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13 Eternalism and Death’s Badness
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Suppose that at the moment of death, a person goes out of existence.1 This has been thought to pose a problem for the idea that death is bad for its victim. But what exactly is the problem? Harry Silverstein says the problem stems from the truth of the “Values Connect with Feelings” thesis (VCF), according to which it must be possible for someone to have feelings about a thing in order for that thing to be bad for that person (Silverstein 2000, 122). But in order for a person to have feelings about a thing, the person and the thing must coexist in some way. Thus Silverstein feels compelled to endorse a metaphysical view he calls “four-dimensionalism ,” but which I prefer to call “eternalism”: the view that purely past and purely future objects and events exist.2 I agree with Silverstein that the badness of death entails eternalism. But the reason is different. Eternalism must be true in order for there to be a time at which death is bad for its victim. Death is bad for its victim at all those times when the victim is worse off for having died: namely, the times when he would have been living a good life had that death not occurred.3 Silverstein rejects this view; he thinks there is something wrong with the very question of when death is bad for its victim. In what follows I argue that Silverstein has not shown the relevance of eternalism to VCF or the badness of death, and I defend my view about the time of death’s badness against Silverstein’s arguments. 1 Eternalism, Values, and Feelings Epicureans hold that death is not bad for us; they point to the fact that death does not cause its victim to feel bad. Thus they assert a connection between values and feelings: something is bad for a person only if it causes that person to feel bad. Though Silverstein rightly rejects this strong thesis , he thinks it contains a nugget of truth; he accepts a weak version of the 13 Eternalism and Death’s Badness Ben Bradley 272 B. Bradley VCF thesis according to which, in order for something to be good or bad for A, it must be possible for A to have a good or bad feeling about that thing. And “if a posthumous event does not exist, it can hardly be an object of feeling or experience” (Silverstein 1980, 110). This is where eternalism enters the picture. The eternalist holds that past and future objects and events coexist with present ones in a four-dimensional manifold. Other times are treated relevantly like other places; objects and events that exist in the past or future, but don’t exist now, nevertheless exist, in just the way that objects that don’t exist here nevertheless exist if they exist in a faraway place. By contrast, presentists hold that only present things exist. If we adopt eternalism, we can say that people coexist with their deaths, and therefore that our deaths can be the objects of our feelings. But there are three things puzzling about this. First, why accept VCF? Silverstein briefly suggests one reason. He says that VCF explains the difference between posthumous harm and posthumous reference: “those who reject VCF owe us an explanation of why, for example, the problem of posthumous harm seems to be a ‘real’ problem in the way that posthumous reference is not” (Silverstein 2000, 122). This demand for explanation is puzzling for two reasons. First, there is an obvious way in which posthumous harm is more problematic than posthumous reference: unless we accept a certain sort of axiology (e.g., preferentism), posthumous harm involves backward causation. Posthumous reference does not. Perhaps Silverstein had in mind not posthumous harm, but the harm of death itself, which need not involve backward causation no matter what axiology we accept; perhaps Silverstein thinks that the harm of death seems more problematic than posthumous reference. But posthumous reference does seem to be a problem, at least for presentists, since at least some presentists take their position to entail that we cannot refer to purely past things (Markosian 2004). Posthumous reference and the harm of death seem equally problematic to a presentist. Suppose we accept VCF. The next puzzle is, why think that an event must exist in order to be the object of feelings? Stephen Rosenbaum points out that people often fear events that never transpire (Rosenbaum 1986, 130). Silverstein...