This is a particularly intriguing field for me and I'm curious as to what other people think about it. Is death bad for us or not? If it is bad, just how is it so?
On one hand, we have Epicurus and Lucretius saying death is not a bad thing since experience terminates at death. Other scholars submit death is bad because it deprives us of continued good (i.e. life).
What are your thoughts on this?
The original question in this thread is assuming an implicit, fundamental premise: that goodness or badness is measured by the quality of one's experience (happiness or suffering, respectively), and transitively, on the likelihood of such experiences in the future.
If one were to assume this premise, which we can call "utilitarianism" (and may be of the collectivist or egoist variety), then there are three fundamentally different ways to approach the question, depending on what kind of expe