Hmm, do we need to suppose something as robust as being "better off" or "being is always better than non-being" to make the argument work?

I think it might be an entailment in some way, but one has to tackle the objection that 'some lives aren't worth living'- say a life of overwhelming mind-blurring pain. On my argument, I think that even the person who is suffering excruciating pain is incoherent insofar as he thinks that death will "help" him, and thus is acting from irrational motives. That's certainly cold comfort, but insofar as the suicidal person wants to act from reasons, and many do so desire, I think he's mistaken even without supposing from the outset any robust principles of life's inherent value. It's as simple as it not being possible in this world (given the assumption of non-eternalism) to achieve the desired end through the given means whatever the relative goodness of the desired end: you just can't be better off for being dead given what death and "being better off" are. It doesn't matter if there is some non-life state that's better than living (ergo it could be false that it's "always better to live") nor does it matter if death can be charecterized as better or worse (ergo it could be false that existence is always better): death is on the assumption of the argument cannot lead to something better for you.

Also, and I'm not sure I'm reading him correctly, but I think Aquinas is mistaken when he says things like:

" Secondly, it may be considered as a relief from a painful life or from some unhappiness: and thus "not to be" takes on the aspect of good, since "to lack an evil is a kind of good"

It can't be so considered since death does not actually affect "relief" in the the dead, since the dead are not and so cannot have the accident of being relieved. That is to say, "the lack of evil is a kind of good" in the thing that lacks it. If there is no such thing, then there is no such good.

I take him to be equivocating on unhappiness as the evil (privation) of an object and unhappiness as an (positive) evil present in the world. Dying does not remove unhappiness in the sense that healing removes a wound from the body. Unhappiness is a deficiency of a person- some inability to exercise power or to exercise it correctly. It is not a positive property. If the soul is destroyed on death, to kill a man amounts to a total deficiency of his being- a loss of any actuality. You can only take the "removal" of a deficiency by means of the removal of that of which it is a defficiency from existence as an "improvement" if you construe unhappiness as a positive evil present in the world which has now been removed. But not only would this not be an improvement for the one who has died, but given that unhappiness has no positive existence, it's not even an improvement in the general state of the world. Thus one would be in error to so "consider" not being: not-being is not an actual state of any actual thing and thus can not actually be any kind of relief for anything.

Since I've been studying phenomenology again it occurred to me that a chief confusion that's happening is something like the phenomenological confusion of ourselves qua site of experience with an ordinary object of experience:

When we experience the presence of something that's irritating, a mosquito, for instance, we become aware that one approach is to simply remove the irritating object from experience by destroying it (smashing in the case of the mosquito). It's here, biting me, and if I get rid of it, that irritation goes with its source. We then experience either a state of relief, having remembered the irritant, or if we don't attend to our memory, we experience ordinary non-irritated being.

The depressed person, however, often has no particular irritating object on which he can focus because phenomenologically depression presents as world-totalizing deficiency: things that showed up before no longer show up and possibilities of action seen no longer available. Lacking a specific object of experience he might turn his attention on himself qua object in experience and, treating himself on the pattern of the mosquito, think that if he removed himself then the irritation goes with him. But the experience of his being non-irritated is ordinarily an object of possible experience only for himself and has the significance of personal relief only to the sufferer. Suicide is the elimination of himself not merely as an object but also as the site of experience. In a certain respect, since he ignores himself as subject, he could be said to tacitly mean to survive his own dying and die his own death.

Timotheos wrote:

Basically, the idea is that, if the soul is destroyed at death, and hence death always puts one worse off than if they continued to live, then one always ends up better off if they continue to live, regardless of how bad their life is. So suppose there is a situation wherein one could extend their life if they kill somebody else, but will surely die if they don't; something like they need a special organ transplant, and they are way back on the waiting list with no hope of getting an organ in time, but they could kill somebody and make an organ available for them right now. Now normally one would say such killing would be murder and intrinsically wrong, and hence ought to be something that one would never do. But the previous scenario suggests that one in fact ought to murder somebody for the organ; regardless of how that might make you a worse person, it still makes you better than dead.

Hmm, that does seem troubling. This might be a reductio of the assumption of the principle that it's always "better" to be than not to be. Perhaps it's more correct to say that "to not be" isn't anything at all: thus there can be no relation of "better than" (or worse than) to it. That I not be isn't a great evil I need to stave off, but it's also nothing I can aspire to be, so I have no rational motive to try and attain it either.

The upshot of that is that it would eliminate all the given motive to try and find a donor to murder: death isn't anything to worry about either, so we have to consider the act of murder in itself. There might be other motives- the importance of my projects, or some such -but this isn't merely the in principle preference for existence and so we might be able to save most of our intuition that you're not permitted to kill someone just to keep existing.

On the other hand, my reply seems to entail both a theory about non-extants that may not hold up and it seems to entail that we can't say that the problem with murder is that it causes something to not be, which is something that I suppose that the person who refuses the immortality of the soul will also want to accept (though perhaps not).

The former worry seems more troubling. One might think we can have real relations to non-extants: my book is not a square circle or the present king of France. Thus one might think that there is no in principle reason to think that we can't have relation of better or worse to the non-extant. I'm not sure that works. I'm running into the logical problem of referring to what is not, and I'm not sure the best way to proceed.

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Phenomenologically, I might say that your example lacks grounds. I do not, in fact, experience the condition of "always being better off for being alive" either with respect to this always being so or with respect to it being an aspect of myself proper. I experience this or that good in my life. I do not experience the good of my life except when I regard myself as an object of reflection. But to take myself in this way and then to import what I experience in so taking myself onto my experiencing as such is a confusion.

For, when I regard myself as some object in the world I am taking myself in relation to other such objects. Not only does this goodness show up as relative to the other objects- "I am good insofar as I'm properly exercising my objective functions./Insofar as I am in objective conformity to the law./Insofar as I appear to be in some objective state of positive utility." but it can't be said to apply to my experiencing itself.

When I am acting as the site of experience (ego/experiencing) I do not experience my ego as this object of reflection and do not apprehend my experiencing as having the properties of that object: my experiencing does not appear as bipedal, even though my body does. Nor does my experiencing appear as itself good but only as the ground of the possibility of my relative good as an object. And even if the enabling conditions of goodness can be said to be good by means of some inference they are only good insofar as they're in relationship to some good and do not display it of themselves.

All I show up as qua site of experience is a kind of focal point for the appearing of phenomena: these tables and chairs and thoughts are all experienced here in some respect that isn't merely spatial. But this "here" doesn't show up at all like an object does. The appearing of things itself doesn't show up as an aspect of some thing in experience.

Since it lacks the character of things, it cannot be said to display goodness of itself as something in view might, for you will struggle in vain to point out the good aspect of my experiencing as such. You will always grasp for this or that appearance- this vision of beautiful scenery, that wonderful lover, this feeling of pleasure, that noble action, etc, but these appearances are not themselves that to which they appear. Since we cannot speak of experiencing as if it were some good object experienced, we cannot speak of experiencing ourselves as essentially better off for existing.

Add to this that our own not-being is not an object of our experience such that it could be said to show up as worse than our present state. When I project myself as not-being I either imagine the world such that I'm not in it as an object of reflection and thus must make a real evaluation as to whether or not this imagined world is in fact worse for my not being in it or I try to think of a nullity, and a nullity shows up with no character whatsoever. Thus your murderer is actually forced to ask himself whether it's better that an imagined world where in he exists and his victim doesn't is better than the contrary, and that is by no means obviously in his favor. Or else he is mistakenly trying to characterize a nullity as having some positive character of "being worse", which is a category mistake and no part of experience. For try now to think of a nulity, and then tell me of its attributes. You will be unable to do so, for any listed will ammount to the experiencing of a non-nulity.