© 2002 University of Southern California and Blackwell Publishers Ltd. DEATH, ASYMMETRY AND THE PSYCHOLOGICAL SELF 407 407 DEATH, ASYMMETRY AND THE PSYCHOLOGICAL SELF  GLEN PETTIGROVE Abstract: Lucretius thought that we should be as indifferent to the time of our death as we are toward the time of our birth. This paper will critique the ways in which Thomas Nagel, Frederik Kaufman and Christopher Belshaw have appealed to a psychological notion of the self in an attempt to defend our asymmetric intuitions against Lucretius’ claim. Four objections are mar- shalled against the psychological-self strategy: (1) the psychological notion of the self fails to capture all of our intuitions about selfhood; (2) some of the intuitions to which proponents of a psychological notion of the self appeal are drawn from irrelevant or misleading ethical and epistemological aspects of certain examples they consider; (3) the arguments developed on the basis of a psychological notion of the self do not answer Lucretius in the right way; and (4) the psychological-self explanation overlooks an important distinction between awareness-dependent and awareness-independent explanations. While the psychological-self explanation of the asymmetry in our attitudes toward the time of our birth and the time of our death may explain why Nagel, Kaufman and Belshaw have asymmetric attitudes, it fails to explain why most people have such attitudes. I. Recently, the question of the nature of the self has sparked an interesting debate in the philosophical discussion surrounding the metaphysics of death. There are two central questions in response to which philosophers have invoked competing ideas of selfhood in this discussion. The first question has focused on the nature of death’s harm. The second has asked for whom death is a harm. Interwoven with the answers offered to each of these questions have been attempts to respond to a suggestion made by Lucretius that our attitudes toward birth and death should be Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 83 (2002) 407– 423 0279–0750/00/0100–0000 © 2002 University of Southern California and Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.