OrangePhilosophy

Ben, good stuff--I agree with everything you say. I just wanted to say thanks for keeping OrangePhilosophy alive.

Hi Ben,

I agree with you and I don't believe what I am going to say, but here is an argument nonetheless.

Student's death is worse than Baby's. We will see this when we recognize that identical goods can acquire extrinsic value depending upon who possesses them. An agent A of greater moral status than A* such that A and A* possess the same good are such that that good is better for A than A*. So, death is worse for student because he has greater moral status than baby.

I don't believe this because I doubt the claim about greater moral status. Secondly, baby not only misses out on more good than student, but he would also miss out on acquiring this moral status, which is bad, but also those goods that student misses out on when he has this moral status, which, by hypothesis, are just those goods baby would have had had he not died.

If moral status makes a difference to the value of the good possessed, we have yet a further reason to think that baby's death is worse for him, he missess out on acquiring moral status, something that student doesn't miss out on.

It seems clear to me that Baby's death is worse for him.

I think that a main cause of intuitions that Student's death is worse than Baby's is evolutionary. The death of Student is particularly bothersome because, after receiving a lot of time, resources, and effort that could have gone towards other endeavors, he died just when he was ready to be productive and reproduce. Ancestors of ours who were more concerned about the deaths of people like Student than people like Baby would have ended up having more reproducing offspring, so thanks to natural selection we share their concerns.

There is an argument from marginal cases to support these intuitions (although I don't buy it). Consider the following entity:

Sperm. A recently created sperm, Sperm, dies in an accident without ever leaving the body in which he was created. Had Sperm not died then, he would have gone on to fertilize an egg, which would then have developed into a boy who would be born, enjoy a happy infancy, childhood, and adolescence, attend college, enter a PhD program in philosophy, become a professional philosopher, and live an enjoyable life until dying at age 80.

Sperm missed out on some valuable parts of life that Baby and Student got to have, like the post-natal experienced. But would anyone say that Sperm's death was worse than Baby's or Student's?

To complete this argument, it would be necessary to say what it is that that differentiates Sperm and Student that makes the latter's death worse, and to claim that whatever this is also differentiates Baby and Student to some extent. The argument might be made more plausible by the introduction of other entities like Fetus and Zygote.

One thing that differentiates sperm is that sperm presumably ceases to exist while combining with Egg. Sperm doesn't last long anyway, and Sperm presumably has no moral value to begin with since Sperm isn't an organism. Even those who deny that a fetus is a person will tend to agree that I was once a fetus, and it's biologically clear that a fetus is an organism that is genetically distinct from both parents. So focusing on the entities Fetus and Zygote would be much more helpful.

So here's the question. Why do we consider miscarriages to be much less unfortunate for the miscarried fetus than we do a child that has been born? Is it a view that such a death has harmed the person more than it would have if it were later, after birth? [I know that most people reading this won't admit that it is a person, but that just seems the most natural term for me to use.] I'm not sure if Ben's argument requires saying that. There may be other factors for why we don't consider it to be as bad as it intrinsically is, if Ben's view is right. So it could be a problem, but he might have some good things to say here. I think I raised this before with him, and I think he had a satisfactory answer, but I'm not sure now.

Jeremy,

My initial explanation for explaining why people judge a newborn's death to be worse than a death due to miscarriage is that people are taking into account extrinsic features that make a death bad. When a newborn baby dies there is the badness associated with losing someone one is attached to emotionally, the badness of pyschological pain that occurs when one is able to distinctly remember an individual that is dead and the badness associated with unsatisfied want to touch and cradle someone that one has touched and cradled, but is no longer able to be touched and cradled. This badness accompaies the death of a newborn and not death through a miscarriage. So, the death of a newborn is worse in the sense that it is not intrinsically worse for the individual, but rather, it is worse for the parent of the individual.

Oh, but then you've changed the rules of the game. Ben is asking which would be worse for the person in question. He said that from the outset of the first post, though commenters on that post made the same mistake.

I think Blargh made an interesting observation above. I know the right response to it is to say that we are concerned with the badness of death *for the individual who dies* and not with the badness that befalls the survivors. But in my limited experience with the tragedy of death, I always find myself most moved by the extrinsic bad stuff. So when a young father or mother dies, leaving several very young children, I think that is a terrible death. Only a very small portion of my judgement depends on a thought like "they had so much to look forward to" and the vast majority of what I see as the badness concerns the bad consequences of the death for others.

I think the same intuitions can cloud our judgement in the student/baby case. I would start with the view that losing the student is (in my eyes, *clearly*) the bigger tragedy. That is the sort of thing a family will often be unable to recover from. They have invested their hopes in an individual who is gone. This is almost certainly not the case with the baby; it would be a bit sick if it were. Blargh's point about all the investment of love and resources and education which is lost if the student dies is also relevant.

So I'm prepared to agree with Ben that death is worse *for the baby* than for the student, but I think that if you're deciding whom to murder, you should pick the baby every time. In judging what's worse simpliciter, I think it's clearly the death of the student.

Thanks for the comments. The Zygote case seems to be the one people bring up most, so I think I'm going to have to make sure to deal with that in some way. There are a few possibilities. I could say that Zygote's death *really is* very bad for him, but also say that zygotes lack moral status, or don't deserve much yet, so the misfortunes of zygotes need not bother us very much even if they are enormous misfortunes. (Death is very bad *for the zygote*, but not very bad *simpliciter*, as Dave says.) Or, I could say that a zygote is not the sort of thing that can be benefited or harmed - maybe because zygotes are not organisms yet, or maybe because they are not persons. (In fact, the way I stated C in the post, it applies only to persons, so it's pretty plausible that zygotes wouldn't be relevant. But it's not clear to me that restricting C to persons is justified.) Or I could become a pro-lifer. Nah.

Your arguments seems very clear, Ben. Although I didn't get involved in the first round of discussions on this, I have some questions (maybe repeats of some asked before, I don't know, and by no means do I think the questions I ask here are burning). My concern is for how we might use your argument in practice--provided I'm not jumping the gun here. As a whole, the death of a baby rather than the 23 yr old doesn't seem as bad, but this isn't your focus, viz., bad for him. But in choosing whom to murder, shouldn't you consider factors other than the ones pertaining to the presons feelings, pains, etc? As someone noted here, the 23 yr old seems to have a greater impact on the world, has duties and commitments, and feels, wills, etc at quite a different level. I know this extends beyond what you are saying. But if the value of the 23 yr old seems greater (so far as other people see it), how might we introduce your argument the make the better choice? Maybe this is a burning question, if only because it points out an intuition (whether appropriate or not) that tries to poison your suggestions above.

Chuck - good question. What I've said here doesn't entail all by itself that we should behave one way rather than another. But if I am right, there are many cases where many people might be underestimating the badness of some deaths, and therefore many cases where, e.g., changes in public policy might be warranted. For example, if we're deciding how much money to devote to solving various deadly health problems, some involving infants and others involving adults, we might be giving short shrift to the infants. (Again, not necessarily, because maybe the other ways in which adults' deaths are bad outweigh the badness of babies' deaths.)

Sorry about this shameless plug. I'll be giving a talk at Rochester on Friday, and at a conference at Buffalo on Sunday (Nov. 12, Nov. 13). Both talks are on DEATH. I call this my "Death March Through Upstate NY"....

Hope to see you there!

John, I hope to make it to Rochester tomorrow for your talk. I just finished an upstate death march of my own.

Baby's death is worse for him as you say, but that is not particularly relevant, morally speaking. If you've got murder in mind, the value changes wrought to everyone's lives ought to be considered.

Think about what happens to our intuitions if we set up the situation so that no-one else can be affected by who dies. The situation is like this. You and A are the last two humans alive after a nuclear armageddon. You are old and very near death. A is a baby. Your last act, you decide, will be to set a time bomb. Is it morally better to set the time bomb for 5 minutes or 23 years? (Obviously it's best not to set it at all.)

I think in this situation it's obvious that giving A, the last human being, an extra 23 years of life is a good thing, even if you kill him in the end. This is a small claim, but I think it's really identical to the one you make in the post, just couched in a way that's slightly less counterintuitive.

Or were you trying to make a different point?

Rob,
I agree that it's obviously right to give him the extra 23 years. But someone might think that, while it's better for the baby to get the extra 23 years, his death at age 23 would nevertheless be worse for him than the death he'd have if he died in infancy. The question is whether the value of someone's death depends solely on the amount of a good life the death takes from the person.

I see what you mean. But without careful phrasing, there is a risk of attributing too much moral significance to what is basically a technical point. For instance, you said in your last post:

"The question is whether the value of someone's death depends solely on the amount of a good life the death takes from the person."

But the answer to that question is *obviously* no. Other factors are relevant to the value of a death (like whether it saves a village of people).

Perhaps you meant an implicit 'for him', like this:

"The question is whether the value of someone's death for him depends solely on the amount of a good life the death takes from the person."

But even this is unhappy. The value of my death for me depends on various extrinsic features, like the upset caused to my loved ones. I would sort of rather have died at five than now, so that my parents could have had a replacement child. Or at least, it's a consideration, and a more selfless person might really have an analogous preference. The kinds of things I value are not just dependent on the quality of my own life (people sacrifice themselves for higher causes).

Reflecting further on this, I suspect the only point to take out of this discussion is that most people would rather be killed old than young, which is no newsflash. Perhaps it's also possible to make a distinction between the 'selfish' value of one's death and the 'selfless' value, and therefore to say that the 'selfish value' is intrinsically higher when you die young, all else being equal. But it is very far from obvious to me that this distinction can be motivated.