NOTE-1298: The Afterlife (Tanner Lectures I and II)

Contribution

It names a belief nearly everyone holds and almost no one examines: that people will go on living after one dies. It argues, by thought experiments, that this “collective afterlife” carries much of the weight of our valuing. It then draws three lessons: about the shape of valuing, about the limits of egoism and individualism, and about our relation to future generations.

Key insight

Our own deaths do not drain our projects of point; humanity’s imminent end would. People pursue cancer research knowing the cure may come after they die. They would lose the will to pursue it if no one were to come after them. So the survival of others after we die is “a condition of other things mattering to us” (Lecture I, part 3). Scheffler’s gloss is not that we are secretly altruistic. “The point has not been that we are more highly motivated to advance the interests of future generations, but rather that we are in certain ways more dependent on them” (Lecture II, part 6).

Assumptions

• A “wait-and-see” we. Claims about “our” attitudes are claims about Scheffler’s and those of whoever shares them, not universal ones (Lecture I, part 1, borrowing from David Lewis).
• “We” do not believe in a personal afterlife. The attitudes described are, in the first instance, those of non-believers (Lecture I, part 1). Believers are taken up in Lecture II, part 6.
• Valuing is a syndrome: a belief that the thing is valuable, a susceptibility to emotions about it that one takes to be merited, and a disposition to treat considerations about it as reasons (Lecture I, part 1). Caring and mattering are treated as close enough to it.
• Conjectures about counterfactual reactions. Scheffler grants they are hard to verify. He stipulates the key one as “the afterlife conjecture” (Lecture I, part 9).

Key results

• The doomsday scenario (Lecture I, part 2). You live a normal span; the earth is destroyed by an asteroid thirty days after your death.
  • Few would say “So what?”. So something after our deaths matters to us, and so things other than our experiences matter: valuing is nonexperientialist. Scheffler cites Nozick’s experience machine.
  • Few would weigh the end of all joy against the end of all suffering. Valuing is nonconsequentialist.
  • We want what we value sustained: valuing is conservative. Wills and bequests extend our agency past death to that end.
• What would lose its point (Lecture I, part 3). Projects whose success lies well in the future, or whose value lies in long-term benefits to many: research, activism, institution-building, infrastructure, the environment. Perhaps creative and scholarly work, and having and raising children. Least affected: personal comfort and pleasure. Hence “in some significant respects, the existence of the afterlife matters more to us than our own continued existence”. This is not a mere causal condition, like a mineral in the diet: humanity’s continuation “also matters to us in its own right”, and its loss would be a reason, not just a cause, for other things to matter less.
• Instrumental rationality is not the point (Lecture I, part 3). Of course a doomed goal loses its appeal. What is notable is that we gladly pursue goals we expect to be reached only after we die.
• Loved ones and a personalized future (Lecture I, part 4). We want some of those we love to outlive us. Partly from concern for their lives “and not merely about the effects on us”. Partly to be spared grief (loss minimization, “the efficient organization of personal disaster”). And partly because their survival personalizes our relation to the future: we retain a social identity in an ongoing world, and may be remembered. The future becomes “more like a party one had to leave early and less like a gathering of strangers”.
  • Calling this irrational, Scheffler says, presupposes the experientialism he has rejected.
  • Children have a special place, but the desire is not limited to parents. Evolutionary explanations of it are “doubly irrelevant”.
• Group-based strategies (Lecture I, part 5).
  • Traditions are practices “whose organizing purpose is to preserve what is valued beyond the life span of any single individual or generation”. In them one acts as a custodian of values that will be one’s successors’.
  • Survival of one’s community or nation lets one imagine oneself “as retaining a social identity in the world of the future”, with no belief that one survives. Groups outlast individuals.
  • The two strategies are one: “a unified attempt to defend and extend the coherence and integrity of our selves and our values over time”.
• Not only particular people (Lecture I, part 7). The desire for a personalized future seems to need particular people or groups. But cancer research would lose its point without anyone one loves dying. In P. D. James’s Children of Men no one dies early, yet the coming extinction is a catastrophe. So there is “another powerful element … the impact that the imminent end of humanity as such would have on us”.
• The infertile world (Lecture I, part 8). Scheffler finds James’s picture plausible: apathy, anomie, despair, eroded institutions, lost conviction. Four kinds of activity are threatened: goal-directed projects, work that needs a future audience, activities that sustain values and traditions over time, and work for particular groups. James suggests a fifth: enjoyment of nature, art, knowledge and food. Our idea of “a human life as a whole” may assume a place in “a temporally extended chain of lives and generations”.
• The limits of egoism (Lecture I, part 9). Everyone now alive will soon die, and no one treats that as a crisis. Yet the infertile world, equally inevitable, is a catastrophe. So “the coming into existence of people we do not know and love matters more to us than our own survival and the survival of the people we do know and love”. He allows that part of this is concern for “particular groups with which we specially identify”. Three objections are answered:
  • Disappointed expectations: a generation raised knowing it was the last would, he thinks, lack confidence from the start.
  • “The end of society”: that only redescribes concern about the nonexistence of future people.
  • Egoism after all: the young would have no one to care for them in old age. Scheffler grants this “some merit” but not the whole story: with caregiver robots guaranteed, the scenario would still be a catastrophe.
• Whose survival (Lecture I, n. 13). Human beings, persons, or people who share our values? Most of us hope future people share our values, but humanity’s survival “also matters to us in a way that is not exhausted by this concern”, even knowing its values will change. Nonhuman persons might console; they would not give “a personalized relation to the future”.
• Three dependency theses (Lecture II, part 1). Attitudinal: what matters to us depends on our confidence in the afterlife. Evaluative: things are valuable only if there is in fact an afterlife. Justificatory: we are justified in valuing them only if there is. A drug that gave a false belief in the afterlife would make things seem, not be, worth doing. The conjecture directly supports only the first, and only indirectly our acceptance of the other two.
• Exceptions (Lecture II, part 1): relief from severe pain, friendship (probably), the afterlife itself (“the afterlife matters to us whether there will be an afterlife or not”), and games, whose stakes were already pointless.
• The limits of individualism (Lecture II, part 2). Much individual valuing, however solitary its content, has an implicit collective dimension. “Humanity itself as an ongoing historical project provides the implicit frame of reference”. Indeed “we need humanity to have a future for the very idea that things matter to retain a secure place in our conceptual repertoire”.
• Valuing and time (Lecture II, part 3). Valuing is diachronic: one acquires a stake in how what one values fares. It is risky, since we give hostages to fortune, and proprietary: “we lay claim to the future”. To value is to resist time’s normative authority.
• Why the far future does not trouble us (Lecture II, part 4). Equanimity needs humanity to last a “healthy and indefinitely long period”, not forever. Scheffler offers no reason for this; he thinks we cannot integrate “billions of years” into judgements of importance.
• The two afterlives (Lecture II, part 5). The personal afterlife has mattered for survival, reunion with loved ones, justice and explanation, and meaning. The collective afterlife delivers none of the first four. Both reveal two desires: to keep one’s place in a web of valued relationships, and to live in a just world. Non-believers in a personal afterlife live value-laden lives; loss of the collective afterlife would erode them. So “there is a very specific sense in which our own survival is less important to us than the survival of the human race”. Scheffler distinguishes this from Johnston’s Surviving Death, on which some of us “can hope to survive our own deaths”, and from Parfit, on whom understanding personal identity might make others’ survival matter more (n. 10, n. 11). His claim is that it already does.
• Dependence, not motivation (Lecture II, part 6).
  • Believers may need only one afterlife or the other. Scheffler grants this and adds a danger: belief in a personal afterlife may reconcile people too readily to the end of life on earth.
  • “Care more” can mean more motivated or more dependent. The arguments support the second. Our surprise shows less that “we have been blinded to our own altruism than … that we have overestimated our independence and self-sufficiency”.
  • So we have reasons to attend to future generations beyond justice and responsibility, “simply because they matter so much to us”. Their causal dependence on us becomes an opportunity: the collective afterlife, unlike the personal one, is partly under our control (climate change, nuclear proliferation).
  • In some contexts we are also more motivated. Offered an earlier death with humanity surviving, or a longer life as the last human, Scheffler would not hesitate to take the first. But “it would be misleading to interpret these preferences as evidence of hitherto unsuspected reserves of altruism”. His reason is that a world without other people would be a world without value; he would decline to live on alone even if everyone, himself included, would otherwise die. That shows the limits of individualism, not of egoism.
  • Kolodny’s variant (n. 12): die sooner and humanity survives, or live to old age and humanity perishes when you do. Choosing the first “cannot be because of an unwillingness to live as the only human being on earth”. Scheffler raises it and leaves it.

Claims

id	claim	strength	support
C1	Things that happen after our deaths matter to us, so our values are nonexperientialist, and our reactions to doomsday are nonconsequentialist and conservative	moderate: an appeal to imagined reactions, granted to be conjectural	Lecture I, part 2
C2	Our confidence that others will live after us is a condition of many things mattering to us, and humanity’s survival also matters in its own right	moderate: argued from what would lose its point; the “in its own right” is asserted more than shown	Lecture I, parts 3 and 7
C3	The concern is not only for particular loved ones or groups: the infertility scenario, with no premature deaths, would still be catastrophic	moderate: rests on the plausibility of James’s fiction	Lecture I, parts 7–8
C4	In one respect our own survival and our loved ones’ matters less to us than the coming into existence of strangers, a limit of egoism	moderate as a claim about dependence; Scheffler himself withdraws it as a claim about motivation	Lecture I, part 9; Lecture II, parts 5–6
C5	What the conjecture shows is our dependence on future people, not altruism toward them	strong as Scheffler’s own reading of his argument	Lecture II, part 6
C6	Individual valuing presupposes humanity as an ongoing historical project	moderate: an inference from C2 and the infertile world	Lecture II, part 2
C7	We have reasons to care for future generations because they matter to us, not only obligations to them	weak to moderate: sketched in one paragraph	Lecture II, part 6

Concepts

• the afterlife (collective afterlife): the continued existence of other people after one’s own death; opposed to the personal afterlife, one’s own survival.
• afterlife conjecture: in an infertile world people would lose confidence in the value of many activities, cease to see reasons for them and become emotionally detached from them.
• personalized relation to the future: conceiving the future after one’s death as a social world in which one retains a social identity, through loved ones, groups or traditions that survive.
• attitudinal, evaluative and justificatory dependency: of what matters to us on our confidence in the afterlife; of what is valuable on its existence; of our being justified in valuing on its existence.
• limits of egoism / limits of individualism: the first concerns the power of self-interested motives relative to others; the second, how far individual valuing is part of a collective enterprise.
• conservatism of valuing: valuing something involves wanting it preserved and seeing reasons to preserve it.

Connections

• The book this stands in for (LIT-1754). Its third essay, the four commentaries and the replies are not here. Cottingham’s review (NOTE-1298-cottingham) reports some of them.
• Its sequel (LIT-1712), unread. Lecture II, part 6 already sketches its thesis: reasons concerning future generations that come from what matters to us, not only from obligations to them.
• Johnston (LIT-1759; NOTE-1257). Scheffler cites Surviving Death as the view he is not taking: that some of us survive our deaths. His collective afterlife needs no survival in any sense.
• Parfit (THEORY-464). Cited as arguing that understanding personal identity might make others’ survival matter more. Scheffler says it already matters more, on any view of identity.
• Schubert et al. (NOTE-1270). That NOTE asked whether ordinary judgement gives humanity’s continuation the weight the conjecture predicts. The conjecture is about something else: whether one’s present projects would lose their point, not how bad an outcome is.
• Intergenerational justice (NOTE-1304) reports a later reading of the conjecture as grounding a duty to present people not to destroy what their future-oriented projects depend on.

Bearing on the record

• The owner’s thesis (CLAIM-491). The record filed Scheffler as the hardest case for the thesis in time. Read, he is a mixed case. These are inferences; Scheffler does not discuss the self’s extent.
  • Against the thesis. He finds a concern for future people that is not for one’s experiences, not only for loved ones or one’s groups, and not explained by self-interest in the ordinary sense: the robot caregivers remove it. He invokes no extended self and expressly declines Johnston’s survival through humanity.
  • But he denies it is altruism. What he finds is dependence. The future matters because, without it, our present valuing fails. Even his own choice to die sooner so that humanity survives he explains by what a world without people would be for him, a world without value. So the concern he documents is for the continuation of the frame in which the living value, not for the good of future persons. He never claims we care about their welfare.
  • The thesis can claim him only by redefining the self served. Here it is neither welfare nor, as in the fusion paper (NOTE-1256), a self-concept kept true, but one’s standing as a valuer: the “coherence and integrity of our selves and our values over time”. That is a third sense of “self-interest”, and CLAIM-492 applies to it with force.
  • His own pair of terms fits the thesis better than “egoism”. He separates the limits of egoism (how strong self-interested motives are) from the limits of individualism (how far valuing is collective) and puts his main result under the second. The thesis says the self extends; Scheffler says the individual’s valuing depends on a collective that need not be part of the self. The second is the weaker claim and is all the lectures support.
  • Where he does fit the thesis. The personalized relation to the future, through loved ones, nation and tradition, is concern for a world in which one “retains a social identity”. That is the thesis’s extended self in time, and Scheffler presents it as one strand, not the whole.
• The triviality objection (CLAIM-492). The attitudinal dependency thesis is a test that can come apart from caring. Scheffler’s exceptions show it: we care about relief from pain and about friends without that care depending on humanity’s future. A criterion of the self’s extent in time could be built on it: what one’s present valuing depends on. That is an inference, and the lectures test it only by imagined reactions.
• The legacy question (QUESTION-301). Of the question’s three readings, Scheffler’s is not “care for a future that does nothing for us” as the question puts it. He says the future does a great deal for us: it keeps our valuing secure. The question’s summary should say so.
• Obligations to the future (QUESTION-299). He grounds reasons, not obligations, in what the living value, and says that framing makes our power over future people an opportunity rather than a burden.
• A dated note should be added to CLAIM-491, and the question’s wording revised. Proposed text below.
• No THEORY filed. No ML instruction.

Limitations

• Conjecture, by design. Every result rests on how Scheffler expects “we” would react to fictions. He says so, and stipulates the key one.
• Non-believers only, in the first instance.
• Not the book. The lectures as revised for the Tanner site; the 2013 text, the third essay, the commentaries and the replies are not read here.
• Copy. The accessible HTML has no page numbers, unnumbered footnote texts, and run-together or split words from conversion (“contextdependent”, “nonconsequential ist”, “partic ularistic”). The author’s note at the head breaks off: “where he joined the faculty in” with no year (the lecture page gives 2008).
• Typos:
  • “providing with them with thoughtfully preprogrammed caregiver robots” (Lecture I, part 9);
  • “we care less about own survival” for “our own” (Lecture II, part 6);
  • “its only a matter of time” for “it’s” (Lecture I, part 4).

Open questions

• Would people actually lose confidence in their projects if told no one would come after them? An experiment that varied whether a project’s beneficiaries would exist, holding the agent’s own life fixed, would test the attitudinal dependency thesis directly.
• Does the dependence follow identification with humanity or with one’s groups? Measuring identification alongside the loss of confidence would show whether the thesis’s extended self carries it.
• What do Wolf, Frankfurt, Shiffrin and Kolodny say? Shiffrin’s title, “Preserving the Valued or Preserving Valuing?” (Crossref), names this NOTE’s question.