The Evil of a Premature Death

The existence of harm due to a short life is a necessary condition for the construction of a social insurance against premature death: in the absence of such harm, there would be no justification for insuring all citizens against a short life. But the specific nature of the event ‘death of a person’—it implies that the person disappears—tends to make the characterization of the associated damage complex. This chapter examines the issue of the existence of harm due to premature death, by revisiting some arguments supporting the neutrality of death from the perspective of the person who dies. For that purpose, this chapter presents and critically assesses several arguments by Epicurus, Lucretius and Seneca, as well as criticisms of these arguments by modern analytical philosophers such as Nagel, Parfit and Broome. Based on these investigations, it is concluded that death is generally not neutral for the person who dies: death harms the person, to an extent that depends on the quantity and the quality of life-years that would have been lived in the absence of the event of premature death. The existence of such harm tends to open the questions of the social desirability and the feasibility of constructing a social insurance against premature death, questions examined in Chapter 3 .