Animals and the Harm of Death - Killing Happy Animals: Explorations in Utilitarian Ethics - page 39

3 Wants versus value
An alternative account of the harm of death claims that the harm of
death is not frustration of wants but curtailment of value. This view
is called the foreclosure or forbearance view, or the deprivation view. 7
Instead of focusing on how much a being wants the future it would have
had, this approach focuses on how much value this future would have
had for the being . According to this view, the harm of death consists in
the foreclosure of the value that the subject's future life would have
contained for the subject. In other words, the harm of death for the
subject can be determined by calculating the difference between the
value of her actual life for her and the value of her counterfactual life for
her, in case she had not died when she did. 8 For instance, if a baby of
three weeks old dies in an accident, and the baby would otherwise have
had a happy childhood, studied philosophy and made a good career
as a philosopher, had a happy life and died at the age of 80, then the
baby's death harms it a lot. Imagine that a philosophy student dies, who
had an equally happy childhood as the baby would have had, and who
would have had a good career as a philosopher and an equally happy life
as the baby would have had. According to the foreclosure view, death
is a lesser harm for the student than for the baby because the student is
deprived of less value.
The foreclosure view is compatible with different accounts of
welfare. For instance, a hedonist account of welfare obviously does
not put any weight on future-oriented desires or the desire to stay
alive. On a hedonist account, death is harmful because it takes away
all the enjoyment that the being otherwise would have experienced.
The more pleasure is taken away, the greater the harm. Thus, death
harms all sentient beings that would otherwise have continued a
pleasant life. It does not matter how future-directed these beings are.
On a hedonist account of the harm of death, non-human animals are
significantly harmed by death, if death deprives them of the pleasur-
able experiences they would otherwise have enjoyed.
If one accepts the desire-satisfaction account of welfare, the forbear-
ance view of the harm of death is a plausible option as well. According to
the desire-satisfaction version of the forbearance view, death is harmful
to the extent that it precludes all future desire-satisfaction that a being
would otherwise have had. This desire-satisfaction can consist of both
the satisfaction of the desires that the being already had before dying
and the satisfaction of the desires that the being would come to have if
it had not died. In a way, it is more straightforward to take into account