Annihilation: The Sense and Significance of Death
By Christopher Belshaw
Acumen £16.99, 272 pages

The Philosophy of Death
By Steven Luper
Cambridge University Press, £16.99, 264 pages
FT Bookshop price: £13.59

Our Stories: Essays on Life, Death and Free Will
By John Martin Fischer
Oxford University Press, £37.99, 192 pages
FT Bookshop price: £30.39

Death
By Todd May
Acumen £9.99, 119 pages

Who is afraid of the reaper? Not the logicians – they have long relished in tearing off Death’s robes, mocking his fabled sting and pointing and laughing at his bony behind.

“When we exist”, wrote the philosopher Epicurus, “death is not; and when death exists, we are not.”

In other words, for as long as we are alive, we are clearly not dead – so need not worry. As soon as we are dead, however, we are no longer in a position to worry about anything. “Death”, said the Greek thinker, “is nothing to us”: his scythe is blunt, and his danse macabre is just a girlish prance.

This view has given consolation to millions, especially those sceptical of religion’s promise of paradise. Julius Caesar was a convinced epicurean as, much later, was Thomas Jefferson. In today’s more materialist age, belief in an afterlife is lower than ever, and many of us are starkly confronting our own mortality. We might, therefore, expect Epicurus’s comforting view of a toothless Death to be on the rise. But it is not. Instead, the Grim Reaper is making a comeback.

In universities around the world, professors are now arguing that the Dark Angel deserves more respect. Contrary to Epicurus, Death is justly to be feared, say today’s academicians – the common folk had it right all along; we should humbly hand him back his scythe and then run for our lives. Four new books insist that we are right to panic when the reaper comes – and that our very civilisation depends upon it.

Imagine, writes Christopher Belshaw in Annihilation: The Sense and Significance of Death, what life would be like if death were really not bad for those who die: “There would be no proper justification for our grief and distress at the death of others, no reason to avoid runaway buses, intensive care units would have their funding cut, murder would be a lesser crime than assault and battery.”

In other words, if it is not bad for you to die, it is not bad for me to kill you. Mowing down people would be no more wrong than mowing the grass. There would be no point in saving lives, or even taking the least safety precautions. If death is not to be feared, we should take off our crash helmets, toss all the parachutes out of aircraft, and, if we fancied, toss ourselves out after them just to see how far we can get by flapping our arms and making bird noises.

Belshaw, a senior lecturer at the Open University, describes this position as “strongly counterintuitive”. Society exists to preserve life; it is therefore grounded on the “badness” of death. But, he acknowledges, “this is not to say that its badness can be easily understood”. The problem, as Epicurus identified, is that the dead are those who have ceased to exist. And how can anything, even death, be bad for someone who does not exist?

Not implausibly, Belshaw counters that it is not the dead who are harmed by death but the living: the moment of dying is the moment when harm is done. And dying is something that happens to living people. Aside from any pain that might be involved, the “problem” of dying is that it deprives the person of the good life they could otherwise have had.

Steven Luper, professor at Trinity University, Texas, expands. In The Philosophy of Death, he claims that anything that deprives me of a stretch of good life is thereby bad for me. Being dead may not be dreadful in itself, but dying is dreadful if it stops me from having a fine time with my family and friends. Just as it is bad for me if I miss the bus to a party that I am looking forward to, it is even worse if I am knocked down dead by the bus and cannot go to a party ever again.

In arguing that death is awful after all, these philosophers believe they are defending common sense. But in unpacking the implications of their arguments, they come to some startling conclusions.

Belshaw is convinced that to feel Death’s sting, we must have forward-looking desires that would be thwarted by his reaping. So if I am looking forward to seeing my children grow up, then Death is doing me a mischief in foiling my hopes. But, Belshaw believes, it is doubtful whether unborn babies or animals have such forward-looking thoughts. He boldly states: “I do not think death is bad for animals, any more than it is bad for trees ... Nor do I think that death is bad for foetuses.”

Belshaw challenges us with this grim conundrum: suppose you come across a burning car in which a 30-year-old man and a baby are both trapped; you have time to rescue just one of them before the flames engulf the wreck. Which do you choose? He believes the answer is clear: the man “has more, stronger and further-reaching desires for more life than does the baby”. He, therefore, stands to lose a great deal of what he hopes for, whereas “the baby loses nothing at all”.

Many will disagree with the cold logic of this view. The baby, after all, stands to lose more future life. But Luper, too, struggles to see how death is genuinely bad for babies. The surprising conclusion to which these philosophers come is that we can show death to be fearful, but only with any certainty to humans with well-formed hopes and wishes for the future.

Although strong on analysis, these books do not explore the changing context of our approach to dying. Why is it that philosophers, who were once as keen as priests were to offer us consolation in the face of mortality, are now proclaiming death’s grimness?

The answer reflects broader shifts in our attitudes to life and death. When Epicurus was writing in 4th century BC, the brutal facts of mortality were far more visible than they are in the developed world today. Life expectancy was around 30; there was neither paracetamol nor penicillin to ease life’s pains. People sought solace in the face of the inevitable – Epicurus would have spoken to many with his doctrine that, when dead, we would finally be free of suffering.

But in this medically advanced age, most of us can look forward to decades of health and comfort. It is, therefore, no surprise that a willingness to go quietly with the reaper is seen as a betrayal of red-blooded love of life. We are now expected to battle illness, fight ageing and declare war on cancer. This bellicose language reveals the deeper reason why we are now willing to acknowledge Death as our enemy: because we believe that for all his fearfulness, we may one day be able to defeat him.

This thinking can be seen in John Martin Fischer’s Our Stories: Essays on Life, Death and Free Will. If we are right to dread death, he argues, then we should be trying to live for ever. And not in some wishy-washy afterlife, but here on earth. Or in Fischer’s case, in California, where this thought is occurring to a generation of ageing baby boomers, thousands of who now swallow supplements and pull on jogging shoes in their efforts to outrun the reaper.

In defending the desirability of immortality, Fischer, a professor at the University of California, Riverside, also claims to have common sense on his side. But as with defending death’s badness, there is a long tradition of thinkers who have argued the opposite. These curmudgeons, as Fischer calls them, believe that death gives shape and meaning to our lives. Immortality, according to them, would reduce us all to disaffected teenagers kicking tin cans down a never-ending street.

The curmudgeon’s position is ably defended by Todd May in his excellent book Death, part of Acumen’s popular philosophy series “The Art of Living”. Those who wish for immortality, he claims, are failing to grasp how very, very long for ever is. No matter what we like doing, playing the jazz saxophone, for example, it is difficult to believe we would find it fun for, say, an entire century, let alone a thousand or a million years. But even a million years is just the beginning of infinity. Just as we are sick of turkey by the end of Boxing Day, our fickle minds are likely to have exhausted every possible passion while eternity is just getting going.

Fischer is more optimistic. It is all about the correct pacing of our pleasures, he believes. A gourmand is never sick of foie gras – as long as he does not have it every day. And though we cannot look at a turkey sandwich by New Year’s eve, we are looking forward to cranberry sauce again the following November.

He might have added that it could be our very limitations that save us. Allegedly, goldfish do not get bored swimming around their tanks because of their legendary short-term memory (“ooh, a plastic grotto, I’ve never seen that before”). So perhaps serial forgetfulness could save us from tedium too. We could find infinite joy in Fawlty Towers reruns, as long as we have forgotten each one by the next viewing. Whether this is the immortality Fischer dreams of is hard to say, however.

But May’s concerns go deeper than turkey and sitcoms. Imagine a play that never ends but that you are not allowed to leave – how could it have plot or meaning, how could the actors fail to repeat themselves endlessly? In the end, they would drive each other mad, like the characters from Sartre’s eternal waiting-room in his play Huis Clos (No Exit), who come to realise that “Hell is other people”.

An immortal life, May writes, “would, sooner or later, just be a string of events lacking all form”. He does not deny that death is dreadful, he just adds that eternal life most likely would be too.

The books by Fischer, Belshaw and Luper will be of most interest to fellow philosophers. While Luper’s work is the clearest and most comprehensive, Fischer and Belshaw are less shy about drawing bold conclusions. Only May’s Death targets the general reader – and it is a fine example of what popular philosophy can be: wide-ranging and thought-provoking, in little more than 100 pages.

May is also the only one of these four authors to grasp the real paradox of mortality: that the fact of death imbues our life with passion and urgency, but it is that very passion for life that makes death tragic. Our eye on the reaper’s hourglass prompts us to strive for our highest achievements; but that very striving means that when he comes knocking, it is always too soon.

Stephen Cave is writing a book on immortality