Matters of life and death

This thesis is about four ethical problems concerning death. The first two chapters are about the reasons we have to prolong our own lives. In Chapter 1, I argue that we can defensibly maintain that it would not have been in our interests to have been brought into existence earlier than we were, while also holding that it is often against our interests to die earlier than we otherwise would. In Chapter 2, I argue that one can have a reason to continue one’s conscious life even when the particular contents of it will not be good on balance. The last two chapters are about the morality of taking life. In Chapter 3, I argue against the common-sense view that the strength of the moral objection to killing a person is unaffected by certain facts about her, chief among them what she stands to lose by dying. In Chapter 4, I discuss the nature and extent of the obligations that are incurred by those who wrongfully kill, or who mistreat people in other ways that seem, on the surface, impossible to redress.