Book Reviews 113

Samuel Scheffler Death and the Afterlife, edited by Niko Kolodny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 224 pp. isbn 9780199982509 (hbk). £19.99.

Death and the Afterlife consists of two lectures which Scheffler delivered as the Tanner Lectures at Berkeley in 2012, an additional lecture which he delivered at the University of Chicago in 2011, searching critical remarks by commentators (Susan Wolf, Harry Frankfurt, Seana Valentine Shiffrin, and Niko Kolodny), and Scheffler’s replies to his critics. Scheffler titles his Tanner Lectures “The Afterlife,” but the “afterlife” he is referring to is not some form of supernatural existence that we may or may not enjoy after we die. Instead, it is the mundane existence that other (genera- tions of) people will have, over an “indefinite” period of time, after we die. He notes that the things that we care about would “matter to us less” if there were no such “afterlife.” To make this point vivid, he describes two scenarios. In the first, which he calls “Doomsday,” you enjoy a normal lifespan, and then die. Soon after your death, everyone else dies, too. In the second scenario, which he calls “Infertility,” everyone in the world is infertile, so your generation is the last there will be. In either scenario, you are deprived of an “afterlife.” Scheffler predicts that when you project yourself into either situation you will see that lacking an “afterlife” is a terrible prospect, for without an “afterlife” you would lose interest in your projects. So the significance you place on your engage- ments hinges on your belief that you will be survived by further generations of people. By contrast, when you contemplate the prospect of your own even- tual demise, you do not lose interest in your engagements. This contrast leads Scheffler to claim that “our own survival, and even the survival of those we love and care about most deeply, matters less to us than the survival of strangers, the survival of humanity itself.” I doubt that this claim is true. It is instructive to consider our response to some other scenarios, beginning with the depicted in the film The Quiet Earth. This is one of that my friends and I collect under the heading “exquisitely bad”—“bad” because these films are awful, but “exquisite” because they are also extremely interesting (another exquisitely bad film is Dark Star: don’t miss it). In The Quiet Earth Zac Hobson awakens one day to find that his city is completely deserted. There is no sign of anyone anywhere he looks, and his radio carries nothing but dead air. At first he takes advantage of the situation—he drives any car he wants, takes whatever jewelry he fan- cies, and so forth—but he quickly loses interest in such things. What good is gold if you are the only person alive? For that matter, why write a book or con- tribute to culture? His next move is the one we all would make: he seeks out

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114 Book Reviews other people (After this the movie earns its label “bad.”). Some of my friends nominated Children of Men as another exquisitely bad movie, but this film is far more controversial (since it is not all that bad). If you have seen it, you will think of this movie (or the P. D. James novel it is based on) when contemplat- ing “Infertility.” Over the years I’ve used The Quiet Earth in many classes to il- lustrate the Aristotelian point that human beings are social creatures. Life is hardly worthwhile without friends and loved ones, and so much of what we do derives its importance from the role it plays in the lives of others. If I had to choose between living a normal lifespan in a world I knew to be otherwise devoid of people (the interesting version of The Quiet Earth), or avoiding that fate by dying in my sleep tonight, I would opt for the latter. If my choice were dying tonight or living in a world in which everyone is infertile (the interesting version of Children of Men), I would not hesitate to choose the latter. This says nothing about my attitude about an “afterlife,” as I lack an “afterlife” in all three situations. So consider the following choice: suppose that everyone except me were the victim of some affliction that would kill them to- night, but passing aliens (who are completely inhuman) give me a device that will save everyone’s life. However, it will also make them infertile. Fortunately, the aliens offer me an alternative: if (but only if) I don’t save everyone using the device, the aliens will take some frozen gametes to another planet, raise human beings, teach them our culture in great detail, and allow humanity to continue its existence indefinitely, giving all of us an “afterlife.” Presented with this choice, I would use the device, thus avoiding a Quiet Earth-type scenario, but placing myself into a Children of Men-type situation. So I care more about the people around me and the life I have with them than I do about having an “afterlife.” I doubt I am alone in this preference. I am also inclined to think that death is more devastating than Scheffler seems to think. I rarely dwell on my own eventual death, but that is not because I am indifferent about it. If I were faced with the prospect of dying soon, say within the year, I doubt I could ignore it. It would cripple me. If I could press a button that would enable everyone to live as long as they wish but at the expense of being childless, I would, and I bet just about everyone else would too, even if they knew that it would result in there being no “afterlife” (at least no “afterlife” of the sort Scheffler has in mind). Scheffler seems to have a very different view about overcoming death. In Lecture 3 he argues as follows: with only trivial exceptions the values that make life attractive to people presuppose that life is temporally limited; moreover, a life without temporal boundaries is conceptually impossible (“a life without temporal boundaries would no more be a life than a circle without a circumference would be a circle”); so neither eternal life nor valuing it makes sense; “death gives the meaning to life” since

journal of moral philosophy 14 (2017) 105-123