The Cambridge Companion to Life and Death

by Steven Luper

This volume meets the increasing interest in a range of philosophical issues connected with the nature and significance of life and death, and the ethics of killing. What is it to be alive and to die? What is it to be a person? What must time be like if we are to persist? What makes one life better than another? May death or posthumous events harm the dead? The chapters in this volume address these questions, and also discuss topical issues such as abortion, euthanasia, and suicide. They explore the interrelation between the metaphysics, significance, and ethics of life and death, and they discuss the moral significance of killing both people and animals, and the extent to which death harms them. The volume is for all those studying the philosophy of life and death, for readers taking applied ethics courses, and for those studying ethics and metaphysics more generally.

Genres: Philosophy

368 pages, Paperback

First published February 28, 2014

Reviews

[Billie Pritchett · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Cambridge Companion to Life and Death is a collection of essays related to the larger themes of life and death. The particular topics discussed in this volume are the nature, significance, and ethics of life and death. The collection is organized in such a way and the individual essays are discrete enough that they harmonize. By the time you finish reading the book, you will feel as though you have been presented with a coherent worldview, and whether or not you agree you will have been exposed to a bevy of fascinating positions regarding life and death.

I'll lay out the big picture of the positions of these essays. According to this volume, life is fundamentally any organism that has a metabolism and that makes use of resources in its environment to continue its existence. This definition of life is broad enough to cover anything from bacteria to bengal tigers. As for human life, we are fundamentally animals, but animals of a very beautiful sort, whose identity is partially determined by enduring character traits and traits we develop throughout our experience on Earth. And also rather beautifully and poetically is the fact that if we take the current physics models seriously regarding the nature of space and time, the entire space-time continuum is already laid out for us, past, present, and future, and the death of us or our loved ones is very much like being in another country. Speaking a little loosely, people do not so much die as just live back there in the past, just as those people yet to be born just live somewhere there in the future. Death comes to us, according to the essay in this volume, when our cardiopulmonary system or critical brain functions fail us, whichever comes first.

I won't talk about the significance or meaningfulness of life and death, the middle portion of the book (you can read it for yourself), but regarding the ethics of life and death, we can find in this volume thoughtful essays on several topics, including human enhancement, procreation, abortion, suicide, killing in self-defense, any obligations we may have to help others, and the ethics of stopping extinction of species.

I recommend this volume, and if you like this book, you might also like Shelly Kagan's Death , an introduction to the philosophy related to issues in death. Or if you liked Kagan's book, you will probably like this one.