Abstract
Most philosophers in the death literature believe that death can be bad for the person
who dies. The most popular view of death’s badness—namely, deprivationism—holds
that death is bad for the person who dies because, and to the extent that, it deprives
them of the net good that they would have accrued, had their actual death not
occurred. Deprivationists thus face the challenge of locating the time that death is
bad for a person. This is known as the Timing Problem, which is thought to be one
of the biggest challenges facing views holding that death can be bad for the
person who dies. Every possible answer to this question has been defended in the
literature, yet each answer can seemingly be shown to be subject to compelling
objections. In this paper, I argue that the force of the Timing Problem is illusory.
Specifically, I argue that the problem, as formulated in the literature, is
underspecified. Any adequately precise form of the question ‘When is death bad for
the person who dies?’ is one to which there is a clear, decisive, and unproblematic
answer.