Thomas Nagel: Death Suppose That Death Is the Permanent End of Human Existence

question 26

Multiple Choice

Thomas Nagel: Death
Suppose that death is the permanent end of human existence. If so, is death bad for the person who dies? Some argue that such a claim is senseless, on the grounds that nothing can be bad for a person who no longer exists. Nagel rejects these arguments, and defends the view that death is bad for us. In Nagel's view, death is not bad because of any of the positive features of death, but because it deprives us of the goods that life contains. Nagel defends his view from three objections.
The first objection is based on the assumption that nothing can be good or bad for someone unless it is experienced as pleasant or unpleasant. Because the dead do not experience anything, it seems that death cannot be bad for us. Nagel responds by denying the assumption behind the objection. We can be harmed by people betraying us behind our backs and without our knowledge, and we can even be harmed by people neglecting our wishes after our deaths.
The second objection is that death cannot be bad for a person, because after death there is simply no subject for which anything can be good or bad. In response, Nagel claims that it would be bad for a person to be reduced to the cognitive level of an infant, even if he remained perfectly content. The badness of such a fate is not undermined by the contention that the original person no longer exists, for the badness is grounded in the contrast between what actually transpired and possible alternatives. Such a fate is bad because it deprives a person of potential goods. Nagel claims that death is similar in this respect.
The third, and final, objection is this: because we were not harmed by our prenatal nonexistence, we cannot be harmed by posthumous nonexistence. Nagel responds that although our nonexistence before our birth did not deprive us of anything, death deprives us of time that we would otherwise be alive. Ultimately, then, Nagel concludes that these three objections fail to undermine the thought that death is bad for us.
-Nagel defines permanent death as:

• A) the end of our bodily existence.
• B) the end of our bodily existence, but our conscious survival.
• C) the end of our bodily existence, unsupplemented by conscious survival.
• D) none of the above.

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Definitions:

Distribution Mean

The average of all values in a data set, calculated by summing the values and dividing by the number of observations, representing the center or location of the distribution.

Standard Deviation

An indicator of how much data points deviate from the central value, signifying the spread of the dataset.

Process Distribution

The statistical distribution that characterizes the outputs or results of a process, helping to understand its behavior and variation.

Assignable Variation

Variation in a process that is caused by specific, identifiable factors, as opposed to random or inherent variability.