So I agree that this paradox is quite interesting as a statistical puzzle. But I’m not sure it shows much about the ethical question of whether and when death is bad. I think the relevant notion of “premature death” might not be a descriptive notion, but might itself have a normative component. Like, “premature death” doesn’t mean “unusually early death” (which is a fully descriptive notion) but something else. For example, if you assume Thomas Nagel’s “deprivation account” of the badness of death, then “premature death” might be cashed out roughly as: dying while there’s still valuable life ahead of you to live, such that you’re deprived of something valuable by dying. In other words, you might say that death is not bad when one has lived a “full life,” and is bad when one dies before living a full life. (Note that this doesn’t beg the question against the transhumanist “death is always bad” sort of view, for one might insist that a life is never “full” in the relevant sense, and that there’s always more valuable life ahead of you.) Trying to generalize this looks objectionably circular: death is bad when it’s premature, and it’s premature when it’s bad. But at any rate it seems to me like the notion of premature death is trying to get at more than just the descriptive notions of dying before one is statistically predicted to die, or dying before Laplacean demon who had a perfect physical model of the world would predict one to die.
Anyway, low confidence in this, and again, I agree the statistical puzzle is interesting in its own right.
Yes, I think Steve White in that livestream was making a similar point (more briefly). I can certainly see this as a sense of premature death; in that you can imagine someone living to a reasonable old age and feeling like they’ve achieved all they wanted and are ready to die (e.g. I think Einstein ended up like this); so someone in the opposite condition (in the middle of important work and not wanting to die at all, as well as maybe dying significantly younger than their cohort) would be said to have died prematurely or ‘too soon’.
(And many people die in an in between state, still doing stuff and not wanting to die, but fairly elderly and not particularly in the middle of important projects. So not clearly premature or not. Which merely shows that the concept, like many, is somewhat vague.)
That livestream also showed me there are many different philosophical angles on death. Really my post was just about the statistical puzzle, rather than the wider issue of premature death, which I’ve never given much thought to before!
So I agree that this paradox is quite interesting as a statistical puzzle. But I’m not sure it shows much about the ethical question of whether and when death is bad. I think the relevant notion of “premature death” might not be a descriptive notion, but might itself have a normative component. Like, “premature death” doesn’t mean “unusually early death” (which is a fully descriptive notion) but something else. For example, if you assume Thomas Nagel’s “deprivation account” of the badness of death, then “premature death” might be cashed out roughly as: dying while there’s still valuable life ahead of you to live, such that you’re deprived of something valuable by dying. In other words, you might say that death is not bad when one has lived a “full life,” and is bad when one dies before living a full life. (Note that this doesn’t beg the question against the transhumanist “death is always bad” sort of view, for one might insist that a life is never “full” in the relevant sense, and that there’s always more valuable life ahead of you.) Trying to generalize this looks objectionably circular: death is bad when it’s premature, and it’s premature when it’s bad. But at any rate it seems to me like the notion of premature death is trying to get at more than just the descriptive notions of dying before one is statistically predicted to die, or dying before Laplacean demon who had a perfect physical model of the world would predict one to die.
Anyway, low confidence in this, and again, I agree the statistical puzzle is interesting in its own right.
Yes, I think Steve White in that livestream was making a similar point (more briefly). I can certainly see this as a sense of premature death; in that you can imagine someone living to a reasonable old age and feeling like they’ve achieved all they wanted and are ready to die (e.g. I think Einstein ended up like this); so someone in the opposite condition (in the middle of important work and not wanting to die at all, as well as maybe dying significantly younger than their cohort) would be said to have died prematurely or ‘too soon’.
(And many people die in an in between state, still doing stuff and not wanting to die, but fairly elderly and not particularly in the middle of important projects. So not clearly premature or not. Which merely shows that the concept, like many, is somewhat vague.)
That livestream also showed me there are many different philosophical angles on death. Really my post was just about the statistical puzzle, rather than the wider issue of premature death, which I’ve never given much thought to before!