When debates over trade arise, one often hears calls for “protecting American jobs” through tariffs and trade restrictions. These arguments can sound initially compelling: why shouldn't we defend domestic industries against cheaper foreign competition? Why shouldn’t we “put America first?” But if we dig beneath a surface-level analysis, we find that, while protectionism may shield a visible few, it comes at a great but often hidden cost to the unseen many, and that free trade benefits orders of magnitude more Americans than do protectionist tariffs—both as workers and consumers. Nor is the case merely a question of economic expediency, but a moral case that touches on the well-being of citizens across virtually every material aspect of their lives.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet advised us, “What dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil must give us pause.” Death, he soliloquized, is an undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns, the thought of which makes us bear the woes of this life rather than take up our bare bodkins and end all our suffering in one decisive stab. Death, as the story goes, is something to be feared, not merely as an end to life, but as an intractably mysterious state into which individuals go when their earthly time is up, a state that might contain more of the same suffering and woe as our present situation, in greater or lesser proportion.  This story of death as a change of state of an individual, as we shall see, begins to seem less and less plausible the closer one inspects it.  If death is not a change of state or venue, but simply the annihilation of an individual, what attitudes might we rationally take towards death, and toward the fact of our own mortality?