Dead and Gone? Reply to Jenkins

Abstract

In a recent article, Joyce L. Jenkins challenges the common belief that desire satisfactionists are committed to the view that a person's welfare can be affected by posthumous events. Jenkins argues that desire satisfactionists can and should say that posthumous events only play an epistemic role: though such events cannot harm me, they can reveal that I have already been harmed by something else. In this response, however, we show that Jenkins's approach collapses into the view she aims to avoid.

Value after death

“…Another is to hold that the value is accrued prior to death (Luper, 2007;Pitcher, 1984). 2 The third is to simply deny that there are any posthumous harms or benefits at all (Jenkins, 2011; but see Ekendahl & Johansson, 2014). Yet a proponent of one of these responses must be careful not to defend them by appeal to Alive at That Time, because that would be to beg the question.…”