A friend you love and trust—a parent with seniority—has road-tested the items in question, vetting them for safety and functionality. Two years apart, my daughter and son spent their first weeks sleeping on a desk in a Moses basket handed down to me by my friend J.
My friend C. The C. SIDS deaths fell precipitously after , when the A. Those safe-sleep guidelines were branded on my brain. When my son was six weeks old, he was hospitalized for three days with a fever that settled into a bad, persistent cold. He was horribly congested for months; during that period, I doubt he ever slept flat on his back for more than an hour or two at a time, because sinus pressure and nasal drip would leave him coughing and struggling.
Other treatment options include oral appliance therapy and surgery. Proper treatment can restore healthy sleep and decrease the risk of cardiovascular death. Previous Next. View Larger Image. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email. Related Posts. Obviously, due to the difficulty of determining when human life does begin, birth was always a natural choice for marking the beginning of life.
Lucretius' observation forms the basis for the Symmetry Argument against the fear of death. The argument suggests that given the symmetry between the two temporal limits of our existence, our attitudes towards our birth and death should also be symmetrical. Since there is nothing frightening in the earlier temporal limit of our existence, we should also not fear the later temporal limit of our existence.
Notwithstanding the obvious benefit of dispelling the fear of death, many philosophers found this argument wanting, and attempted to defend the rationality of our common sense attitudes towards the temporal limits of our existence. Any such defence requires the establishment of the badness of death, thus justifying our fear of death, assuming that fear of bad things is rational see, for example, Aristotle ARISTOTLE. Nicomachean Ethics, Translated by Roger Crisp.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Furthermore, any successful defence of our normal attitudes towards the temporal limits of our existence should also explain and justify the asymmetry in our attitudes.
That is, it should indicate a relevant asymmetry between the earlier and the later temporal limits of our life, such as would explain and justify our lack of fear of birth. In this paper I adopt a version of the Deprivation Account of the badness of death. The Deprivation Account originates from Nagel, who suggested that death is bad because it deprives one of future goods for example, pleasures which one could enjoy if one died later NAGEL, T.
Nous, 4 1 , pp. Notwithstanding the attractiveness of this explanation of the badness of death, it leaves unanswered the question of the asymmetry between birth and death.
Moreover, it seems that an analogous consideration applies to birth. For it can be argued that birth equally deprives one of past goods, which one could have enjoyed if one was born earlier. My purpose in this paper is to defend the Deprivation Account of the badness of death. I do so by supplementing Nagel's account with an explanation of the generally accepted asymmetry between birth and death, which justifies the asymmetry in our attitudes.
I begin by arguing in section 2 that while the Deprivation Account of the badness of death is a truism, previous attempts to identify the relevant asymmetry between birth and death failed to justify the asymmetry in our attitudes. In section 3 I examine any attempt to establish the asymmetry between birth and death based on metaphysical considerations as to the direction of time.
I argue that the metaphysics of time is unable to account for the asymmetry in our attitudes towards the temporal limits of our existence. In section 4 I present my contribution to the Deprivation Account of the badness of death. I argue that the asymmetry in our attitudes is both explained and justified by generally accepted contingent facts about the development of human life.
More specifically, I argue that the asymmetry in our attitudes is both explained and justified by the view that contrary to birth, death is not a nomologically necessary condition for life, and therefore death is viewed as an unnecessary limitation of life.
In section 5 I summarize and conclude my paper. The Deprivation Account's answer to the Symmetry Argument is based on two claims. The first claim is that death is bad because it deprives one of future goods.
The second is that there is a relevant asymmetry between the past and the future, which explains and justifies the asymmetry in our attitudes towards birth and death. The major disagreement found among philosophers who adopt the Deprivation Account is about the nature of this asymmetry.
To begin with the first claim, assuming that the possibility of an afterlife is rejected, this proposition is not only true, but correctly interpreted is in fact a truism.
Death is bad not because of any inconvenience which may be involved in the process of dying - we find death bad even if it is quick and painless. We find death bad because we want to persist in our lives, that is, to live more.
If one wants something, it is because one sees something good about it, either intrinsically or instrumentally, that as, as a means to an end which is perceived to be good Aristotle , a. Hence, we want to live more because we find something good in life, either as a means to achieve other goods, or simply because we find a value in life per se.
We therefore view death as bad because it deprives us of future goods. This is the reason why in some extreme circumstances, for example euthanasia, death can be seen as a blessing. If one can expects nothing more of life but pain and misery, death can be seen as something good. The truism that we find death bad because it deprives us of future goods is however insufficient in itself to provide an answer to the Symmetry Argument.
For the considerations which were used to explain and justify the badness of death apply equally to birth. Both birth and death mark the limits of our temporal existence. Both our prenatal nonexistence and our posthumous nonexistence seem bad, because they deprive us of the goods we might have enjoyed had we lived in these periods of time.
If death is bad because it deprives us of goods which we would have enjoyed if our lives had ended later, birth should be viewed negatively because it deprives us of goods which we might have enjoyed if our lives had begun earlier. If one wants to justify our asymmetrical attitudes towards the temporal limits of our life, one must therefore indicate a relevant asymmetry between birth and death, which can justify both our fear of death and our joy regarding birth. There have been several attempts to indicate the asymmetry between death and birth which justifies the asymmetry in our attitudes.
Nagel, for example, has argued against the claim that we could have existed earlier, thus rejecting the claim that it is better to be born earlier. According to Nagel, it is impossible for one to be born substantially earlier than one actually was, because the time of one's birth is essential for one's self-identity.
Any possible person who would have been born substantially earlier than one actually was born would have been someone else NAGEL, T. Nagel's explanation for the asymmetry in our attitudes raises a difficulty. Nagel relies on an alleged asymmetry between the past and the future. For his explanation relies on the assumption that while it is impossible for one to be born earlier than one actually was, it is possible for one to die substantially later than one actually dies.
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 50 2 , pp. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 74 2 , pp. American Philosophical Quarterly, 36 1 , pp. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 24 1 , pp. McDaniel et al Eds. The good, the right, life and death: Essays in honor of Fred Feldman. Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, pp. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 89 4 , pp. I will not press this point further; the metaphysical thesis that one's identity depends on one's time of birth, even if it is correct, is too intricate and controversial to account for the common sense intuitive asymmetry between birth and death.
For in order to justify the asymmetry in our attitudes, any account should first and foremost explain the asymmetry in our attitudes. Another suggested asymmetry between birth and death relates to an alleged asymmetry between the way we view early birth and the way we view late death. While we think of late death we naturally hold the birth date constant, and therefore think of a longer life.
Philosophical Review, 2 , pp. Again, this explanation raised several objections. However, envisioning special circumstances cannot discredit this suggested explanation for the way we normally think about birth and death, which admits of no special circumstances. Often our ordinary attitudes are strongly challenged by envisaging special circumstances, simply because we normally do not consider these possibilities. However, it is difficult to see how envisaging special circumstances can discredit an attempted explanation for the way we normally think, for the very same reason that we normally do not consider these special circumstances.
A more convincing objection is raised by the question of whether it is normally justified to think of late death as a longer life span while not thinking the same about earlier birth. Unless we find an explanation which would justify this asymmetry in the way we think of early birth and late death, any attempt to rely on this asymmetry in order to answer the Symmetry Argument is begging the question.
An influential explanation for the asymmetry between the past and the future, which allegedly justifies the asymmetry in our attitudes towards the temporal limits of our existence, was first offered by Derek Parfit PARFIT, D. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Oxford University Press, In order to explain the asymmetry in our attitudes towards the temporal limits of our life, they rely on an asymmetry in our attitudes towards events which take place in our life.
This asymmetry is reflected, for example, by the fact that we generally fear future pains, but are grateful for their passing see, for example, Prior PRIOR, A. Philosophy, 34, pp. Generally speaking, and leaving aside special circumstances, we are usually more concerned about future bad events than about past bad events, and would prefer to be after an unpleasant event rather that before it.
Based on this asymmetry, Parfit has suggested that we are indifferent to our past suffering while not indifferent towards our future suffering, and that this asymmetry is not irrational PARFIT, D. This shows, according to Parfit, that it is not irrational to have different attitudes towards past and future bad events. Hence, death can be rationally considered by us to be a bad event, while birth is not.
Brueckner and Fischer have pointed out that even if Parfit is correct in claiming that it is not irrational to have asymmetrical attitudes towards symmetrical events in the past and in the future, his claim cannot be extended to the case of death.
This is due to the fact that Parfit relies on examples in which things are experienced as bad by the subject, while death is not experienced at all. Brueckner and Fischer have suggested instead that the asymmetry in our attitudes towards prenatal and posthumous nonexistence is explained by the asymmetry in our attitudes toward good events, rather than the asymmetry in our attitudes toward bad events BRUECKNER, A.
The asymmetry in our attitudes towards good events in our life is the mirror image of the symmetry in our attitudes towards bad events. It is reflected, for example, in our preference to be before a pleasurable event rather than after it. Our attitude towards death is thus explained, according to this suggestion, by the fact that death deprives us of future experienced goods, which we look forward to and care about, while birth deprives us of past experienced goods, to which we are indifferent.
I find two major difficulties with Brueckner and Fischer's account of the fear of death.
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