Compare And Contrast Nagel And Epicurus

Nagel and Epicurus have conflicting views on whether to fear death or not. Although Nagel and Epicurus agree that life is good they have three main arguments in which their view upon death differs which are: “what you don’t know can’t hurt you”, “who suffers?” and asymmetry”. This paper will focus on those three reasons and explain both philosopher’s views.

The first argument the philosopher’s opinion contrast in is “what you don’t know can’t hurt you”. Epicurus believes in egotistic hedonism which is essentially a theory that human motive is pleasure and to avoid pain. He claims we should not fear death because it has “no sensations, and that which has no sensation is nothing to us” (Epicurus, p. 1). When death is to come to us we will not feel pain so we should not focus on it as when we think about death it does not bring us pleasure but pain. We will not know what happens when we are death because we will not have any sensation so really what we don’t know can’t hurt us. Nagel rebut to the argument is that “the discovery of betrayal makes us unhappy because it is bad to be betrayed- not that betrayal is bad because it’s discovery makes us unhappy.” (Nagel, p.2). Something that you are unaware of could still hurt you (Jackman, 2016(insert number)). If something is being
Introduce point. Epicurus believes that “death doesn’t cause us any suffering once we are dead, since once we are dead, then we no longer exist, in which case there is nothing to suffer” (Epicurus, p.1). Since death is the end of life, we cannot suffer because we would not feel anything. Nagel’s view is completely different than Epicurus’s; he claims that life is good because “it is being alive, doing certain things, having certain experiences, that we consider good” (Nagel, p. 1). So ultimately death is bad because it deprives us from these experiences and the chance to do things. Death robs us of the good that there is in living. (Nagel, p.3).