Thomas Nagel on the Harms of Death

Is death bad for the person who dies? It sounds like a straightforward question, but it opens into one of philosophy’s deepest puzzles. After all, once someone is dead, they no longer exist to feel the loss. So who, exactly, is harmed? Thomas Nagel, one of the most influential analytic philosophers of the twentieth century, confronted this question directly in his landmark 1970 essay “Death,” published in the journal Noûs. His answer – that death harms us primarily by depriving us of life’s goods – remains central to how philosophers think about mortality today.

Death as deprivation, not as suffering 🔗

Nagel begins with an important clarification. If death is an evil, it is not because of anything it positively contains – no pain, no suffering, no dreadful experience awaits the dead. Death is bad not because of any positive features, but only because of what it deprives us of. This is the foundation of what philosophers now call the deprivation account of death’s harm.

The deprivation account holds that life is genuinely good, and death – by ending life – removes that good permanently. Death is commonly regarded as one of the greatest losses that can befall an individual because it not only deprives a person of a particular good, but of every good that a future life had to offer. Nagel’s contribution was to articulate this intuition with philosophical rigor and defend it against serious objections.

Crucially, Nagel is not talking about the process of dying, which may indeed involve pain and fear. He is concerned with death itself – the permanent cessation of conscious existence. Some elements, like perception, desire, activity, and thought, are so general as to be constitutive of human life, and they are widely regarded as formidable benefits in themselves. When death removes these, the loss is real and serious, even if the person who has died is no longer around to register it.

Can something harm you if you don’t experience it? 🔗

This is where Nagel’s argument becomes philosophically interesting. A common objection to the deprivation account runs as follows: how can death harm someone who no longer exists? Harm, the objection suggests, requires a subject who can suffer. Once you are dead, there is no subject left to be harmed.

Nagel pushes back against this by drawing a distinction between two kinds of harm. On one hand, something can harm you intrinsically – pain is the clearest example, bad in itself because of how it feels. On the other hand, something can harm you by depriving you of goods you would otherwise have enjoyed, regardless of whether you are aware of that deprivation.

He illustrates this with a striking thought experiment. Nagel raises the hypothetical scenario of an intelligent adult suffering a brain injury which leaves him in the mental state of a cared-for but ignorant infant. One would most definitely view this man’s state as a misfortune for the man himself – not because he suffers, but because of the person he was and the person he could be now. The injury is a catastrophe not because of the infant-like creature that remains, but because of what has been lost: the adult mind, the future possibilities, the ongoing life. The same logic, Nagel argues, applies to death.

He reinforces the point with the example of betrayal. If a man is betrayed by his friends, ridiculed behind his back, and despised by people who treat him politely to his face, these can be counted as misfortunes for him even if he does not suffer as a result. The harm is real whether or not the person discovers it. Nagel’s view is that objective loss – the loss of goods that would have been experienced – is a genuine form of harm, independent of subjective awareness.

The subjective openness of life 🔗

Nagel makes a further observation that gives death its particular weight. From the inside – from the perspective of the person living a life – experience feels open-ended. There is no internal deadline, no felt sense of a natural limit. A person’s sense of his own experience does not embody the idea of a natural limit; his existence defines for him an essentially open-ended possible future, containing the usual mixture of goods and evils.

This subjective openness means that death, whenever it occurs, cuts short something that felt unlimited. Viewed in this way, death, no matter how inevitable, is an abrupt cancellation of indefinitely extensive possible goods. Nagel presses the point further: the fact that death is inevitable does not make it any less harmful. If everyone were inevitably going to suffer six months of agony, he notes, the inevitability would not make the agony less painful. Why should deprivation be any different?

This is why, for Nagel, even the death of an elderly person represents a genuine loss – though he acknowledges that the earlier a death occurs, the greater the deprivation. When we discover that someone has died young we lament that she had her whole life in front of her, while we may say of an elderly person that it was her time or that she lived life to the fullest. The scale of deprivation varies, but the nature of the harm is the same.

The timing problem 🔗

One of the more technically challenging objections to Nagel’s account concerns timing. If death is a harm, when does that harm occur? So long as a person exists, she has not yet died, and once she has died, she no longer exists; so there seems to be no time when death, if it is a misfortune, can be ascribed to its unfortunate subject.

Nagel’s response is to suggest that not all harms need to be pinned to a precise moment. Some things – betrayal, the violation of a will, the cancellation of a life’s possibilities – are bad in a way that resists exact temporal location. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains, Nagel suggests it may be an indeterminate matter when death makes us worse off, even though it clearly does so. The harm of death consists in the overall fact that a life that could have contained more valuable experiences contains fewer – not in any specific moment of suffering.

The symmetry argument: why not worry about pre-birth nonexistence? 🔗

The most famous challenge to Nagel’s position comes from the ancient Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius, who offered what philosophers call the symmetry argument. The reasoning is simple: before you were born, you also did not exist, and that period of non-existence doesn’t bother you at all. Death is just the mirror image of that earlier non-existence. So if you don’t lament the time before your birth, why should you lament the time after your death?

Lucretius turns our attention to a puzzling asymmetry in our attitudes towards prenatal nonexistence and posthumous nonexistence. While in each of these periods we do not exist, we normally fear our later limit of life – death – but share no similar feeling towards our earlier limit of life. His conclusion is that the fear of death is irrational.

Nagel rejects this equivalence. His key move is to argue that the direction of time matters for what counts as a deprivation. It is true that both the time before a man’s birth and the time after his death are time of which his death deprives him. But we cannot say that the time prior to a man’s birth is time in which he would have lived had he been born not then but earlier, for anyone born substantially earlier would have been someone else. Pre-natal non-existence cannot therefore be understood as the loss of a life that was already “his” to be deprived of. Death, by contrast, deprives an already-existing person of a continuation that genuinely belonged to them.

A definition of deprivation must involve some loss, and one cannot lose something she has never before possessed. What is worse about the period after death is the fact that death involves loss, whereas prenatal nonexistence does not. The two periods are not symmetrical after all.

Philosophers Anthony Brueckner and John Martin Fischer have further developed this asymmetry, arguing as noted in the philosophical literature on the metaphysics of death that death deprives a person of goods that it is rational to care about – namely, future experienced goods that the person was already oriented toward – while birth deprives no existing person of anything at all.

Nagel versus Epicurus: does death concern the dead? 🔗

Nagel’s position also stands in direct contrast to the ancient Epicurean view. Epicurus famously argued that death is nothing to us: while we exist, death is not present, and when death is present, we no longer exist. On this view, there is simply no subject left to be harmed, so the whole worry about death is a confusion.

Nagel grants that the dead do not suffer, but insists this misses the point. The harm of death is not an experience of badness – it is the objective cancellation of a good. Life has value apart from its contents. When we take away all the good and bad experiences in life what is left over – the bare experience of life – is valuable in itself. Death removes that value permanently, and the absence of a subject to feel the loss does not make the loss any less real.

This is a fundamentally objectivist position. As discussed in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s treatment of the harm thesis, Nagel’s version of the deprivation account measures the harmfulness of death in terms of the goods that continued existence would have brought – regardless of whether those goods are subjectively desired or experienced.

The severity of death: Keats and Tolstoy 🔗

Nagel does not treat all deaths as equally bad. The deprivation account naturally implies that the harm of death scales with how much life – and how much good life – is cut short. The death of Keats at 24 is generally regarded as tragic; that of Tolstoy at 82 is not. Although they will both be dead forever, Keats’ death deprived him of many years of life which were allowed to Tolstoy; so in a clear sense Keats’ loss was greater.

Yet Nagel is careful not to imply that dying at 82 is therefore unimportant. The harm is always present; it is only the degree that varies. And since from the subjective standpoint life always feels open-ended, no death can be said to arrive at a moment when it no longer represents the cancellation of indefinitely many possible goods.

This view puts Nagel in direct disagreement with philosopher Bernard Williams, who argued, as surveyed in the Stanford Encyclopedia, that immortality would itself become meaningless – that a life without death would eventually lose its character and purpose. For Nagel, death is an evil whenever it comes. The fact that it is universal does not make it any less of a loss.

Why Nagel’s account still matters 🔗

Nagel’s deprivation account remains one of the most discussed positions in the philosophy of death because it captures something that most people intuitively believe: that dying young is a tragedy, that a life cut short is genuinely worse than a full one, and that the dead have lost something real. It gives philosophical backbone to our ordinary grief and to the moral weight we attach to preserving life.

At the same time, it raises genuinely hard questions that philosophers continue to wrestle with – about the timing of harm, about what it means to lose something you can no longer experience, and about how to compare possible lives we might have lived. These are not merely academic puzzles. As the Yale Open Courses lecture series on death frames it, the deprivation account asks us to rethink our assumptions about what harm is and who can be harmed – with implications for how we think about everything from end-of-life ethics to the moral status of future generations.

What do you think? If death’s harm lies in the experiences we never get to have, does that mean a shorter but intensely rich life is less harmed by death than a longer but unremarkable one? And if we cannot experience our own non-existence after death, is the loss Nagel describes a harm to us – or only a loss to the world?

References

1. https://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil150/Nagel.pdf
2. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/death/
3. https://philarchive.org/archive/CYRHDD
4. https://oyc.yale.edu/philosophy/phil-176/lecture-17