People sometimes respond that death isn't bad for the person who is dead. Death is bad for the survivors. But I don't think that can be central to what's bad about death. Compare two stories.
Story 1. Your friend is about to go on the spaceship that is leaving for 100 Earth years to explore a distant solar system. By the time the spaceship comes back, you will be long dead. Worse still, 20 minutes after the ship takes off, all radio contact between the Earth and the ship will be lost until its return. You're losing all contact with your closest friend.
Story 2. The spaceship takes off, and then 25 minutes into the flight, it explodes and everybody on board is killed instantly.
Story 2 is worse. But why? It can't be the separation, because we had that in Story 1. What's worse is that your friend has died. Admittedly, that is worse for you, too, since you care about your friend. But that upsets you because it is bad for her to have died.
Actually, I think the universe is better for me with my friend being alive in it, even if I won't ever see her. My utility function is defined over the world states, not over my sensory inputs.
Isn't that included when he says "that is worse for you, too, since you care about your friend"?
http://chronicle.com/article/Is-Death-Bad-for-You-/131818/
Summary: Shelly Kagan, Yale philosophy professor, discusses the argument that death isn't bad for you, because when we are dead we won't care. He hunts around for justification, doesn't find anything satisfactory, or even paint a clear picture of what "satisfactory" would look like, and ends up conveying mostly mysteriousness to the audience.
There are a variety of right ways to approach this argument. One good goal is to understand what's going on in someone's head when they say that death is bad for you.
Reading the article, a bell rang for me about all this discussion of "possible worlds" - for example, the idea of feeling pity for people who don't exist. We usually don't interact with people who don't exist, so what process has led us to compare these different worlds against each other?
The answer is a decision-making process. "Possible worlds" doesn't mean spawning any physical universes - it's a convenient shorthand for imagined possible worlds, which we (in our capacity as intelligent apes) compare against each other, usually as part of a consequentialist decision process.
Once you start looking, you see the fingerprints of decision-making all over the article. It's the machinery that generates these possible worlds to think about, and the context that colors them. So I think noticing that "possible worlds <- us imagining possible worlds as part of our decision-making" is a good relationship for understanding topics like this.
Edit for clarity: The basic idea is that death being bad is, at its root, a function of the decision-making bits of our brains. This can be seen not just from a priori claims about "low utility = bad," but from the structure of what Shelly Kagan hunts around for, which mainly involves choices between possible worlds.