4 Don’t Fear the Reaper
4.1 Introduction
My aim in this chapter is to argue for the surprising conclusion that you shouldn’t fear death. In short, the idea is that the only things that can be bad for you, ultimately speaking, are pains and other such unpleasant sensations. Accordingly, since you won’t be experiencing any unpleasant sensations once you’re dead, being dead isn’t bad for you, and you shouldn’t fear things that aren’t bad for you. In other words:
I should emphasize that I am not denying that dying is bad. The process of dying can of course be quite painful—both physically and emotionally and, thus, bad for you. If you’re going to be torn apart by piranhas tomorrow, that’s certainly bad for you and something to be afraid of. But you should fear it because the dying will be painful, not because you will be dead at the end of it. On the other hand, if you are about to be anesthetized for some surgery and there is a very good chance that you will die painlessly while under anesthesia, this is not bad for you and there is nothing to fear.
I’ll defend the opening premises in reverse order, first arguing (in sections 4.2–4.3) that if it’s true that you cease to be conscious when you die then being dead is not bad for you, and then arguing (in sections 4.4–4.5) that it indeed is true that you cease to be conscious when you die. Then, having established that being dead isn’t bad for you, I defend FD4 (in Section 4.6) on the grounds that it is irrational to fear things that aren’t bad for you.
Let me make one last preliminary remark before launching into the defense of FD2. Some readers may be strongly inclined to reject the first premise, FD1, because they think that they will go on, after death, to have conscious experiences in the afterlife. Perhaps pleasant experiences, or perhaps painful experiences, depending on the will of their Creator. But even such readers have reason to think carefully about FD2. For the Creator may instead decide to punish sinners and nonbelievers, not by sending them to hell, but by permanently snuffing out their consciousness after they die. You probably think that this would be bad for you. But if FD2 is true, then it wouldn’t in any way be bad for you (and thus wouldn’t be any sort of punishment). So if you are inclined to say that being snuffed out by your Creator is bad for you, then you’ll need to find some way to resist my argument below for FD2.
4.2 Hedonism
My argument for FD2 turns on the idea—sometimes known as “hedonism”—that, ultimately speaking, experiencing pleasant sensations is the only thing that’s good for you, and experiencing painful sensations is the only thing that’s bad for you. And when I say ‘painful’, that should be understood in a broad sense, to include psychological and emotional pain, in addition to physical pain and discomfort.
It’s easy to see the appeal of hedonism. Why is it bad for you if someone kicks you? Because it’s painful. Why it is bad for you not to brush your teeth? Because you might get plaque. Why is that bad for you? Because plaque leads to cavities. Why is that bad for you? Because cavities are painful.
Still, we must be careful in how exactly we formulate our hedonistic account of what’s bad for you. For instance, suppose we tried the following:
- Hedonism (HD)
- Something is bad for you if and only if it’s painful.
There are multiple problems with HD. First, there are all sorts of things that are bad for you that aren’t themselves painful. For instance, eating a whole large pizza in one sitting isn’t painful, but it is bad for you. Second, there are all sorts of painful things that aren’t bad for you. For instance, a deeptissue massage isn’t bad for you, but it can be somewhat unpleasant while it’s happening.
Thinking a bit more about these examples can help us see what’s missing from HD. Why is eating the whole pizza bad for you? Because, later in the day, you’ll have a painful stomach ache. Why isn’t the deep-tissue massage bad for you? Because working out the knots in your muscles results in your having less discomfort later on. What we’re seeing is that what makes something bad for you isn’t just whether it itself is painful but also its connection to the presence or absence of future pains. With this in mind, we can revise the principle as follows:
- Hedonism (HD*)
- Something is bad for you if and only if it results in more pain than you would otherwise have had.
This is still true to the core hedonist insight stated above. Eating the whole pizza in one sitting is bad for you because it results in a painful stomach ache that you wouldn’t otherwise have had. Massages aren’t bad for you because, even if they’re painful in the moment, they eliminate future pains that you would otherwise have had. Ultimately speaking, what is or isn’t bad for you is still just a matter of what is or isn’t painful for you.
4.3 The Argument from Hedonism
With HD* in hand, we can now run an argument for FD2 of the Against Fearing Death argument.
Premise AH1 is trivial. Pain is a conscious state, so if you aren’t conscious while you’re dead, then you don’t have any pain while you’re dead. And the second premise is just our modified hedonist principle, HD*. Accordingly, one might try to resist the argument by attacking HD*. I’ll consider three sorts of attacks.
First, one might point to people who suffer from congenital analgesia, a rare condition which involves an inability to experience pain. While this may at first seem like a good thing, it’s easy to see on reflection why this is actually very bad for those who have it. They might, for instance, inadvertently place their hand in a fire and not realize it before their hand is irreparably damaged. But (the idea goes) HD* seems to entail that this condition can’t be bad for those who have it, nor for that matter can anything bad ever befall them, since nothing can be painful for them.
In response, I deny that HD* entails any such thing. Remember that ‘pain’ isn’t restricted to unpleasant physical sensations. It also includes the sort of emotional distress that one would have from irreparably damaging one’s hand, and those suffering from this condition are entirely capable of experiencing these sorts of psychological pains.
Second, one might object to HD* on the grounds that something can be entirely pleasurable and yet still be a bad thing to do. Consider the following case:
What Pieper did is bad, and yet it didn’t lead to her having any unpleasant sensations.
Is that a problem for HD*? No. One must be careful to distinguish between something being bad for you and something being bad to do. HD* is only about the former and has nothing to say about the latter. If giving Brendan food poisoning doesn’t end up being unpleasant for Pieper, then it isn’t bad for Pieper that Brendan got food poisoning. But that’s not at all to deny that deliberately giving him food poisoning was a bad thing to do (which of course it was).
Now for the third objection to HD*. Here the idea is to grant that hedonism is basically right, but to insist upon further changes to its formulation. Specifically, one might suggest that something can be bad for you not just by giving you painful sensations but also by depriving you of pleasant sensations:
- Hedonism (HD**)
- Something is bad for you if and only if it results in more pain or less pleasure than you would otherwise have had.
In short, the idea is that what’s bad for you is what—in one way or another—makes you worse off in terms of pleasure and pain. If HD** is right, then we won’t be able to get the Argument from Hedonism off the ground. After all, it’s true (for most people) that they would have had more pleasure had they not died when they did, in which case HD** entails that being dead is bad for them.
The problem with HD** is that it is open to counterexamples like the following:
Carly would have been a tiny bit better off if she hadn’t met Evan. Does that mean that it was bad for her that she met Evan? Of course not. Yet HD** wrongly implies that it is bad for her that she met Evan. After all, she would have had more pleasure in her life had she not met him.
This gives us a compelling argument against HD**:
Thus, one shouldn’t prefer HD** to my formulation of the principle of hedonism, HD*, and we have not found any good reason to reject HD*, the second premise of the Argument from Hedonism.
4.4 Against Post-Mortem Consciousness
We’ve just seen an argument for the conditional premise that if you cease to be conscious when you die, then being dead is not bad for you. But why think that you do cease to be conscious when you die? In other words, why accept premise FD1 of the Against Fearing Death argument?
Some readers likely already accept it: when you die, you cease to exist and your consciousness is snuffed out completely. After all, your brain stops working and that’s the source of all conscious experience. Others, however, may need some convincing. They may think that, after death, we continue to have conscious experiences in some sort of afterlife, perhaps in heaven or hell. Or they may be agnostic: we can’t know what happens after we die, and we just have to wait and see.
I say we don’t have to wait and see. We can settle the matter right now. Start by noticing that, right where you are, there is a living, breathing, fleshand-blood human animal. For simplicity, I’ll refer to it as ‘Animal’. Here, then, is the argument that you will permanently cease to be conscious once you die:
First, I’ll explain the idea behind PC1 and PC2, which are both straightforward. Then I’ll argue for PC3, which admittedly is more controversial.
PC1 is extremely plausible once you wrap your mind around what it’s saying. PC1 is not saying that you are Animal, nor is it saying that Animal ceases to be conscious when you die. Rather, it’s saying that if both of these things are true, then you (yourself) cease to be conscious when you die. Why is that? Suppose that you are literally the same thing as Animal. In that case, you and Animal are one thing, not two; ‘you’ and ‘Animal’ are just two ways of referring to one and the same thing. If you and Animal truly are one and the same thing, then anything that’s true about Animal is also true of you. It can’t be that Snoop Dogg goes to heaven and Calvin Broadus doesn’t, since Snoop Dogg is Calvin Broadus. (‘Snoop Dogg’ is Calvin Broadus’s stage name.) There is only one individual there to go or not go to heaven. By the same reasoning, if Animal ceases to be conscious when you die, then—supposing you are Animal—you must also cease to be conscious when you die. That’s PC1.
Now for PC2. Set aside for a moment whether you cease to be conscious when you die, and just focus on Animal. Why think that Animal isn’t conscious after you die? When you die, Animal will still be here on Earth, as a dead animal, waiting to be buried or cremated. It will have no brain function whatsoever. We can poke and prod it, and it won’t feel anything. Even if you think there might be a conscious afterlife, you certainly don’t think that it’s the rotting human animals in the cemetery (the corpses) that are having the conscious experiences. In other words, even if you think there will be or might be a conscious afterlife, you should still accept PC2: you shouldn’t think that Animal itself will be conscious after you die.
4.5 The Too Many Thinkers Argument
If you think that you will (or might) go on to enjoy a conscious afterlife, what you’ll probably want to say is that you and Animal part ways after death: Animal ceases to be conscious at that point, but you go on having conscious experiences in the afterlife. But, as I have already argued, you and Animal can part ways only if you and Animal are two different things. Accordingly, you’ll have to deny PC3, which says that you and Animal are one and the same.
And yet there is a simple and powerful argument for this premise. You’ll want to sit down for this. (Seriously, sit down. And sit by yourself if you’ve got a cat in your lap, shoo it away.) Here is the argument:
Let’s take the premises one at a time. If both TT1 and TT2 can be successfully defended, then I will in turn have defended PC3, the crucial premise of the argument that you will cease to be conscious when you die.
At least on the face of it, TT1 is incredibly plausible. Your head is part of Animal and so is your brain. And this brain of yours is a fully functioning brain. Of course, it won’t be a fully functioning brain after you die. But that’s irrelevant, because TT1 doesn’t say that Animal will be thinking after you die. It says that that Animal is thinking right now. And that seems undeniable, given that it now has a fully functioning brain as a part.
You may be tempted to object that it’s not Animal itself that’s thinking. Animal, you’ll say, is a mere vessel, and it’s you—a distinct, perhaps ghostly “soul” that inhabits the animal—that’s doing all the thinking. Here’s why you should resist the temptation. Certainly, you’ll admit that other animals, like squirrels or dogs, are capable of thinking. (If you don’t admit that, you’d have to say that squirrels and dogs have no intelligence whatsoever; after all, something can’t very well be intelligent if it doesn’t think.) But once you admit that these animals have thoughts, it would be absurd to deny that human animals, with their far more advanced brains, have thoughts.
How about TT2? TT2 says that you are the only thinking thing in your chair. To see the idea behind this premise, just think about what would be involved in denying it. You’d have to say that something other than you is in your chair right now with you, and it’s thinking. But that seems absurd.
You might try to lessen the absurdity by saying that, yes, you and Animal are two different things, both in your chair, both thinking, but you’re thinking about different things. You’re thinking about abstract philosophical matters, and it’s thinking about bodily concerns like eating lunch or taking a nap. But that can’t be right. It’s got the same brain as you, which means that it’s thinking exactly the same thoughts as you. For instance, if you’re thinking to yourself right now, “I’m a person, not a mere animal,” it’s because your brain is in a certain specific state. But Animal’s brain is in exactly that same state. After all, it’s got the same brain as you! So, it must be thinking exactly the same thing: “I’m a person, not a mere animal.” The same goes for absolutely anything you and Animal are thinking. And that’s completely absurd: surely there aren’t two different things in your chair, simultaneously thinking all the same thoughts.
TT1 and TT2 together entail PC3. What that means is that if you don’t want to accept PC3, you must reject one of these two premises. But, as we just saw, the premises are hard to deny, and in any case PC3 is already highly plausible. So, you should accept PC3.
4.6 Irrational Fears
I have thus far argued that being dead is not bad for you. The first premise, FD1, was that you cease to be conscious when you die, and I argued for this premise on the grounds that the human animal that’s where you are ceases to be conscious when you die, which in turn means that you cease to be conscious when you die (since you are that animal). The second premise, FD2, was that death is bad for you only if you continue to be conscious after you die; after all, the only things that are bad for you, ultimately speaking, are pains and things that lead to pain.
But the claim that being dead is not bad for you (FD3) is merely a subconclusion of the argument. The ultimate conclusion (FD5) is that you shouldn’t fear death, and for that we need one more premise.
The final premise of the Against Fearing Death argument, FD4, says that if being dead isn’t bad for you, then you shouldn’t fear death. To see why we should accept that, we need to think more generally about what makes a fear rational or irrational. Suppose a tarantula crawls onto your hand. Really, it’s not all that dangerous. It’s pretty unlikely to bite you, and even if it did it actually wouldn’t be any more painful or harmful than an ordinary bee sting. But even knowing how harmless they are, you might still be utterly terrified of a tarantula crawling onto you. And that would be irrational. Why? Because that amount of fear is disproportionate to the likelihood of something bad happening to you and how bad it would be if it did.
Still, it could bite you, so it’s rational to be a little bit afraid of the tarantula, just like it’s rational to be a little bit afraid of honeybees. But there are other things that it is irrational to fear to any degree. Take ablutophobia, the fear of bathing. Ablutophobia is completely irrational because bathing is not bad for you, not even a little bit. Or take lepidopterophobia, the fear of butterflies. This is irrational too, and it’s irrational because having an encounter with a butterfly is not in any way bad for you. Or take podophobia, the fear of seeing feet (including one’s own). What makes all of these irrational fears so irrational is precisely that the object of the fear isn’t in any way bad for the person who fears it. You shouldn’t fear things that aren’t bad for you. So, if indeed being dead isn’t bad for you, you shouldn’t fear it at all, just as FD4 says.
One might object that it’s unnatural to fear all these other things, whereas it’s completely natural to fear death. Fair enough. I’m not denying that fearing death is natural. I’m denying that fearing death is rational. Just because it comes naturally to us to act or react in a certain way, that doesn’t mean it’s rational. (Google ‘cognitive biases’, and you’ll see what I mean.) And in any case, it just isn’t true that all of those other fears are unnatural. It’s entirely normal for people to experience excessive fear of spiders and other creepy crawlies. And we can all recognize, on reflection, that this degree of fear is excessive and irrational, despite being our natural reaction.
Thus, I conclude that death isn’t bad for you and you shouldn’t fear it. This is a surprising result, but not necessarily a bad one. After all, fearfulness is emotionally painful, and if this argument helps you do without that pain, that’s good for you!
Reflection Questions
- Can you think of any counterexamples to the hedonist principle HD* from Section 4.2? Could such an example give us reason to prefer HD** from Section 4.3?
- Do the hedonist principles discussed in sections 4.2–4.3 imply that being born into this world was bad for you? Why or why not? If they do, can they be modified to avoid this implication?
- Are you convinced by the Against Post-Mortem Consciousness argument in sections 4.4–4.5? In particular, are you convinced by the argument that you and Animal are one and the same thing?
- In the final section (4.6), I suggested that it can never be rational to fear something that is not bad for you. Is that true? Can it be rational to fear something because it’s bad for others? Should we fear death because (and only because) of how our deaths will affect other people?
Sources and Resources
The argument advanced here originates with the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus, in his “Letter to Menoeceus” (link is to a public domain translation, but translation below is from Long and Sedley):
Accustom yourself to the belief that death is nothing to us. For all good and evil lie in sensation, whereas death is the absence of sensation. Hence a correct understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding infinite time, but by ridding us of the desire for immortality. (Long and Sedley 1987, 149).
The History of Philosophy without any Gaps podcast has an episode on Epicureans on death ( for a text alternative, see Adamson (2015, ch. 6).)
See Feldman (1994) for a more in-depth discussion of philosophical questions about death, and in particular chapter 8 of his book for a defense of the idea that death is bad because it deprives one of good things. The Too Many Thinkers argument in Section 4.5 is drawn from Olson (2009).
1000-Word Philosophy offers not one but two articles on the fear of death, Purves (2014) and Kaufman (2020). Cholbi (2023) (Philosophy Compass) offers a more in-depth overview. Timmerman (2017) (Wireless Philosophy) is an introductory lecture on the topic:
Rowland (2014) (Wireless Philosophy) is a lecture on hedonism:
For a deeper dive into the issues, Kagan (2008) is the archive of an entire course on the philosophy of death, offered at Yale in Spring 2007, with taped lectures. Here is the first of several lectures on the badness of death:
Nagel (1970) is a classic defense of the view that death is bad because it deprives one of future goods. On the possibility of posthumous harm, see Grover (1989). On the idea that death is a social harm rather than a harm to the individual who dies, see Gruen (2014). For a contemporary defense of the view that fear of future non-existence is irrational, see Bradley (2015).
As the Too Many Thinkers argument makes clear, questions about death are closely connected to questions about personal identity. The first half of Kagan’s course on death, linked above, is actually on what it is to be a person. With this in mind, Baker (2005) explores the relationship between answers to that question and how we might understanding the Christian doctrine of bodily resurrection.
Worries about death are also closely tied to the desire for immortality. But would immortality actually be a good thing? For a short story on the topic, read Borges (1962). For an influential argument against the desirability of immortality, see Williams (1973). (And for an overview of that argument, see Pereira (2020) (1000-Word Philosophy). For a challenging article on boredom, mortality, and makes life worth living, see Millgram (2004).