Well-Being and the Good Death
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Well-Being and the Good Death Stephen M. Campbell 1 Accepted: 29 June 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract
The philosophical literature on well-being and the good life contains very little explicit discussion of what makes for a better or worse death. The purpose of this essay is to highlight some commonly held views about the good death and investigate whether these views are recognized by the leading theories of well-being. While the most widely discussed theories do have implications about what constitutes a good death, they seem unable to fully accommodate these popular good death views. I offer two partial explanations for why these views have been neglected in discussions of well-being and make two corresponding recommendations for future work in the philosophy of well-being. Keyword well-being . welfare . death . good death . good life . prudential value All of us have some preferences about how we will die. We care about such things as what will cause our death, when and where it will happen, who will be with us, how much warning we will have, and how we will experience death. While such preferences are sometimes grounded in a concern for the well-being of others or a desire to promote some social or spiritual cause, preferences regarding one’s own death are commonly self-interested or, as philosophers say, prudential. In other words, they are grounded in a concern for one’s own well-being. Accordingly, they provide insight into an individual’s substantive normative view about what makes a death go better or worse for the one who dies. This is commonly referred to as the theme of the good death.1 Despite its obvious significance to self-conscious mortal beings like ourselves, particularly as we draw close to the end of our lives, there has been very little discussion of the good death in one place where one would most expect to find it: the philosophical literature on the good life, which is primarily devoted to identifying a plausible substantive theory of well-being.2 1
See, for instance, Davis and Slater (1989), Miller (1995), Neumann (2017), Smith and Periyakoil (2018).
2
For an introduction to this literature, see Heathwood (2010), Bradley (2015), and Fletcher (2016a, 2016b).
* Stephen M. Campbell [email protected]; [email protected]
1
Philosophy Department, Bentley University, Adamian 117, 175 Forest Street, Waltham, MA 02452, USA
S. M. Campbell
Explicit discussion of the good death has been curiously absent from philosophical discussions of the good life.3 It might be thought that there is nothing problematic about the silence surrounding the good death. After all, the silence is only apparent. Most theories of the good life are understood to be comprehensive and pertain to all portions of a life, from beginning to end. So, even if wellbeing theorists have not explicitly addressed the theme of the good death, they have been implicitly addressing it. For instance, those who defend hedonism (which identifies well-being with pleasure and the absence of pain, broadly construed)
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