The thought police-Brief Answers To Big Questions: I want five more minutes. Does that mean I want to live for ever?

How are we to view death? Among the countless subsidiary questions that this raises, there are two in particular that are interesting to pit against each other. Superficially they are equivalent; however, it is important to distinguish them. I shall put them in the crudest possible terms. Refining them would be a large part of addressing them. (1) Is death a bad thing? (2) Would immortality be preferable to mortality?

It can easily look as if these questions must receive the same answer. True, no sooner does one begin refining them than one sees all sorts of ways in which a full, qualified response to one can differ from a full, qualified response to the other. But it is important to see how, even at this crude level, there is scope for answering yes and no respectively. (I shall assume, incidentally, that death is the end of our existence. A full answer to either question would have to take into account the possibility that it is not.) Very roughly, death is a bad thing because it deprives both the person who dies and others of basic opportunities to create and discover meaning. On the other hand - and this is equally rough - immortality would not be preferable to mortality because mortality is what gives life its most fundamental structure and, therewith, the very possibility of meaning.

Yet there is something puzzling about the idea that the answer to (2) can be no, even if the answer to (1) is yes. If death is a bad thing, then surely living would always be preferable to dying? And surely this in turn means that immortality would be preferable to mortality? Admittedly, there are - all else being equal - clauses implicit here. Someone could resist this simple line of argument by claiming that all else would eventually, and necessarily, not be equal. But suppose we waive that consideration. Then this line of argument certainly looks compelling.

It has recently found expression in Thomas Nagel's The View From Nowhere. On page 224 Nagel writes: "Given the simple choice between living for another week and dying in five minutes I would always choose to live for another week.... I conclude that I would be glad to live for ever."

But, in fact, that does not follow. What follows is rather that if, starting now, I were granted a weekly choice between living for another week and dying in five minutes, then (since I would always choose to live for another week) my repeated choices would keep me alive for ever. This is not to say that I would ever actually choose to live for ever, still less that I would be glad to do so. I might be appalled at the thought that I was going to live for ever, yet still never want these to be my last five minutes. I might never want to die, without wanting never to die. The simple line of argument above can be resisted then. There is no logical conflict in answering yes to (1) and no to (2). But there may be conflicts of other kinds. Indeed, if these are the right answers, with whatever qualifications are called for - if death is both a destroyer of meaning in life and a precondition of the very meaning it destroys - then this surely signals one of the great tragedies of human existence.

A W Moore is a tutorial fellow in philosophy at St Hugh's College, Oxford University. His latest book is 'Points of View' (OUP).

Please send any comments on the Thought Police to Nick Fearn, email: n.fearn@independent.co.uk