add paper 2

2024/documents/by-course/phil-1/paper-2/main.typ

@@ -43,9 +43,13 @@
 
 = Introduction
 
-The argument Against Fearing Death proposes the surprising thesis that you
+The argument Against Fearing Death says that you should not fear being dead
-should not fear being dead because it is not bad for you. The author states it
+because it is not bad for you. In this paper, I reject this thesis by showing
-as follows on #cite(<Korman2022-KORLFA>, supplement: [p. 74]):
+that the argument from hedonism with which the author supports their premises
+forces us to draw incorrect conclusions.
+
+The author states the argument against fearing death as follows on
+#cite(<Korman2022-KORLFA>, supplement: [p. 74]):
 
 #indented-argument(
   title: "Against Fearing Death",
@@ -57,22 +61,125 @@ as follows on #cite(<Korman2022-KORLFA>, supplement: [p. 74]):
   [ So, you should not fear death ],
 )
 
-To support premise FD2, the author argues
+First off, the author does not argue that you should not fear the _process_ of
+dying. A painful death is something to be rationally feared. The author only
+argues that _being dead_ itself is not bad. That is, you may fear the way by
+which you die, but you should not fear the state of being dead itself.
+Furthermore, if there was a high likelihood you may die painlessly, perhaps
+under anesthesia during a risky surgery, you should not fear that either, as
+you will painlessly transition from being alive to being dead, and there is
+nothing to fear about being dead.
+
+The author justifies FD1 by denying the only possibility of rejecting it, which
+is the notion that your consciousness continues after the death of your
+physical body, perhaps in an afterlife. He rejects this idea by arguing that
+you, the consciousness reading this, and your physical human body, are one and
+the same (i.e. they are _numerically equivalent_). So, if your physical human
+body biologically ceases to be conscious after death (which it does), then you
+also cease to be conscious when you die.
+
+Premise FD3 is the direct result of FD1 and FD2, so its validity is dependent
+entirely on FD1 and FD2. We've already shown why FD1 should be accepted. Let us
+first examine FD4 before returning to FD2.
+
+FD4 makes a lot of intuitive sense. Indeed, upon close inspection, there are no
+glaring issues. It is rational to fear something if and only if it is bad for
+you. Sure, you may fear things that are not bad for you, but these fears are
+_irrational_, you should try to resist them. The only things that it is
+rational to fear are things that are actually bad for you, such as burning your
+hand on a hot stove, or stubbing your toe.
+
+Finally, we return to premise FD2. This is perhaps the most questionable
+premise as it is not immediately clear why being unconscious implies that being
+dead is not bad.
+
+We first need a rigorous account of what exactly characterizes something as
+"bad." The author defines the following hedonist principle:
+
+#pad(
+  left: 16pt,
+  [ (HD\*) Something is bad for you if and only if it results in
+    more pain than you would otherwise have had ],
+)
+
+Then, he constructs the following #smallcaps[Argument from Hedonism] to support
+FD2.
+
+#indented-argument(
+  title: "The Argument from Hedonism",
+  abbreviation: "AH",
+  [
+    If you cease to be conscious when you die, then being dead doesn't result in more pain than you otherwise would have had
+  ],
+  [
+    Something is bad for you if and only if it results in more pain than you otherwise would have had
+  ],
+  [
+    $<==>$ (FD2) So, if you cease to be conscious when you die, then being dead isn't bad for you
+  ],
+)
+
+I've slightly modified the author's numberings to emphasize that the conclusion
+AH3 is equivalent to the premise FD2. That is, if the #smallcaps[Argument from
+Hedonism] holds, then FD2 must be true.
+
+We've shown that the author's argument for why you should not fear death is
+substantiated by what appear to be valid premises. I object in section 2 by
+arguing that we should _not_ accept the author's hedonist principle, and
+therefore should not accept premise FD2, because it leads us to the conclusion
+that we should kill ourselves. In section 3, I address various potential
+responses to my objection.
 
 = Don't kill yourself
 
+I will advance the argument that we should reject HD\* because its logical
+conclusion is that you should kill yourself. HD\* implies that being dead is
+not bad for you, but it also implies that _being alive_ is bad for you.
+
 #indented-argument(
   title: "Argument for Killing Yourself",
   abbreviation: "KYS",
-  [You are conscious when you are alive],
+  [You are occasionally conscious when you are alive],
-  [Something is bad for you if and only if it results in more pain than you otherwise would have had],
   [If you are conscious, you experience more pain than you otherwise would have if you were unconscious],
+  [$<==>$ (HD\*) Something is bad for you if and only if it results in more pain than you otherwise would have had],
   [So, being alive is bad for you],
   [If you are unconscious when you are dead, then being dead isn't bad for you],
-  [If being alive is bad for you, then: if being dead isn't bad for you, you should kill yourself],
+  [If being alive is bad for you, then: if being dead isn't bad for you, you should stop being alive],
-  [So, you should kill yourself],
+  [So, you should stop being alive],
 )
 
+In other words, KYS7 plainly states that you should kill yourself to stop being
+alive. This is clearly a ridiculous conclusion and one we should not accept. In
+order to reject this conclusion, we must reject KYS3, which is HD\*. All of the
+other premises can be substantiated easily, as follows.
+
+KYS1 is trivial. KYS2 is true because you experience no pain when unconscious,
+and we certainly experience pain at some point while conscious. So, we must
+experience more pain while conscious than we otherwise would have (while
+unconscious).
+
+KYS6 essentially just says that if being alive is bad and being dead is good,
+then you should take action to stop being alive and start being dead. After
+all, why continue doing something that is bad for you when the alternative not
+bad for you?
+
+Clearly, our own avenue forward is to reject HD\* as our principle of hedonism.
+Without HD\*, the #smallcaps[Argument from Hedonism] no longer stands, and
+therefore the argument for FD2 fails.
+
+= Possible objections
+
+One might attempt to object to KYS without rejecting HD\*. The only other
+premises to object against are KYS1 and KYS2. In particular, one might raise
+the concern that someone could be alive without ever being conscious (as an
+objection to KYS1), and that someone may not experience any pain while
+conscious (an objection to KYS2).
+
+These criticisms are not substantial enough for us to reject KYS. KYS1 brings
+up a valid point, but being unconscious for the rest of your life is not really
+substantially different from being dead. Regardless, we could modify our
+argument to
+
 #pagebreak()
 
 #[