Book Reviews: Confrontations With The Reaper: A Philosophical Study of The Nature and Value of Death

The Philosophical Quarterly Vol. 45 No.
179 April 1995

ISSN 0031 -8094
BOOK REVIEWS
Confrontations with the Reaper: a Philosophical Study of the Nature and Value of Death.
BY FRED FELDMAN. (Oxford UP, 1992. Pp. xiv+ 249. Price £22.50.)
The Metaphysics of Death. EDITED BY JOHN MARTIN FISCHER. (Stanford UP, 1993.
Downloaded from http://pq.oxfordjournals.org/ at Seton Hall on April 5, 2015

Pp. xiv + 423. Price $45.00 h / b , $16.95 p/b.)
There is an old tradition that death is the muse of philosophy. Until fairly recently,
however, analytic philosophers have shied away from death as a subject. These two
books are evidence that things have changed. A turning-point was Thomas Nagel's
1970 paper 'Death', which revived interest in two ancient Epicurean arguments.
The first of these maintains that death cannot be an evil for the one who dies
since the supposed evil can have no subject. The second maintains that it is
unreasonable to fear our non-existence after death, for we are not similarly
troubled by our non-existence before birth. Nagel's seminal paper, which rejects
these two arguments, is reprinted in the Fischer anthology, together with articles
by Jeffrie Murphy, Bernard Williams, Harry Silverstein, Stephen Rosenbaum, Palle
Yourgrau, George Pitcher, Joel Feinberg, Derek Parfit, Anthony Brueckner and
John Martin Fischer, Jeff McMahan, Steven Luper-Foy, Fred Feldman and David
Velleman. All of these pieces address the Epicurean challenge. Most agree with
Nagel that the Epicureans are wrong; but they disagree with each other as to
exactly why. (The one exception to the general consensus is Rosenbaum, who has
two papers defending the Epicurean position.) The contributors' explorations of
the topic of death as an evil ramify out into many other issues: the definition of
death; the connections between death and meaning; the nature and timing of
harm; our asymmetrical attitudes to past and future experiences. Fischer has col-
lected together much of the best recent work on the topic and supplied a useful
introduction and bibliography. Accordingly the book would make an excellent
text for an upper-level course on death. However, since all the chapters have been
previously published, the collection's primary role is one of consolidation, rather
than pioneering new approaches. Nevertheless it is very convenient to have these
pieces gathered together in such a handsomely produced volume.
Feldman's book (most of which has not appeared previously) is divided into two
parts: the nature of death and the value of death. In the first part Feldman
explores attempts to define death. Beginning with the suggestion that death is the
cessation of life, he goes on to criticize some plausible accounts of life. However,
even if we cannot define life, perhaps we can understand it well enough to evaluate
various accounts of death which utilize the notion of life as an element. Feldman
considers a number of such accounts and offers trenchant criticisms of them all
(though I am still not fully persuaded that the butterfly counter-example on p. 59
©The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterly, 1995. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road. Oxford OX4 rJF,
UK and 238 Main Street. Cambridge, MA 0214a, USA.
BOOK REVIEWS 235
conclusively refutes my own suggestion that death is the destruction of a functioning
biological organism). Feldman concludes that death is an enigma in that it seems
resistant to definition, but he does offer a materialistic scheme for death which
can at least locate it conceptually, even if it fails to amount to a proper analysis.
The second part of the book begins with two chapters devoted to the Epicurean
arguments, wherein Feldman defends an original version of the deprivation
approach to the evil of death. He then goes on to consider why killing is wrong,
criticizing various proposals before defending a version of the view that killing is
wrong because it makes the world worse than it would have been. Conjoining this
with the deprivation account yields the theory ('justicized act utilitarianism') that
wrongful killings make the world worse primarily because they unjustly deprive
their victims of intrinsic goods they would otherwise have enjoyed. The implic-

ations for abortion and suicide are explored in the final two chapters.
Feldman's book is surely the most rigorous extended treatment of these issues to
date. His philosophical style is to proceed by proposing definitions of key concepts,
progressively refining these in the face of counter-examples. His analyses are careful,
his counter-examples mostly telling, and his refinements often ingenious. Some-
times, however, it would be nice to see some of his original proposals developed a
bit more fully, e.g., his novel way of drawing the distinction between intrinsic and
extrinsic badness in ch. 8, or again, his argument that non-conception is not as bad
as abortion because in the former case there is no victim of injustice, no subject of
desert (p. 207). Here it would be instructive to hear Feldman's view of our responsi-
bilities to future generations. For it seems plausible that we can now do them injus-
tice, even though there is no present subject of desert (and may never be).
One small lapse from Feldman's generally high level of precision concerns his
claim that death is an 'enigma' or a 'mystery'. He explains that he means that
death is 'a conceptual mystery - that it is impossible to formulate a fully satisfactory
philosophical analysis of the concept of death' (p. 125). Feldman does not specify
the relevant modality here, but it is unclear that the claim is supported by his
arguments. He certainly shows that the task of providing an adequate analysis of
death is a difficult one. And sometimes that is all he seems to mean by 'enigmatic'
(e.g., pp. 72, 86, 106). But it is a big step from this modest claim to the thesis that
it is impossible to analyse death. Elsewhere (pp. 112, 118) Feldman distinguishes
between practical and conceptual necessity. Presumably if death is a 'conceptual mys-
tery', this is because it is conceptually impossible to define. But if conceptual necess-
ity is logical necessity, I cannot see Feldman has provided any grounds for believing
death is conceptually impossible to define.
The reluctance of earlier analytic philosophers to deal with death was partly
motivated by the suspicion that the topic was not amenable to rigorous treatment.
These two volumes alone, packed with argumentation, conclusively refute that
claim. But another suspicion may linger, due to a recognition that the importance
to us of matters like death (or sex, or love) is intimately related to our emotions.
Couple this recognition with a positivistic suspicion of the emotions as surges of
blind affect ('the passions') and we can see why such topics were felt to be beyond
the pale of rationality.
This view of the emotions has recently come under heavy philosophical fire. But
©The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterly, 1995.
236 BOOK REVIEWS
much analytic philosophy is still written in a style that eschews intimacy with our
affective nature. Thus though there are good, rigorous analytical treatments of
death (and sex, and love) now available, these can often seem to many readers
disappointingly thin. Something important about these fundamental issues and
our concern with them is just not captured. Feldman's (in other ways impressive)
book provides one example. It is dedicated to his daughter Lindsay, who died at
sixteen. In his preface he briefly explains, in a poignant and dignified way, how
the book grew out of that experience and his conversations with her about death.
But in the book proper he immediately changes style and begins to Chisholm
patiently away at the definitions. The emotions are presumably no part of the
examined life. Indeed Feldman himself admits an impatient reader may feel his
style 'plodding' (p. 227). However, he goes on to suggest that the only alternative

to his programme of distinctions and definitions is just 'to savour the sounds of
the words and to allow memory and imagination to wander' (p. 228).
This is surely a false dichotomy. An important part of why we are concerned
with death is to do with the way it gives rise to powerful emotions like fear and
anger. Hence if we are properly to understand death and our concern with it we
need to engage with those emotions in a disciplined and rational way. Moreover
it is by no means clear that the ideal philosophical style for doing so is the imper-
sonal abstract one of most recent analytic work. In so far as we are concerned (as
these two books are) with the value of death and its significance for the good life,
we need to be open to the possibility of philosophical styles that may better address
our emotional connections to death. One suggestion (brilliantly championed in
Martha Nussbaum's Love's Knowledge) is a conception of philosophy informed by a
recognition of literature as a source of ethical knowledge, precisely because it
involves emotional as well as intellectual activity and gives priority to the experi-
ence of the particular individual, rather than to abstract rules. As such it can offer
'thicker' accounts of what we care about and assist us to understand better why we
do so, without lapsing into a mere wandering of memory and imagination.
Presumably Fischer at least would not be entirely unsympathetic to this sugges-
tion. Interleaved between the articles in his anthology are extracts from Tolstoy,
Stoppard, Delillo, Woody Allen and Joyce. Moreover there is a selective bibli-
ography of science-fiction treatments of immortality. But what we get in the text
proper are only the barest of gestures. The extracts are relegated to a merely
epigraphic role and there is no real attempt to engage philosophically with the
literary material. What would be an exciting and pioneering development in the
philosophy of death would be a sustained attempt to explore these directions in a
disciplined and imaginative way, connecting our emotional concerns with death
with our sense of what we most value about life. Books like these two have surely
vindicated the claim that death deserves a place on the analytic philosophical
agenda; what needs to be done now is to broaden still further that agenda (and
its conception of philosophy).
Massey University ROY W. PERRETT

©The Editors of Thr Philosophical Quarifrly, 1995.

Book Reviews: Confrontations With The Reaper: A Philosophical Study of The Nature and Value of Death

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Book Reviews: Confrontations With The Reaper: A Philosophical Study of The Nature and Value of Death

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Book Reviews: Confrontations With The Reaper: A Philosophical Study of The Nature and Value of Death

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Philosophical Quarterly Vol. 45 No.

179 April 1995

Downloaded from http://pq.oxfordjournals.org/ at Seton Hall on April 5, 2015

Downloaded from http://pq.oxfordjournals.org/ at Seton Hall on April 5, 2015

Downloaded from http://pq.oxfordjournals.org/ at Seton Hall on April 5, 2015

Massey University ROY W. PERRETT

You might also like