Anna Brinkerhoff, currently teaching at George Mason University

Class 3.2 Brinkerhoff - Death and the Afterlife

For Monday’s class we read and discussed Thomas Nagel’s seminar essay ‘Death’, which lays out a model of what have come to be called ‘deprivation’ accounts of the badness of death. For this class we’re going to continue in the vein of trying to understand what deprivation accounts of the badness of death are committed to, by reading and engaging with Anna Brinkerhoff’s recent (April 2021) article ‘Death, Deprivation, and the Afterlife’.

Anna Brinkerhoff

Anna Brinkerhoff received her PhD from Brown University in 2021. You can check out her other work here.

Deprivation Accounts

We know from last time that according to deprivation accounts, death is bad for you because it causes you to be deprived of things that, had you not died, would have been good for you. Deprivation accounts are designed to answer Lucretius’s argument, but as we saw, Lucretius was assuming that there is no afterlife. So this leaves an interesting question that I already encouraged you to start thinking about as you read Nagel’s article, of whether deprivation accounts have an especially hard time explaining what is bad about death if what death actually does is get you started on an afterlife that is actually better than the mortal life that you were already leading. This is the question that Brinkerhoff asks and tries to answer in her paper. She argues, surprisingly, that actually, deprivation accounts can explain why death is bad even if there is an afterlife, and even if the afterlife is much better than this life, and even if the goods of the afterlife are similar in many ways to the goods of this life.

Reading

As you read Brinkerhoff’s article, ‘Death, Deprivation, and the Afterlife’, ask yourself, “Why does Professor Schroeder say (above) that deprivation accounts make it even more puzzling how death could be bad if there is an afterlife and the afterlife is even better than this life?” “What is the key idea behind Brinkerhoff’s answer to this puzzle, and why does it address the answer to my first question?” and “Do I really agree that death is only bad because of what it deprives people of, or is there anything else about death that is bad?