Abstract

Bernard Williams (1973) famously argued that if given the choice to relinquish our mortality we should refuse. We should not choose to always live. His piece provoked an entire literature on the desirability of immortality. Intending to contradict Williams, Thomas Nagel claimed that if given the choice between living for a week and dying in five minutes he would always choose to live. I argue that (1) Nagel’s iterating scenario is closer to the original Makropulos case (Čapek’s) that inspired Williams’s piece; (2) iterating versions of the choice given in the Makropulos case might well be less desirable than a one-time choice; and (3) Nagel’s mathematical induction premise is implausible. I discuss some useful implications of (1)-(3) for the broader discussion of Williams’s arguments and, more generally, for our understanding of the value of mortality and the possibility of mutually consistent but necessarily incompatible wants in ordinary human psychology.