UC Santa Barbara

In this paper, I argue that, contrary to what is claimed by Anthony Brueckner and John Martin Fisher, the account of the badness of death that they offered fails to establish that death can be bad for somebody, while prenatal non existence cannot be so without appealing to the controversial metaphysical assumption of the impossibility of prenatal existence, and therefore it fails to offer an adequate solution to the Lucretian symmetry argument. Furthermore, I argue that, assuming that we could have come to be before our birth, prenatal nonexistence can indeed be bad for us.

I then focus on the weaker thesis that death is necessarily worse than prenatal non existence. I argue that, assuming that it is possible for us to be born before our birth, this claim as well can be proven to be false through a counterexample, even in the circumstances in which both death and prenatal nonexistence are bad for us.