Suppose you knew that, though you yourself would live your life to its natural end, the earth and all its inhabitants would be destroyed thirty days after your death.
He is the author of Human Morality, Boundaries.
About the Author: Samuel Scheffler is University Professor in the Department of Philosophy at New York University.
Scheffler adds a final reply.
Death and the Afterlife concludes with commentary by four distinguished philosophers--Harry Frankfurt, Niko Kolodny, Seana Shiffrin, and Susan Wolf--who discuss Scheffler\'s ideas with insight and imagination.
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 further demonstrates 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.
Despite the terror we may feel when contemplating our deaths, the prospect of humanity\'s imminent extinction would pose a far greater threat to our ability to lead lives of wholehearted engagement.
By contrast, the prospect of our own deaths does little to undermine our confidence in the value of our activities.
Without the expectation that humanity has a future, many of the things that now matter to us would cease to do so.
Indeed, Scheffler shows that, 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.
To what extent would you remain committed to your current projects and plans? Would scientists still search for a cure for cancer? Would couples still want children? In Death and the Afterlife, philosopher Samuel Scheffler poses this thought experiment in order to show that the continued life of the human race after our deaths--the "afterlife" of the title--matters to us to an astonishing and previously neglected degree.
Suppose you knew that, though you yourself would live your life to its natural end, the earth and all its inhabitants would be destroyed thirty days after your death
