Title: Our Aversion to Death
Abstract: If fearing death is rational, this must be because death is somehow harmful to us. But the most plausible philosophical account of death’s harmfulness, deprivationism, seems not to imply that harmful deaths are worthy of fear and fails to capture how our apparent fear of death is largely detached from when we die or how long we live. The aversive attitude toward death we misidentify as fear is therefore more often a form of anxiety, grounded less in uncertainty about the timing of our deaths than in uncertainty about the harmfulness of death.
