On the usual reflective context, when it comes to studying the question of what is the sense in which death could be considered bad, one considers only the moment of death, as if death was not part of life, but something ontologically external. They say things like: “Life is good, it is a pity we have to die” without seeing that if it is a pity that we have to die, then life is not good, since life brought death with it, or rather, they are one and the same thing. But understanding this is already going out of death as punctual to structural, to the constitutive “mortality” of being. When one says: “Death is bad because it deprives us of the good things of life”, the meaning is to give a privative sense to death, as if life were positive, without seeing that life carries the negative with it. From this tendency to see death as “bad”, this opportunity is taken to formulate, by opposition, the idea of the “goodness” of life: if death is bad, and life is the opposite of death, then life must be good.
But, what sense could this statement have? Clearly only an empirical sense: “Death is bad because it deprives us of worldly goods." Here, the moment of death is the only thing that is considered, as literal interruption of goods such as perception, movement, performing tasks, desire, etc. But to avoid an unjustifiable affirmative asymmetry, it should be answered back that, in the same way, one could say that “Death is good because it frees us from the evils of life” if we continue to understand death only as punctual, and if we think of worldly evils as deception, treachery, aggression, disease, wars, etc., from which death frees us. Since the world is, in the empirical view, an alternation of goods and evils, death may be called “good” or “bad” as we consider as depriving of the former or as freeing from the latter. If death is good (for freeing us from the worldly evils) and life is the opposite of death, then life must be bad.
But I do not think this is the correct line of argument. The lack of value of life cannot be shown in this purely empirical manner, because one cannot escape from total symmetry in what I like to call the “seesaw vision”, or the “one day the sun shines, the other one it rains vision”. If death is understood as merely the moment of death, and life just as worldly, with its mixture of goods and evils, there is no way of breaking the tie or overcoming the seesaw vision. It seems to me that the right way is to consider the issue of the value of human life also considering structural death, the mortality of being. If we use this other dimension of death, it could not have any sense to say that “life is good, but dying is bad” (the usual tendency), nor the opposite, that “life is bad, and therefore death is good”, given that, structurally seen, death is inside the living, it is inseparable from it, living is internally mortal, mortality has emerged along with the being itself, it is the very being of being.
In the structural domain of death, it is therefore absurd to say that being born (have emerged) is good but having to die is bad, because death came along with the being so inseparable and constitutive, not as a passing event, but in its own structure. Being born is being placed on the mortality of being, so that if death is, for some reason, considered bad, then having emerged should also be bad, or both things should be good (or, as the agnostic claims, neither good nor bad), but in no case it could be argued some asymmetry in favor of one side or the other. Regretting having to die should be structurally identical to regretting being born, because it is not in our power being born in a non-mortal way.
