I find the deprivation account (DA) of the badness of death plausible, though not without problems. I’m also inclined to hold that death can be bad for dead people and that this badness holds when the person is dead. For example, spreading vicious lies about a dead person who lived a virtuous life can be bad for that person, and bad for him when he is dead.
According to DA, the event of death (and perhaps the state of being dead) is extrinsically bad for person P if and only if that death prevents P from being intrinsically better off had the death not occurred. In other words, death deprives the dead person of intrinsically valuable goods that person would have or experience were he not to die, and thus, death serves as a means to prevent the person from having intrinsic goods or being in intrinsically valuable states.
As Neil Feit notes in Death Is Bad for Us When We’re Dead (In Exploring the Philosophy of Death and Dying), the DA raises a timing problem: precisely when is death bad for the dead person?
To get a sense of the problem, Feit presents the timing argument:
1. Nothing can be bad for a person before it happens.
2. Nothing can be bad for a person when that person does not exist.
3. From the time of a person’s death onwards, that person no longer exists.
4. Anything that is bad for a person must be bad for that person at some time or other.
5. So, death cannot be bad for the one who dies.
The argument is valid, which means that rejecting (5) requires rejecting at least one of the premises. But which one?
Like Feit, I’m inclined to reject (5) and affirm subsequentism, i.e., that death is bad for the person when he is dead. Feit denies (2) and discusses an example from Fred Feldman of a boy who dies a painless death. Feit suggests that the boy’s unfortunate demise ends his existence. (Feit seems to accept the so-called “termination thesis” (TT), which holds that death terminates one from the realm of existence.) Yet Feit also suggests that the dead boy has a well-being level of zero. This seems odd since it does not seem to make any sense to say that a non-existent thing possesses a level of well-being. One might reasonably hold that, for something to be in the category of having or not having a level of well-being, that thing must exist (or otherwise have being). It therefore seems to be a category mistake to say that a non-existent thing can possess a level of well-being.
Feit addresses this difficulty, but not substantively, given the article's brevity. One way to deal with the challenge is to distinguish between existence and being (cf. Palle Yourgrau) and hold that although the TT is true and the boy no longer exists, he nevertheless has being and hence can possess a level of well-being.
Another way to deal with the problem is to accept (2), reject the distinction between existence and being, reject the TT, and reject (3). I see at least two ways to do this: first, assume eternalism in the philosophy of mind, which enables one to hold that dead persons exist; second, assume that human persons survive bodily death, which also enables one to hold that dead persons exist.
Still another approach is to reject (4). Perhaps this can be done with the help of eternalism.
There is another problem. Feit doesn’t discuss it. ‘Deprivation’ is ambiguous. One might say that (i) death deprives a dead person of his consciousness and thus his ability to experience intrinsic goods he would have experienced had he lived and remained conscious. One might say that (ii) death deprives a dead person of the future goods he would have had or experienced had he lived. Or one might say that (iii) death deprives a dead person of future goods and experiences.
On option (i), what is deprived is something the person has and loses at death, namely consciousness (assuming there is no conscious afterlife). On (ii), what is deprived is a counterfactual good or experience. (Does it make sense to say that one can be deprived of a counterfactual good?) On (iii), what is deprived is a future good. Option (iii) seems to require something like eternalism, according to which the future and its constituents exist.
So, is death bad for dead people when they are dead?
I’m still inclined to think so, at least in some cases. Perhaps there are some cases in which death is extrinsically/instrumentally good for some person P because the death prevents P from having or experiencing intrinsic bads that it would be better for P not to have or experience. But this is a topic for another post.