1 Feldman's variant of the deprivation view enables him to propose plausible answers to these puzzles: (i) How can being dead be a misfortune for a person if he does not exist during the time when it takes place? (ii) How can the deprivation approach be coherent if it requires a comparison between the benefits and harms that would come to a person if he were to live, and those that would come to him if he were to die? After all, it appears that there is no second term for the comparison, (iii) Finally, if the deprivation approach is correct, and if early death is bad for us because it deprives us of the goods we would have enjoyed had we died later, why is not a late birth just as bad for us?

2 Feldman, Fred, Doing the Best We Can: An Essay in Informal Deontic Logic (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1986).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 It is somewhat misleading to call this state “suspended animation”: as I see it, something can be in this state even though it has never been animated. Therefore, it is not literally a state of suspended animation.

4 Of course, one might object that once in existence, no entity can enter into suspended animation unless it was “animated” at some earlier time. That may well be true, consistent with its being true that an entity can come into existence either in the undead non-lively state or in the state of being dead. I take it that there is some possible world in which God, if he exists, creates some dead person.