Mcmahan's Badness Of Death

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McMahan's account of the badness of death is a modification of the deprivation account, as he tries to solve what he considers a problem for this account, namely, the badness of death for fetuses and newborns. As we have seen, the deprivation account evaluates the badness of death based on the amount of good the person loses when they die. Death is a misfortune if the person loses a future with a positive balance of well-being: the more positive well-being lost, the greater the misfortune. Consequently, an implication of this position is that, everything else being equal, the death a younger person implies a greater harm than the death of an older one. Clearly, this is in line with most of our intuitions, we normally believe that the death …show more content…
There is a widespread idea that the death of a baby is not as bad as the death of a child or an adult1. We appear to have the notion that a child or an adult lose more in dying than a fetus or a newborn baby. However, if the deprivation account is right, the death of a baby should be the worse occurrence possible. The logic of this judgement is simple: imagine a baby (Baby) and a twenty year old (Young). If they do not die now, they would both live until sixty, when they will die of a heart attack. Also, suppose that they would have a life worth living, full of meaning and happiness, both enjoying a similar level of overall well-being (from the time of their birth to the time of their death at sixty). In this case, if the loss of welfare is our main and only concern, it is clear that the death of Baby is worse than the death of Young. Baby loses 20 more years of happiness, so she is clearly worse off.

How are we to deal with this incongruence between the intuition and the deprivation account? Some authors decide in favour of the account, abandoning the intuition, and declaring, therefore, that the death of a baby is a greater misfortune than the death of a child or adult (Bradley, 2009). According to McMahan, however, is the deprivation account that needs reform (McMahan 2002: 165-188), as he sees the theory as failing to capture one of our primary insights into the badness of death: the importance
…show more content…
Thus, his theory is not opposed to the deprivation account, but a modification of it. This alteration is based on his position about about personal identity, or more specifically, about the basis of prudential concern. Following Parfit (1984), McMahan (2002: 69-86) defends that what matters for prudential concern is not personal identity itself, but psychological connectedness. In this perspective, he combines both ideas to explain the badness of death as a function of the amount of well-being lost and the level of psychological connectedness between the individual now and the time when the future goods would be enjoyed. When the connections are weak, this is discounted from the amount of goods lost, as it seems that the person is not strongly related to those future goods. In his own words: “The evaluation must be based on the effect that the death has on the victim at the time of death rather than on the effect it has on its life as a whole. This is what the Time-Relative Interest of the badness of death does. It discounts the importance of the death to the victim at the time for any weakness there would have been in the prudential unity relations that would have bound him to himself in the future” (McMahan, 2002:

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