Thomas Nagel's Death

“Death” Mini-Essay Thomas Nagel’s “Death” has a central theme that is addressed. Nagel explores the idea that if death is a lasting and permanent end to our lives on earth, it could be bad. Nagel uses this theme and goes on to give two possible arguments. In the first argument, Nagel explains that life is all we really have in the end and because death puts an end to our life, it must be our greatest loss in life. The second position he takes is that the person who actually dies will not experience any loss whether it is positive or negative because death will end that person’s life and their existence anyway. Nagel then goes on to examine whether or not death is an evil. He states that if death is in fact an evil, it has nothing to do with

His first is that there is doubt when it comes to anything being bad for a person unless is causes some sort of displeasure to that person. Someone needs to mind the deprivation of life in order for it to be evil. Nagel’s second problem is that when somebody dies, how is there a misfortune? There is no longer a person left so they are unable to experience it so who would experience the misfortune from it? Lastly he presents a third problem which is that if the period of our nonexistence before our birth was not bad, then our nonexistence with death should not be bad either. He then offers a response to each of these problems. For the first, he states that good or bad things that happen to people do not always occur in their present state and therefore just because they do not directly experience it, it can still affect the person. He then objects to the second problem by saying that even though the person that died did not survive, they can still experience misfortune because if they did not die they would have continued to enjoy their life before their death. Lastly, he objects the third problem and explains that the period of nonexistence before birth does not deprive us of anything as death deprives us of the time we could have been living. He clearly shows that there is a difference between these two periods of nonexistence. Nagel goes on to examine that if we live a full life to 100 years, is it really a misfortune? We all know we are going to die so could it really be a misfortune? He also gives the example that people often go through a time of pain before dying and know that death is going to happen soon and he argues that if this is the case, we could still fear