So far we have focused mostly on theories of what is good for us and then, in the previous chapter, we looked at the question of whether how well our lives go as a whole is determined simply by how well they go at each point. But I would be very surprised if you have not asked yourself the following question: Is death bad for me? After all, we are just as interested (perhaps more interested) in this question as in the question of whether pain is bad for us, or whether it is bad for us to have our desires frustrated. In this last chapter, I will turn to examining whether death is bad for us. I will spend the rest of this section on some preliminary issues. We will then (§2) look at reasons to think that death is a harm, or that it is not a harm. In §3 we will look more closely at what is meant by ‘death’ in the context of the question of death and harm and I will also introduce an analysis of harm. In the next sections (§4-5) we use these understandings of what can be meant by ‘death’, and of what harm is, to assess the objections to the claim that death is a harm. The tentative conclusion is that there are good objections to one interpretation of the harm thesis but that there is another interpretation of the harm thesis, one under which there is a plausible case that death is sometimes a harm.1