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Dead and Gone

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2011

JOYCE L. JENKINS
JOYCE L. JENKINS*
Affiliation:
University of [email protected]
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Abstract

I argue that desire satisfaction theories of welfare are not committed to the view that changes in welfare levels can happen after death, or that events that occur after death impact the agent's welfare levels now. My argument is that events that occur after death have only epistemological import. They may reveal that the person was successful (unsuccessful) in life, but the desire was already frustrated or satisfied before the person died. The virtue of the account is that it gives us a way to acknowledge both the intuition that we cannot be harmed after we die and, in a sense, the intuition that things that happen after we die are relevant to our lives.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 23 , Issue 2 , June 2011 , pp. 228 - 234
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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References

1 Aristotle, , Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Irwin, Terence (Indianapolis, 1985), bk. I, ch. 10, 1100a10–30, pp. 23–4Google Scholar; Brandt, Richard, A Theory of the Good and the Right (Oxford, 1984), p. 330Google Scholar; Feinberg, Joel, ‘Harm to Others’, The Metaphysics of Death, ed. Fischer, J. M. (Stanford, 1993), pp. 171–90 (180)Google Scholar; Grover, Dorothy, ‘Posthumous Harm’, Philosophical Quarterly 39 (1989), pp. 334–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hooker, Brad, ‘Mark Overvold's Contribution to Philosophy’, Journal of Philosophical Research 16 (1991), pp. 333–44 (333–4)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kavka, Gregory, Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory (Princeton, 1986), p. 41Google Scholar; Levenbook, Barbara Baum, ‘Harming Someone After his Death’, Ethics 94 (1984), pp. 407–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Luper, Steven, ‘Mortal Harm’, Philosophical Quarterly 57 (2007), pp. 239–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thomas Nagel, ‘Death’, The Metaphysics of Death, ed. J. M. Fischer, pp. 159–68 (66); Parfit, Derek, Reasons and Persons (Oxford, 1984), p. 495Google Scholar; George Pitcher, ‘The Misfortunes of the Dead’, The Metaphysics of Death, ed. J. M. Fischer, pp. 159–60.

2 Sumner, L.W., Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics (Oxford, 1996), p. 127Google Scholar. There are others who argue against the view, outnumbered though they are. Among them are Callahan, Joan, ‘Harming the Dead’, Ethics 97 (1987), pp. 341–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fuchs, Alan E., ‘Posthumous Satisfactions and the Concept of Individual Welfare’, Journal of Philosophical Research 16 (1991), pp. 345–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Glannon, Walter, ‘Persons, Lives and Posthumous Harms’, Journal of Social Philosophy 32 (2001), pp. 127–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Partridge, Ernest, ‘Posthumous Interests and Posthumous Respect’, Ethics 91 (1981), pp. 243–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1101b1–2, p. 27.

4 Fuchs, ‘Posthumous Satisfactions’, p. 349.

5 I note that Parfit's ‘case of the stranger’ somehow became known as the ‘case of the stranger on the train’. I don't know who transformed the example, but Kagan, Shelly (‘The Limits of Well-Being’, Social Philosophy and Policy 9 (1992), pp. 169–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar) talks about Parfit's case of ‘the stranger on the train’. And that seems to be the way the case is recalled in the literature.

6 Parfit, Reasons, p. 494.

7 See Kagan, ‘Limits’, p. 171, and Sumner, Welfare, p.125.

8 See, for example, Scanlon, T. M., What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA, 1998), p. 112Google Scholar, for the view about false friends, and Nozick, Robert, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York, 1974), pp. 42–5Google Scholar, for a discussion of the significance of the experience machine.

9 Parfit, Reasons, p. 495.

10 Partridge, ‘Posthumous Interests’, p. 253.

11 Feinberg, ‘Harm to Others’, p. 180.

12 Partridge, ‘Posthumous’, p. 251.

13 Partridge, ‘Posthumous’, p. 251.

14 Feinberg, ‘Harm to Others’, p. 183.

15 Feinberg, ‘Harm to Others’, p. 185.

16 See Callahan, ‘Harming the Dead’, p. 345.

17 Parfit, Reasons, p. 495.

18 Feinberg, ‘Harm to Others’, p. 186.

19 Feinberg, ‘Harm to Others’, p. 188.

20 I would like to thank Robert W. Shaver for helpful comments on this article.