Paper Seven
Topic 1

Epicurus ethical beliefs start with what ethics is, the matter of choosing certain things and avoiding others. For example one should choose to help someone when they are being physically harmed, and on the other hand one should avoid eating rotten meat because it will make them sick. Epicurus believes that the ultimate goal in life is to achieve pleasure, which according to him is the absence of pain. When one is not experiencing pain, they must be experiencing pleasure. Unlike the Cyrenaics, Epicurus embraces both types of pleasures, katastematic and kinetic, in both the body and the soul. Katastematic pleasure is the pleasure experienced while being in a state, such as being free from pain, and free of annoyance. Kinetic pleasure is the pleasure experienced while performing an act, such as eating, or having sex. People who things such as steal, rape, and generally bad acts, are punished with physical pain and it is viewed by non followers of Epicurus as the worst form of pain. But since the body is only effected by the present Epicurus says that pain of the soul is the greatest form of pain since it is effected by the past the present and the future. A cut will only hurt until it is healed, a hurt feeling or a bad memory will continue to hurt into the future and the pain of the feeling will not fade with time. If pleasure is happiness, and pain is unhappiness, then happiness is the absence of pain. Epicurus says that one should not fear death, and that death is not unhappiness. This was a wild claim at the time, because people fear death at least some point in their lives. Epicurus says that this is an irrational fear that people’s mental state basically makes up. For one to know what death is, is impossible, because when you are living you are not dead, and when you are dead you are not living. This says that after you die there is no more, and that is something that can never be conceived. If someone could conceive their death, then they wouldn’t be truly dead because what they are conceiving is something and when you are death you are nothing. He goes into an argument with the symmetry of non existence. Before one is born, they do not exist, the same goes for after one is dead, yet only the latter of the two are feared. No one ever talks about the scary times before they were born, and brought into existence. This is because you are nothing before you are born, now where that nothing comes from would be something for Parmenides to ponder about, and put through the Eleatic challenge. So the fear is not stemming from the concept of non existence. I believe that the fear people have about dying, is the uncertainty. Because it is impossible to conceive about not existing, no one can truly understand what is like to not exist. There is nothing that anyone knows to not exist, because then it would exist in one way shape or form, this notion is not a very comforting one. Going along with that I don’t believe anything can not exist to us, because we can never know of that “what” that doesn’t exist. Therefore the concept of not existing is a failed concept for our minds to grasp. Epicurus said “when we are there, death is not, and when death is there, we are not.” In order for the fear of death to be rational there must be some sort of harm brought upon ones self. For there to be some sort of harm there are some questions that need to be answered, such as who is harmed, when are they are harmed, and how they are harmed. For example if Johnny jumps from a third story window and landed in the parking lot and survived. Johnny would be the one being harmed, from the impact of the parking lot. Johnny is the individual harmed as soon as his body hit’s the unforgiving asphalt ground. Finally Johnny is harmed by the pain from his broken bones and internal damage. Every question was able to be answered in that example, so therefore Johnny was harmed by jumping out of the window. Now lets do another example. If Johnny was walking on some train tracks with his Ipod blasting his favorite classic rock so he is unable to hear the approaching train until it is too late, and he is hit at 60mph with the force of 13,000 tons. With this type of situation there is no way that Johnny doesn’t die instantly from the impact of the train. Johnny is not the individual being harmed because in death there is no subject to be harmed. The harm did not occur at anytime because when death is there, we are not, and vise versa. Finally Johnny is not harmed because for there to be the concept of harm there must be some sort of “thing” that is being harmed and since after death there is nothing, nothing can be harmed. Without being able to accurately answer those three questions it is impossible to prove something has experienced harm, according to Epicurus. According to Epicureanism killing someone does not harm them. This view, in my opinion, would be detrimental if it was widely accepted, because there couldn’t be any repercussions for killing someone because you wouldn’t be harming them. It shows a since of dehumanization, because no compassion would be shown to those who have lost someone because there was no harm brought to the person. It is obvious that this view is not a particularly popular one because people don’t just go around killing other, and people still try to avoid death whenever faced with it. I understand the idea that no one can experience anything after death because they are no longer there to experience, but that doesn’t mean no one is harmed. When someone is killed, they may not be harmed, but they lost their potential to live life, and are deprived of what they may have been able to achieve. The friends and family of the person who is killed is also harmed with the loss of a loved one in their lives, and the things that those people are not going to be able to do with that individual dead. For example if there are two guys who are opening a business by combining money and resources, and after getting the building and materials needed, one of the men is robbed and murdered on his way home. Though harm is not experienced by the man who was killed, his business partner would be the one harmed because he has lost his other half of resources and more importantly his good friend. Now the man who is still alive is harmed in the fact that he is unable to perform the acts he would have been able to perform if his partner was still alive. This is a simple example, but the message is clear that there is always going to be someone harmed when an individual is killed, and it doesn’t have to be the individual who was killed. We have come to the conclusion that death can not harm us after we are dead because we would no longer be in what we consider “existence”. furthermore if you consider death non-existence then we would have been considered dead before birth, and could not experience any harm before coming into existence. So with that said the only time one can be harmed by death is at the exact moment that death occurs, not a millisecond earlier or later, and this moment in time could be instantaneous which would mean there isn’t enough time to experience any sort of harm.