Confessions of a Terminator
The Termination Thesis (briefly, ‘TT’) is one of Fred Feldman’s favorite critical targets. It is the central theme of Chapter 6 of his book Confrontations with the Reaper[1], and he returns to it almost a decade later in an extended eponymous essay.[2] Stated briefly and roughly, TT is “the view that people go out of existence when they die” (FFTT 98; cf. CR 89), but it is, of course, more difficult to formulate it precisely and in detail. Feldman traces the origins of the thesis back to arguments offered by Epicurus and Lucretius for the conclusion that death cannot be an evil for the one who dies, and he locates versions of it (or at least strong echoes) in the work of about a dozen contemporary authors. In his terminology, philosophers who accept TT are “terminators”; those who reject it, “survivalists”. Feldman himself is a survivalist. I think of myself as a terminator, but I’m not entirely sure that Feldman would. One of my aims today is to try to reach a definitive verdict on that question.
In both his book and his essay, Feldman takes pains to distinguish TT from “the view that when a person dies, he or she ceases to exist ‘as a person’”. (TT 99)
[TT] is not the thesis that when a person dies, he or she ceases existing as a person. It is the thesis that when a person dies, he or she simply ceases to exist. The person goes out of existence; subsequently there is no such thing as that person. (CR 91)
Feldman’s ‘exists as’ idiom has always struck me as awkward and unperspicuous. On the face of it, the idiom will have appeal only for someone enamored of an old-fashioned sort of “modes of being” metaphysics that deliberately blurs the distinction between existence and predication, for surely, that something “exists as a K” just means that the thing is a K, and, correlatively, that something “ceases to exist as a K” just means that the thing ceases to be a K. That, in any case, is how I will interpret the idiom in what follows.
What is less clear is how we are to understand Feldman’s notion of “simply ceasing to exist”. His explanation seems straightforward enough:
When I say that a thing [simply] “ceases to exist” at a time, what I mean is that for some period of time up to that time there was such a thing as it; subsequently there is no such thing. (CR 90)
[S]omething ceases to exist simpliciter at a time if it simply goes out of existence at that time. In the typical case, a thing ceases to exist simpliciter at a time if it exists for a while up to that time, but exists no longer after that time. (FFTT 100)
And in CR, Feldman also provides what is intended to be a helpful example. We are asked to imagine that he has a little wooden table. “Suppose I break off the legs,” he continues,
and then chop up the tabletop for kindling. Suppose I burn all the resulting wood and scatter the ashes. Then the table no longer exists. Of course, all the atoms from which it was made still exist. But the table no longer exists. Instead of the table, we now have scattered ashes and dispersed smoke. (CR 90)
The example is instructive in that it makes clear that something’s simply ceasing to exist need not involve anything’s absolutely ceasing to exist. At the beginning of Feldman’s example, certain atoms compose a small wooden table. At the end of his example, those same atoms compose some scattered ashes and dispersed smoke. That collection of atoms has undergone a dramatic reorganization, but there is, so to speak, just as much stuff in the world at the end of the process as there was at the beginning. As Kant put it in the Critique of Pure Reason, “In all change of appearances substance persists, and its quantum is neither increased nor diminished in nature”. (B224) In nature, that is, there is no absolute “arising” or “perishing”, but only alterations. “Everything that is altered is lasting, and only its state changes.” (A187/B230)
But looked at in this way, the example also puts pressure on Feldman’s distinction between something’s simply ceasing to exist and its ceasing to exist as this or that. For it is not clear why, adopting his idiom, we could not describe the example equally well by saying that a certain collection of atoms first “exists as a small wooden table” and then later “exists as some ashes and smoke”. Of course, it would not be correct to say that the small wooden table “exists first as a table and then later as ashes and smoke”. When the ashes and smoke are what exists, the table no longer does. A fortiori, the table then no longer exists as anything.[3] The table has (simply) ceased to exist. That is the point of the example. But the example does not demonstrate, nor is it the case, that the table’s simply ceasing to exist cannot consist in an alteration in the state of something else, in particular, of the matter (the atoms) of which the table is composed.
In such a case, I think it is perfect natural to say that the table has been transformed into ashes and smoke. The table (simply) ceases to exist by becoming, first, a heap of kindling and then, later, some scattered ashes and dispersed smoke. Elsewhere Feldman appears to acknowledge that a thing can cease to exist by turning into something else. He considers two examples from my own Thinking Clearly About Death[4]—an amoeba which divides, thereby becoming two amoebas, and a caterpillar which undergoes metamorphosis, thereby becoming a butterfly. Both can be understood as illustrating what he calls substantial change.
As I understand it, the crucial elements in a pure example of such a change are these: The first entity (the caterpillar) is a concrete individual substance—a “thing.” It is made of some “stuff”—a certain parcel of protoplasm, perhaps. During the substantial change, the first entity goes out of existence, and a new concrete individual substance (in this case, the butterfly) comes into existence. The new entity is diverse from the old entity, but they are made of the same parcel of stuff (or “matter”). In such a case, we can say that the first entity “turned into” the second. (CR 67)
Metamorphosis
is a case of one kind of individual substance (a caterpillar) ceasing to
exist by turning into another kind of individual substance (a butterfly). In this connection, the example of amoebic
division is instructive, since it shows that a substantial change can also
affect the number of individual substances that exist at various
times. When an amoeba divides, one
individual substance (one amoeba, say,
Do such cases illustrate something’s simply ceasing to exist? Feldman’s paradigm of the small wooden table which is brutally reduced to smoke and ashes is, in certain respects, more radical than either division or metamorphosis. Smoke and ashes are not concrete individual substances, but rather kinds of “stuff”, and themselves result from what we might call a “material” change: Burning transforms a quantity of one kind of stuff, the wood of which the table is composed, into diverse quantities of two other kinds of stuff, smoke and ashes. Concrete individual substances do not re-emerge in the story of the burned table until we consider the composition of wood, smoke, and ashes alike at the level of atoms.
On the
other hand, since neither of
Feldman argues against TT by supplying a plethora of ostensible counterexamples to it. One of these suggests that he would reject the conclusion that I have just reached.
In some cases there is reason to wonder about why a person died. … In these cases, a medical examiner might perform an autopsy. By looking closely at details of the corpse, the examiner hopes to learn more about what happened to the person who died. … I can readily imagine that there might be a person who is hit by a bullet on one occasion and then later dies as a result of a stroke. I can readily imagine that an autopsy might be performed on this dead person and that the medical examiner might then remove the long-embedded bullet. The object that formerly was a living person still exists—now as a corpse—and still contains the bullet. If such a thing could happen, then TT is false. (FFTT 102)
What this passage clearly implies is that Feldman thinks that a corpse is a person. It is a dead person. That, of course, is exactly what a survivalist must believe. Since all that remains when a person dies is a corpse, if that person does not cease to exist when he dies, the corpse must be that person.
Feldman distinguishes four senses of the word ‘person’ or, as he puts it, “four distinguishable concepts of personality”—legal, moral, psychological, and biological. (Since nowadays the term ‘personality’ adverts in the first instance to a person’s manifest character or qualities, ‘personhood’ would vastly preferable here, but I shall reluctantly continue to follow Feldman’s usage.) It should be clear enough that a corpse is not what Feldman would call a legal, moral, or psychological person.[5] What is at issue with respect to the Termination Thesis can only be what he calls “the biological concept of personality”.
When we say that something is a biological person, we are merely saying that the thing is a human organism—a member of the species Homo sapiens. (CR 101)
And here Feldman is quite explicit. “I think that all human corpses are biological persons”, he writes. (CR 123)
I do not think that there is a “biological concept of personality” at all. There is, of course, the biological concept of a human being, i.e., the concept of a member of the species Homo sapiens, and, as matters now stand, I would agree that all and only human beings are persons, but the co-extentionality of two terms does not endow either with the sense of the other. Elsewhere I have argued that the central and fundamental concept of a person is a close relative of what Feldman calls the concept of a moral person. It is
the concept of a being who is the subject of rights which one has an enforceable obligation to acknowledge and respect and of enforceable obligations which include the reciprocal acknowledgement and respect of parallel rights and obligations in others. (TCAD 176)
Call this, for convenience, the social concept of a person. Although one is not morally permitted to do just anything at all to or with a human being’s remains, a human corpse plainly does not satisfy this concept of personality. Understood in terms of it, the Termination Thesis is trivially true.
My social concept of a person is therefore evidently not the same as Feldman’s moral concept of personality. For he writes that
So far as I can discern, there is no interesting connection between the moral concept of personality and the concepts of life and death. … If dead human bodies have the moral right to be treated with respect, then some dead things are moral persons.[6] Thus, something’s history as a moral person might extend beyond that thing’s death. (CR 122)
Here I take ‘dead human bodies’ to be synonymous with ‘human corpses’, i.e., the remains of human beings who have died, and, while I would not dispute that we have a moral obligation to treat such corpses with respect, I would be unwilling to conclude on that basis that those corpses have a correlative moral right to be so treated. A corpse is no more fit to be a subject of rights than is a rock. Someone who mutilates a corpse perhaps does something that is prima facie morally wrong, but, if so, its moral wrongness does not consist in its being a violation of the corpse’s right not to be mutilated. Or so I believe, although I confess that I do not have a principled way of settling such questions. Still, someone who mutilates a great work of art, a painting or a statue, arguably also does something that is prima facie morally wrong, but I suspect that few people would be inclined to describe such an act as a violation of one of the painting’s or the statue’s rights. And, in any case, merely having a special moral status, which corpses unquestionably do, is surely not sufficient for being any sort of person. Sentient animals—dogs, cats, elephants, and chickens, for example—surely have a special moral status. Cruelty to such animals is a moral offense. But even the most passionate zoophilists do not claim that such animals are literally persons.
Be that as it may, what is primarily at issue between Feldman and a terminator of my ilk is whether, as he puts it, “all human corpses are biological persons”, i.e., members of the species Homo sapiens or, as I would put it, human beings. In CR, Feldman distinguishes several variants of the Termination Thesis. The narrowest version, TTp, is restricted to persons: “If a person dies at a time, then he or she ceases to exist at that time.” (CR 89) But a broader version, TTo, would apply to all organisms: “If a biological organism dies at a time, then it simply ceases to exist at that time.” (CR 92)[7] I have already committed myself to endorsing TTp, when ‘person’ is understood as ‘social person’. When ‘person’ is understood as ‘biological person’, however, TTp becomes merely a special case of TTo, and, indeed, many of Feldman’s proposed counterexamples are directed to TTo.
Thus in CR, he asks us to
[c]onsider what goes on in elementary biology courses. The aim is to teach children something about the anatomy of certain organisms—usually frogs. On the appointed day, the children cut open the dead frogs, carefully drawing diagrams of the mutilated guts. … Suppose someone pointed to one of the dismembered frogs and said: “That object was never alive. The thing you are dissecting never swam in a pond; never ate a fly; never dozed on a lily pad.” Surely such remarks would be greeted with utter disbelief. … Yet if TTo were true, these remarks would be entirely correct. The former frogs would have gone out of existence when they died. … The biology students have spent a whole class period investigating the anatomy of objects that never lived. (CR 94)
And in FFTT, he offers us the example of “a huge old elm tree … which has been dead for many years” standing in a field behind his house. “I doubt that anyone would want to say,” he writes, “that the large arboreal object currently in the field never lived or that it came into existence just a few years ago when the elm tree died”. If this is right, he concludes, “then virtually everyone would agree that trees don’t go out of existence when they die”. (FFTT 101)
But must a terminator endorse the claims that Feldman rightly finds so counterintuitive? Must a terminator, for example, say of what a child dissects in an elementary biology class “That very object was never alive”? As I understand the Termination Thesis, the answer is “No”. The noncommittal word ‘object’ precisely leaves room for an alternative to Feldman’s interpretation. As I see it, what the phrase ‘that very object’ picks out is the remains of a frog. That, however, is something that once was a living frog, and when it was a living frog, it indeed swam in a pond, ate flies, and dozed on lily pads. Here’s an analogy: Butterflies fly and sip nectar; they do not crawl and chew leaves. But, on my view, it would be incorrect to say, pointing at a butterfly, that “That very object never crawled and chewed leaves”. For that very object, the butterfly at which one is pointing, once was a caterpillar, and when it was a caterpillar, it crawled and chewed leaves. The anatomy of a butterfly is, of course, quite different from the anatomy of a caterpillar. That is why we call such a substantial change a metamorphosis. But it is not surprising that children can learn about the anatomy of living frogs by dissecting their remains. For when a frog dies “peacefully”, as it were, its basic anatomical structure is not affected. The physical structure of the remains of a frog, in other words, is essentially the same as the physical structure of a living frog, and so it makes sense to learn about the latter by studying the former.
Similarly, since the “large arboreal object” in the field behind Feldman’s house once was a living elm tree, it would be incorrect to say that it never lived. A terminator of my ilk—that is, one who interprets death as an instance of substantial change in which a living organism ceases to exist by becoming its remains—is thus not committed to endorsing any of the wildly implausible claims that Feldman imputes to him. And he is also not stymied by Feldman’s ostensible puzzle-cases.
Imagine a case in which a person was dressed in a tight-fitting, hard-to-button suit at the time of death. The corpse is discovered dressed in the same outfit. It might seem that none of the buttons has been undone. The zippers are untouched. No alien fingerprints are found on the clothing. How did the person get out of the suit without unbuttoning the buttons and unzipping the zippers? How did the corpse get in there? If TT is true, these things must have happened. (CR 103)
But, of course, on my view, when it died, the living human being in the tight-fitting suit became the corpse in the tight-fitting suit, without the need for any Houdini-like escape artistry.
Now Feldman is by no means blind to the possibility of interpreting the relationship between a living organism and its remains as an instance of substantial change. He mentions it explicitly near the beginning of FFTT:
There is also a question about the relation between a person and his “remains”. Is this relation identity, or is it rather a relation that holds between an entity and another entity into which the former has “substantially changed”? If we accept TT, we seem committed to saying that no one is identical to his remains. (FFTT 99)
As we have seen, Feldman embraces a view according to which a person who dies is identical to his remains. The person exists first as a living organism and then as a corpse. Otherwise put, on Feldman’s view, a person can exist in two different states or conditions—as a living person or as a dead person. On my view, in contrast, a dead person is no more a person than a toy gun is a gun; a model airplane, an airplane; a forged Rembrandt, a Rembrandt; or a counterfeit hundred-dollar bill, a hundred-dollar bill. How might one decide between these two alternatives?
Feldman does not think that he can demonstrate that the Termination Thesis is false. “It may appear that I am … presenting arguments against TT,” he writes, “But that’s not my aim.” And he continues:
I know that those who accept TT (the “terminators”) will not be moved by my remarks. I know that they will have TT-consistent redescriptions of the phenomena that I describe. I mention these reasons in an effort to remind the reader of the extent to which our ordinary talk and thought about death seem to presuppose that people go on existing (although perhaps not as people anymore) after they die. (FFTT 101)
What Feldman concludes from his examples, in short, is that “the termination thesis … runs counter to common-sense views about death”. (CR 95)
Now one can hardly deny that we often talk in ways which suggest that a person who has died continues to exist. Feldman several times cites (CR 93; FFTT 98-9) one of my own examples of just such an idiom: “My Aunt Ethel died last week, and we’re burying her tomorrow.” (TCAD 41) On the face of it, the anaphoric pronoun implies that two claims are being made about one single thing, my Aunt Ethel, namely, that it (she) died last week and that we are burying it (her) tomorrow. But, as I went on to argue in connection with that example, the fact that such idioms are commonplace and unremarkable is philosophically inconclusive. A terminator of my ilk will rather insist that we do not bury people. What we bury is not Aunt Ethel, but only Aunt Ethel’s remains, and the ostensible double reference is consequently mere linguistic appearance. He will, in other words, take such examples to show only that we typically use a kind of “verbal shorthand” when we are talking about the remains of an organism.
This sort of verbal shorthand is exceedingly common. Pointing at a portrait hanging on the wall, I say to a visitor “That’s the Duke of Essex”. Pointing at a stuffed toy, you ask a child, “What do you call your rabbit?” Serving up a helping of venison, a hunter boasts, “I brought down this deer with one shot”. It would simply be tedious always to have to take pains to say explicitly and precisely what is literally the case—e.g., that what I’m pointing at is only a picture of the Duke of Essex, not the man himself—since, in any normal case, it is perfectly obvious. And it would simply be tedious, whenever we’re talking about the remains of an organism which has died, always to have to explicitly say so, since, in any normal case, that is also perfectly obvious. But, as Feldman himself insists, when we are engaged in a philosophical investigation, more stringent standards of rigor and precision of thought and expression are appropriate.
Rather than carefully interrogating the sense of our commonplace idioms, however, Feldman straightaway concludes from such examples that the Termination Thesis “is blatantly inconsistent with common-sense views about death”, and he proceeds to add a few rhetorical flourishes:
This provokes a natural question. What do the terminators know that ordinary people do not know? Why do these philosophers accept such a paradoxical view about death? (CR 95)
The answer to Feldman’s first question, of course, is “Nothing”. Everyone knows that a picture of the Duke of Essex isn’t the Duke of Essex, that rabbits aren’t made of polyester, … and that Aunt Ethel’s remains aren’t Aunt Ethel. There’s nothing “paradoxical” about such observations. They are just “common-sense”.
So, given that he recognizes the possibility of a consistent alternative view along the lines that I have been developing, why does Feldman nevertheless make such a point of rejecting the Termination Thesis? The answer, I think, is that he believes that it is inconsistent with what he calls “a sort of straightforward materialism about people”. In particular, he writes,
I think we are our bodies. If this sort of materialism is true, then I am my body. In that case, I must have the same history as my body. Since my body will go on existing for a while after I die (unless I die in a remarkably violent way), I will go on existing after I die. Of course, I will then be dead. I will not be conscious. Perhaps I will not even be a person any more.[8] But I will be there. You can’t get rid of me so easily. So TT seems to me to be false. (FFTT 102)
But this line of thought, I would argue, is deeply confused. It fails to recognize and respect the multiple ambiguities of the term ‘body’, and hence it commits at least two fallacies of equivocation.
I, too, subscribe a “a sort of straightforward materialism about people”. I hold that people are bodies, i.e., physical objects.[9] Here the word ‘body’ has the same sense as it does in physicists’ talk about “moving bodies” or “falling bodies”. But people are not their bodies, and, indeed, the claim that they are strikes me as simply incoherent. For what could it mean to say that Max, for instance, is his body? If that is an identity claim, “Max = Max’s body”, then we can presumably substitute ‘Max’s body’ for ‘Max’ in extensional contexts, and, in particular, in the identity claim itself, yielding “Max’s body = Max’s body’s body”—but what are we to make of the idea that Max’s body has a body? And if it is not an identity claim, then surely it is just a misleading and unperspicuous way of formulating my sort of straightforward materialism, i.e., of saying that Max is a body.
Talk about a person’s body, about the body that a person has, is rather just a special way of talking about the person himself, an idiom designed to highlight the fact that what is under consideration is the person’s physical aspect, certain physical characteristics of that person. To say that a person has a frail or limber or muscular body is simply to say that the person himself is frail, limber, or muscular.[10] Understood in this way, the claim that people are their bodies makes as little sense as the claim that people are their physiques.
When Feldman writes that his body will go on existing after he dies, however, he is most likely using the term ‘body’ in yet a third sense, namely, as equivalent to the expression ‘dead body’, i.e., as a synonym for ‘corpse’. This is the sense in which we speak of “bodies” being recovered from the scene of a crash or littering a battlefield. Of course, the physical object which Feldman is will also go on existing for a while after he dies, although it will have lost the abilities and functional capacities which made it a living human organism and thereby become a corpse, but we have already seen that the possessive ‘his’ is out of place when the word ‘body’ is used in that sense. There is, in contrast, a perfectly correct use of possessive constructions in connection with a person’s corpse or remains. Aunt Ethel’s remains are what she became when she died, and Feldman’s corpse, the “body” that will go on existing for a while after he dies, is the corpse that he will become when he dies.[11]
One can, then, unproblematically embrace both the Termination Thesis and a straightforward materialism about people, and I have here confessed to being both one sort of materialist and one sort of terminator. But does anything ultimately turn on the issue? In one sense, no. For we understand perfectly well what someone means when he says that his students are dissecting frogs, that there’s a dead tree in his backyard, that a corpse is a dead person or a dead body, or that his Aunt Ethel is buried in the family plot. Like Feldman, I also normally avail myself of such commonplace idioms. That is, like Feldman, I customarily “speak with the vulgar”, and it would be tedious to do otherwise. But unlike Feldman, I am especially sensitive to the basic insight of analytic philosophy, that there can be appearance and reality with respect to language, and so I take my disciplinary duties to include the careful scrutiny of even the most mundanely unproblematic idioms of “common-sense”. That scrutiny has made me a terminator. And while I do not think that terminators know anything that ordinary people do not know, when they are engaging in philosophical discourse, terminators of my ilk nevertheless do something that ordinary people don’t do. They attempt to formulate and express the common-sense truths that everyone does know with the rigor and precision that is the mark of “thinking with the learned”.
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NOTES