Abstract

I argue that attempts to explain the badness of death as a deprivation to the person who dies fail to defeat the ancient Epicurean argument that death is nothing to us. At the same time, I argue that the deprivation account of the badness of death provides a way for us to understand how death can be bad for the person who dies. In support of this paradoxical thesis I invoke a distinction between momentary well-being and narrative well-being—a distinction which, while not entirely new, is insufficiently developed in the literature.