Death and the Afterlife (The Berkeley Tanner Lectures)

Scheffler argues elegantly that for our lives, projects and commitments to matter, we rely on the continuation of humanity, and indeed on the flourishing of society. He does this without appeals to relatedness or strictly communitarian emotions, and in ways that are entirely immune to Parfit's 'non-identity problem'. Scheffler concludes that perhaps we should care about humanity's survival rather more than we appear to. Scheffler is not (as far as I could tell) a 'care ethicist', but I found many encouraging synergies between his approach to the future, and the ideas of interdependency elaborated in the Ethics of Care. Scheffler's book may be academic philosophy, but - based on a series of public lectures - it is entirely readable, rather than complex and abstruse. Highly recommended.

This confused the heck out of me. But its way too interesting to not like it.

interesting ideas

This well-written, short book purports to be a contribution to a theory of value. Scheffler asks us to imagine as a thought-experiment two grim scenarios and then asks us to think about how these possibilities would affect the way we think about what we value or, as he says more often, "what matters to us." The two scenarios involve a world without a human future, the "afterlife" of the title being the continued life of the human race (a communal afterlife) and not the "personal afterlife" that some religious traditions offer. Scheffler is not interested in the latter possibility. The two scenarios are "The doomsday scenario" --"Suppose you knew that, although you yourself would live a normal life span, the earth would be completely destroyed thirty days after your death in a collision with a giant asteroid" (18) -- and "the infertility scenario" -- everyone alive now would live out his or her normal life span, but in a world where no children are being born to create a future generation and future generations beyond that.Dire, eh? We would feel bad, of course, and we would perhaps ask ourselves about whether what we have up to that point been doing with our lives is worth continuing with. And there can be no doubt that there would be changes in our ways of thinking about whether or not this or that project was worthwhile. We would have to acknowledge that our sense of what matters to us often does unthinkingly take for granted not just the lives of our own children and grandchildren but generations of people we will never know. As Scheffler says, "our confidence that there will be an afterlife is a condition of many other things mattering to us here and now" (32). One can agree with this, broadly . . . but is belief in an afterlife a NECESSARY condition of things mattering here and now?Scheffler's strongest claim is that such a belief is indeed a necessary condition of our valuing. Here's how he frames that strong claim: "We need humanity to have a future for the very idea that things matter to retain a secure place in our conceptual repertoire" (60). I read this as meaning that we could not possibly provide good reasons for our valuing ANYTHING without a belief in a communal afterlife. Notice that we might still prefer some things or courses of action to others; we might like some things better than others -- but we could not possibly give good reasons for our judgments of value, absent an afterlife in Scheffler's sense. ("I just like X or Y or Z" not being a good reason, or indeed a reason at all.)The rest of the book seems to be a clarification of what that claim entails -- about temporality in relation to value, for example -- rather than an argument in support of the claim. The claim in its strongest form (p. 60) remains, I think, just a claim, provocative to be sure, because the relations of our values to time are worth thinking about, even without the dire contexts of the doomsday and infertility scenarios. It seems to me that what Scheffler is also wanting to get at is the idea that his thought experiments show that our values are not at bottom egoistical or individualistic. The very act of valuing, he would like us to believe, is finally a commitment to a communal rather than a purely selfish end. This amounts to an extension of the strong claim, and it is worth pondering, but it doesn't GROUND the claim, which, as I said, remains asserted and elaborated rather than argued.In the group with which I read and discussed the book, there was discussion of reasons why we might continue valuing (keeping the notion of value in our conceptual repertoire), one of which started from the Aristotelian distinction between process (kinesis) and activity (energeia), the former being goal-oriented and the latter being a matter of "valuing in the act of doing." (My thanks to my friend Jim Edwards for the distinction). Certain very long-term goal-oriented projects might come to seem less valuable. But would our sense of the value of artistic appreciation or musical performance be diminished? Might the value of such activities not be heightened? You get the idea . . .? Lots of food for thought here, and the book includes not just Scheffler's three essays but some responses from philosophers and Scheffler's response to them. Recommended.

In 'Death and the Afterlife' the philosopher Samuel Scheffler asks an unusual question: to what extent does it matter to the individual human being that humanity itself survives his or her death? Rather than think about 'the afterlife' within a religious or traditional philosophical framework, Scheffler asks us to consider to what extent the value and meaning or our lives are affected by our - largely unconscious - assumption that human life will continue, even if we ourselves will not.Scheffler approaches this problem by way of two thought experiments. How would we feel about our lives if we knew that mankind was going to be exterminated en masse by an asteroid strike thirty days after our death? And then: how would we feel if we knew that, due to some environmental catastrophe, mass infertility would gradually lead to species extinction as all living human beings enjoyed a full life but died without heirs?The tentative answers to Scheffler's what-ifs prove to be interesting and not immediately obvious. The book's format divides between Scheffler's original lectures and the responses of his professional peers, who are unanimous in seeing the problem as novel and interesting, but uncertain of its significance, or the validity of Scheffler's own conclusions. A final chapter allows Scheffler to address their caveats without closing the discussion.The question of how our human sense of meaning and our values are to survive the modern scientific perspective on individual death, species demise and the eventual destruction of the universe has become steadily more urgent, particularly for those of us who cannot fall back on religious belief. Scheffler's book is an interesting one, bringing long-suppressed problems to the surface of consciousness. The second half of the book, in which four of Scheffler's colleagues raise their doubts, is somewhat drier than Scheffler's exposition, but may be particularly interesting to those who wish to see at first hand how contemporary philosophers engage in debate.Serious philosophy, but accessible to the intelligent general reader.

Do we measure our life and value it only by what we experience and expect to experience? Do we feel the loss of life only because we miss being around, either with our friends or by ourselves? Thus Scheffler poses apt questions that make us ponder what really matters to us on the assumption that we have no afterlife to distract us. These are questions that compels us to assess the difference between a thing of value and a valuable thing. We are led to ponder what the incentives are for people to want to give up their lives for others.Several other contributors including Harry Frankfurt and Susan Wolf comment on Scheffler's work and Scheffler, in turn, presents his rejoinder to those comments.