Death and the Afterlife (The Berkeley Tanner Lectures)

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.

This book has an interesting thesis: it contains a conversation between several philosophers responding to the idea that each of us (or at least most of us) require the existence of the rest of humanity for a kind of existential meaning in our lives. This goes beyond the obvious. It is obvious, unless we are hopeless misanthropes or content hermits, that we need others for things like survival and much of our happiness. But Scheffler argues that we also need a future for humanity outside of our friends and family for our current lives to make it worth living. Much of our lives, values, energy to do things he argues, are dependent on the onward rush of humanity beyond our deaths. I think most are at least intuitively aware of this but this book demonstrates just how much it is.He illustrates this point with several imaginary examples such as the Children of Men sci-fi scenario where humanity loses its ability to procreate (thus will be doomed within a generation's time) and the plausible view that society would also then loose its purpose and people would experience ennui. There would be subsequent social breakdown. Scheffler gives many plausible ways in which this might happen.The book also contains a really interesting discussion on the Macropolous Case and how this (fictional) scenario shows that in some sense, life requires death for our projects to have any kind of importance.It's an interesting topic and Scheffler is an exceptionally clear writer with entertaining examples. My objections mirror some of the respondents especially Wolf and Frankfurt. As with Wolf, I believe that eventually there are ways people will learn to live very meaningful lives in such scenarios where extinction is certain within a short time and everyone knows it. I also think Frankfurt is correct in that this need for the continuation of the human species says probably more about our evolutionary instincts than about our existential makeup as meaning-seeking and meaning-needing beings. I don't think Scheffler's objections to these philosopher's criticisms were very strong. Also I wish Schefller had a better response to the question of why his argument doesn't collapse into an Alvy Singer pessimism. Alvy Singer is the character in Annie Hall who having refused to do his homework told his psychiatrist that doing it is pointless because the human race will eventually die out in another 4-5 billion years when the sun explodes. If we require the onward rush of humanity for deep meaning in our lives into the foreseeable future, why doesn't the prospects of certain extinction in the distant future equally undermine our need for meaningful lives? It seems that this question wasn't answered adequately. I also don't think he explained or went into it deeply why he thinks we need others to exist after our deaths for meaning to exist in ours. Perhaps Frankfurt was correct to say that it's just a desire from biology and not much else.

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.

This is an interesting book that challenges our understanding and assumptions of what gives meaning to our lives. It turns out that our belief in the continued existence of the human species into the future has considerable bearing on how we live and what we do. The author's meaning of afterlife is not what you would expect -- just that human life goes on after we die. Something I never really thought about much before, but that I now recognize as being true. This is a good read to explore ideas you probably have not considered before, and build some new nueral pathways in your brain.

Early shipping, perfect!

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