Ten Questions about Life and Death

from Christopher Belshaw's Ten Good Questions about Life and Death

1. Where are the Answers?

Just before she died she asked, "What is the answer?" No answer came. She laughed and said, "In that case, what is the question?" Then she died.

— The last words of Gertrude Stein

Where to start:
Good introductions to philosophy include Simon Blackburn's Think, Nigel Warburton's Philosophy: The Basics, and, something much shorter, Thomas Nagel's What Does it All Mean? Alain de Botton’s The Consolations of Philosophy is good at arguing that dead white men shouldn’t all be forgotten.

Two useful websites, both with a range of materials, including much that is relevant here, are The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is exactly what it says it is, and Philosophy Talk, a great radio show/podcast.

2. Is Life Sacred?

I call upon all Americans to reflect upon the sanctity of human life. Let us recognize the day with appropriate ceremonies in our homes and places of worship, rededicate ourselves to compassionate service on behalf of the weak and defenseless, and reaffirm our commitment to respect the life and dignity of every human being.

— George W. Bush, proclaiming Sunday, 20 January 2002, as National Sanctity of Human Life Day

Where to start:
Ronald Dworkin’s Life’s Dominion, gives the best discussion of the sanctity of life, both readable and detailed, that I know of.

Much shorter discussions can be found in a number of books, including Peter Singer's Practical Ethics, the same writer’s Rethinking Life and Death, Jonathan Glover's Causing Death and Saving Lives, and Rosalind Hursthouse's Beginning Lives. Michael J. Coughlan's The Vatican, the Law and the Human Embryo offers a close account of the Catholic Church’s position on issues concerning the sanctity of life.

3. Is It Bad To Die?

He who pretends to look on death without fear lies. All men are afraid of dying, this is the great law of sentient beings, without which the entire human species would soon be destroyed.

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, La Nouvelle Héloïse

Where to start:
The topics of this and the following question are well discussed in a number of books, including Fred Feldman's Confrontations with the Reaper, F.M. Kamm's Morality, Mortality, and Jeff McMahan's The Ethics of Killing. Two very useful collections are The Metaphysics of Death, edited by John Fischer, and Life and Death: Metaphysics and Ethics, edited by Peter French and Howard Wettstein.

For literary and cultural approaches to death and dying, see especially, Philip Ariès' The Hour of our Death, Jonathan Dollimore's Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture and, for a particular kind of death, Al Alvarez's The Savage God: A Study of Suicide.

4. Which Deaths Are Worse?

There is nothing I desire more to be informed of, than of the death of men: that is to say, what words, what countenance, and what face they show at their death . . . Were I a composer of books, I would keep a register, commented of the diverse deaths, which in teaching men to die, should after teach them to live.

— Montaigne, Essays

5. Might I Live On?

When it is asked, whether Agamemnon, Thersites, Hannibal, Nero, and every stupid clown, that ever existed in Italy, Scythia, Bactria, or Guinea, are now alive; can any man think, that a scrutiny of nature will furnish arguments to answer so strange a question in the affirmative?

— David Hume, "Of the Immortality of the Soul"

Where to start:
For collections of views on life after death, see Death and Afterlife, edited by Stephen T. Davis, and Immortality, edited by Paul Edwards.

The Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion gives access to a wealth of information on both religion in general and philosophy of religion in particular, including, of course, the topics discussed here.

6. Should I Take the Elixir of Life?

. . . the people who ask for death earliest are a bit like you. People who want an eternity of sex, beer, drugs, fast cars – that sort of thing. They can’t believe their good luck at first, and then, a few hundred years later, they can’t believe their bad luck.

— Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 101/2 Chapters

7. Will I Still Be Me?

OK, then, if I’m not me, who the hell am I?

— Arnold Schwarzenegger, as Doug Quaid in Total Recall

Where to start:
Many of the discussions and views on this matter derive from Part III of Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons. Indeed, almost everything written on this topic in the past 20 years takes, and has to take, Parfit into account.

Other books on the topic include Harold Noonan's Personal Identity, Peter Unger's Identity, Consciousness and Value, and collections edited by Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, The Identities of Persons and John Perry, Personal Identity.

On identity more generally see especially Saul Kripke’s highly influential and highly readable Naming and Necessity. This is a modern classic.

8. Is It All Meaningless?

One day I had Bertrand Russell in the cab. So I said to him, ‘Well, then, Lord Russell, what’s it all about?’ And, do you know, he couldn’t tell me.

— London taxi driver

Where to start:
A pair of books, Oswald Hanfling's The Quest for Meaning, and his edited collection, Life and Meaning: A Reader, together comprise a number of classic and contemporary writings on the topic (including Tolstoy, Schopenhauer and Nagel) and a commentary on them. More recent collections include The Meaning of Life, edited by E.D. Klemke, and The Meaning of Life in the World Religions, edited by Joseph Runzo and Nancy Martin. John Cottingham’s On the Meaning of Life is a short and stylish book which is more sympathetic to the role of religion in giving life meaning. For a very useful summary of a range of views, see Thaddeus Metz's article in Ethics, "Recent Work on the Meaning of Life." And for a very recent work, look at Julian Baggini’s What’s it all About? Philosophy and the Meaning of Life.

Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is famous for its numerical interpretation of life’s meaning. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is a twentieth-century classic dealing with the threats to meaning from modernization and progress.

9. Should There Be More, and Better, People?

The ultimate economic betterment should be sought by breeding better people, not fewer of the existing sort.

— The Eugenic Record Office, 1910

Where to start:
As with the previous question, much here derives from Derek Parfit’s arguments – this time in Part IV – in Reasons and Persons. The whole of that part is a fascinating, even if sometimes convoluted, discussion of ideas related to the themes of this chapter.

Two collections that deal with issues concerning future generations are Responsibilities to Future Generations, edited by Ernest Partridge, and Justice Between Age Groups and Generations, edited by Peter Laslett and James Fishkin.

Discussions of quality of life issues appear in many books dealing with medical ethics. See, for example, Jonathan Glover's Causing Death and Saving Lives, John Harris' Wonderwoman and Superman, and, though harder, several of the essays in John Broome's Ethics out of Economics.

10. Does Reality Matter?

. . . by reality I mean shops like Selfridges, and motor buses, and the Daily Express.

— T.E. Lawrence, 1929

Where to start:
In Like a Splinter in Your Mind: the Philosophy behind the Matrix Trilogy (Blackwell, 2004) Matt Lawrence explores a whole bunch of good questions including, of course, many of those discussed here.