My intuition here is that even if you treat death as intrinsically bad, as lives get longer the fixed harm of death eventually gets outweighed by even a small decrease in marginal utility over a long time.
My intuition is that there is no such thing as a fixed harm of death, as if it were a bad experience like a bout of the flu, added to the scales of utility. The harm of death is precisely the loss of one’s future. The amount that one wants that future is the amount that one wants to not die.
You can value or disvalue whatever you like. But the only negative thing I see about my death is that I don’t get to live any more. That is what death is. I don’t understand the distinction you are intending between them.
Separate from that is the actual process by which it comes about, which is at best instant, but usually unpleasant, and sometimes dreadful.
I think this is an important point. What measures the subjective value of an event or state of affairs? If we assume that it is something like happiness, or time of being alive, we run into counterexamples and paradoxes like the repugnant conclusion.
A more plausible measure of subjective value seems to be based on what we want: Death is bad for someone precisely to the degree of how strongly they don’t want to die. Furthermore, death is bad for them because they don’t want to die. Death is not bad because death would make them live shorter, or because it would deprive them of future happiness. (Those may be influencing factors, but only and exactly to the degree they want to avoid to living shorter or being deprived of future happiness.)
My intuition is that there is no such thing as a fixed harm of death, as if it were a bad experience like a bout of the flu, added to the scales of utility. The harm of death is precisely the loss of one’s future. The amount that one wants that future is the amount that one wants to not die.
Why am I not allowed to intrinsically disvalue dying, in a way that’s separate from the value I place on my future as a whole?
You can value or disvalue whatever you like. But the only negative thing I see about my death is that I don’t get to live any more. That is what death is. I don’t understand the distinction you are intending between them.
Separate from that is the actual process by which it comes about, which is at best instant, but usually unpleasant, and sometimes dreadful.
I think this is an important point. What measures the subjective value of an event or state of affairs? If we assume that it is something like happiness, or time of being alive, we run into counterexamples and paradoxes like the repugnant conclusion.
A more plausible measure of subjective value seems to be based on what we want: Death is bad for someone precisely to the degree of how strongly they don’t want to die. Furthermore, death is bad for them because they don’t want to die. Death is not bad because death would make them live shorter, or because it would deprive them of future happiness. (Those may be influencing factors, but only and exactly to the degree they want to avoid to living shorter or being deprived of future happiness.)