PHIL 008 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Moe Williams, Cebes
29 Oct 2020
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Death is not evil and not to be dreaded. (p1) death is either like the best sleep you"ve ever had or death involves a fun afterlife (p2) neither option is an evil. It is a permanent loss of goods that go hand and hand with being alive among other things, perception, desire, and thought (74). One implication: things are no worse for shakespeare than proust. Circumstances that are evil for a person include more than their being in unpleasant experiential states (76). Asparagus plant, contented infant, betrayal, breach of deathbed trust, tarnished reputation. Whether a circumstance is a misfortune for a person depends on their history, possibilities, and hopes. There is an asymmetry between the time of non-existence before your birth and your death (79). You weren"t deprived of something by not being born earlier you couldn"t have been born earlier. On the one hand, living less than 120 years is natural to us as a species.
