Skip to main content
Article
Brueckner and Fischer On the Evil of Death
Philosophical Studies (2011)
  • Fred Feldman, University of Massachusetts - Amherst
Abstract
According to the Deprivation Approach, the evil of death is to be explained by the fact that death deprives us of the goods we would have enjoyed if we had lived longer. But the Deprivation Approach confronts a problem first discussed by Lucretius. Late birth seems to deprive us of the goods we would have enjoyed if we had been born earlier. Yet no one is troubled by late birth. So it’s hard to see why we should be troubled by its temporal mirror image, early death. In a 1986 paper, Anthony Brueckner and John Martin Fischer appealed to a version of Derek Parfit’s ‘‘Bias toward the Future’’; they claimed that early death deprives us of future goods that we care about, while late birth deprives us of past goods that we don’t care about. In this paper I show that the Brueckner–Fischer principle is open to several possible interpretations, but that it does not solve the Lucretius problem no matter how we understand it.
Keywords
  • Death,
  • Deprivation Approach,
  • Lucretius,
  • The mirror of time,
  • Symmetry problem,
  • Brueckner and Fischer,
  • Parfit,
  • Bias toward the future,
  • Asymmetry
Disciplines
Publication Date
June 23, 2011
Publisher Statement
DOI 10.1007/s11098-011-9766-6
Citation Information
Fred Feldman. "Brueckner and Fischer On the Evil of Death" Philosophical Studies Vol. 162 Iss. 2 (2011)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/fred_feldman/37/