ABSTRACT
In the contemporary fear of death literature, few if any authors discuss what implications insights from the philosophical literature on emotions might have for arguments about the fear of death’s rationality. This chapter remedies this deficiency. It discusses two types of arguments to conclusions about the fear of death’s rationality. One type is Badness Arguments. The other is Epicurean Arguments. The argument types have contradictory conclusions. Both employ different conditional claims as their crucial premise. And both presuppose that there is some relation between the fear of death’s rationality and the value of death. The chapter argues that these arguments share another feature: they are unsound. This is because the crucial premise of each argument type is false, given some plausible analyses of the several conceptions of emotional rationality found in the fear of death literature, analyses that themselves follow from several ubiquitous assumptions about the nature of emotions.
