New Philosopher – July 2019

NewPhilosopher

Ethical

children

Questions from

and answers for children,

by Matthew Beard

Ethical children

What does it feel like to die?
I don’t know what it feels like to
die because I’ve never died before!
But you probably already knew that,
didn’t you?
Knowing what something feels
like is really hard unless you’ve experi-
enced it before. For example, if you’ve
never had a migraine (an extreme kind
of headache that causes vomiting, diz-
ziness and lights flashing across your
eyes), it’s hard to imagine what it
would feel like to have one.
There are two things you could
do to try to understand though. First,
you could think of times you’ve felt
dizzy, needed to vomit or just had a
bad headache to try to get  some  idea
of what a migraine is like. Or second,
you could ask someone who has had a
migraine what it felt like.
Why am I blabbing on about
headaches? Well, because it helps us
understand why it’s so hard to know
what dying feels like. First, it’s not clear
that there are any experiences that are
slightly  similar to dying, so that we
could even come close to imagining
what it feels like. Second, we can’t re-
ally ask someone who has experienced
dying, because we can’t talk to them.
The exception is those people
who have died for a short period and

then been revived by doctors. But the

problem is, they experience such dif-

ferent things that there’s no way of

knowing what our experience of dy-

ing would be like. 

Maybe instead of asking what dy-

ing would feel like, we should ask how

we’d like to feel when we die. For me,

I’d like to feel like I’d lived a good life,

made the world better and that the

people I loved knew I loved them and

that they were also living great lives.

Even if dying feels awful, if I felt all

that, I reckon I could live with it.

Why do we have to die?

There are lots of ways of answer-

ing this question. Biologists who

study the human body might tell you

that it’s because the parts of our body

that sustain life simply stop working

after a while. Religious people might

say it’s because we are destined to live

in another world, and to get there we

have to die.

But as a philosopher, I’m inter-

ested in what exactly it means to say

we ‘have to’ die. Does it just mean

that we’re all going to die and we can’t

avoid it? That might be it, but it might

be more than that. Saying we ‘have to’

die might mean that dying is not just

inescapable, but really important for

us. Some philosophers have thought

that all the things we think are impor-

tant about being human depend on

the fact that one day we’ll die.

Here’s a summary of what they

say: imagine if you lived forever. Im-

agine how you’d change in that time.

You’d read every book that needed to

be read, master every skill you wanted

to master (and lots you didn’t). Even-

tually, you’d be completely bored.

Nothing would matter to you any

more. Then, you’d be living forever

but have nothing to live for! Death

means we have to choose how to

spend our time, make sure we spend

it well, and get out of life before it

gets boring. 

But other philosophers will say

that we don’t ‘have to’ die at all. They

think we can have all the good stuff

about being human and also be im-

mortal, if only those pesky scientists

would figure out how to do it! 

Here’s one thought to hold on to.

Maybe not all of us has to die. Our

bodies might die and we might stop

experiencing the world around us, but

we can build things, commit to causes

that are important, and build relation-

ships with good people that mean our

actions and memory live on even after

our bodies are gone.