Is death a bad thing? According to the “deprivation account,” death is bad because the dead don’t get the various goods that they would have if only they were still alive. But it’s not normally a misfortune when a merely possible good doesn’t come your way: Bill Gates didn’t write you a check for a million dollars today, but it would be silly to be upset at that. So how can death actually be bad? This talk will explore a promising answer.
Shelly Kagan, Ph.D., is the Clark Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. Kagan’s main research interests lie in moral philosophy, and in particular, normative ethics. Kagan is a popular lecturer at Yale, known for his introductory lectures on death and ethics. His course on death has been turned into an Open Yale Course that is particularly popular in China and Korea. His books include The Limits of Morality (1991), Normative Ethics (1997), The Geometry of Desert (2012), and Death (2012), a book based on his Yale course and a national bestseller in South Korea.
This event is part of a series sponsored by the McDevitt Chair in Religious Philosophy and McDevitt Center, Vulnerable Life. As human beings, we are all exposed to suffering. We suffer physically and psychologically. We are confronted with moral dilemmas that have no clean resolution. We are all faced with our mortality and with the related fact that whatever lives we choose we cannot know what the alternatives would have been like. During the 2016-17 academic year, the McDevitt Center and the McDevitt Chair in Religious Philosophy will sponsor Vulnerable Life, a series of public lectures at Le Moyne College engaging the theme of our human vulnerability to suffering and how we can cope with it. The central question orienting the initiative is: Should seek to overcome our vulnerability, as some philosophies and spiritual practices counsel, or find ways to live with it?
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