The Epicureans are often credited with the view that death is not bad and is not to be feared. One of the most discussed arguments in this Epicurean tradition is the “symmetry argument”, principally drawn from Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura. In the key passage of the poem, Lucretius urges, “Look back similarly at how the stretch of unending time before we are born has been nothing to us. Nature, therefore, offers this reflection to us of the time to come after our eventual death.” We can formulate his appeal as an argument. Begin with the observation that most of us are unconcerned with the fact that we did not have conscious existence prior to our births. Yet we think death is to be feared. There is no important difference between the absence of pre-natal conscious experience and the absence of post-mortem conscious experience. So, the typical symmetry argument concludes, we should not be concerned with the fact that we will eventually be dead. Note that this argument concerns our attitudes toward the state of being dead rather than, say, our fear of the process of dying. While the state of being dead is presumably just like the state of not yet having been born, for most of us the experience of being born is nothing like the experience of dying. For the rest of this paper we’ll understand the state of being dead to be the post-mortem absence of conscious existence. There’s a longstanding scholarly dispute over how to characterize the thoughts presented in De Rerum Natura and how to relate Lucretius to the complete Epicurean tradition. In this paper, we will be completely silent on these difficult exegetical issues (hence the scare quotes around “Epicurean”). We will also be mostly silent on how to compare extant symmetry arguments vis-à-vis their soundness or dialectical efficacy. Instead, we want to present and defend a new symmetry argument. Our argument focuses on rational preferences

中文翻译：

---

又一个“美食家”的论点

伊壁鸠鲁派通常认为死亡并不坏，也不可怕。这一伊壁鸠鲁传统中讨论最多的论点之一是“对称论”，主要来自卢克莱修的 De Rerum Natura。在这首诗的关键段落中，卢克莱修敦促说：“同样地回顾一下，在我们出生之前的那段无休止的时间对我们来说是什么。因此，大自然为我们提供了对我们最终死亡之后的时间的反思。” 我们可以将他的诉求表述为一个论点。首先观察到我们大多数人并不关心我们在出生前没有意识存在的事实。然而，我们认为死亡是值得恐惧的。没有产前意识体验和没有死后意识体验之间没有重要区别。所以，典型的对称性论证得出的结论是，我们不应该担心我们最终会死的事实。请注意，这个论点涉及我们对死亡状态的态度，而不是我们对死亡过程的恐惧。虽然死亡的状态大概就像尚未出生的状态一样，但对我们大多数人来说，出生的体验与死亡的体验完全不同。在本文的其余部分，我们将把死亡状态理解为死后没有意识存在。关于如何描述自然之歌中提出的思想以及如何将卢克莱修与完整的伊壁鸠鲁传统联系起来，学术界一直存在争议。在本文中，我们将完全沉默这些困难的解经问题（因此，围绕“伊壁鸠鲁”的恐吓引语）。关于如何比较现存的对称性论证与它们的健全性或辩证效力，我们也将大多保持沉默。相反，我们想提出并捍卫一个新的对称性论证。我们的论点集中在理性偏好上