Death
As soon as we die, we cease to exist, feel no emotion and experience no pain. Thomas Nagel defines death as being an “unequivocal and permanent end to our existence”. Negel presents several possible positions as to whether death is, or is not a bad thing for a person. The meaning of life to most people is to merely live. This claim goes with the view Nagel has towards death as being an evil that strips away the good while depriving us of more life. Death should not be feared or viewed as an evil, because once we are dead, it is an end to our consciousness and for something to be good or bad a person has to be able to perceive that something.
Nagel interprets life as simply being alive and being able to experience life and value life's offers. Nagel explains that, people don't think of death as bad, just because it “involves long periods of nonexistence”. If people could be temporarily frozen or have some sort of “suspension” in life, it would not be viewed as a misfortune because that person will eventually come back to conscious life. We also don't think of the time before we were born as a misfortune. Nagel explains that, “people who object to death have made the mistake of trying to imagine what it is like to be dead”, but to imagine being dead is impossible because there is nothing to think about.
Nagel explains the difficulties in making sense of the “difficulties of loss and privation in general, and about death in particular”(75). Nagel organizes these difficulties by presenting three objections. The first problem suggest, if a person doesn't realize the evil, than that evil doesn't affect that person. Nagel illustrates this objection in the remark of “what you don't know can't hurt you”. When a person is betrayed behind his or her back, it is not a misfortune for this person as long as this person is unaware of the betrayal. The second problem is at what point does death cause harm when...
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