The Epicurean Argument holds to the idea that death represents the “limit of life”. In other words, death represents something that does not occur in a life and thus it cannot actually harm us. We can’t die while we are alive and we can’t be harmed any further while we are dead. Death can’t harm us before we die there is nothing for death to harm when we are already dead. Rowlands then extends this argument to consider the possibilities that death has of harming us. Because, if death can in fact harm us in some way, this Epicurean Argument loses its power. He first considers the notion of death serving as a “harm of deprivation”. Personally, I do not particularly find this discussion to be of much value as the scenario Rowlands provides of a brain injury is not analogous to death, but he uses this argument to lay the foundation for his proceeding discussion, so I guess it is appropriate.
Rowlands then considers the notion of death serving as the deprivation of our possibilities. He sees little worth in using the deprivation of possibilities as a source of death-induced harm because of the “promiscuity of possibilities”. Just because someone has the possibility of doing something later in life does not mean that this person has an interest in pursuing
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The tricky part of this argument is determining what is actually meant by the use of the word future. If the future is simply a set of possibilities that we may choose to pursue later in life, this argument reduces back to the argument of the previous paragraph. If the future is more than a set of possibilities, then the notion of our future has a heavier impact on the value of the future. According to Rowlands, the mental states that we possess concerning future events in our lives help determine the ultimate value of such a future and thus aid in determining the level of harm that death has on the discontinuity of that