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Progeria Case Study Essay

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There is a final problem that the account of the overall losses has to face: the progeria patient. Progeria is a congenital condition that accelerates the aging in such a way, that the children suffering from it, start ageing at age two and do not normally survive their teens or early twenties. They have average to higher that average mental capabilities and they do not suffer from anything apart from the conditions we normally link to old age, such as cardiac condition or kidney failure. Imagine a little girl aged 12 that dies from the complications of the disease. We would normally think, according to McMahan, that the progeria patient suffers a bigger loss than the geriatric patient. However, according to our assessment, it should be the …show more content…

First one is the narrative unity. Life can be understood as a diachronic unity over time, a meaningful whole, with a beginning, a middle and an end. In this account, death harms the person if it prevents the life from having a clousure. Another consideration is desert, what does the person deserve after her time in Earth. This consideration measures the contribution the person has made to the common good, what has the person achieved and the amount of effort she has made. And finally, it is also important to take into account the desires of the person. A loss that the person did not desire is not really a misfortune for the the person, as she was indifferent to it. Desires determine the time-relative interest of a person, up to a point. Desires contribute, thus, to the level of psychological connection and help us determine what is good for the particular person that has dies.

McMahan's conception of the badness of death is a complicate one, where he tries to account for most of our intuitions about death and the tragedy of death, and for this reason, he uses several alternative accounts of the badness of death. For clarity purposes, he finally highlights the importance of seven principles. These factors can combine in different ways and the badness of the death would be accumulative. The seven principles are:
1. The amount of loss suffered by the “victim” was

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