Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/death/

EXCERPT: First published Wed May 22, 2002; substantive revision Fri Oct 17, 2014

This article considers several questions concerning death and its ramifications.

First, what constitutes death? It is clear enough that people die when their lives end, but less clear what constitutes the ending of a person's life.

Second, in what sense might death or posthumous events harm us? To answer this question, we will need to know what it is for something to be in our interests.

Third, what is the case for and the case against the harm thesis, the claim that death can harm the individual who dies, and the posthumous harm thesis, according to which events that occur after an individual dies can still harm that individual?

Fourth, how might we solve the timing puzzle? This puzzle is the problem of locating the time during which we incur harm for which death and posthumous events are responsible.

A fifth controversy concerns whether all deaths are misfortunes or only some. Of particular interest here is a dispute between Thomas Nagel, who says that death is always an evil, since continued life always makes good things accessible, and Bernard Williams, who argues that, while premature death is a misfortune, it is a good thing that we are not immortal, since we cannot continue to be who we are now and remain meaningfully attached to life forever.

A final controversy concerns whether or not the harmfulness of death can be reduced. It may be that, by adjusting our conception of our well-being, and by altering our attitudes, we can reduce or eliminate the threat death poses us. But there is a case to be made that such efforts backfire if taken to extremes....

(Oct 21, 2014 03:28 AM)C C Wrote: [ -> ]First, what constitutes death? It is clear enough that people die when their lives end, but less clear what constitutes the ending of a person's life.

That in turn depends on there being some acceptable definition of 'person'.

I'm not convinced that death is any single thing. Certainly there's a biological component to it and a psychological one.

Biologically, death would seem to be the cessation of cell metabolism and the biochemical breakdown of the cells themselves. That comes fairly late in the death process and not all at once. It wouldn't make sense after all to transplant dead organs taken from officially "dead" individuals into living people. The organs have to still be alive and capable of functioning.

Psychologically, death would seem to be the permanent and irreversible loss of human self-awareness and personality. A body with a shattered brain might still be capable of maintaining the custodial functions, so to speak, while there's no chance of anything resembling human awareness and cognition ever returning. The difficulty with this one is that human awareness and cognition come in a whole spectrum of forms, ranging from perfectly normal to minimally aware and functional vegetative states. Drawing a clear line as to how much neural activity is necessary to constitute a person will be very tough. Making the irreversibility judgement will be hard too.

What once looked like a clear-cut distinction, alive/dead, starts to look awfully fuzzy.  

Death is the core of paradoxicality. It is the state of being in no state at all. It is Heidegger's "possibility of the impossibility of Being There (Dasein)". Existentially it makes itself present as an absolute nothingness that at every point is the most certain thing that will occur but also the least certain thing to occur as to when or how. We live in the face of this "fatedness to not be" every day. Death crosses our minds probably more than any other topic thruout our day. The wreck on I5. The condition of a sick relative or friend. Our insurance policies, our medical care, our entertainment from movies and books, our plans for our future, our memories of our relatives, our recreation, and our spirtuality. Whatever else the AFTERdeath may be, death itself is simply the angst-generating presence of our total and eternal absence from the universe. How is such a thing even conceivable? It isn't. It is the most transcendental fact about us--that we will all die, that we all die alone, and that we know this with a certainty that cannot be denied.