual claim at the heart of the deprivation thesis and it contradicts the causal hypothesis. Under the causal hypothesis, Joe’s choice of A is not extrinsically bad because Joe’s subsequent life is not bad, indeed it is reasonably good.
To emphasise the point raised by the Joe College thought experiment, consider another thought experiment:

Taliban Girl: Suppose there is a girl living in a repressive, fundamentalist Islamic culture that forbids teaching women how to read. If she is raised in this culture, she will remain illiterate but will otherwise live a reasonably good life. If she had been raised elsewhere, and taught to read, she would have developed a love for poetry, become a great poet and have lived a much better life.

Supposing she is raised in the fundamentalist culture, is her life bad? Again, it seems like it is. The fact that things would have been better if things were different seems to make the life she lived bad, even though the positive aspects of the life she did live outweigh the negative aspects (i.e. the illiteracy). This contradicts the causal hypothesis. The two possible lives are illustrated in the diagram below, and the badness of the illiterate existence is highlighted.

Taliban Girl - Thought Experiment

There are lots of problems with the two thought experiments. Many of which will be raised in subsequent parts. But granting their plausibility for now, Feldman thinks they support the following account of extrinsic badness (this is labelled EI, for some reason that is not revealed in Smuts’s article):

EI: Something is extrinsically bad for a person if and only if he or she would have been intrinsically better off had it not taken place.

This thesis explains the intuitive reactions to the Joe College and Taliban Girl thought experiments, and replaces the causal hypothesis.


2. Denying Anaesthesia
But EI only looks at half the picture. If the causal hypothesis claims that an event is only extrinsically bad if it causally contributes to an intrinsically bad state of affairs, it stands to reason that the symmetrical position is also true, i.e. that an event is extrinsically good if and only if it contributes to an intrinsically good state of affairs. As Smuts puts it, any defence of the causal hypothesis that appealed to an asymmetry between good and bad, would be ad hoc.

But there is a seemingly compelling counterexample to the causal hypothesis when it is applied to extrinsic good. Consider:

Denying Anaesthesia: Suppose a person is undergoing surgery that will alleviate some serious condition. The surgery clearly leads to an intrinsically good state of affairs. But the surgery itself can be performed in two ways: (a) with anaesthetic; or (b) without. If it is performed without anaesthetic, the person will not die, but will be in considerable pain. If it is performed with anaesthetic, this is avoided.

Denying Anaesthesia - Thought Experiment

Now the question: is it extrinsically good (better) to administer anaesthetic, even if it is not absolutely essential to the success of the surgery? It seems obvious that it is. But, bizarrely, the causal hypothesis denies this. According to the causal hypothesis, performing surgery with or without anaesthetic is extrinsically the same since both lead to the exact same outcome. Administering anaesthetic does not causally contribute to an intrinsically better state of affairs so it can’t be extrinsically good.

This, as I say, seems bizarre and wrong. And developing a thesis that accounts for why this is would be desirable. EI doesn’t do this since it only looks at extrinsic bad, so a broader thesis is needed. Bradley, another defender of the deprivation account, offers one such thesis. He calls it the OVT (Smuts does not say why, but I’m guessing it stands for “Overall Value Thesis”):

OVT: The overall value of a state of affairs P for a subject S at is equal to the intrinsic value of T for S at W, minus the intrinsic value of T for S at the nearest world to W at which P does not obtain. (Where W = a world, and T = a time)

OVT fully embodies the counterfactual claim at the heart of the deprivation thesis. It claims that the value of a state of affairs can only be assessed by comparing it to the value of the state of the nearest possible world in which that state of affairs does not obtain. This supplies all we need for a deprivationist argument for the badness of death. For sake of completeness, let’s spell out that argument here (with numbering continuing from part one):

• (8) OVT is true: the overall value of a state of affairs P for a subject S in a particular world at a particular time is equal to the value of the world at that time to S, minus the value of the nearest possible world at that time to S, in which P does not obtain.

• (9) If you die at time T, you cease to exist and cease to have anymore positive experiences (call this state of affairs P1). 

• (10) In the nearest possible world in which P1 does not obtain, you do not die and continue to have positive experiences (call this state of affairs P2). 

• (11) The value of P2 (for you) exceeds the value of P1 (for you). 

• (12) Therefore, dying is overall bad for the person who dies.

As I believe I have mentioned elsewhere, this is pretty much the canonical view about death. But Smuts thinks it is wrong. He does so because EI and OVT, which are used to support this deprivationist argument, lead to absurd conclusions. We’ll start looking at those absurd conclusions the next day.

Is Death Bad or Just Less Good? (Part One)

Tweet

I’ve been thinking about death a lot recently. And also immortality. I’m trying to figure out whether one should be indifferent to death or afraid of it, in favour of immortality or against it, or some other combination of views. Consequently, I’ve been reading quite a number of papers on the topics of death and immortality and generally getting overwhelmed by the amount of material that is out there. Nevertheless, I thought I might share some of the insights from a couple of the papers I have read here on the blog.

I start today by looking at Aaron Smuts’s recently published paper “Less Good But not Bad: In Defence of Epicureanism about Death”. This paper is just the latest in the longstanding philosophical debate over the Epicurean attitude to death. Famously, Epicurus argued that death cannot be bad for the person who dies, since they do not experience their state of non-being.

This is a counter-intuitive view. Most people subscribe to the Harm Thesis, which holds that death is indeed harmful to the person who dies, and it seems that they are right to do so. After all, many of our commonsense moral beliefs — foremost among them being the belief that killing is wrong — seem to flow from the harm thesis.

At the same time, the Epicurean view that death is not associated with any painful or harmful experiences looks reasonable enough. So in defending the Harm Thesis appeal must be made to something other than how death feels in order to explain why it is bad for the person who dies. To this end, many philosophers defend the Deprivation Thesis:

Deprivation Thesis: Life is intrinsically good because it is associated with enjoyable and pleasant experiences. The state of non-being (death) is intrinsically bad because it deprives you of those states.

We’ll be going through some slightly more careful formulations of the deprivation thesis later in this series, so don’t get too wedded to this one right now. All that matters for now is the general form of the deprivation thesis, which is a form that depends on a counterfactual claim, viz. death is bad because continued life would have been better. The defender of the Epicurean view, like Smuts, must offer some refutation of the deprivation thesis. This is exactly what he does and in this series we’ll be following his argument closely.

The series will be broken into a number of different parts. This first part introduces the basic Epicurean argument that Smuts endorses, and gives a rough overall defence of its key premises. As we shall see, Smuts excludes certain controversial premises from his analysis and focuses instead on the premise that directly challenges the deprivation thesis. Subsequent posts will look at the arguments from defenders of the deprivation thesis and Smuts’s responses thereto.


1. The Dead End Argument
Smuts defends a brand of Epicureanism he calls innocuousism, which may be the most awkwardly titled philosophical thesis I have ever come across. According to innocuousism, death is not prudentially bad for the person that dies. This is to be distinguished from another view, one we might call fearlessness, which holds that death is not to be feared because it is not bad. Fearlessness is sometimes associated with Epicurean view, but it is worth keeping it distinct from innocuousism. Innocuousism might provide some support for fearlessness, but it is primarily a thesis about (prudential) value, not about how we ought to feel.

This is the argument that Smuts uses to support innocuousism. He calls it the Dead End Argument (DEA) because it holds that death is not bad because it leads to an experiential dead end. As follows:

• (1) The only thing that bears intrinsic prudential value is an experiential mental state (mental statism).

• (2) Being dead is (at least partly) constituted by the complete absence of experiential mental states, i.e. being dead is an experiential blank. 

• (3) Therefore, the state of being dead is not intrinsically prudentially bad. 

• (4) An event is extrinsically bad if and only if it leads to intrinsically bad states of affairs (the causal hypothesis). 

• (5) Therefore, death (which is an event) is not extrinsically bad. 

• (6) An event is only prudentially bad for someone if it is intrinsically or extrinsically prudentially bad. 

• (7) Therefore, death is not prudentially bad for the person who dies.

This argument depends on a number of controversial premises. The first being the claim that only experiential mental states can be bearers of intrinsic value. The second being the claim that death is an experiential blank. And the third being the causal hypothesis that X is extrinsically bad if and only if X leads to something that is intrinsically bad. Smuts’s article is primarily a defence of the causal hypothesis, but we’ll briefly consider the other premises below.

Before we do that though it’s worth pausing to consider the significance of the word “prudential” in this argument. That which is prudentially bad/good must be distinguished from that which is morally bad/good. Prudential bad/good has to do with what is good or bad for the person making the decision. Moral bad/good may (or may not) be judged against impersonal standards. A person who selflessly dedicates themselves to charity work may live a life that is morally very good — judged against impersonal standards — but that is a misery to them personally. So the argument being made here is about what the person should value, not what is valuable for others or from an impersonal point of view.


2. Are Mental States the only bearers of Intrinsic Value?
The first premise of the DEA claims that experiential mental states are the only bearers of intrinsic prudential value. This might seem reasonable but Smuts notes that it is disputed by defenders of Nozick’s Experience Machine Argument (EMA). I discussed this in some detail in a podcast last year. The argument presents us with a thought experiment involving a super-powerful virtual reality machine that can accurately replicate any experience we might wish to have, including the most pleasurable and desirable ones. We are then asked whether we prefer experiencing those states in the machine or experiencing them in reality?

Intuitions vary, and exactly how the choice is framed can make a difference, but the general view is that reality is to be preferred over the experience machine. What are the implications of this? It might be tempting to say that the EMA shows that experiential mental states are not only thing that can bear prudential value. But I’m not sure that’s the correct interpretation. It seems to me like the EMA might prove that experiential mental states are insufficient for value, but they might nevertheless be necessary.

More pertinent to the present discussion is the fact that the EMA, as Smuts points out, does nothing to show that the absence of experiential mental states is harmful? The EMA may well show that something more than mere positive mental experience is needed in order for something to be prudentially valuable, but it does not show that the complete absence of mental experience is prudentially harmful. Since it is the latter that concerns us here, it looks like we have nothing much to fear from the EMA.

Smuts accepts that there may be more to say, but he moves on because he has bigger fish to fry.


3. Experiential Blanks and the Causal Hypothesis
The second controversial premise is (2), which holds that death is an experiential blank. This is only really controversial to those with a particular conception of the mind and a particular conception of death. For those who hold that mental experiences supervene on brain states, and that death occurs when the brain ceases to function, there is nothing much to complain about here. And even dualists might be willing to accept the possibility of mental experiences ceasing, for the sake of argument, just to see whether this would be a bad thing. So let’s not worry about premise (2) here.

The other controversial premise is (4), which states the causal hypothesis. As I said, the majority of Smuts’s article is dedicated to the defence of this premise. He thinks the best possible defence of this premise is negative in form. In others words, one that fends off countervailing views. We will be looking at this negative defence in future entries. But can anything positive be said in its favour?

Maybe. One could defend the causal hypothesis in the following manner. First, one could accept that there are only two ways in which something can be valuable: (i) it can be intrinsically valuable, i.e. valuable in and of itself; or (ii) it can be extrinsically valuable, i.e. valuable as a means to an end (instrumentally valuable). So if X is not intrinsically valuable it can only be extrinsically valuable. Next, one could argue for something like a Derivation Thesis, i.e. that X can only be extrinsically valuable if it derives its value from something that is intrinsically valuable. And since the most plausible mechanism of derivation is via the causal contribution to the attainment of that which is intrinsically valuable, the causal hypothesis would look to be supported.

But this might be just a circuitous way of rephrasing the causal hypothesis, dressed up to look like a defence of it. Better to rely on the negative defence, which we’ll get to in due course.

Okay, that brings us to the end of this part. As we have seen, Smuts defends innocuousism about death. This is the view that death is not prudentially bad for the person who dies. He defends this by means of the Dead End Argument (DEA) which holds that death is neither intrinsically or extrinsically bad because it leads to an experiential dead end. The key to this argument is the causal hypothesis which claims that something cannot be extrinsically prudentially bad if it does not causally contribute to an extrinsically bad state of affairs. The rest of the series is taken up with the defence of this hypothesis and its more troubling implications.

Peter on Pure Epistemic Proceduralism

Tweet

There are those who believe that democracy is the preferred system of governance because of the epistemic advantages it bestows. To be more precise, there are those who believe that democratic decision rules are better because they “track the truth” more closely than their non-democratic brethren (e.g. autocratic or elitist decision rules). Such decision rules can include voting and deliberation, with deliberation often being preferred for a variety of reasons. Those who defend this position are known as Epistemic Democrats, and although there is no perfect characterisation of their view, I’ll be taking the following as about as canonical as one can get:

The Epistemic Defence of Democracy: Democratic decision rules are justified, and the political decisions made through such procedures are legitimate, because they have more epistemic value than alternative decision rules. This means that decisions made via such processes are, in general, more likely to be right.

Limiting our focus to the deliberative version of epistemic democracy, there is a question about the precise source of the epistemic value of deliberative decision rules. According to some — usually referred to as instrumentalists — deliberative procedures are better because they can get us closer to some procedure-independent standard of truth or rightness. That is to say, for instrumentalists there is a goal or aim or end against which deliberative procedures are to be measured. According to others — referred to as pure proceduralists — there is no procedure-independent standard of truth or rightness. Rather, the deliberative procedure is itself intrinsically epistemically valuable.

I’ve read several defences of instrumentalism over the years, but only one article that defends pure proceduralism (that's not to say there aren't others). That was by Fabienne Peter and it was entitled “Pure Epistemic Proceduralism”. The article itself is rather dense, but I want to zone in on one portion of it in this post (pgs 35-37, for those with a copy). The portion in question purports to offer a basic defence of pure proceduralism, and my hope is that by explicating here I will gain a better understanding of it.

The basic defence is made up of two, ultimately interlocking arguments. Each provides some support for pure proceduralism, but only jointly do they (allegedly) offer an exclusive defence of it. Individually, they provide a partial defence that leaves some room for instrumentalists to salvage their view. The first argument is the argument from reasonable value pluralism, and the second is the argument from knowledge construction. I’ll outline both below, and make some comments along the way.


1. The Argument from Reasonable Value Pluralism
The notion that values are irreducibly plural is a popular one. Isaiah Berlin is perhaps the classic exponent of this notion. If I may quote from him here (I can’t remember the exact source for this quote right now):

“We are urged to look upon life as affording a plurality of values, equally genuine, equally ultimate, above all equally objective; incapable, therefore of being ordered in a timeless hierarchy or judged in terms of some one absolute standard.”

If Berlin is right, and if values are really plural and equally genuine, then we might expect reasonable people to disagree over about what ought to be done. You might think that the well-lived life is one that is dedicated to charity work, and I might think the well-lived life is one that is dedicated to intellectual discovery. According to pluralists, both our views are legitimate, but the differing emphases and potential clashes between them could filter into the democratic process. In a deliberative forum, I might try to argue for the merits of government-funded research programmes, whereas as you might argue for government-funded welfare programmes. With a limited pot of money to share out, one of us might not get what we like.

Peter’s first argument for pure proceduralism takes this possibility — i.e. the possibility that reasonable people may disagree as to which values should be pursued and with how much vigour — seriously. Indeed, she takes it as a foundational premise for assessing the legitimacy of any democratic decision rule. As she sees it, any democratic procedure that fails to accord proper respect to reasonable value pluralism would be illegitimate, and the problem is that an instrumentalist approach fails to accord the proper respect.

This is the gist of the argument. Now let us spell it out in more detail by introducing something called a legitimacy condition. A legitimacy condition is anything that a procedure must satisfy in order to be legitimate. The debate between instrumentalists and pure proceduralists is essentially a debate about the number and weight of the legitimacy conditions that democratic decision rules have to satisfy. Pure proceduralists count fairness, equality of participation, consideration of different views and arguments, and deliberation over outcomes as the key legitimacy conditions. Instrumentalists can count fairness and equality of participation and likelihood of achieving the truth as the key legitimacy conditions. Indeed, at least as I read her, Peter seems to think that instrumentalists accord decisive weight to achieving the truth in the legitimacy calculus.

And therein lies the rub. For if decisive weight is accorded to achieving the truth, respect for pluralism is merely contingent. If a procedure is more likely to achieve truth by not providing a public forum for deliberation, then so be it. To be clear, this is not to say that, in practice, deliberative forums will not be mandated on instrumentalist grounds. It is merely to say that, in principle, they need not be. That is enough to damn them in Peter’s view because to accord proper respect for value pluralism necessarily mandates deliberative procedures.

One might wonder about the normative premise that is implicit in all of this. This premise must state something like “we ought to respect reasonable value pluralism”, but why should we do this? Peter offers an argument, which she take from Amartya Sen, that claims that people ought not to be treated as patients, as mere passive carriers of well-being, but rather as agents that have an interest in the autonomous formulation and pursuit of their own ends. In other words, respect for reasonable value pluralism stems from respect for individual autonomy.

This gives us the following argument:

• (1) It is fact that there is an irreducible, but reasonable, pluralism about values. 

• (2) We ought to respect reasonable value pluralism. 

• (3) If we wish to respect reasonable value pluralism, then (necessarily) people must be allowed to participate in the evaluation and determination of alternative social policies (i.e. there needs to be a deliberative forum for decision-making). 

• (4) Therefore, we necessarily ought to have deliberative forums for decision-making. 

• (5) Instrumentalists do not think we necessarily ought to have deliberative forums for decision-making.

• (6) Therefore, instrumentalism is wrong.

Written out in this manner, I see several problems with this argument. The first is the assumption of reasonable value pluralism. I’m perhaps overly influenced by something I read by Gerald Gaus years ago on this, but I think pluralism is at least questionable. For starters, it’s not always clear what is meant by pluralism. The Berlin quote I gave above runs together several concepts that should arguably be kept distinct. Perhaps the best conception of pluralism holds that values are intransitive. But even if we accept this definition, it’s not all that clear that pluralism is true. Most arguments for pluralism (that I have seen) tend to revolve around dilemmas in which one has to choose between two (allegedly) equally desirable or equally awful outcomes, which are allegedly irresolvable. I won’t get into it here, but I think those kinds of arguments are insufficient to prove pluralism. For one thing, equally desirable does not mean intransitive.

In addition to this, I’m not entirely convinced by premise (5). I think it would be possible for an instrumentalist to necessarily value deliberation, if it could be shown that deliberation was essential, not merely contingent to achieving the truth. In other words, if they can show that deliberative democratic processes are always going to be more likely to attain the truth than alternatives. And indeed, there are a number of arguments out there suggesting that might be the case. Deliberation often involves the pooling of information, the gathering of evidence, and the weighing of arguments. Each of these might be essential for achieving the truth. Interestingly, Peter’s second argument, which I’ll get to momentarily, seems to endorse this point of view.

Finally, I’m not sure that pluralism is even really necessary for this argument. Given that the key normative premise is supported by reference to individual autonomy and agency, I wonder if the argument might get off the ground with that alone. In other words, I wonder if respect for autonomy, moral equality and agency would mandate some kind of deliberative process. Given that pluralism is, at least for me, a controversial thesis, I would be happier with this option.


2. The Knowledge Construction Argument
Peter’s second argument for pure proceduralism appeals to the essential role that deliberative processes play in the construction of knowledge. Again, Peter appeals to some of Sen’s work to support this point. To quote from the man himself:

the practice of democracy gives the citizens an opportunity to learn from each other . . . . Even the idea of “needs” (including the understanding of “economic needs”) requires public discussion and exchange of information, views and analyses. In this sense, democracy has constructive importance, in addition to the intrinsic value it has in the lives of the citizens and its instrumental role in political decisions.

So the idea here, as alluded to above, is that deliberative procedures allow for the pooling and exchange of information, both of which are essential to producing knowledge. Of course, that just opens the door to the instrumentalist argument I outlined: If deliberative procedures really are essential for the production of knowledge (where knowledge is understood, minimally, as “true belief”), then it looks like one could be instrumentalist about deliberative procedures and still respect reasonable value pluralism.

But, as Peter sees it, this all depends on how one conceives of the constructive process. Later in the article, she partly endorses the Deweyan conception of democracy. According to this conception, deliberative democratic processes are not merely instrumentally essential to the attainment of knowledge, rather they are part and parcel of what constitutes knowledge in the first place. This flows from Dewey’s broader pragmatic theory of truth, which abjures the more traditional correspondence theory of truth, and holds that truth is not merely a correspondence between beliefs and reality, but rather a functional product of the correct procedures. It would take too much time to get into the debate over this conception of truth here, but hopefully what I have said is enough to get the gist of the position.

In the end, Peter finds the Deweyan conception problematic because it too fails to give proper weight to reasonable value pluralism. So she comes up with her own theory which partly incorporates the Deweyan view, but still respects reasonable value pluralism. I won’t outline that view here.

These then are the two arguments Peter uses to supply a basic defence of pure proceduralism. I'm still not convinced since I still think there is room for the instrumentalist view within this framework, but maybe I'm just missing the point.