It seems clear that death is inevitable for anyone living here. And it seems equally clear that death is a considerable harm. Our reason tells us to do virtually anything to avoid it. If avoiding it means sawing your arm off, reason recommends doing that. And even if your life is relatively joyless and/or contains more unhappiness than happiness, our reason still bids us not kill ourselves. Indeed, we only seem to have reason to die if we are in absolute agony without any prospect of it ending. Mild misery, mild discomfort, even when there is no prospect of them ending, do not seem to give us reason to seek death.

Consider what this implies: it implies death is incredibly harmful. So harmful, indeed, that any amount of mildly miserable life here is rationally preferable. It does not seem to matter how long the mildly miserable life promises to be - its very mildness means that at no point in its duration will you have overall reason to seek death. Which implies that the harmfulness of death is not some one-off harm, like a toothache or stubbed toe, but instead consists of a permanently altered condition - a condition altered for the worse. For example, imagine that you know that you will have to suffer agony tomorrow, but only tomorrow and the rest of your life here will be so-so. Do you have reason to seek death to avoid that episode of intense agony tomorrow? No, surely not. It would be irrational to kill oneself just to avoid that one-off episode of agony, precisely because it is going to end. If it was not going to end - if the remainder of any life here would be characterized by that agony, then yes, you have reason to exit this realm. But if the agony is going to end, then you have reason to try and stay. That would make sense if death, rather than being a one-off harm, instead condemns one to a worse existence - that is, it would make sense if death was not the end, but just the point at which one is transferred to a worse state of being.

If this is true, then we who already exist here find ourselves in a terrible predicament: even if at the moment our lives are giving us much more pleasure than pain, that is doomed to end. We are fated to enter another realm in which our lives will continue, but not in our interests.

If that is correct - and I think there is more reason to think it is than it isn't - then it would be a terrible thing to make it someone else's predicament as well. Bad enough that we are in it, wicked to make others join us in it. And thus if I am right above, then bringing people into our situation would be a very evil thing to do.

Most people do not believe that death makes our situation worse. They believe one of two things - either that death transfers us to a much better place of milk and honey, or they think death marks the cessation of our existence. Comforting though both views may be, neither has any rational support. Indeed, the first seems ludicrous - if death took us to a better place, then it'd be in our best interests to die and we should rejoice when anyone is killed and look forward to our own demise. Yet it is manifest to reason that it is not in our best interests to die - not unless our life here has become unbearably rotten - and that the death of another is something to be regretted, not rejoiced at.

The idea that our deaths mark the cessation of our existence fares no better. There is no evidence that they cease our existence. After all, if they did then how could they harm us? As Epicurus put it, if they cease our existence, then "where death is, we are not, and where we are, death is not". But you can't be harmed by something that never happens to you. So death would not be something we would have any reason to avoid - yet clearly we do have reason to avoid it, under all but the most terrible of circumstances.

The 'common sense' views described above seem to be mere exercises in wishful thinking. They express worldviews that we have no evidential reason to believe in - a religious worldview on the one hand, and the naturalist worldview on the other. But they enjoy no support from reason at all. If we listen to reason, then reason tells us that our deaths are considerable harms and that we have reason to avoid them, even if our lives are not recording a profit in terms of happiness versus unhappiness. This implies that death is not a one off intense harm, in the way that breaking a leg is. But rather, that death alters our condition - that it takes us from here to somewhere worse. And if that is true, then our situation is truly a awful one and we do a great wrong if we voluntarily bring anyone else into it.