Death as a fact of life: a perspective on the badness of death.

This paper suggests that the Epicurean argument against death's badness can be much more easily defended if one endorses the view that lives and people are evaluated differently. Drawing on the work of philosophers Shelly Kagan and Stephen Rosenbaum, it is argued that death is not bad for those who are dead, but that it can be bad for the lives of those who are dead. Although death never harms the one who dies, it always affects the value of one's life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]