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  1. Selves, Persons, and the Neo-Lucretian Symmetry Problem.Patrick Stokes - 2024 - Philosophia 52 (1):69-86.
    The heavily discussed (neo-)Lucretian symmetry argument holds that as we are indifferent to nonexistence before birth, we should also be indifferent to nonexistence after death. An important response to this argument insists that prenatal nonexistence differs from posthumous nonexistence because we could not have been born earlier and been the same ‘thick’ psychological self. As a consequence, we can’t properly ask whether it would be better for us to have had radically different lives either. Against this, it’s been claimed we (...)
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  • Death, Creation, and Future Bias.Michael Rabenberg - 2022 - Philosophical Quarterly 72 (2):465-477.
    A much discussed question in the philosophy of death is whether both of the following claims are true: (1) it is at least typically appropriate to prefer dying further in the future to dying less far in the future; and (2) it is at least typically appropriate not to prefer having been created further in the past to having been created less far in the past. Some philosophers have tried to defend (1) and (2) by appeal to the alleged appropriateness (...)
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  • Torture and Incoherence: A Reply to Cyr.Duncan Purves - 2015 - The Journal of Ethics 19 (2):213-218.
    John Martin Fischer and Anthony L. Brueckner have argued that a person’s death is, in many cases, bad for him, whereas a person’s prenatal non-existence is not bad for him. Their suggestion relies on the idea that death deprives the person of pleasant experiences that it is rational for him to care about, whereas prenatal non-existence only deprives him of pleasant experiences that it is not rational for him to care about. Jens Johansson has objected to this justification of ‘The (...)
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  • The Lucretian Puzzle and the Nature of Time.Jens Johansson - 2017 - The Journal of Ethics 21 (3):239-250.
    If a person’s death is bad for him for the reason that he would have otherwise been intrinsically better off, as the Deprivation Approach says, does it not follow that his prenatal nonexistence is bad for him as well? Recently, it has been suggested that the “A-theory” of time can be used to support a negative answer to this question. In this paper, I raise some problems for this approach.
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  • More on the Mirror: Reply to Fischer and Brueckner.Jens Johansson - 2014 - The Journal of Ethics 18 (4):341-351.
    John Martin Fischer and Anthony L. Brueckner have argued that a person’s death is, in many cases, bad for him, whereas a person’s prenatal non-existence is not bad for him. Their suggestion relies on the idea that death deprives the person of pleasant experiences that it is rational for him to care about, whereas prenatal non-existence only deprives him of pleasant experiences that it is not rational for him to care about. In two recent articles in The Journal of Ethics, (...)
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  • Asymmetry and Incoherence: A Reply to Cyr.Jens Johansson - 2017 - The Journal of Ethics 21 (2):215-221.
    In defense of the Deprivation Approach to the badness of death against the Lucretian objection that death is relevantly similar to prenatal nonexistence, John Martin Fischer and Anthony L. Brueckner have suggested that whereas death deprives us of things that it is rational for us to care about, prenatal nonexistence does not. I have argued that this suggestion, even if correct, does not make for a successful defense of the Deprivation Approach against the Lucretian objection. My criticism involved a thought (...)
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  • The Mirror-Image Argument: An Additional Reply to Johansson.John Martin Fischer & Anthony Brueckner - 2014 - The Journal of Ethics 18 (4):325-330.
    We have argued that it is rational to have asymmetric attitudes toward prenatal and posthumous non-existence insofar as this asymmetry is a special case of a more general asymmetry in our attitudes toward past and future pleasures. Here we respond to an interesting critique of our view by Jens Johansson. We contend that his critique involves an inappropriate conflation of the time from which the relevant asymmetry emerges and the time of the badness of death.
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  • Accommodating Counterfactual Attitudes: A Further Reply to Johansson.John Martin Fischer & Anthony Brueckner - 2014 - The Journal of Ethics 18 (1):19-21.
    Here we respond to Johansson’s main worry, as laid out in his, “Actual and Counterfactual Attitudes: Reply to Fischer and Brueckner.” We show how our principle BF*(dd*) can be adjusted to address this concern compatibly with our fundamental approach to responding to Lucretius.
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  • How A-theoretic deprivationists should respond to Lucretius.Natalja Deng - 2015 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1 (3):417-432.
    What, if anything, makes death bad for the deceased themselves? Deprivationists hold that death is bad for the deceased iff it deprives them of intrinsic goods they would have enjoyed had they lived longer. This view faces the problem that birth too seems to deprive one of goods one would have enjoyed had one been born earlier, so that it too should be bad for one. There are two main approaches to the problem. In this paper, I explore the second (...)
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  • Death’s Badness and Time-Relativity: A Reply to Purves.Taylor W. Cyr - 2016 - The Journal of Ethics 20 (4):435-444.
    According to John Martin Fischer and Anthony Brueckner’s unique version of the deprivation approach to accounting for death’s badness, it is rational for us to have asymmetric attitudes toward prenatal and posthumous nonexistence. In previous work, I have defended this approach against a criticism raised by Jens Johansson by attempting to show that Johansson’s criticism relies on an example that is incoherent. Recently, Duncan Purves has argued that my defense reveals an incoherence not only in Johansson’s example but also in (...)
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  • Rationally Not Caring About Torture: A Reply to Johansson.Taylor W. Cyr - 2014 - The Journal of Ethics 18 (4):331-339.
    Death can be bad for an individual who has died, according to the “deprivation approach,” by depriving that individual of goods. One worry for this account of death’s badness is the Lucretian symmetry argument: since we do not regret having been born later than we could have been born, and since posthumous nonexistence is the mirror image of prenatal nonexistence, we should not regret dying earlier than we could have died. Anthony Brueckner and John Martin Fischer have developed a response (...)
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  • A puzzle about death’s badness: Can death be bad for the paradise-bound?Taylor W. Cyr - 2016 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 80 (2):145-162.
    Since at least the time of Epicurus, philosophers have debated whether death could be bad for the one who has died, since death is a permanent experiential blank. But a different puzzle about death’s badness arises when we consider the death of a person who is paradise-bound. The first purpose of this paper is to develop this puzzle. The second purpose of this paper is to suggest and evaluate several potential attempts to solve the puzzle. After rejecting two seemingly attractive (...)
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