Resisting Epicurean Therapy: On Why Death Is a Fitting Object of Fear

What is the fitting attitude one should have toward her own death? Or, to put it differently, what is it about death that makes it worthy of a certain attitude? The commonsense view is that death is something that merits fear because it is arguably the most terrible harm that a person can suffer. Surprisingly, however, this commonsense view about the fittingness of fear toward death has been challenged ever since the Hellenistic period. Epicurus, an ancient Greek philosopher, famously argued that death does not merit fear because it is not bad for the one who dies. Epicurus intended his argument to have therapeutic effects—he wanted people to live a pleasant life by ridding themselves of the fear of death and believed that the correct understanding of the nature of death enables us to do that. For this reason, I call any argument attempting to show that death is not worthy of fear an “Epicurean therapeutic argument” (ETA).

There are two kinds of ETAs. The traditional ETA holds that death does not merit fear because it is not bad for the person who dies. The contemporary ETA, on the other hand, acknowledges that death can in some special sense be bad for the one who dies, but it still denies that this special badness warrants fear. In light of these two kinds of ETAs, the primary goal of my dissertation is to defend the commonsense view that death is a fitting object of fear. I do this in two ways. First, I show that both the traditional and contemporary ETAs fail to establish that death is not worthy of fear. Second, I offer my own positive account of why death is a fitting object of fear.