Analytic Philosophers on the Fear of Death

I've been teaching some of the dialectic stemming from Nagel's article on the rationality of the fear of death again. This time through, a worry that had been inchoate became clearer to me. There are two kinds of interesting argument that our attitudes about death are irrational. The first set of arguments all conclude that being dead cannot be bad for you and so, if you fear it, you are being irrational. You are being irrational in the same way you would be if you believed something to be purple when it is not. The second kind of argument is a challenge to the consistency of our attitudes. It concludes that the horror with which we conceive our own demise is inconsistent with the mildness with which we conceive our prenatal non-existence.

The worry is this: the analytic response to these arguments consists in pointing out how these arguments turn on premises that are grossly inconsistent with our common sense attitudes. But, in a context in which the rationality of our fear of death is in dispute, it is not at all clear to me that one ought to treat the deliverances of common sense as authoritative. Taking the question -- should I be afraid of death -- seriously already requires rejecting the authority of common sense. After all, the thesis that death is not bad for you is itself grossly inconsistent with common sense.

To get a flavor of how this dialectic works consider the following line of thought: Nagel notes that if an argument for the conclusion that we ought not fear death rests on the supposition that the badness of a condition must be intrinsic to the time during which it exists, then we might reject it on the grounds that the badness of things like failure is not wholly constituted by the time during which one has failed. He points out, plausibly enough, that the special badness of failure is a relational matter. The special badness of failure consists in a relation between the condition you're in during which you have failed and the condition you could have been in had you not failed. Great. So common sense is committed to rejecting any argument premised on the claim that badness must be non-relational.

So should we be afraid of death or not? At best we have learned from Nagel that it is not a requirement of common sense that we not fear death. This is because common sense would recommend rejecting a premise that would oblige us to think that the fear of death is irrational. But this is not a surprise. After all, we already know that common sense would require that we fear death. If we are required by common sense to fear death, then it is no surprise that common sense does not also command that we be unafraid of death.

How is the philosopher to settle his mind on a question, which, if it is taken seriously, must undermine the authority of the evidence on which he would rely to settle his mind?