The Evil of a Premature Death

Gregory Ponthiere

Chapter Chapter 2 in Allocating Pensions to Younger People, 2023, pp 9-38 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract The existence of harm due to a short life is a necessary condition for the construction of a social insurance against premature death: in the absence of such harm, there would be no justification for insuring all citizens against a short life. But the specific nature of the event ‘death of a person’—it implies that the person disappears—tends to make the characterization of the associated damage complex. This chapter examines the issue of the existence of harm due to premature death, by revisiting some arguments supporting the neutrality of death from the perspective of the person who dies. For that purpose, this chapter presents and critically assesses several arguments by Epicurus, Lucretius and Seneca, as well as criticisms of these arguments by modern analytical philosophers such as Nagel, Parfit and Broome. Based on these investigations, it is concluded that death is generally not neutral for the person who dies: death harms the person, to an extent that depends on the quantity and the quality of life-years that would have been lived in the absence of the event of premature death. The existence of such harm tends to open the questions of the social desirability and the feasibility of constructing a social insurance against premature death, questions examined in Chapter 3 .

Keywords: Death; Premature death; Harm; Evil of death; Deprivation account (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-031-24748-4_2

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783031247484

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-24748-4_2

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Books from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().