Death and Immortality: The Open Horizon View

Many have written about death and immortality. 

Thomas Nagel tells us death is bad because it deprives us of future goods. Bernard Williams warns that immortality would be unbearably boring. Borges paints immortals as apathetic troglodytes. Martha Nussbaum emphasizes that mortality gives life urgency. 

These are clever points, but they all miss something important. They partially assume there is a natural limit to human life, they ignore unknown unknowns, and they lean heavily on the self—my desires, my projects, my boredom. I think there is a better way to see things. Specifically, that death is always premature, immortality is not boring, and the real problem with the pro-death camp is a failure of imagination.

Nagel and the problem of timing

Nagel’s essay Death raises a simple puzzle: if death is bad, when is it bad? Not before death, because you are still alive. Not after death, because you no longer exist. Nagel’s solution is that death is not like pain, which has a clear moment. It is bad because it deprives you of future life you might have had. If you die at 30, you lose out on the decades that could have followed.

Though Nagel rests his account on the idea of a natural lifespan of about 100 years, he explicitly says that dying at 82, or even at 806, would still be a misfortune. The badness of death is not relative to cultural standards or averages. It lies in the deprivation of any further goods that could have been experienced. Just as blindness is still a misfortune even if it is normal for moles, death remains a misfortune even if it is natural for humans. Mortality itself, he argues, is a harm, because our sense of our own future is open-ended. We do not experience ourselves as bounded by a fixed endpoint.

And so the harm of death does not depend on comparing ourselves to social benchmarks of lifespan. It applies across all ages and all eras. Whether someone dies at 22, 82, or 806, the deprivation is the same in kind: the loss of possible goods that would have been part of continued life.

Williams and the boredom of immortality

Williams took the opposite route. In The Makropulos Case, he argued that living forever would drain life of meaning. His key point was that our lives are shaped by what he called categorical desires. These are projects and commitments that give life direction. If you lived forever, he said, you would either fulfill these desires and run out, or lose interest in them. The result would be boredom.

That argument may have made sense in 1973, when Williams was writing. Back then, life moved at a slower pace. But today, novelty arrives at breakneck speed. Entire industries rise and fall in a decade. AI, virtual reality, gene editing, renewable energy, even space travel—these are worlds that did not exist when Williams wrote his essay. In a century, a person can experience several completely different realities. The boredom argument does not hold in an age of acceleration.

There is another issue. Williams made the case as if life were only about fulfilling your own desires. But what about other people? Even if you had ticked off everything on your own list, there would still be endless opportunities to help others. Ending poverty, curing diseases, fighting climate change, building fairer societies—these are projects that cannot be finished in one lifetime. They are inexhaustible. Williams’s argument misses the fact that meaning does not end when you stop chasing your own pleasures. It multiplies when you turn outward and expand your circle of moral concern.

And then there are the unknown desires. Williams assumed people know their desires in advance. But most desires are discovered only when circumstances change. Nobody in 1900 dreamed of antibiotics or VR headsets. People in 2000 were not longing for generative AI tools. Immortality guarantees that new conditions will arise, sparking new wants. There is no closed catalog. Human creativity makes sure of that.

Borges and the apathy of the Immortals

Borges’s story The immortal adds a literary version of the boredom argument. A Roman soldier drinks from a magical river and gains immortality. He finds others who are immortal, but they have become apathetic, living in ruins, careless of their city. Over time, he sees immortality as a curse.

This story looks like support for Williams, but I see it differently. First, there is envy and homocentrism. The soldier sees the Immortals as troglodytes, assuming their way of being is empty. But maybe their state of existence is simply different, optimized for them, and incomprehensible to mortals. That judgment is more about his ego than about truth.

Second, there is egocentrism in the Immortals themselves. They give up on their city because they are bored. But why not use their time to help the mortals outside their gates? They could share knowledge, teach arts, improve health, spread wisdom. Instead, they withdraw. Their failure is not proof that immortality is hollow. It is proof that imagination can die even when the body cannot.

Finally, there is hypocrisy. If immortality is truly unbearable, why did they not simply end their lives? If death is such a relief, why didn’t they embrace it? The fact that they linger shows that even the bored Immortals still valued life in some way. Their refusal to act undermines their own conclusion.

Nussbaum and the unfinished project

Martha Nussbaum began as Williams’s student but later pushed back against his boredom thesis. She pointed out that death interrupts long-term projects and makes them empty. This argument came originally from David Furley, but she sharpened it. Death makes our commitments fragile. It robs us of the time needed to finish what we start.

The irony is that Williams himself died in the middle of serious philosophical work, taken by an incorrectly diagnosed cancer. If medical science had advanced faster, he might have lived to publish more. His death illustrates Nussbaum’s point: it is not immortality that is the problem, but the lack of enough time.

Why one life?

Williams worried that the same “you” would get bored. But why should we assume one life equals one self? Why not live multiple lives in one body? With enough time, you could be a farmer for fifty years, then a painter for a century, then a doctor, then a traveler. 

Andrew Stark counters this in an argument for death over immortality in his book, The Consolations of Mortality. His view hinges on misaligned values and lost relationships:

“If you want to keep jettisoning your goals, attachments and memories and replacing them with new ones over time to avoid boredom, that would be the same as dying and becoming someone entirely different. You’re not going to share any of the values you have now, and you’re not going to have any of the relationships you have now. So essentially, you’re going to die anyway because everything you’re attached to now will be gone. In this way too, sooner or later immortality would turn into its own form of death.”

This appears valid at first glance — we intuitively want to retain our most cherished relationships and personal values. But it’s easily disproven with a simple observation: you’re not the same person you were at 5, and have not kept the same friends since kindergarten. You grew up, adopted new values, and made new friends. You no longer believe it’s okay to pee on yourself whenever you need to go, and you (hopefully) are able to strike up conversations with new people to eventually make friends. So even without immortality, the values-and-relationships argument falls apart.

I also think that overlaps and repetition would not be problems; they would build empathy. Imagine living long enough to know what it feels like to be a parent, a teacher, an engineer, an accountant, and a scientist. Or what it must feel like to be an Arab, African, Canadian, or Asian. Wars are often fought out of ignorance. If we could live others’ lives, we might be less quick to destroy them.

Think about how travel broadens perspective today. People who live abroad often come back with more empathy and less hostility. Immortality would let us live entire lifetimes in those other contexts. Instead of shrinking our identities, it would expand them. Nussbaum too recognizes this in a lecture she gave at the University of Chicago, alluding to the potential to create more justice in the world if one gets tired of living multiple lives.

Hypocrisy

Arguments against immortality are inherently hypocritical. Immortality is not only about avoiding death but about extending life. That assumes a longer life is desirable. If you reject immortality, you are really saying a long life itself is undesirable. But if that’s true, why not end things now? Why wait for some arbitrary future when you might die, instead of taking matters into your hands today?

The usual answer is, “I don’t want to die right now—I just want to enjoy a normal life first.” But what counts as a “normal life” depends entirely on time and place. Today, 100 years might seem normal. A century ago, 50 or 60 was normal. Five hundred years from now, when people live to 500, dying at 100 will feel like dying in your teens. Normal life span is a moving target, and calling anything beyond it “excessive” is pure relativity.

This hypocrisy mirrors how everyone wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die. People claim not to want immortality, yet nobody volunteers to cut life short. Their stated position (“death is fine”) clashes with their revealed preference (“not yet”). That gap exposes the weakness of the pro-death camp.

Old age

Much of our talk about death and immortality is biased by current views of aging. We assume life would get unbearable because we wouldn’t be mobile, healthy, or energetic. But that’s not about immortality—it’s about how we treat aging today.

History shows how flexible these categories are. In ancient times, a 16-year-old might already be fighting in wars or raising a family. Today, 16 is considered childhood, and college years stretch far longer than entire lifespans used to. Our expectations of “old age” shift with life expectancy. If we find ways to preserve mobility and energy, then growing old will no longer mean decline, and a longer life will not mean boredom.

The fear of immortality is really just a fear of aging badly. Once we solve energy and ability, longer lives will look less like a burden and more like an opportunity. Our current bias comes from reality as it is, not reality as it could be.

The failure of imagination

The claim that life would get boring is really a failure of imagination. A boring life assumes you cannot change it. But an immortal life gives you more power than anyone else to change things, because you have seen so much. You would know where the edges of possibility lie, and how to push them.

Think about the first humans. They might have thought life would get boring after 30 or 40 years. Instead, they imagined fire, tools, art, and language. If they had chosen boredom over imagination, we would not be here at all. We are their legacy of refusing to settle.

Pro-death, or more accurately, “anti-immortality” views not only rob us of chances today but also rob future generations. Every early death erases knowledge, wisdom, and possibilities that could have been passed on. Every extra year adds value not just for the person living it but for everyone around them. This is not about selfishness, but collective progress.

The open horizon view

All this leads me to what I call the open horizon view. Nagel was right that death is deprivation, but wrong to tie it to a natural lifespan. Williams was right that life needs projects, but wrong to think those projects run out. Borges was right that immortality can produce apathy, but wrong to think apathy is inevitable. Nussbaum was right that death interrupts our projects, and her later reflections show she too longed for more time. Other philosophers like John Danaher have come to similar conclusions.

The open horizon view says this: death is always premature, immortality is not boring, and meaning is inexhaustible. Every life is an unfinished project. Every future is worth protecting. The real problem is not living too long, but not living long enough.

This leaves us with a choice. We can keep defending death as natural and inevitable. Or we can accept that these arguments rest on shaky assumptions about boredom, natural lifespans, and fixed identities. We can face the truth: death cuts us off too soon, every time. The answer is not to glorify mortality but to push for longer, healthier lives. To do otherwise is to sell ourselves, and future generations, short.

Death is not a friend, but a thief. The task before us is to make it steal less and less.