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This paper offers a partial defence of the Epicurean claim that death is not bad for the one who dies. Unlike Epicurus and his present‐day advocates, this defence relies not on a hedonistic or empiricist conception of value but on the concept of 'existential' value. Existential value is agent‐relative value for which it is constitutive that it can be truly self‐ascribed in the first person and present tense. From this definition, it follows that death (post‐mortem non‐existence), while perhaps bad in some respects, cannot be an existential harm for the one who dies. This paper argues that existential goods are central to any explanation of why life appears good to us from a self‐interested perspective, which means that death is not bad in the very respect in which life is most saliently good (from that perspective). A corresponding error theory shows why this truth is easily overlooked and explains why we tend to think that death is significantly worse than it really is. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contextualist accounts of free will recently proposed by Hawthorne and Rieber imply that the same action can be both free and unfree (depending on the attributor's context). This paradoxical consequence can be avoided by thinking of contexts not as constituted by arbitrary moves in a conversation, but rather by (relatively stable) social practices (such as the practices of attributing responsibility or of giving scientific explanations). The following two conditions are suggested as each necessary and jointly sufficient for free will: (i) the agent is able to form considered practical judgements and to act accordingly, and (ii) the agent (or some agent-involving event) is the original cause of her actions. A contextualist reformulation of the second condition is developed according to which only contexts in which responsibility is attributed are relevant for the kind of original causation required for free will, which allows for a non-relativist contextualism about free will. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]