Value, Trauma, and the Future of Humanity - UC Berkeley ...

Value, Trauma, and the Future of Humanity R. Jay Wallace, University of California, Berkeley

Abstract: Samuel Scheffler has recently argued that the value of our most important activities depends on the Afterlife: the continued existence of the human species in future generations. The argument begins with a speculative psychological hypothesis: that we would lose interest in most things if we believed that our species was about to go extinct (e.g. through general infertility of the current generation). I argue that even if we accept this hypothesis, it wouldn't follow that the Afterlife is a condition for the value of our activities. For many of our most important activities, the imminent extinction of the species would not affect the properties that make them worth pursuing. I go on to propose an alternative way of thinking about Scheffler's hypothesis, showing that it reflects psychic trauma on the part of those who are aware that they are the last generation of the species.

It is natural to suppose that our personal mortality confronts us with a problem, indeed with a looming catastrophe of tragic dimensions, to which the only conceivable solution would be some kind of personal afterlife. Natural though it might be, however, philosophers over the years have questioned both parts of this thought. They have pointed out, first, that it isn't entirely clear what exactly the catastrophic problem is

2

supposed to be that is presented by the mere fact that we will eventually die. And they have argued, second, that to the extent our personal mortality is a problem, it is far from clear that personal immortality would be a genuine solution. Whether or not these arguments are ultimately persuasive, the fact is that most of us get along pretty well in the face of the fact that it will eventually all be over for us; we muddle through with our relationships and projects and activities, which provide us with meanings that are not necessarily threatened by the mere fact that we are someday going to die.

We naturally lead our lives in the shadow of our own eventual demise as individuals; but we also lead them on the assumption that human life will continue after we are gone. In his arresting recent book Death and the Afterlife, Samuel Scheffler has focused our attention on the second of these assumptions, arguing that it is much more significant than any of us has heretofore realized.1 Specifically, Scheffler's central claim is that the collective afterlife of the human species (the "Afterlife", as I will call it in what follows) is a condition for our ability as individuals to lead value-laden or meaningful lives. It matters to us that the human enterprise should carry on after we are no longer around, because the value of our personal enterprises depends on its doing so. Indeed, in this respect at least, the collective Afterlife matters to us much more than our own personal afterlife, since our actual skepticism about the latter does nothing in fact to incapacitate us from leading value-laden lives in the time that remains to us.

This is an immensely provocative claim. Scheffler appears to have discovered something that has been completely overlooked about the nature of value and about our capacity for meaningful engagement with it. But is Scheffler's claim true? Taking his

3 discussion as my starting point, I will argue that the collective Afterlife does not actually have the kind of importance he attributes to it for the value of our present activities and relationships. It might matter to our attitudes toward our present activities and relationships, but not in virtue of being an antecedent condition for their having the kind of value we attribute to them.

1. After We're Gone. Scheffler's argument takes off from two massively hypothetical scenarios, which he invites us to reflect on. They are

Doomsday: You will live a normal life span, but the earth will be destroyed by an asteroid thirty days after you die. and Infertility: The human species has become infertile; everyone currently alive will live a normal life span, but there will be nobody who comes after us. Scheffler contends, plausibly enough, that it would be deeply disconcerting to us if we found ourselves in either of these scenarios. We would be profoundly dismayed, and this reaction would spread throughout our normal pursuits, leading us to become comprehensively disengaged from the things that ordinarily give us reason to carry on with our lives in the first place. According to Scheffler's Afterlife Conjecture, "people would lose confidence in the value of many sorts of activities, would cease to see reason to engage in many familiar sorts of pursuits, and would become emotionally detached from many of those activities and pursuits" (44).

4

Both of the scenarios involve the imminent end of the human species. But there are differences between them that are relevant to the interpretation of the broadly similar reactions they would allegedly provoke in us. In Doomsday, the catastrophic event that extinguishes human life on the planet does not affect us directly, coming thirty years after the point at which we are no longer around. But it will directly affect many individual human beings that we know and are attached to, including our children, younger relatives, friends, and colleagues, and other people whom we may have come to know. Our emotional connection to at least some of the individuals whose lives will wrenchingly be cut short by the asteroid strike gives us a personal basis for being dismayed about it; the event might not harm us in any immediate way, but it will be a calamity for individuals whom we have come to love, and this is enough to render intelligible our being horrified that it will occur. In Infertility, by contrast, personal grounds for dismay of this kind are deliberately screened out. Under this scenario, it is postulated that every member of the human species has become infertile, but by hypothesis this condition will not otherwise affect the lives of the people who are currently around. Humanity will gradually wither away as people live out their normal spans of life, but both we and the people we are attached to can carry on much as before. It's just that there will be no-one who comes after us.

The Afterlife Conjecture is a speculative claim about how we would react under the counterfactual hypothesis that we were in the Infertility scenario. As several of Scheffler's commentators have pointed out, and as he himself would agree, this is an empirical claim, one that in the nature of the case is impossible to verify conclusively.2

5

Who knows exactly how we would react if we were to find ourselves in a scenario like Infertility, with full knowledge that we are at the tail end of the long history of our species? Scheffler seems to think that, though we can't be certain how we would react in this situation, we have imaginative resources that enable us to engage in believable armchair speculation about the question (40-41). The Infertility scenario is in fact modeled on a situation that has been explored in fiction and in film; it is the premise of a well-known novel by P. D. James, The Children of Men, and a screenplay loosely based on the novel was later made into a movie by the director Alfonso Cuar?n. Scheffler observes that the Afterlife Conjecture mirrors fairly closely the reactions of the people depicted in the novel and the film, quoting the novel's academic protagonist, Theo Faron, who summarizes the prevailing outlooks as follows: "Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruins" (41).

Faron is a believable fictional character, and his reactions to the bleak events depicted in The Children of Men certainly strike one as emotionally and personally intelligible. One might nevertheless wonder about how much can really be extrapolated from his fictional depiction in the novel. The outlook of an Oxford don might not be fully representative of the views of many ordinary people, who are less likely to think about their relation to posterity or to brood about the fate of humanity, being caught up to a greater extent in the here and now. Having said that, however, I would like in what follows to grant Scheffler's Afterlife Conjecture; as a speculative hypothesis about the

 ................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download