Death, killing and personal identity

Abstract

"It is an extremely commonly held intuition that death is a “bad” thing—something to be generally avoided. Most also hold that death is a particular “harm” for the one who dies. In addition to this, most hold that because of the harm of death, killing is a serious moral wrong. The connection between the badness of death and the wrongness of killing seems to be generally in accord with our strongest held intuitions. Many, such as McMahan2 and Bradley3, have argued that the argumentative force required to defeat this basic intuition would need to be considerable, and it is likely that its defeat is impossible"