Abstract
Samuel Scheffler has recently defended what he calls the ‘afterlife conjecture’, the claim that many of our evaluative attitudes and practices rest on the assumption that human beings will continue to exist after we die. Scheffler contends that our endorsement of this claim reveals that our evaluative orientation has four features: non-experientialism, non-consequentialism, ‘conservatism,’ and future orientation. Here I argue that the connection between the afterlife conjecture and these four features is not as tight as Scheffler seems to suppose. In fact, those with an evaluative orientation that rejects these four features have equally strong moral reasons to endorse the existence of the collective afterlife.
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Notes
My critique of Scheffler is also germane to Lenman’s position (2002) that only from a “generation-centered perspective” can human extinction be thought bad.
See also Scheffler’s reply to Seana Shiffrin (Scheffler 2013: 192–195), where he seems to backtrack on how fundamental conservatism, non-experientialism, and non-consequentialism are to our reactions to the prospect of human extinction.
See also Scheffler (2013): 100, where he speaks of these stages as being “essential to our idea of a life that is temporally bounded.”
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Cholbi, M. Time, Value, and Collective Immortality. J Ethics 19, 197–211 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-015-9198-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-015-9198-1