Suppose you did not find Lucretius terribly convincing. Death still strikes you as a bad thing. Does it follow that what you want is immortality?
Williams says it does not.
More specifically, he argues from premises about desire and happiness to these conclusions:
Death is reasonably regarded as an evil.
Immortality would be intolerable.
Lucretius had argued that death cannot be bad because the dead do not want anything and so they cannot be frustrated or made unhappy.
Williams responds with a distinction between two kinds of desires: conditional and categorical (Williams 1973, 85–86).
Conditional desires are for things that you want provided you are alive. Examples: breathing, getting a good night’s sleep, not being in pain.
Categorical desires are things you want to be alive for. Examples: enjoying your friends and family, accomplishing something, seeing something like the Grand Canyon, enjoying a meal, and so on.
The idea is that conditional desires do not give you any reason to be alive. If all you want is to avoid pain and suffering, you could achieve that by being dead.
But categorical desires do give you a reason to be alive since that is the only way of satisfying them.
And if you have a reason to be alive, then it is bad for you to die.
Incidentally, what Williams calls Lucretius’s second argument is what I called his third argument. We both refer to the same argument as Lucretius’s first argument.
Does denying Lucretius’s point commit us to thinking that it would be better to live always?
Williams thinks that the value of life depends on what someone wants. Those without categorical desires have little reason to live. They would be equally well off alive with their conditional desires fulfilled or dead with no conditional desires at all. They will not be frustrated either way.
Most of us, most of the time, are not in that position. We have categorical desires and they give us plenty of reason to live.
However, Williams believes, those who live too long will lose their categorical desires. There can be such a thing as dying too late, or dying on time, before it is too late.
Williams’s argument rests on the claim that our categorical desires would be extinguished if we lived too long. Why would that be?
He says that if a person’s character remains constant, life would get boring. For example, in the opera, everything that can happen to a 42 year old EM has happened and she is tired of herself. Williams claims this would happen to any of us if we stayed the same, retained the same character.
More abstractly, I have reason to look forward to immortality only if two conditions are met:
It is clearly me who lives on (and on and on and on).
The state in which I survive is adequately related to my present categorical desires.
Someone whose character never changes would grow bored, Williams claims. But someone whose character changes over time would, at some point, have very different categorical desires from mine. That person would no longer be living my life.
Here is one question for discussion. How do we square this point about character change with his views about personal identity? I would have expected him to say even if my character changes quite a lot, it would still be me, just with a different character. After all, while there are some similarities between me now and me as I was when I was six years old, my character is different. But I am still the same person.
Here is another question. One way of avoiding boredom would be to change one’s character. Another way would be to change one’s circumstances. Think of someone who was around when Socrates was debating about whether to drink the hemlock or not. If that person had survived to the present day, he or she would live in a very different world now. Why wouldn’t that be interesting enough?