Hello Jamie, sorry for my delayed response. It would be helpful to me if I knew your view on the badness of death, so I can grapple with your position more effectively.

Intuitively, I find the deprivation account plausible since I think there can be good reasons to avoid one's own death that are not based one's responsibility to others. For example, I want to live to see tomorrow so that I can see your response to this comment. I am also looking for a framework that addresses humans w/o things like self-reflection, especially infants.

Your observation that the harm can be reduced by changing the post-mortem circumstances is one that I have accepted as it relates to personal responsibility of causing harm, but not to harm incurred itself.

If someone at the age of 1 is killed in an accident, and we calculate that they would have lived to 70, but there is a sudden collapse of water purification infrastructure in his county, and the life expectancy at birth decreases to 50, then the cause(s) of harm have merely been redistributed from the accident to the water purification, but total harm has not been reduced. He has still been deprived of an expected 69 years, only the causes have changed. We could then see the accident as having been less harmful retroactively, though this observation is of little practical use.

For your bulleted arguments: I am struggling to visualize *who* is harmed and *how* they are harmed when we speak of hypothetical humans. An actual human, especially a healthy and young one, has a likely future absent their premature death. We can speculate about the utility of that future, and if we calculate that it would been on balance a life worth living, we can say that it is a shame he won't be around to see those things, and this is harm attributed to that real human that once existed.

Who are hypothetical humans and what is harming them? I cannot kill one, since they do not exist. Properly speaking, they aren't even dead, since they never were.

I cannot compare the likely future of a hypothetical human to a starting point because they do not have likely futures or starting points. As long as they remain hypothetical, they have no future at all. An actual human has a starting point and an end point with which to compare.

To speak of a likely future that one can be deprived of, we need an actual human to have existed at one point or another.