Some claims seem so clearly right that we don't think to question them. Steven Luper-Foy's remark is like that. It borders on the ‘trivially true’ (i.e. so obviously true as to be uninteresting). If I have a reason to live, surely I likewise have a reason not to die. It may then be surprising to learn that so many philosophers disagree with this claim – either directly or by implication. I will look at some of the things people say that stand in opposition to Luper-Foy's claim. I will also consider what is needed in order to agree with it. The views canvassed cover broad issues concerning life and death, and what matters to us with respect to both.

Epicurus (341–271 B.C.) made claims about death that are still debated today. Perhaps his most notorious was that death is ‘nothing to us’ (Leading Doctrines, 2). There is a sense in which, for Epicurus, the claim that death is nothing to us is quite literally true. We have nothing to do with death because so long as we are alive, it is not present for us. And if it were present for us we would be absent (Letter to Menoeceus, 125). At no point do ‘I’ and ‘death’ coincide. So it cannot have an impact upon me.

Sometimes when reinforcing this point Epicurus emphasises that I will not sense or perceive anything when I am dead. Sometimes he merely emphasises that I will not exist when I am dead. There are unspoken assumptions in either case: either I need to sense something in order for something to be bad for me, or I need to exist in order for it to be bad for me. Both assumptions have come in for considerable criticism, especially the first one. But we can set this aside for the time being. Instead, I want to investigate how Epicurus deals with the issue of reasons for living. Understanding Epicurus' views on life, it turns out, can help shed light on his view of death.

If death is nothing to us, do we have any reason to live? An uncharitable reading of Epicurus might say we do not. Certainly Epicurus and his followers were known for having challenging views about what in life is valuable. Life is good in so far as it yields pleasurable experience. But pleasurable experience is characterised by Epicurus in terms of the absence of pain. This being so, according to Epicurus, the benefits of pleasure do not increase with duration – more is not better. This can be difficult for people to understand and accept. But consider an analogy with health, which is sometimes used to explain the Epicurean view of pleasure: if you are healthy your health does not get better the longer it goes on. Likewise with pleasure in the Epicurean sense – the absence of pain, like the condition of being in good health, is a stable quality. It does not increase with time.

Epicurus would be the first to admit that this view of pleasure goes against the norm; his goal in part was to reform the common view. Thus it is not surprising that his understanding of pleasure is a far cry from the types of things many people often think of as pleasurable, e.g. sensual, often short-lived activities, such as the pursuit of physical pleasure beyond what is needed to survive and stave off appetites. Lucretius (c.94–c.50B.C.), a later follower of Epicurus, compared the relentless accumulation of pleasures to the pouring of water into a sieve or cracked vessel (On the Nature of Things 3.1005–1008) – a time-involving, never-ending and ultimately frustrating procedure. People who engage in such pursuits enjoy the act of drinking more than they appreciate the sensation of quenched thirst. Therefore they are constantly compelled to seek further pleasures. There are various names for such people but I am going to call them ‘Acquisitionists’; their key trait is that, for anything they deem good, the pleasure lies in the experience of obtaining it, and they will always crave more of it. By contrast to the Acquisitionist, Epicurus' view of non-time-bound pleasure invites us to rest content with the state of well-being that ensues when appetites and wants have been fulfilled.

What has this got to do with the relation between reasons for living and reasons for not dying? The Acquisitionist's compulsion to pursue and enlarge on fleeting pleasures is an ongoing endeavour that can be cut off by death at any time. Someone afflicted with this compulsion always wants more of what she wants, and so death stands in the way of her achieving this. Her reasons for living are reasons for not dying; she abhors and fears death because it interferes with a project that in theory has no end. That is part of why the thought of her own death produces fear and anxiety. However, once we rid ourselves of such wants, ‘we no longer need unlimited time’, according to Epicurus (Leading Doctrines, 20). We therefore stop being afraid that life is not eternal. We don't need to live forever in order to live well, since a good life can happen in a finite amount of time and isn't increased with duration. This is why, for the Epicureans, reasons for living are not reasons for not dying. Whatever it is that makes life good for an Epicurean, it cannot be anything we insist on pursuing ad infinitum. The thinking person, who follows the ‘mind’ and not the ‘body’ does not ‘avoid pleasure’, but nor does he regret ‘departure from life’ (Leading Doctrines, 20); his pleasures are time-bound and death does not infringe on them. In short, and in contrast to the Acquisitionist, the Epicurean has reasons to live but they are not reasons not to die.

Some people think that Epicurus' difficult view of death is tied to his having rather spectacularly missed the point of life. He paints a picture in which our choices are between life as frustrated and fearful persons of the flesh trying to fill the cracked vessel of our endless, fleeting desires, and life as the person of the mind who basks in a state of simple well-being in the form of the absence of pain, with no great need to prolong this state. But perhaps these are not the only options. There are many valuable things in life that do take considerable time but don't demand endless renewal. Consider having a child, pursuing a career, undertaking a project of scientific discovery, or athletic excellence, or artistic creation. These are all potential reasons for living. For many people, such things constitute the reasons for living. They propel us into the future and make us want to go on – as opposed to the day-to-day mundane things we do in order merely to pass the time we have been allotted.

These reasons for living take time to see through to the end. However, time is needed not because, like the Acquisitionist with the insatiable appetite, we just want to do these sorts of things again and again, but because in order to accomplish these tasks we need to follow a certain complex path. We need to do certain things in a certain order over a considerable stretch of time. If I want to become a successful lawyer I need to reach adulthood, and undergo a long period of education, apprenticeship, and work before achieving my goal. If I want to have and raise a child, biology determines that this too takes time. Successfully completing a marathon is unthinkable unless one follows a lengthy and structured regimen of training. But crucially, unlike the ongoing, endless pursuit of additional pleasures, completion of these goals and activities is also possible. The partnership in a firm can be obtained. The child can grow and thrive and be sent off into the world. The race can be run to the finish line. And so on.

The people who hold some form of this view are a diverse lot and differ amongst themselves on many of the details. For the purposes of this discussion, I am going to group them together and call them ‘Completionists’. The key feature which they share is that they believe in and value time-extended but completable goals. The completion of valued life projects requires time, and the time required can be interrupted by death. Such an interruption, far from being nothing to them, would be a disaster, coming as it does before the goals are fully realised. As far as Completionists are concerned, Epicurus' composure about death was gained at the expense of ignoring these time-extended but completable goals.

Notice that the Completionists' disagreement with Epicurus here is not total. Like the Epicureans, Completionists also reject Steven Luper-Foy's claim. The reasons they give for living are not reasons for not dying. Or not ultimately – there is a qualification in this case. Prior to the completion of one's goals, these goals provide reasons to avoid death. But it is understood that the goals can be completed. So they cannot stand as permanent, unqualified reasons for wanting to avoid death. In fact, many Completionists emphasise that a limited life-span is necessary for us to form, pursue, and appreciate certain activities. I would not be motivated to become a top lawyer or star athlete if my time on earth were unlimited. I might not even be able to imagine goals for my self in the future if that future had no limit. I also may not value my accomplishments if they are amongst countless that I will be able to go on to pursue. Reasons for living here go hand-in-hand with reasons for dying. The time-extended but completable goals discussed have the fact of our mortality built into them, because mortality is part of what helps us formulate them and makes them valuable. So Completionists cannot embrace Luper-Foy's edict that any reason for living is an excellent reason for not dying. They have many reasons for living but these do not ultimately stand in the way of accepting death – indeed, death has a positive and necessary role to perform in helping to articulate and shape the primary reasons to live.

Does anyone other than the Acquisitionist agree with Luper-Foy? Maybe we should be satisfied with the Acquisitionist's endorsement. But even apart from Epicurus' criticisms, Acquisitionists are usually portrayed as shallow and unthinking. They are motivated by the spirit of acquisitiveness; emphasis is placed on the pursuit of more and further pleasures for their own sake, rather than on any satisfaction they bring about. The Completionist tends to view the Acquisitionist with despair – she is unwilling to undergo hardship for the sake of a long-term goal. And nothing will ever be finished for her, so she cannot achieve closure and contentment. That this is no way to live is another point the Completionists and the Epicureans can agree on. Furthermore, Lucretius' cracked vessel metaphor strikes a chord; there is something perhaps empty and unsatisfying in the constant accumulation of more short-lived pleasurable experiences. If we want to do justice to Luper-Foy's point, it would be nice to have a better representative of it than the Acquisitionist. Let's consider what we might need here, in light of where we have got to so far.

Epicurus and his followers cannot accept that any reason for living is an excellent reason for not dying, because the pleasures of life are not increased with time. While there are things we can enjoy in life, death does not detract from that enjoyment, which would not increase if we did not die. Completionists hold, against Epicurus, that death can undermine what is good in life. In particular, death is bad when it comes before we have completed certain time-extended goals. But once those goals are completed death is not a threat, and in order to form and appreciate those goals, it is necessary that we are beings who can and will die. Therefore in so far as those goals are our reasons to live, they are still not always reasons not to die. If we want reasons for living that are also reasons for not dying, it seems we need the following: reasons for living that are time-extended (contra the Epicurean), but are also open-ended, in the sense of not limited by time (contra the Completionist). And ideally, we would like those reasons not to consist entirely in obtaining the maximal experience of pleasure for its own sake (contra the Acquisitionist).

One person who may point us in the right direction here is Thomas Nagel. He is amongst the many who do not accept Epicurean detachment about death. Death is bad, according to Nagel, and it is bad because it deprives us of the goods in life. These goods consist in not just momentary, experienced pleasures, but hopes and possibilities that death may undermine. A person, for Nagel, is ‘identified by his history and his possibilities’ more so than by his experiential state at any particular moment (5). So far this does not necessarily differ from the Completionist view that we need a decent stretch of time in order to complete meaningful goals. Both Nagel and the Completionist seem to agree that many of the goods of life are time-extended and death is bad in so far as it can curtail them. But Nagel adds a key point that pushes him into a separate camp, namely that the possibilities apparently open to a person may be unlimited. This changes matters considerably. As Nagel puts it, ‘if there is no limit to the amount of life that it would be good to have, then it may be that a bad end is in store for us all’ (10). What he is suggesting here is that death may always come at the wrong time, depriving us of possible goods of life.

Nagel is perfectly well aware that we cannot in fact live forever. Nature dictates this. So his talk of the limitless possible goods death deprives us of cannot mean ‘possible’ only within the current bounds of nature. There is clearly a limit to what possibilities are in fact available to us, given that we are mortal and our lives are short. But there may be no limit to the possibilities that we can imagine or conceive of for ourselves. It is when we dwell on these that we enter Nagel's realm of limitless possibilities for the self. Our sense of our own experience, says Nagel, ‘does not embody this idea of a natural limit’ (9–10); we can and often do plan as though there were no tomorrow. And even when we know it is not true, we are capable of imagining another career, another race, another goal worthy of pursuit, which could bring us further happiness. The Completionist's apparent acceptance of death under certain circumstances rings hollow when we let our imagination take flight and think of all the good experiences we have yet to have, or want to have again.

In Nagel we find the time-extended but open-ended reasons for living that we were looking for. These reasons to live propel us beyond the present experience and into the (theoretically open-ended) future. This is in contrast to the Epicurean view, where good is associated with an experiential state defined by the absence of pain, and does not increase with time. But it is also in contrast to the Completionist, who views the goods in life to be time-extended but completable; for here is a view that claims, in theory anyway, these goods may have no limit. In so far as death poses a threat to the realisation of the possible goods we can conceive of, the threat, like the possibilities themselves, is unlimited. Hence reasons for living, on Nagel's view, are always reasons for not dying.

Has this view avoided association with the shallow Acquisitionist position? That depends on what about Nagel's view we choose to emphasise. There are some apparent similarities with the Acquisitionist, in that the view Nagel considers implies that more of what is good is better, so to speak. Hence death's permanent potential to deprive us of the goods in life: ‘death, no matter how inevitable, is an abrupt cancellation of indefinitely extensive possible goods’ (10).

But Nagel also says that some things can be good or bad independently of how they feel for a person at the time. For instance, he disparages the ‘man who wastes his life in the cheerful pursuit of a method of communicating with asparagus plants’ (5). Similarly, but more seriously, he views the adult who suffers a brain injury and is reduced to the state of a contented child to be the subject of a great misfortune. The asparagus-man and the brain-injured person are in a contented state. The Acquisitionist would have trouble saying that anything is wrong for them or that they suffer any harm, so long as they can go on experiencing the pleasures of being fed and well cared for. Nagel's view that they do suffer harm connects with his belief that persons are defined not just in terms of their present state, but their history and possibilities. These possibilities must, for Nagel, be richer and more complex than the potential to live in a state of physical comfort indefinitely (otherwise he would not view these people as unfortunate). He speaks of the importance of success and failure and aspects of our life that are like processes rather than individual moments of well-being. ‘Processes’ here can plausibly include the longer-term goals of the Completionist – achievements which require time and, often, some pain and sacrifice. If we include such things amongst the possible goods of life, we arrive at something quite different from the Acquisitionist's understanding of the goods that death can deprive us of.

Despite such differences between himself and the Acquisitionist, Nagel will also have to contend with criticism of his claim that the goods of life may be ‘indefinitely extensive’. The Epicurean objects to the notion of time-extended goods, and will criticise Nagel for suggesting that someone in a good state might still be deprived, and that this deprivation might be alleviated by additional time. The Completionist objects to the notion of indefinitely extended goods, and will criticise Nagel for suggesting that anything could retain its value indefinitely, or that we can imagine an open-ended future of limitless possibilities for ourselves.

It may be possible to maintain that any reason for living is a reason for not dying. But the claim is hard-won, if we are to give it the seriousness it deserves and ensure that the reasons in question are ones that we are prepared to live for, for all time. The Acquisitionist's reasons for never dying could wear thin after a finite amount of time; simply revelling in the experience of pleasure may lose its appeal given enough time, and thereby cease to be a reason for living. The Completionists arguably offer us better reasons for living (or at least what many of us would recognise as good and enduring reasons to go on). However, they added that those reasons gained their strength and possibly their coherence from being placed in the context of a finite, mortal lifespan. Nagel disagreed, and he is not alone in holding that the complex, rich and varied possibilities that give us, now, reasons to go on, can in some form provide grounds for continuing on indefinitely.

We cannot here resolve the disagreements that remain between the various parties. But we can at least note that Luper-Foy's claim that any reason for living is an excellent reason for not dying, regardless of its truth, is certainly not trivial. There are a number of ways of disagreeing with it. What is more, there are arguable advantages to disagreeing with it. The fact that the Epicurean and the Completionist have reasons for living that are not always reasons for not dying helps them accept their mortality. Their reasons for living won't necessarily place them in the unhappy position of having to dread or regret their inevitable demise. On the other hand, we may, like Nagel, think our reasons for living are always reasons for not dying – and excellent reasons at that, going far beyond the Acquisitionists' superficial, perhaps unsustainable, values. But if that is what we think then it is hard to avoid the view that, in so far as our reasons for living are sustainable and unlimited, a bad end is indeed in store for us all.