Shelly Kagan on Death and Deprivation

Philosophy Bites

Nigel Warburton

Education, Philosophy, Society & Culture

4.6 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 18 April 2017

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The process of dying can be horrible for many, but is there anything bad about death itself? The obvious answer is that deprives us of something that we might otherwise have experienced. But that leads to further philosophical issues...Shelly Kagan discusses some of these with Nigel Warburton in this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is philosophy bites with me Nigel Warburton and me David Edmonds.
0:08.0	Philosophy bites is unfunded.
0:09.8	Please help us keep it going by subscribing or donating at
0:13.0	W.w. dot philosophy bites.com
0:16.4	or you can become a patron at Patreon.
0:19.4	If I got attacked by a crocodile while swimming,
0:22.1	my death would be a painful and be unlucky.
0:26.5	The process of dying can be full of suffering, but what about death itself?
0:31.0	Is there anything to fear about non-existence? Is death as opposed to dying something
0:36.3	to regret? Shelly Kagan has been reflecting on the philosophy of death.
0:41.6	Shelly Kagan, welcome to Philosophy Bites.
0:45.0	Thank you very much for having me.
0:47.0	The topic we're going to focus on is death and deprivation.
0:51.0	Before we get on to deprivation, let's just talk a bit about dying.
0:55.0	It seems to me that dying, for all of us, the process of dying, is likely to be quite a bad thing.
1:01.0	Well, for many of us, the process of dying is a painful one.
1:05.0	You can have a painful disease.
1:07.5	I could be eaten alive by Bengali Tigers.
1:10.2	That would be really a painful way to die.
1:12.0	But you can also die painlessly in your sleep.
1:15.0	It doesn't seem to me that the central way in which death is bad is the process.
1:19.0	There's something about death itself that's bad and undesirable.
	...

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