What's the worst age to die?

A look at the arguments

Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel

Last time on Value Judgments, I discussed the results of a survey of U.S.-based bioethicists. Specifically, I argued that the majority of respondents—sixty-three percent of them—mistakenly believe that “preventing a death is equally important irrespective of age”. My view is that it’s worse to die younger, which I suspect is also the majority view of ordinary non-philosopher types, but that’s a guess.

There’s a sub-question to this, which a few people asked me about. If it isn’t equally important to prevent death irrespective of age, which age is most important? Or, what is the worst age to die? You can approach this in two ways, broadly speaking. According to the first view, the younger someone dies, the worse it is. This follows from the deprivation view, which holds that death is bad for the one who dies because it deprives that person of whatever value her life would have had if she remained alive. If death is bad because it means we miss out on stuff, then dying earlier will (typically) mean we miss out on more stuff, so dying earlier is worse. Therefore, the younger the person who dies, the worse it is.

The deprivation view is basically the only game in town in philosophy of death circles, but there’s lots of debate about the details. This age question is one aspect of the debate. The second option is that, while it’s generally worse to die young than old, a newborn baby’s death, while surely tragic, isn’t the worst age to die.

The survey reports what the minority of bioethicists think:

In order of frequency, other respondents indicated it was most important to prevent someone from dying at 10 years of age (65, 16%), 1 year of age (53, 13%), or 25 years of age (32, 8%). No respondents selected either 50 or 75 years of age.

There isn’t much difference in the numbers, but twelve more people think saving ten year olds is more important than saving one year olds, while fewer people think saving twenty-five year olds is most important.

I don’t have a strong view either way, but the case for saving slightly older people is that these people’s lives are starting to take shape. The significant relationships, interests, a developing career, and all the other things that give life its contours and meaning start to come into view. In contrast, with a young child, none of life’s details are worked out. Her life has potential but nothing has been actualized. Given this, according to the argument, death robs the young adult of more than the young child.

There’s something to this. In ‘Big League’, Tom Cochrane sings from the perspective of a father whose eighteen-year-old son was killed by a truck driving in the wrong lane. The special tragedy is that the son had spent his whole life dedicated to hockey and had just been given a scholarship to play for a “big U.S. team”. In this case, the special sadness of the story is that we know specifically what he will miss out on. The kid did all the investing but gets none of the payoff.

That doesn’t settle it, though, because for every ‘Big League’, there’s a song about losing a young child: ‘Tears in Heaven’, about the death of a four year old; ‘Fiddler’s Green’ by the Tragically Hip, which mentions the child’s “tiny knotted heart”; and ‘Bigger Than the Whole Sky’ by Taylor Swift, which is about a miscarriage.

When a young child dies, we don’t know the particular contours of that life, but that’s its own kind of tragedy. Take ‘Fiddler’s Green’:

​​He doesn’t know a soul

There’s nowhere that he’s really been

But he won’t travel long alone

No, not in Fiddler’s Green

I don’t mean to imply that we can settle these questions with close readings of pop songs, but another feature of songs about the deaths of young children is that they’re often focused on the parent. I only noticed this after I had chosen these songs. ‘Tears in Heaven’ is all about the narrator: “I’ll find my way through night and day”, etc. The opening stanza of ‘Fiddler’s Green’ is about the boy’s mother:

September seventeen

For a girl I know it’s Mother’s Day

Her son has gone alee

And that’s where he will stay

In Swift’s song, the narrator has had a miscarriage and is lamenting that she’ll never get to meet her child.

I’m never gonna meet

What could’ve been, would’ve been

What should’ve been you

What could’ve been, would’ve been you

Maybe it’s just easier to write these songs from the perspective of the parent, but maybe the songs are evidence that people think it’s worse to be a parent who loses a young child than it is to be the young child. If so, they would be in good company, as this is the view of Jeff McMahan, who has the most robust (and accepted?) defense of the deprivation view. McMahan believes that it’s worse to die younger, but, moving from old to young, at some point—McMahan regularly says thirty-five—deaths become less bad again, making thirty-five the worst age to die for him. For my purposes, the specific age isn’t as important as the idea that moving back from old age, death gets worse up to some point, whereupon death becomes less bad once again.

These are still comparative claims. McMahan isn’t arguing for indifference, but he uses fairly strong language. He says that the death of an infant is “substantially less bad” than the death of a thirty-five year old. Here’s what he says about a child who dies shortly after birth: “This brief life contained very little good at all. Yet it does not seem to have been a tragic life; nor does the infant seem to have been a deeply unfortunate individual.” He then spends a lot of pages trying to make sense of this intuition. Throughout, he claims that this is the popular view, that people don’t regard infant deaths as tragedies in the way the deaths of older people are. 

I’m suspicious about this empirical claim. I don’t know of any studies about this, and society spends a lot on neonatal intensive care and other ways of keeping infants alive, indicating that it matters. However, in McMahan’s defense, outside of religious circles, when someone miscarries, it seems more common to hear “I’m so sorry that happened to you” than “that poor child”.  

McMahan explains this as follows. The infant hasn’t developed enough psychologically for her death to count as a loss to her, so she has no sense of what she’s missing out on. As McMahan puts it, “It seems that all misfortunes that consist of the loss or the absence of good require a psychologically well developed subject in order to be grave misfortunes.”

There’s a great deal more to say about this argument, which depends in part on his particular view of personal identity, or what it means for someone to exist across time. His view also runs into some problems that it takes him some work to address, including the following paradox:

A day-old infant will die unless the doctor saves him. Although the infant can be saved, the condition that threatens his life cannot be cured and will certainly cause his death later around the age of thirty-five.

McMahan says that we ought to save the infant—which I’m sure is what most would say—but that’s in tension with his claim that it’s worse to die at thirty-five, so he develops an argument to address it without abandoning his original view.

The minority of bioethicists in the survey partially agree with McMahan. Sixty-five of them think that ten is the worst age to die while fifty-three say it’s worst to die at one. But, contra McMahan, only thirty-two say that twenty-five is the worst age to die.

I’m inclined to think that the death in ‘Big League’ is more tragic, but I don’t believe this nearly as strongly as I believe that, in general, younger deaths are worse.