176. The class is on death.

My name is Shelly Kagan. The very first thing I want to

do is to invite you to call me Shelly.

That is, if we meet on the street, you come talk to me

during office hours, you ask some question;

Shelly's the name that I respond to.

I will, eventually, respond to Professor Kagan,

but the synapses take a bit longer for that.

It's not the name I immediately recognize.

I have found that over the years, fewer and fewer students

feel comfortable calling me Shelly.

When I was young, it seemed to work.

Now I'm gray and august. But if you're comfortable with

it, it's the name that I prefer to be called by.

Now, as I say, this is a class on death.

But it's a philosophy class, and what that means is that the

set of topics that we're going to be talking about in this

class are not identical to the topics that other classes on

death might try to cover. So the first thing I want to do

is say something about the things we won't be talking about

that you might reasonably expect or hope that a class on death

would talk about, so that if this is not the

class you were looking for, you still have time to go check

out some other class. So here are some things that a

class on death could cover that we won't talk about.

What I primarily have in mind are sort of psychological and

sociological questions about the nature of death,

or the phenomenon of death. So, a class on death might well

have a discussion of the process of dying and coming to reconcile

yourself with the fact that you're going to die.

Some of you may know about Elisabeth Kübler-Ross'

discussion of the so-called five stages of dying.

There's denial, and then there's anger,

and then there's bargaining. I actually don't remember the

five stages. We're not going to talk about

that. Similarly, we're not going to

talk about the funeral industry in America and how it rips off

people, which it does,

in their moments of grief and weakness and overcharges them

for the various things that it offers.

We're not going to talk about that.

We're not going to talk about the process of grieving or

bereavement. We're not going to talk about

sociological attitudes that we have towards the dying in our

culture and how we tend to try to keep the dying hidden from

the rest of us. These are all perfectly

important topics, but they're not,

as I say, topics that we're going to be talking about in

this class. So what will we talk about?

Well, the things we'll talk about are philosophical

questions that arise as we begin to think about the nature of

death. Like this.

In broad scope, the first half of the class is

going to be metaphysics, for those of you who are

familiar with the philosophical piece of jargon.

And roughly, the second half of the class is

going to be value theory. So, the first half of the class

is going to be concerned with questions about the nature of

death. What happens when we die?

Indeed, to get at that question, the first thing we're

going to have to think about is what are we?

What kind of an entity is a person?

In particular, do we have souls,

and for this class when I talk about a soul,

what I'm going to mean is sort of a bit of philosophical

jargon. I'm going to mean something

immaterial, something distinct from our bodies.

Do we have immaterial souls, something that might survive

the death of our body? And if not, what does that

imply about the nature of death? What kind of an event is death?

What is it for me to survive? What would it mean for me to

survive my death? What does it mean for me to

survive tonight? That is, you know,

somebody's going to be here lecturing to the class on

Thursday, presumably that will be me.

What is it for that person who's there on Thursday to be

the same person as the person who's sitting here lecturing to

you today? These are questions about the

nature of personal identity. Pretty clearly,

to think about death and continued existence and

survival, we have to get clear about the nature of personal

identity. These sorts of questions will

occupy us for roughly the first half of the semester.

And then we'll turn to value questions.

If death is the end, is death bad?

Now, of course, most of us are immediately and

strongly inclined to think that death is bad.

But there are a set of philosophical puzzles about how

death could be bad. To sort of give you a quick

taste, if after my death I won't exist, how could anything be bad

for me? How could anything be bad for

something that doesn't exist? So how could death be bad?

So it's not that the result is going to be that I'm going to

try to convince you that death isn't bad,

but it takes actually a little bit of work to pin down

precisely what is it about death that's bad and how can it be

death? Is there more than one thing

about death that makes it bad? We'll turn to questions like

that. If death is bad,

then one might wonder would immortality be a good thing?

That's a question that we'll think about.

Or, more generally, we'll worry about how should

the fact that I'm going to die affect the way I live?

What should my attitude be towards my mortality?

Should I be afraid of death, for example?

Should I despair at the fact that I'm going to die?

Finally, we'll turn to questions about suicide.

Many of us think that given the valuable and precious thing that

life is, suicide makes no sense. You're throwing away the only

life you're ever going to have. And so we'll end the semester

by thinking about questions along the lines of the

rationality and morality of suicide.

So roughly speaking, that's where we're going.

First half of the class, metaphysics;

second half of the class, value theory.

Next thing I need to explain is this.

There's, roughly speaking, two ways to do a class,

especially an introductory class like this.

In approach number one, you simply lay out the various

positions, pro and con, and the professor strives to

remain neutral; sort of not tip his hand about

what he holds. That's approach number one.

And sometimes in my intro classes that's the approach that

I take. But the other approach,

and the one that I should warn you I'm going to take this

semester, in this class, is rather different.

There's a line that I'm going to be developing,

pushing, if you will, or defending in this class.

That is to say, there's a certain set of views

I hold about the issues that we'll be discussing.

And what I'm going to try to do in this class is argue for those

views. Try to convince you that those

views are correct.

To help you know sort of ahead of time quickly what those views

are, I want to start by describing a set of views that

many of you probably believe. So I'm going to give you a

cluster of views. Logically speaking,

you could believe some of these things and not all of them.

But here's a set of views that many of you probably believe,

and I imagine most of you believe at least some of these

things. So here's the set of common

views. First of all,

that we have a soul. That is to say we are not just

bodies. We're not just lumps of bone

and flesh. But there's a part of us,

perhaps the essential part of us, that is something more than

the physical, the spiritual,

immaterial part of us, which as I say in this class

we'll call a soul. Most of us, most of you,

probably believe in souls. Certainly most people in

America believe in some sort of immaterial soul.

And given this existence of this immaterial soul,

it's a possibility, indeed a fair likelihood,

that we will survive our deaths.

The death will be the destruction of my body,

but my soul is immaterial and so my soul can continue to exist

after my death. And whether or not you actually

believe in a soul, you hope that there's a soul so

that there'll be this serious possibility of surviving your

death because death is not only bad,

but so horrible that what we would like to have happen is,

we would like to live forever. And so, armed with a soul,

as it were, there's at least the possibility of immortality.

Immortality would be wonderful. That's what we hope is the

case, whether or not we know that it's the case.

Immortality would be wonderful. That's why death's so bad.

It robs us of immortality. And if there is no soul,

if death is the end, if there is no immortality,

this is such an overwhelmingly bad thing that the only,

the obvious reaction, the natural reaction,

the universal reaction, is to face the prospect of

death with fear and despair. And as I mentioned earlier

then, death is so horrible and life is so wonderful that it

could never make sense to throw it away.

So suicide is both immoral on the one hand and never makes

sense. It's always irrational as well,

in addition. That, as I say,

is I think a common set of views about the nature of death.

And what I'm going to be doing, what I'm going to be arguing in

this class, is that that set of views is pretty much mistaken

from beginning to end. And so I'm going to try to

convince you that there is no soul.

Immortality would not be a good thing.

Fear of death isn't actually an appropriate response to death.

Suicide, under certain circumstances,

might be rationally and morally justified.

As I say, the common picture is pretty much mistaken from start

to end. That's at least my goal.

That's my aim. That's what I'm going to be

doing. Now, since of course,

I believe the views I believe--and I hope at the end

of the semester you'll agree with me,

because I think they're true and I hope you'll end up

believing the truth [laughter]. But I should say that the

crucial point isn't for you to agree with me.

The crucial point is for you to think for yourself.

And so what I'm really doing is inviting you to take a good,

cold, hard look at death, and to face it and think about

it in a way that most of us don't do.

If you, at the end of the semester, haven't agreed with me

about this particular claim or that particular claim,

so be it. I'll be content--I won't be

completely content--but I'll be at least largely content as long

as you've really thought through the arguments on each side of

these various issues. Karen, maybe this would be a

good time for you to pass around the syllabus.

Next introductory remark: A lot of today's talk is going

to be devoted to business. I'll get to,

if time permits, some philosophy at the end.

I want to make one more remark about what I'll be doing in

terms of this class. This class, as I say,

is a philosophy class. We'll basically be sitting here

thinking about what we can know or make sense of with regard to

death using our reasoning capacity.

We'll be trying to think about death from a rational

standpoint. One kind of evidence or one

kind of argument that we won't be making use of here is appeal

to religious authority. So some of you may believe in,

for example, the existence of an afterlife.

You may believe you're going to survive your death.

You may believe in immortality because that's what your church

teaches you. And that's fine.

It's not my purpose or intention here to try to argue