Death and the Afterlife

Abstract

Even if we do not believe in a personal afterlife in which we survive our own deaths, we assume that there will be a “collective afterlife” in which humanity survives long after we are gone. Samuel Scheffler maintains that this assumption plays a surprising—indeed astonishing—role in our lives. In certain important respects, the future existence of people who are as yet unborn matters more to us than our own continued existence and the continued existence of those we love. Without the expectation that humanity has a future, many of the things that now matter to us would cease to do so. By contrast, the prospect of our own deaths, despite the terror it inspires, does little to undermine our confidence in the value of our activities. This conclusion complicates widespread assumptions about human egoism and individualism. And it has striking implications for the way we think about climate change, nuclear proliferation, and other urgent threats to humanity’s survival. Scheffler adds that, although we are not unreasonable to fear death, personal immortality, like the imminent extinction of humanity, would also undermine our confidence in the values we hold dear. His arresting conclusion is that, in order for us to lead value-laden lives, what is necessary is that we ourselves should die and that others should live. Scheffler’s position is discussed with insight and imagination by four distinguished commentators—Harry Frankfurt, Niko Kolodny, Seana Shiffrin, and Susan Wolf—and Scheffler adds a final reply.

Building a Post-work Utopia: Technological Unemployment, Life Extension, and the Future of Human Flourishing

“…He claimed that anyone living an immortal life would reach a point in time when they became incredibly bored and no longer lived a valuable life. Others have defended similar claims about the questionable value of indefinite lifespan extension (Smuts 2011;Scheffler 2013). These claims typically centre around the notion that certain essential goods (e.g.…”

Flourishing and Finitude

“…The point of many of our projects hangs on the assumption of our continued existence. Extending this commonsensical thought, Samuel Scheffler (2013) argues for the provocative thesis that the value of many of our activities depends on humanity in general surviving into the future beyond our own lives -in short, on our having what he calls a secular afterlife. We would be rightly demoralized if we knew that history would end after us.…”

Agency, Scarcity, and Mortality

“…The most articulate and promising defense of this 'reconciliatory strategy,' as I will call it, has been recently offered by Scheffler (2013). Scheffler argues that temporal finitude is constitutive of such things as the characteristic temporal structure of our existence, the fundamental structure of deliberation and its objects, the basic motivation to engage in any activity whatsoever, the development of a sense of self, and the nature of many of our cares, values, and virtues.…”

“…Although they correctly call at-2 See Malpas (1998), May (2009), Nussbaum (1989), Nussbaum (1994: 225-32)-but compare later recantation in Nussbaum (1999) and Nussbaum (2013)-Scheffler (2013, and Smuts (2011). This suggestion is also part of the famous discussion of immortality in Williams (1973), although many of the responses to Williams focus on his claim about the undesirability of immortality as boring rather than on claims about its inconceivability or unrecognizability.…”