[00:00:00] MODERATOR:
So welcome to the final session of this year’s Tanner Lectures on Human Values. At this point in the proceeding, uh, our speakers scarcely need any further introduction. Um, but of course, they’re our Tanner Lecturer, Samuel Scheffler, um, Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, and his three commentators, Susan Wolf, Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Harry G. Frankfurt, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Princeton University, and Seana Valentine Shiffrin, Professor of Philosophy and Law at the University of California, Los Angeles.
So, as I say, they hardly need any further introduction. So all I’ll do is briefly outline the format for today’s session and then turn it over to them. So, um, each of our commentators, so first Susan, then Harry, then Seana, will have ten to fifteen minutes to offer some further thoughts on the conversation of the last two days.
Um, and then Sam will have fifteen to twenty minutes, um, to give his response. And then I think, um, we’ll probably have some informal discussion among, um, the four panelists before finally, um, turning it over to our very patient audience, who will at last have a chance to, um, to ask questions. Uh, and when that’s all over, there will be, um, the after-party.
Uh, and, and while I, I hope, um, you don’t need to be assured of the existence of the after party in order to value what comes before it, um, you’re at any rate invited, um, to the after party, which will take place, um, behind those, uh, folding doors. So, uh, without, uh, further ado, I’d like to invite, um, Susan Wolf to the mic. And Susan, you can either remain seated or come to the podium, whatever you find more comfortable.
[00:01:51] SAMUEL SCHEFFLER:
If I just talk without getting closer to the mic, can everyone hear me?
[00:01:55] AUDIENCE:
(audience)
Not at all.
(laughter)
[00:01:57] SAMUEL SCHEFFLER:
Closer to the mic. All right, let’s, let’s try this. How’s that?
[00:02:02] TECHNICIAN:
Good?
[00:02:05] SAMUEL SCHEFFLER:
Well, uh, we’ve heard two wonderful lectures and at least two wonderful commentaries from my distinguished colleagues. Uh, with Harry and Shauna, I am very grateful to Sam for turning our attention to a set of great questions, and I would say to offering a set of great answers, too. Though, in saying this, I take for granted the distinction between great answers and correct ones.
I also want to acknowledge that it’s an unfortunate consequence of the way our discipline is practiced, that since commentary and discussion tends to focus on disagreement, there’s little opportunity to highlight the aspects of another person’s work that strike one as simply compelling and insightful. Sam’s lectures contain much that falls into this category. For me, his discussion of why people play games is one example that springs to mind.
And so I’ll simply express my hope that these are appreciated and remembered, even if they’re not today discussed. But I’m also aware that as an audience, you have been exceptionally patient and respectful of all this lecturing in the front of the room. Uh, so in the hopes that today will be mo- mainly motivated, um, devoted to discussion across the room, I will try to keep my remarks brief.
As those of you who were able to attend the first lecture know, in my comments on Tuesday, I suggested that although Sam’s afterlife conjecture, which predicted that we would respond to the doomsday scenario with general apathy and anomie, was plausible, it was also plausible that with the right leadership, we might overcome this initial reaction, regaining an interest in life and in many of the activities which, on Sam’s conjecture, had become less meaningful for us. My thought, which perhaps I had not expressed clearly enough, was that a robust concern to mitigate the despair and apathy of others would pull us back from the brink of our own apathy and despair, getting us to return to our gardens, our bakeries, our desks, and our studios, at first for their sakes, but then perhaps despite ourselves, regaining our enthusiasm and appreciation for the relevant activities for, for their own sakes, and carrying on in them much as we do now. Underlying this thought, or at, at the very least compatible with it, is the suspicion that, as Sam would agree, it is a necessary condition of many of our, our activities retaining the value they have for us, that they have a place, or at least the possibility of a place, in the life or the world of a valuing community of which we are a part, but that, as Harry Frankfurt seems to agree, but Sam does not, that community need not have a future, that we are part of a past and a present community would be enough.
Sam’s response to my comments raised some hard questions challenging the plausibility of my more optimistic conjecture, if it can be called that, uh, which I shall not answer here. Rather, I shall turn my attention to the question I promised to raise at the end of my comments on Tuesday, namely on the assumption that, uh, more than one response to the prospect of our imminent extinction is at least possible. Would one be a more reasonable response than the other?
Is one of these responses more warranted? Is one based on a confusion? Sam, in his lectures, seems to want to resist any questions of this sort.
Uh, and it is true that the question in its most general form, the question, would it be rat– How would it be rational or even reasonable to respond, might well be greeted with suspicion. Channeling P.F. Strawson or perhaps Bernard Williams, one might reasonably be skeptical of the power and appropriateness of expecting rationality to help us respond to so enormous a catastrophe as doomsday.
Further, we might wonder from what perspective the question is supposed to be addressed. What assumptions about the nature and status of our values, and of their possible independence from an ongoing form of life, are we making insofar as we take the question to even be intelligible? Perhaps such thoughts and concerns are behind Scheffler’s resistance to talking about how we should or ought to respond to the prospect of extinction, and to his determination instead to stick to conjectures about how we would respond and considering what these conjectures might reveal about us.
Whether or not they are Sam’s concerns, they are fair enough. Nonetheless, the question of how we should respond and of that– and that of how we would respond cannot be kept so separate as to warrant dismissing the first one entirely. For we are rational and rationality-valuing creatures, and our thoughts about what is rational and reasonable to do and to feel affect what we ultimately decide to do and feel.
So if from within the perspective of our own values, we find our initial reaction to the prospect of imminent extinction rationally unstable or mysterious, it may weaken that reaction. And if we find another reaction to be more rationally appropriate, that might move us some way toward having that other reaction. Speaking for myself, I am moved by the question which Sam explicitly dismisses of why, if imminent distin-distinct extinction is so catastrophic, more distant extinction is not.
We know, after all, that sooner or later the Earth will be destroyed, and our species will die out. When we focus on activities and projects that do not in any obvious way appear to depend on posterity for either their attainability or their point, it is hard to see why, if such projects are rendered less meaningful by the prospect of imminent extinction, they are not meaningless anyway for reasons that, though available to us, we typically push from our attention. This seems essentially to be the viewpoint of Alvy Singer.
For those who missed yesterday’s lecture and aren’t sure that you’ve heard of the philosopher Alvy Singer, let me tell you that he is the nerdy protagonist in Woody Allen’s film, Annie Hall. Yesterday, Sam reminded us of the flashback scene in the movie in which Alvy is taken by his mother to see a doctor because he refuses to do his homework on the grounds that the universe is expanding and will someday break apart. Following Sam’s lead, I too want to consider Alvy’s views, and more particularly, Sam’s interpretation and response to that scene.
There are three points I want to make about it. First, according to Sam’s analysis, the scene is funny not only because of Alvy’s, uh, precociousness, but because he takes an event so far distant in the future to be a reason not to do his homework. As Sam reminds us, the doctor attempts to reassure Alvy by saying, “But that won’t happen for billions of years.”
Although Sam’s explanation of why the scene isn’t funny– why the scene is funny isn’t wrong, there is another equally good explanation that, while more abstract, seems to me in this case more to the point, having to do with what, in the spirit of Thompson Clarke, we might put in terms of the problematic relation between the philosophical level of thought and the everyday. Woody Allen frequently exploits this rela- this relation as a source of humor. Thus, my favorite line in another of Allen’s works: “If the external world doesn’t exist, then I certainly overpaid for my carpet.”
A second point I want to mention is that even if it’s true that the Earth’s exploding won’t occur for billions of years, we can expect that our species’ extinction will come much, much earlier than that. According to the biologist Ernest Mayr, the average life of a species is a hundred, a hundred thousand years, and apparently we have already existed about that long. So we should not expect to go on for another billion years or even another hundred thousand.
Not even close. But let’s put that aside and go back to Alvy’s own concern and Sam’s response to it. According to Sam, it is simply a datum that in general, we do not respond to our recognition that the Earth will someday be destroyed with angst or nihilism or ennui.
But Sam concedes, if the universe were going to end soon after the end of his own natural life, then Alvy might have a point. To this, I imagine the precocious Alvy, not to mention the young and brilliant Seana Shiffrin, pressing on. If I, if I would have a point under the doomsday scenario, why don’t I have a point anyway?
The fact that people don’t get upset by the prospect of our eventual extinction doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t. Alvy, it seems to me, is within his rights, at least within the seminar room or the lecture hall, for asking for more of an answer than this. Happily, though, we can also run this puzzle the other way.
If the fact that humans will eventually die out doesn’t render dancing the tango or walking in the woods or writing a philosophy lecture meaningless today, why should the fact that we will die out in thirty or fifty or a hundred years m-render it meaningless either? Though I acknowledge the possibility that wish fulfillment is distorting my reasoning powers, I have to say that I find the rational pull coming from this direction fairly persuasive. That is, since the eventual extinction of humanity doesn’t render our current efforts at creating beauty, gaining wisdom, helping each other valueless, neither does, or would, or should, our more imminent extinction.
Probably we would be initially disoriented, unsettled, and depressed by the falsification of so major an assumption that we have until now taken for granted. But just as we are disoriented, unsettled, or and depressed by the loss of our life savings or the unexpected death of a loved one, or to offer a closer analogy, just as we are disoriented, unsettled, and depressed by the loss of faith in a benevolent God and of a personal afterlife, we should, at least as a community, eventually snap out of it and get back to our lives and our world. According to this line of thought, then, if we came to believe that our extinction was imminent, it would be more reasonable to resist, to resist the initial tendency to grow detached, apathetic, and depressed than to give in to it.
Such reasoning over time ought to bring back the meaning and value to many of our activities that we initially thought doomsday would undermine. Moreover, since the doomsday scenario is just a scenario, that is, an imaginary thought experiment, this reasoning should also bring back for us the meaning and value of the activities that would truly have been rendered pointless by imminent extinction. Now, once again, we have a reason to cure cancer, to find more sustainable energy sources, to build buildings, plant trees, repair infrastructures, and so on.
Rationality, if I am right about where rationality on this topic leads, has given us our lives back, restoring the meaning and value to most, if not all, of the activities around which we previously fashioned our lives. This might seem to deflate the point
(laughter)
and impact of Sam’s lectures. For if I am right about the direction that reflection on doomsday scenarios should eventually take us, such reflection ultimately leaves everything where it is. But as some of you know, this is precisely what Wittgenstein thought philosophy should do, and he at least did not regard this as in any way deflationary.
Nor should we. Sam has done us an invaluable service by focusing our attention on the role of posterity in our lives and in our values, and in guiding us along one plausible path towards some tentative conclusions. I take it that the jury is still out on whether that path and those conclusions are right, but the rewards of reflection on these issues and arguments seem secure, no matter how long we as a species will last.
(applause)
(laughter)
[00:15:43] MODERATOR:
Now, now we’ll hear from Professor Frankfurt.
[00:15:48] HARRY G. FRANKFURT:
Scheffler’s account rests very heavily on what appear to be empirical judgments. Judgments concerning what people are likely to do or how they are likely to respond to one or another set of circumstances. These judgments, like all empirical judgments, are susceptible to empirical verification and inquiry.
In Scheffler’s account, however, they are presented primarily for their, uh, apparently primarily for their inherent plausibility or their presumed conformity with common sense. But plausibility and common sense get us only so far. What if empirical inquiry would establish that these judgments are not correct?
Would that require us to discard Scheffler’s account wholesale, or would his account still be illuminating to us
(clears throat)
even though it did not conform literally to reality? That’s one comment. I have four.
Two. Two is somewhat technical. Scheffler asserts that valuing something consists, in part, in believing it to be valuable simpliciter.
That is, I b– I believe he must mean believing it is valuable in itself rather than just valuable to us. I think this is a mistake. Valuing something, I think, consists essentially in being disposed to act in certain ways, to sustain or to enhance the viability of what it values.
In the case of music, for example, not to listen to it, uh, endlessly or to encourage everybody else to listen, but to ensure its availability for listening, to ensure that it continue to be possible to listen to it. The question of where value is, whether the value is objective or subjective, is a philosophical question concerning which the person who does the valuing doesn’t need to have any belief whatsoever. Scheffler–
This is the third comment. Scheffler, uh, claims that when we are faced with a doomsdos– doomsday scenario, certain things would matter to us less. Last night, I argued that some things could continue to matter, uh, matter to us just as much as before.
Now I want to suggest that some things would matter to us more. Faced with a global catastrophe which would entail our own deaths, we might very well be moved to stop wasting the time left to us and to repair certain patterns of behavior into which we had lapsed when we thought we had plenty of time left. We might be moved to care more about nourishing the intimate relationships we have between members of our family and our friends.
Or we might uh be moved to care more about taking a trip we had long wanted to take but had, uh, kept postponing, and so on.
[00:18:41] SAMUEL SCHEFFLER:
Finally, Scheffler refers often to our desire to personalize our relationship to the future and to our desire to see ourselves as part of an ongoing human history. Where do these desires come from? Are we born with them, or do they arise in response to certain aspects of our cultural or social experience?
My own view tends to be that they are versions of our instinctive desire for self-preservation, and that they are not at all specific to a doomsday scenario or to our anticipation of the end of mankind. That’s it.
[00:19:23] MODERATOR 2:
Now we’ll hear from Professor Scheffler.
[00:19:29] SEANA SHIFFRIN:
Um, so can you hear me? Great.
[00:19:33] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
No? No.
(laughter)
[00:19:35] SEANA SHIFFRIN:
The man in the back says yes, the people in the front say no.
(laughter)
Defies understanding. Okay. Well, I, I, I wanna thank, um, Sam and Susan and Harry for a really wonderful and intellectually exciting week.
And also, of course, I think, uh, all of us, um, are very grateful to Jay and to Niko, and the members of the Tanner Lecture Committee. Can you hear me now? Um, what I thought I might do is raise two further topics for discussion.
Um, neither of them are intended to be critical, uh, or, um, forms of disagreement, but both of them are related to the themes from the lectures. And I’m going to take advantage of the informality of this session to be a little more meandering and tentative. So, uh, the first issue, um, I wanted to, um, raise is to, um, in-invite some discussion of the connection between these thoughts about the afterlife and reproduction and repopulation.
And one of the entry points for me in thinking about this, um, has to do with yesterday’s lecture and the connections that were drawn between, uh, the functions of the collective afterlife and the functions of the personal afterlife. And some of the remarks made yesterday suggested that the collective afterlife fulfills some and even many of the desired functions or desiderata of a personal afterlife, and I agree with all of that. What’s interesting to me, though, and I don’t really know quite what to make of it, um, is that empirically, um, those who believe in a personal afterlife are more likely to contribute to the collective afterlife through population growth than those who are not, which is to say that members of religious groups that are devoted to the belief in the personal afterlife empirically are more likely to procreate and to have larger numbers of children than those who do not.
Um, and that’s rather interesting. It suggests that they’re not substitutes for one another, um, and that the relationship between them is more complex. And again, that’s not a criticism, it’s just, I think, an interesting fact.
It may, of course, be just a coincidence or the product of independent religious belief or an enhanced interest in ensuring that as many people get to experience the goods of life and the personal afterlife as possible. But I’m curious whether, um, you have any thoughts about why this might be, and in general, whether you want to draw any connections between procreation, repopulation, uh, and your thoughts about the afterlife. And the second topic I thought we might pursue, um, is to think more, uh, about specifically human history, but from a different angle than the one we discussed yesterday.
So Lucretius observed that we are more untroubled about our prenatal non-existence relative to our anguish about our personal postmortem non-existence. He thought that our indifference toward our prenatal non-existence should render us much less concerned about our own personal mortality. And most readers of Lucretius have been unmoved by that suggestion and persist in being troubled by their death.
But most philosophers acknowledge that there is that asymmetry and take it to provide an interesting puzzle. And so in that light, it’s interesting and tempting to ask whether there’s a similar asymmetry with respect to our collective prehistory and our collective extinction. Unlike our prenatal non-existence personally, our collective life did preexist each of us.
But at one point, humans did not exist, and with some fortune, our collective non-existence will be longer off than our individual mortality. But in thinking about it, I think that something like the Lucretian attitudinal asymmetry does exist with respect to our collective lives. So by contrast with the eventual prospect of the end of the collective afterlife, our prior collective non-existence is not really a source of distress or despair to us.
It is a source of interest and curiosity and wonder. When we did not exist, that is, when humans did not exist, valuable things were not recognized as valuable, nor were they deliberately enacted. But that seems unproblematic.
Yet, as Sam has argued, and I think convincingly, a future without valuing feels desolate in a way that if we focus on it, it might well directly affect our lives and our emotional equanimity now. And perhaps that’s because our prior collective non-existence was so long ago, and a human history has had a long enough arc that we all feel a part of it. Maybe a collective non-existence comparably far out into the future should not trouble us, and that interacts a little bit with some of the concerns Susan was just raising.
Um, but it would understandably upset those closer to it. But suppose that our beginnings were more abrupt and closer in temporal proximity. It’s very hard to imagine this, and the example I have is not a terrific one, but bear with me a little.
Suppose we were to discover that some science fictional conspiracy story were true. Maybe the Scientologists are closer to being accurate than crazy than most of us think.
(breath)
Um, so perhaps that the, only a hundred years ago, very different aliens created us and deposited us here,
(breath)
um, left misleading evidence and implanted effective but false myths about our personal, so-social and biological histories. Let’s imagine that the personalities and fake histories they manufactured did not represent their values or a conscious enactment of a normative alternative. Perhaps our profile was just the output of some fancy randomized simulation game.
So not SimCity, but Sim Alternate Universe. Um, in any case, what I’m asking you to imagine is a case in which we do not share any normative continuity with the aliens. we would, of course, have terrific distress to discover this at the deception, at our misunderstanding of our own past, of a lot of fear about manipulative aliens.
But the question I want to ask is, would the fact that human history recently did not exist be as upsetting as the prospect of collective non-existence within a hundred years? And even though I’ve introduced the case to you, I find it very difficult to think about that kind of science fiction, and it’s very hard to shake off the immediate issues about deception and self-ignorance and fear and betrayal. Um, but nevertheless, if I make myself think about it and put aside those kinds of reasons, I think that would be what the source of distress was, the deception and the betrayal and the lack of self-understanding.
I think it would be less distressing that we, in fact, don’t have a collective past. The fact that we lack a true collective history, I think, wouldn’t be as distressing as the prospect of the lack of a collective future. And so it seems to me that if you can wrap your mind around the example, it may show that the Lucretian asymmetry holds true of both individuals and of the collective.
If there were a human past, it seems important, as Sam has discussed in his other work, that we share some things with the people from before, that we know about them, we recognize them, and we enact many of the same practices in order to share time with them and share activities with them. But if we are, in fact, human pioneers, and we’re really starting virtually from the beginning, I’m less confident that the absence of a rich history matters as much as the absence of a collective afterlife that would involve the continuation of the practices of valuing, if not the continuation of our actual values. Or to put it a different way, the importance of history matters most if in fact there was a history.
Whereas I think Sam persuasively argued yesterday, the importance of the afterlife matters whether or not there will be one. For me, these considerations also suggest that part of what matters is not simply being a part of human history and sustaining value through time, but doing so in a particular future-directed way, being part of a project that now is underway, makes progress, and develops according to reasons. I suspect that it’s not an unrelated asymmetry, that the fact of our prior injustice rankles less than the prospect of our future injustice.
And whether or not that’s an unrelated asymmetry, it’s certainly easier to think about than the aliens. I wanna end by talking, by just noting a second asymmetry that’s related to some of the issues that Harry raised yesterday. Um, which is that the prospect of collective non-existence temporally matters more than its spatial counterpart.
Um, and, mmm, I think I may report somewhat different reactions than Harry. Um, my idea is this, that the thought that human activities may not splay out spatially, but that their span might shrink. It might just be us in California, and there might not be people in other areas of the world.
Um, that’s substantially less distressing than the idea that our temporal extension will hit a limit. Population implosion does not seem so distress-distressing as Collective future non-existence. But both the spatial and the temporal limit on human activity restrict the degree to which valuable things are realized and sustained.
Yet the urgency of temporal extension seems to reinforce for me the idea that there is a temporal dimension to valuing that’s fairly essential to it. Thanks.
(applause)
[00:29:31] MODERATOR 2:
Now we’ll have the response.
[00:29:35] SAMUEL SCHEFFLER:
Well, um, I’m grateful to the commentators for raising all of these questions. Um, I’d be even more grateful if they had a- supplied answers along with the questions. But, um, let me make a few remarks in t-
Response to at least some of the things that they said. I’m going to take my inspiration from Shauna’s opening comments that she was going to feel free to be meandering and tentative. Of course, she wasn’t, but I will be.
So, um, okay. Um, so s– I guess I will respond in the order in which the commentators presented their remarks. Susan, uh, raises an absolutely fundamental, um, question, uh, about the argument I’ve presented.
So I say that we would react, um, with, uh, great dismay and distress to the prospect of the imminent, uh, disappearance of the human race, and that this would greatly erode our capacity to lead, uh, value-laden lives. Um, but that we don’t react that way now to the prospect of the far distant, um, as it seems to us, um, li- elimination of human life. So there’s a kind of discrepancy or asymmetry in our reactions.
And the question is what to make of this asymmetry. Susan, um, rightly points out that one possibility is to try to render our reactions consistent, to decide which one is the right reaction, and then to adjust the other one so that it conforms to the first one. And of course, if we decide to ren– that we must do that, if we feel pressure to make the two kinds of reactions, uh, the same, then we can do that in one of two directions.
Either we can start being upset about the prospect of the eventual elimination of humankind, or we can stop being upset about, uh, the imagined imminent, um, elimination of humankind. So there are really two options there. We can, we can get, uh, we can get more depressed or stop being depressed at all, roughly.
Um, There is a third, um, a third option, which is to stick with the phenomena as I’ve described them. And for the moment, let me just assume, although Harry and Susan at any rate, and perhaps some of you don’t, um, don’t agree with me about what the phenomena are, at least not entirely. But suppose I’m right that that, um, we would react to the doomsday or infertility scenarios in the way that I say, that these would be demoralizing and erode our capacity to lead v-value-laden lives, but that we’re pretty, we don’t display much of that sort of reaction in response to the distant, uh, the prospect of, um, distant, uh, distant disappearance of the human race.
So, the third possibility is to see whether those differing reactions might make sense in some way. And, um, although I feel the rational pressure that, uh, Susan described to render our reactions, um, the same, I, um, I’m not quite ready to give up on the phenomena as I understand them yet, because I don’t feel… I, I mean, in part, I am actually somewhat moved by By the kinds of, um, the kinds of caution that you ascribe to, uh, Strawson and Williams.
Uh, that’s part of it. But I don’t mean to rule out, uh, as unworthy of being addressed or as completely separable questions about how we should react. I mean, I th– I did say a few things.
I’m more tentative about questions about how we should react because I feel more tentative about them. But I don’t mean to say that we shouldn’t address them, And I feel the pressure to try to bring these, uh, two sets of reactions into harmony. But I’m also not persuaded yet that I fully understand the two sets of reactions well enough to be sure that one of, one of them has to go.
And, um, so I incline to want to explore further the question of whether there’s any way of making sense of these differing reactions that would, so to speak, uh, vindicate them, make them both– make both sets, uh, reasonable. Now, I don’t have any, um, any clear, um, way of doing that. So what I’m going to say is really extremely tentative and speculative, and I’ll come back at the end to some thoughts about, uh, what happens if those– if we can’t do that, and which way we should go.
Uh, because we then still have a choice. Should we be depressed about both or depressed about neither, roughly? Um, so it strikes me– First of all, I, let me just mention one factor that may be p-somewhat complicating our reactions to some of these, uh, scenarios that really needs to be set aside because it’s not directly relevant to the central issues, and that is the issue of the determinacy of the end date.
So One thing about the, uh, eventual disappearance of human life is that we don’t have a date to attach to it. We don’t know when exactly it’s going to happen. We can throw around numbers, but nobody really knows.
Um, and in fact, nobody is even– feels confident in an approximate date. So it’s quite indeterminate. The scenarios I, um, described, the infertility scenario and certainly the doomsday scenario, made it much more definite when this was going to happen.
And the mere fact of determinacy, the determinacy of the endpoint, um, is itself, I think, something that may affect our reactions in complicated ways. You can see that if you just think of the personal case. If human beings all knew from the time they were born the date of, the dates of their death, you know, you sort of got a little card that came with you when you left the sort of maternity ward or whatever, you know, “Will die on such and such a date.”
Um, it would have a tr– an amazing and transformative effect on how we live our lives. I think it would affect every, uh, you know, all kinds of things from choice of careers, uh, uh, activities, uh, spouses and partners. I mean, do you want someone who’s gonna live around the same amount of time as you, or someone who’s gonna live a lot less or a lot more?
What… You know, I mean, it would introduce a, a, a complete– a, a very fundamental kind of consideration into our deliberations that just isn’t there now, uh, in general. I mean, there are, of course, the claim needs qualification.
There are cases in which people have a pretty good idea when they’re gonna die, but, but on the whole, we don’t. And that indeterminacy is, I think, makes a huge difference to the way we live. And, and, and would do so even if in the case I’m imagining where you knew the date of your death, uh, the– it, it didn’t change the life expectancy.
I mean, everyone could live as long as they now live. It’s just you’d know in advance when you were going to die. So, um, so I think that this is all just by way of saying we should keep that in mind as a potential complicating factor that may someh- in some ways be, um, affecting some of our intuitions, but should actually be factored out, uh, as best we can.
I myself am somewhat tentatively drawn to the thought that, Um, what we want in, um, is to feel that our activities are part of an ongoing, uh, an ongoing process, that we’re participating in an ongoing, uh, enterprise that’s in pretty good shape and has a future. It’s less clear to me that what we want is that it should exist forever. I mean, what may matter to us, what we may want, is the feeling that what we’re doing is participating in something valuable and something that has a future.
And if that’s what we want, um, it’s not actually inconsistent, um, to fail to react to the prospect of the eventual destruction or elimination of the human race from our vantage point, assuming that it’s something far in the future, or at any rate that we take to be far in the future. Um, it would be rational for people who are confronting, you know, who were living, you know, a year before or half a year before this happened. It would be rational for them to be depressed because they wouldn’t be participating in something with the future.
So we would have the thing that they don’t have. And that would explain why we don’t react from our vantage point to the The prospect of the eventual, uh, disappearance of human beings from Earth, uh, with the, in the, with the same kind of, um, uh, loss of confidence that I say we would react, uh, would characterize the reactions of people who were faced with the imminent elimination of the human race. So it’s the difference between our confidence depending on the belief that humanity will go on forever and our confidence depending on the belief that humanity will go on.
That is, the process that we’re part of is something ongoing and has a future. Anyway, that’s just one sort of tentative thought. It doesn’t seem to me crazy.
We want to avoid the region. If you think of the whole history of, of human experience from the beg– uh, of, uh, the whole history of humankind from the beginning to its eventual end, we want to avoid the region right near the end, um, because those are the only people who will, uh, who c– won’t be able to, if they know about it, to think of their activities as part of a, uh, a flourishing and ongoing, uh, enterprise or project or set of projects, and so on. So it seems to me that, um, you know, I’m not convinced that that’s not a wa– something like that isn’t a way of making sense in the as– of the the asymmetry in our reactions, rendering them consistent without making them the same.
And so I’m not, I’m not there yet as far as feeling we’ve got to react the same way. If we did have to react the same way, um, suppose that, you know, just for the sake of argument, that we were persuaded that there was no way of rationalizing these different sets of attitudes, which would be the right reaction? Well, um, I guess f– here I feel much more tentative, as I said in the actual lectures.
Um, I do– Uh, and one thing I feel was that one has to think about particular cases that rather than s-thinking about global loss of confidence. My, um, inclination is to look at, you know, individual activities and kinds of activities and to wanna say, “Would, would it really make sense to… Would those activities have a point?
Would they continue to be valuable, uh, or strike us as valuable under these conditions?” And my– I continue to feel that, um, a lot of them wouldn’t. Um, I understand the speculation that, well, we’d, um, you know, with other losses that are disorienting, we just sort of snap out of it after a while.
And certainly in res– when people get terminal diagnoses, often they go through a period of, of shock and depression and despair, but then in some sense, they s-they snap out of it, but but they, but they resolve to use the rest of their lives, um, doing things that are particularly valuable. In fact, one thing they do is if they’re inclined to, to, um, change their lives at all, what they wanna do is to reduce the clutter and get rid of all the waste, the, all the things they’ve been doing that have been a waste of time.
This is sort of related to what Harry is saying.
(clears throat)
Um, and they’re, they reaffirm the im-importance of the things that matter most to them, and they wanna do the most valuable things and spend what time they have, um, remaining doing that. And I guess, um, what they don’t do is to feel, “Oh, nothing matters.” What they feel– or even many fewer things matter, uh.
Um, what they feel is, uh, “I’m gonna spend as much time as I have doing the things that matter.” And I guess, um, one reason they’re able to do that is because all of– because the world of value is still all around them, and is ongoing, and is thriving and flourishing, and it’s there to be part, uh, for– open to their participation. The idea that everybody collectively would just, in the same sense, snap out of it, I guess I, you know, to some extent we’re just trading intuitions about plausibility.
I continue not to find plausible, and that’s hard to separate from the thought that there would be so many fewer things to snap out of it, too.
(laughter)
As it— I mean, will the scientists snap out of it and all go back to cure? I mean, it’s comprehensible that a scientist, a cancer researcher who gets a personal, uh, terminal diagnosis might decide that they were going to spend their last months in the laboratory pursuing this valuable activity, uh, that they were… a promising research line that they developed, because that was the most valuable thing they could do. In the infertility scenario, the doomsday scenario, that would seem, you know, pointless.
I mean, it’s the, the, the, um, I continue to feel that many– the problem is that many previously valuable activities would no longer seem valuable, so there’d be much less, as it were, to snap back to. I believe that people would want to still want to do valuable things with their lives. Um, I think that they would just have a much narrower range of valuable things that they could do.
I think also there’d be just a se-serious and mutually reinforcing depressive effect of what was going on. So, um, I’m not convinced that it would be more reasonable to resist the apathy if resisting the apathy meant doing things that no longer made sense to do or didn’t have a point. Um, and I think there would be a lot of things like that.
What would be left, um, is part of what we’ve been discussing and disagreeing about over the last two days. I continue to feel that a lot less would be left. And so if we had to choose whether we should be more, um, whether we should be depressed about both or neither, um, maybe in the end, I’m with Alvi, you know, and we should, um, people are depressed about both.
But really, I’m– I don’t wanna have to choose yet. I’m still inclined to wanna try to make sense of the discrepancy in ways that shows us to be, um, uh, not inconsistent and not unreasonable in having these two sets of attitudes. On the assumption, of course, that we have the attitudes I say we have, which, you know, um, which is a, a matter of some dispute.
Okay, um, Harry, uh, Point one, uh, I appeal to empirical judgments which are in principle, uh, I rest something on certain empirical judgments which are in principle verif- verifiable, although being a good philosopher, I’ve been careful to choose my empirical judgments to make sure that they’re not in fact verifiable under
(laughter)
under, under actual, um, or hoped for, uh, conditions so that I can say things about how we’d react without actually having to, um, provide any evidence. Uh, um, and of course, those of you who disagree are in the same position, so we’re all happy. Um-
(laughter)
The, um,
(laughter)
what if, uh, Harry wants to know what if, what if there were empirical results somehow, and they showed that, um, that, that I was wrong in my speculations about what was plausible under infertility or doomsday conditions? I mean, suppose it happened and, and, you know, um, and it turned out that we were all not demoralized at all. We– people were just as happy to…
Everything seemed just as valuable. Um, you know, um, I was here talking about the, you know, the significance of the afterlife, and you were here listening to me, and we were all, um, you know, we were all carrying on as usual, just as convinced as ever of the value of what we were doing. Um, Yeah, I’d be wrong then.
I mean, that, that wouldn’t be good for my argument. It’d be great for, for us, I guess.
(laughter)
Um, but I, I think that would be bad. I mean, I accept that, you know, um, you know, it’s, it is an empirical judgment and, um, if it turned out to be false, uh, a lot of what I say would be wrong, uh Um, so, uh, I think not everything I say would be wrong because, um, I did– I do think that, um, I– or I like to think that along the way, uh, I said some things which I was led to under the possibly false belief, um, that my afterlife conjecture was correct. I mean, some of the stuff about, uh, uh, uh, our interest in, uh, personalized relation to the future, and Susan mentioned stuff about games.
I mean, I think there were things I said that aren’t– Not everything I said is dependent on that, but the central line of argument depended on that, and if it were wrong, it’d be wrong. Um, so, um, as I said, lucky for me that it’s not, um,
(laughter)
it’s verifiable, but it’s not going to be verified or falsified anytime soon, we all hope. Um, valuing, and–
(cough)
involves believing simpliciter. This is the technical issue. Yeah, Harry and I disagree about this.
I mean, um, that I, um, that much, that much I expected, and, um, we’re probably not gonna settle the disagreement here. I do believe that, uh, valuing something involves, among other things, being believing that it’s valuable. Um, I did not use the words that Harry put in my mouth.
I did not say, um, involve believing that they’re objectively valuable as opposed to subjectively. Um, those are philosophers’ terms of art to some extent. W–
And he ascribed them to me and then said I was ascribing philosophical views to ordinary people. But I don’t do that. I just think that valuing as a conceptual matter among– involves, among other things, believing that the thing that you value is good or worthwhile or worthy or something of that sort.
And philosophers can then try to figure out how to interpret that belief and what its content is, and how it’s best understood, and whether it’s justified or whatever. But I think as a conceptual matter, that’s part of what it is to value something. I don’t expect to resolve this disagreement now.
I will say that in an earlier draft of his comments, there was a part that Harry, uh, omitted where along the way, he made the observation, which I entirely agree with, that, uh, to believe something is to believe that it’s true. That’s just what believing is. Believing involves, um, uh, you believe some proposition, you believe the proposition is true.
And that’s similarly a kind of conceptual claim. I wouldn’t say in response, um, that if we say that about somebody, Um, we are then, uh, uh, that in believing something because they believe it’s true, that they’re believing it’s objectively true in a sense which implicates some sophisticated philosophical theory. I think that, you know, philosophers can try to figure out wh– I, I don’t think that the, you know, average person who has beliefs has a philosophical theory of truth.
I don’t think they have a philosophical theory of value. I just happen to think that’s what– part of what valuing involves. But I understand that Harry has a different view of, about valuing and, um, you know, we can talk more about it or not.
We can leave it as a, a, a technical, uh, disagreement for the, um, for the philosophers. Um, some things would matter to us more. Well, this gets back to, you know, this is here we’re again trading, um, intuitions of plausibility and, um, you know, it, it might be as, I, I mean, the reactions that, um, that you, as you— you think would be, um, plausible under the doomsday or infertility conditions are like the ones that I described in the case of people who get a personal, uh, terminal diagnosis or something of that kind.
You just resolve to do the things that really matter. Um, and, you know, maybe there would be… I, I don’t deny that there would be some of that.
I think there would be, um, uh, at this point I’m just repeating myself. I think there’d be, uh, a widespread sense that it was much harder to find things that one believed to be truly valuable. I did say in the lecture that I thought personal relationships were one thing that whose importance would be most likely to survive, and, um, attending to them is, um, is a natural sug– uh, possibility for something that would seem to people important and worth doing.
Although, I do think that the character of relationships and what would be involved in attending to them would be very altered and very– It’s very hard to predict under those kinds of, uh, conditions. There’s a kind of–
I take that, take it that– re– there’s a kind of ambient level of hopefulness about the possibilities of life and of living that informs most flourishing relationships in ordinary times, and that under these kinds of pervasively depressing and, and, um, really devastating assumptions, what relationships would be like, um, isn’t really altogether clear. I mean, there may be some examples to be had from looking at how people react under conditions of, uh, uh, that are really quite extreme in other ways.
Uh, people who are, you know, victims of atrocities, of oppression, of, of genocide, and how they react, um, when they, when they know that the end is near for them and what their relationships are like. But, um, and here I’m at least making good on my promise to meander. I think that the, um, the upshot is that, to repeat myself, I agree that there would be some desire to focus on the really important things, but I think the really important things would be fewer and further between.
Um, not at all like the case in that respect of, uh, personal, uh, death. Um, finally, Har- fi- Harry’s final point about the personalized relation to the future.
Um, I don’t know where the desire comes from, um, but I completely agree that it’s not specific to the doomsday scenario. I didn’t mean to suggest that it was. I meant that one of the interesting things about the doomsday scenario, and one of the things that would not be falsified if I were wrong about the, uh, in my conjectures about what would happen in the doomsday scenario, is just that it reveals this desire.
Uh, but the desire, I think, is independent of the scenario. I think it’s a desire we all have in general. Ma-ma-many of us have, and, uh, I think it’s an interesting desire, and I think it’s interesting to think about, um, its significance and, um, where it comes from, how it relates to others of our attitudes and so on.
I think it plays an unacknowledged role, um, and that’s quite independent of the, uh, doomsday scenario. The doomsday scenario thwarts the desire, uh, it’s not responsible for the desire. Um, okay, I think that I will move on to Shauna’s, uh, points.
I guess I, um, am not gonna try to say anything about the, um, believers in the personal afterlife contributing more to the collective afterlife, just because I don’t feel I know the facts well enough. Um, I don’t know the empirical data. I don’t know how consistent they are across different kinds of religious belief or belief in the afterlife, and I don’t know the wide range of different religious doctrines that might sort of make sense of this.
So I think it’s interesting. I think it’s an interesting thing to think about. It does suggest that there may be sort of interesting relations of a kind I hadn’t explored between the personal and collective afterlives, as I was calling them.
Um, but I don’t really know what to say about them and hadn’t thought about it before. So I appreciate your raising the question because it’s something, um, it’s something well worth pondering. I just, I just don’t know what to say about it.
Um, Lucretius, um, so I, um, I do think that there’s a temporal asymmetry in the individual case, and I do think that there– that it carries over to the collective case. So I’m with you on that. Um, although I th– I, I might say by way of parenthesis, although I think there’s a temporal asymmetry in the
(coughs)
interest in the, um, individual case, I don’t think we should, um, completely gloss over some of the puzzling aspects of birth, which I think, you know, are not maybe discussed as much as the philosophical puzzles about death. It’s partly because they’re masked by the fact that people come to full to, to their cognitive powers gradually. But if you imagine that people were somehow born cognitively fully formed, so you had, like, complete language and self-consciousness, some of them, And then imagine the moment of your birth.
It’s like, wow. Like, so I was like,
(laughter)
what’s th- You know, what’s this all about?
(laughter)
You know, so like, who am I?
(laughter)
It’s like, where did I come from, you know? And, and, and which is incredibly weird.
(laughter)
Um, and you know, we don’t really have to to kind of do that because I don’t know, you know, we, um… But once you start thinking about it, I mean, I guess there were moments of, you know, I mean, it happens gradually, so maybe there’s no one moment of weirdness, but, well, I don’t know, maybe. I, I wo- I won’t go there.
Suffice it to say that I think the weirdness of birth is under- underrated. But, um, But I don’t, um,
(laughter)
I, I, I, I, But I still think there’s an asymmetry at that, we’re not, we’re not as bothered by prenatal non-existence as we are by, um, by postmortem non-existence. And I think I completely share your sense that that carries over to the, uh, case of the collective afterlife, and that in the case you described, as far as I could follow it, most of our dismay would come from the facts about feeling betrayed or deceived or, you know, sort of just weirded out by the fact that we’d had this, you know. I mean, the whole s-situation is so strange.
But I don’t think that the bare fact that there hadn’t been a history, um, would be disturbing or is disturbing in the actual case, um, certainly. I was a little uncertain about, um, The, um, you’re saying I… I’m not sure that, um…
I’m not sure that the diagnosis that you suggest, um, Is, um, rings entirely true to me in the collective case. Um, I wonder if you would apply it in the personal case. But, um, I was struck by your saying that the fact of our prior injustice rankles less than the prospect of our future injustice.
I was struck by that because I don’t think I share that. Um, I think people are often, you know, greatly, you know, if they’re, if, if they are sensitive to their own injustice at all and capable of being bothered by it, I think they’re tend to be disturbed, you know, to feel guilt, remorse, and so on about past injustice
(coughs)
. I don’t, I don’t know that I think people spend a lot of time feeling bad about injustices they haven’t committed yet. Um, and, um, so
but maybe that’s not quite what you meant. In any case, I wasn’t sure I I, I got the, the intuition there.
Um, finally, on the temporal versus spatial analogy, uh, I quite agree with you that, of course, um, we want it, we want there to be, um, uh, we want humanity to, to, um, enjoy temporal extension to exist in the future. Um, it doesn’t particularly matter to us that they be spread out, um, although living in the middle of Manhattan, that sometimes seems like it wouldn’t be a bad idea. Um, people spread out a little bit.
But, um, But I think that Harry’s point, at least, was not really about spatial extension. It was about contemporary. So it was still in the dimension of time.
It was just that simultaneous other people would be as good as, um, as temporally extended, uh, other people. And although I don’t agree with that, I don’t think that’s the same point as the point about spatial extension. I don’t think Harry or anybody else was making that point here.
It ha– people have suggested it to me, and I agree it has no plausibility whatsoever. There’s no intrinsic concern that there should, you know, be… If we find an unpopulated island, I mean, it’s not like this bothers anybody, um, so, um.
But of course, I agree with you on the fundamental point, which is that it does matter to us that, uh, people should have a future. Okay, time to stop meandering and let all these, or well, I don’t know. I mean, whatever Niko says should happen next
(laughter)
, should happen next.
(applause)
[01:02:19] MODERATOR:
Do, do you have questions for one another or clarifications for one another? Or should we just open it up for questions?
[01:02:25] SEANA SHIFFRIN:
Okay.
[01:02:27] MODERATOR:
Um, uh, Jay Wallace.
[01:02:32] SAMUEL SCHEFFLER:
Does he get to ask questions?
[01:02:34] MODERATOR:
He does.
[01:02:34] SAMUEL SCHEFFLER:
Okay.
(laughter)
[01:02:36] SEANA SHIFFRIN:
Okay.
[01:02:36] SAMUEL SCHEFFLER:
But he was the moderator.
[01:02:38] JAY WALLACE:
I do today. I’ll keep it brief. There, I’m sure there are lots of questions, uh, and a lot of issues have been, uh, touched on, on, touched on already.
Um, y-you know, I think, um, I, I sh– I guess I share Sam’s, uh, kind of philosopher’s armchair speculation about the, um, afterlife conjecture. It does seem to me plausible that under the imagined, um, you know, infertility scenario, people would, would lose interest in things, and, uh, much that we organize our lives around would strike us as not being valuable in the way it was before. Yet, you know, to be really fully confident, though, uh, about, about that intuition, you know, I’d, I’d really want to be able to articulate clearly why, why the things that would strike us as not having valuable, why they, you know, you know, what is it about them that makes it the case under this hypothetical scenario that they aren’t valuable in the way they were?
And, and I’m still a little bit, um, though, though I f- I feel the intuition very, very strongly, I’m still not completely confident at, at my ability to articulate, um, you know, what it is that these formerly viable activities would now seem to lack. I, I mean, in some cases, it, it seems, uh, and, and your speculations about this, uh, seem to me appropriately tentative and suggestive, and so on. But, but I– maybe I could just ask you to, to say a little bit more or just remind me of things that maybe I was overlooking.
In some cases, you know, it seemed pretty clear that the, the, the value of the activity was essentially connected to the activities having a teleological structure or ameliorative character. And, you know, it would lack those things in a world in which the activities didn’t continue to be ones that are engaged in beyond our own, uh, span of life. Um, but, um, uh, you know, and you say with personal relationships, there seems like i-it’s, it’s less–
It has less of that kind of structure. So, so– So, so those seem to be, for instance, activities that might still seem to be ones that could retain their viable, um, properties. But, uh, but it seems like the– with the– a lot of these activities in be- in between those, those two kind of extremes, um, I, I, I bet if I were in the scenario, they would strike me as not being viable in the same way.
But I’m not quite sure, you know, why that would be a reasonable thing to think about them. I mean, philosophical activity, let’s take that as an example of the, uh, the ge-genre of kinds of activities that, um, that you were, you, you talked– were talking about, what it– was it Bulgarian history or whatever? Um, you know, these are activities
I, I take your point completely that have, you know, they’re valuable not just in virtue of the momentary experiential features of them. They have a social character, so we’d, especially with philosophy, we’d want to be able to engage in the activity with other contemporaries, I think. Uh, they also have a historical character, I think.
Um, it’s important that they are the activities that people have been engaging in, and their value. Uh, Nico’s looking at his watch, so I’ll be sure.
(laughter)
Their, their value is connected to that, uh, right? And, and I think they have to be ongoing activities, at least to the extent that, you know, our activity is somewhat kind of teleological. It’s a movement towards a goal.
And so to be able to engage in them as activities at all, you know, they have to be ongoing things that we can be doing in time, and so time has to, you know, we have to have some prospect. But that, but that is guaranteed on, on the scenario we’re thinking. We, we have a life to, uh, for the, uh, within which these activities might play out.
Um, so But so why does it need to, to, to go on beyond us exactly in order for the activity to be valuable in the way that, um, we will come to have less confidence that, that, that it is under these circumstances?
[01:06:33] SAMUEL SCHEFFLER:
Sorry. I mean, I just, I just have to say. Okay.
(laughter)
Um- I’m just gonna wander.
(laughter)
(laughter)
Um, if there’s no afterlife, Jay won’t be able to finish his question,
(laughter)
but, uh, um,
(laughter)
um, so, you know, Yeah. It’s a great question. I think that, um, and I think that we have to look at it case by case or category by category.
I actually find the ca- the simplest teleological cases quite interesting and useful because, as I tried to say, um, it’s easy to see on one level why they would seem pointless. Why, you know, what’s the point of trying to figure out how to build a s-safer Bay Bridge if, you know, it, what-whatever, um, if when there are gonna be no people around to cross it. Um, so on one level, it looks completely clear, and there’s nothing mysterious about it.
And yet what that reveals is the extent to which we invest our, uh, energies and our sense of what matters and what’s worth doing in things that we expect to pay off after we’re dead. Um, and the, the– when we say, well, it’s clear in the teleological cases as if that were somehow too easy somehow or it somehow didn’t really explain anything because those cases aren’t significant. They’re tremendously significant.
Um, the– it’s amazing the extent to which human beings, as they are now constituted, um, invest their lives devoted to activities that– whose rewards they don’t expect to see themselves, or at least most of whose rewards they don’t expect to see themselves. So that when we imagine this doomsday scenario or Something, sim– the simple teleological structure of their efforts is manifestly disrupted, and it’s pointless for them to do what they’re doing. Um, but I don’t think that that is an insignificant result.
I think it’s an amazingly significant result. I mean, it needn’t have been that way. I mean, you can imagine human beings living, um, under the assumption that it was very important to undertake only those goals whose, uh, successful achievement you could reasonably hope to see in your lifetime.
It would be sort of like finishing all the food on your plate, you know, not leaving anything over. Um, and it might have seemed like a kind of form of bad, you know, ma– you know, we can imagine some kind of, some form of virtue that was thought to be, you know, lacking in, in somebody who’s foolishly or profligately took on all these goals that they
(coughs)
could never possibly… Uh, if a person wants to cure cancer, you know, they’re never gonna do that. that, you know, strengthen the Bay Bridge, you know.
Um, so, um, but we don’t. We all invest in the future after we’re gone. We all invest in the afterlife, in my sense.
And yeah, the doomsday would then render a whole lot of what we do pointless for very obvious reasons. So I think we ought to focus more on those cases, uh, and not less because they’re so easy to understand, but not just because they’re so easy to understand, because they’re so central, and they cover so much of the territory. Um, other cases are, you know, don’t in that way wear their explanations on their face.
Um, but, you know, you raised the question of philosophical activity, not perhaps everybody’s favorite example of a, of a valuable activity at the best of times, but I’ll, you know, we’re among friends, so I’ll, um, let’s go with it. Um, you know, so say, take an example like political philosophy. Um, So if you’re writing about the nature of the just society or considering sort of central questions in political, uh, in political philosophy or about the legitimacy of, um, uh, political institutions, the sources of political authority, any kind of standard topic in political philosophy, Um, your enterprise doesn’t have a teleological structure in the way that trying to cure cancer does.
I mean, it’s not like you’re trying to, um, get society to be organized. And, uh, most philosophers would not think of what they’re doing in that way as designed to achieve a certain determinate political result. They might or might not, I, um, think that, well, they, you know, someday if they’re lucky, their… or if the world is lucky, their wonderful ideas will have some, some impact on things.
But most political philosophers don’t think about it in that way, I’m guessing.
(coughs)
Um, and yet, if you imagine suddenly that the world is about to be destroyed, what exactly is the point of trying to figure out, you know, the sources of, you know, legitimate political authority or the nature of political obligation, and so on? And what’s it, it seems in some pretty obvious sense, a pointless activity. And not because it was aimed at achieving a determinate effect which now can’t be achieved.
So why? Well, because it was a contribution of a kind to an enterprise of, uh, the social order trying to make sense of its collective life and trying to structure it in some reasonable way. And even though my particular contribution might or might not have any effect on that, somehow that whole activity seems valuable and important, and it’s important that it go on, on condition that there are going to be such societies to make sense of.
And I think there are a lot of cases like that that don’t really have the straightforward teleological structure. But again, under the assumption that there’s no human enterprise going forward, there’s just no point in doing it. I mean, it would be weird, it seems to me, if somebody sat there trying to work out the right, you know, conception of, um, of, uh, you know, rights or retributive justice or political obligation or whatever under those kinds of circumstances.
So again, I, you know, I, I’d wanna go category by category. I think some of the cases that are puzzling are the kinds of cases, you know, Harry and Susan have focused on, cases about, you know, the appreciation of music, things that don’t look as if they should be like that. Their rewards seem more, as I said, you know, yesterday, available in the moment.
Um, so it’s a little harder to understand that. But there I, I do think that one thing that’s happened is that these things are, you know, are goods that we think of as having a place in a s– in a, in a, in a certain kind of life. And, um, if… And but a good life, uh, if I’m right about the first kinds of categories, really is more than we recognize, a life that situates itself and is implicitly but quite centrally seen as situated within a temporally extended sort of ongoing human experience.
And if you take that away, then well, of course, people can still, you know, you know, turn on their iPods and, you know, listen to music. But– And you know, we could sit down and have a meal, let’s say, notwithstanding the trouble I was trying to make for Susan about that the other day.
You know, we sit down and have a meal. But, but the significance of a meal, um, with friends under these circumstances would be, I take it, different. Not nothing, but Perhaps, but, but different.
Even if, even if we think some things would survive, I hope some things would survive. I assume some would. I think that it would be, for the reasons I’m giving, um, vastly diminished, even if we can find some categories that would, would still, um, would still, uh, persist.
And I mentioned music and those kinds of things partly ’cause James brings them up, but partly ’cause they look like the hardest cases, and there’s some at least reason to question whether even they would pull through. But, but the huge sort of swath of territory that’s covered by things like cancer research, building bridges, you know, trying to promote, you know, more just legislation and pursuing questions in political philosophy, I think would be kind of pretty much out the window. And that’s why I– that’s part of why I’m resistant to the bounce-back scenarios that people are… the sort of optimistic scenarios.
I just think there’d be a whole lot that wasn’t available for bouncing back to. Martin Jay.
[01:15:47] MARTIN JAY:
Uh, I, I share your sense of the importance of the afterlife as something that matters, but I’d like to parcel a little bit more exactly what we mean by mattering. It seems to me it’s useful perhaps to divide it into three different categories. Uh, the first we might call, uh, the social Darwinist natural version of mattering.
That is to say, there is something inherent in all species to survive. And on the level of, uh, the germ plasm surviving the individual deaths of the, uh, you know, the somatoplasm, whatever it’s called, there is in nature a strong imperative somehow to survive, you know, a few lemmings, uh, to the contrary notwithstanding. So that’s a very basic, powerful, uh, let’s say objective value.
I mean, we, we may not know it. Uh, animals may not know it, but it’s there in nature. And so life has its own, in a way, telos.
Uh, it may not always succeed, but it has it. Then there are more subjective, uh, notions of,
(coughing)
uh, mattering. And I would– Perhaps it might be useful to divide them between those that are psychological and those that have to do with culture, reason, uh, that you would defend as not weird. So it seems to me there are very clearly problematic psychological reasons for investing a lot in posterity.
Uh, a kind of, say, the narcissism of fame, uh, or the belief that somehow, uh, injustices can be, uh, you know, through resentment, can be, uh, satisfied in the future in ways that are perhaps, uh, pathologically delusional, but nonetheless we feel the future will redeem the past. Or whatever the, the, the kind of version of a psychological investment we have in our children as somehow, uh, people with whom we identify and hope will make good. So all of these have a kind of, in a way, irrational emotional quality.
And then we might say they’re the cultural, uh, goods. The, the sense in a way of almost indebtedness to the past as an entailed inheritance that we have to pass on. That we’re the curators of a past that is worthy of being, uh, remembered and nurtured and not forgotten.
So there’s a, a way in which that is, is a motivation. And then also the problem-solving motivations. So I mean, let’s build a better bridge.
Let’s solve the con– All of these are part of what matters. So I think to make the argument, it would perhaps be useful to have a more, uh, let’s say, uh, you know, specific typology of the things that matter and that have mattered, and some of which may be, you know, prioritized over others rather than lump them together. It seems there’s a little bit too much of a kind of, uh, uh, you know, general sense of what might matter rather than doing that kind of parsing.
[01:18:26] SAMUEL SCHEFFLER:
Okay. I don’t know how much I can do to, um, to address your concern. I was approaching it from a, an angle that may be s- slightly orthogonal to the, to the concerns that you have.
So I was concerned with valuing or things mattering to us as, as and trying to understand the state of mind we’re in, insofar as we’re in some state of mind when something matters to us or, or we value it. Um, and so in my sense, I don’t think that, um, you know, species that don’t have thoughts of this kind at all, even though they have a survival i-imperative, uh, genetically based survival imperative, I don’t think they value anything in th- in this sense. I mean, I don’t think they–
I don’t think things matter to them in the, in the way that I’m talking about. Um, I’m interested in the, um, uh, in the human attitude of valuing and what it consists in, where that is compatible with particular things people value, um, being, um, you know, misguided, delusional, having very weak. We on the outside might give various debunking explanations of, um, their, their valuing attitudes.
We might say that they value that only because, and then fill in the blank, you know. But that’s okay. At the moment, I’m not trying to vindicate any particular instance of valuing or even valuing in general.
I just want to know what it is. What is it when somebody values something? And, um, I take it that valuing is an important and central human attitude that, um, although it sometimes gets lost, um, in a society where, you know, a consumer-oriented society where we’re under pressure to construe everything as just a bunch of desires, satisfaction of which can have a price tag attached to it, um, that people still aren’t yet like that, that actually some things matter to us.
Um, they– we don’t just want them a lot, they matter to us, or they’re important to us, or we value them. And, um, so my concern– Part of the reason I think that it may have seemed that I was lumping a lot of different things together is because I think that those attitudes do get attached to a lot of different kinds of things. And again, I didn’t mean in any way to be ruling out, um, various skeptical or debunking or unmasking explanations of particular sorts of, uh, valuings that people might go in for, um, or even global, uh, skepticism of certain kinds.
I mean, I happen not to be a global skeptic about value, but I didn’t mean that anything I said would rule that out. I was trying to understand valuing, which I do as, as I said, I– to me, it, I, I believe it’s a sort of syndrome of attitudes that involves certain beliefs about, uh, value, certain kinds of emotional investments and vulnerabilities, certain perception of things as being reasons for acting in certain ways, and so on. Um, and I was concerned with the effects on us, uh, and on our valuing of these, you know, speculations about, uh, the elimination of human life, um, how it, the effect it would have on our capacity to see what we were doing as valuable.
And so I wasn’t so concerned to try to isolate the sources of particular values and to give either debunking or vindicating explanations of the sources of different, uh, values. I don’t know if that helps at all, but, um, maybe it at least helps to explain why I wasn’t quite addressing the kinds of things you’re suggesting.
[01:22:18] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Thank you. Uh, uh, I found your talk very thought-provoking. I just have two thoughts I wanted to ask you for comments on.
Um, they go in quite different directions. Uh, my sympathies are, or my intuitions are with you, so I’m, I’m thinking myself. The first one, um, is that one possible reason why lack of an afterlife, uh, would be a bad thing or cause us, uh, depression or whatever, uh, could be because it reduces, uh, humanity in a way, um, that Nietzsche describes, uh, in terms of it, it, of, um…
Well, let me say this. say that it, it, it curtails the process of, of, of self-creation or self-becoming that some people think is important. And, uh, when you were speaking yesterday and the day before, I was thinking of Nietzsche’s, um, figure of the last human being, der letzte Mensch, in Zarathustra, who is the, uh, who embraces mediocrity.
He’s the last human being. He, um, he’s the most contemptible of human beings, says Nietzsche. He lacks the chaos, the inner chaos necessary to give birth to a dancing star.
He makes everything small. Uh, and so you get the picture. So that’s one thought.
Uh, the second thought picks up– it goes in a different direction. It picks up on what you said about the social dimension of human valuing, and I think there is– or there are multiple important social dimensions to human valuing. And one of the, um, social dimensions I didn’t hear coming out in your, in your talk, um, has to do with the, um, affirmation of, uh, by other people of the value of what I value.
And here I was thinking of Hegel, uh, who, uh, in the Phenomenology talks about the beautiful soul as a kind of a hollowed out or empty or depressed self. And the way I read what he has to say there is this, this beautiful soul, empty self, uh, lacks, uh, uh, uh, affirmation by others of the intrinsic intrinsic value of what, uh, she values or he values. Um, and I think that thought can be developed.
I have my own thoughts, but I’ll, I’ll, I’ll stop here. So no, no, uh, let me just say one more important thing. The reason that’s important is because it cannot be the affirmation by others of what I value can’t be the affirmation of my peers because they could be wrong.
It has to be some sort of anticipated affirmation on the part of, of, by future human beings. So this, this affirmation is a kind of a, uh, with a future-oriented affirmation, and that might be part of the reason why it’s a cause for despair and it’s lacking.
[01:24:55] SAMUEL SCHEFFLER:
Thank you. Those are both extremely interesting points. I don’t know.
I, I, um Um, certainly agree that the problem is with the, uh, as far as the first point is concerned, with the doomsday and infertility scenarios is in some sense that humanity is reduced. I don’t, you know, find terribly compelling the specifically Nietzschean twist on that. Um, but I agree that in some sense, that’s exactly the point.
Humanity is reduced, not only is reduced temporally and in consequence, reduced in other ways, deprived of the capacity to lead lives under the idea of value as it were. Um, and that that is a, a kind of diminishment of human beings of a certain kind. So in broad spirit, I, I think I, um, I completely embrace that
And I thank you for the suggestion. Uh, also with the social dimension, um, uh, the Hegelian, uh, take on it is interesting and again, I do think, uh, actually, um, that the affirmation by other people of what I value is certainly an imp– a very important aspect of the social dimension of value. I see its relevance to this case actually less in the idea that future generations will affirm what I value now, and somehow I need them to, to affirm or vindicate my values.
Um, the, the relevance that strikes me off the top of my head, um, as being, um, salient is that I think it gets at something that I imagine happening under these doomsday or infertility conditions. When I describe my resistance to the idea that people would just bounce back or that they would all just decide to carry on and so on, part of the thought is that some-something that was sort of, as it were, the, um, the, um,
(coughs)
the unhealthy mirror image of this phenomenon would be more likely to take. I mean, nobody would be confident of the value of what they were doing, and nobody would be confident of the value of what other people are doing. And in place of affirmation, there would just be a lot of mutually reinforcing kind of negativity or sort of loss of value, um, and the sense that people would reinforce their lack of confidence rather than reinfor– rather than affirming, um, one another’s values.
And that some- something of the social dimension of value would be under, uh, attack under those circumstances. Precisely, that one reason our confidence would be shaken is because everybody else’s confidence would be shaken, and the shaken confidence of each would reinforce the shaken confidence of the others, and it would be very hard to break out of this cycle under those conditions. So I, um, that actually I, it’s not–
I know it’s not exactly the point you had in mind, but it is something that I, um, that I– Well, I haven’t managed to bring it out very well right now, but I feel I didn’t manage to bring it out at all earlier, and it’s part of what’s influencing my, um, my sense that, uh, that it would be very hard just to muster or to sort of retrieve confidence by it just an act of will, as it were, or an act of sort of pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps or whatever.
[01:28:41] MODERATOR:
So these have been terrifically rich and stimulating questions, and so it made me, for one, very eager to hear as many as we can, um, before we have to, um, close. So please try to keep your questions as, as brief as, as you can. Um, so perhaps the, the gentleman behind Sam.
[01:28:57] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
So I have, uh, three points or questions to make.
[01:29:01] MODERATOR:
Well, could we just-
[01:29:02] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
One is about how to… Sorry?
[01:29:04] MODERATOR:
Could, could we just, uh, le– uh, just ask one question? Is that allowed?
(laughter)
[01:29:09] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
To the extent- I came from Wayne State, Detroit, so I thought I’d get a special, uh, consideration.
(laughter)
It’ll be quick, and it– and I’ve followed Jay’s advice to hone my question.
(laughter)
I think there’s a way for you to avoid the objection about, uh, it depends, your views depend on empirical considerations. I wanna say something about the relationship between what matters and rational care or mattering, and I want to defend your asymmetry view about the Albie case. So the way to start with this is about on what matters.
I take that to be what’s valuable. Luckily, we have these squares. Here’s a matrix.
On the top goes what, what matters personally and what matters impersonally. I’ll call those personal and impersonal goods. It’s the kind of things Parfit talks abo- a lot about.
But on the rows, you have new considerations. You have the, the goods that require the continued existence of a rational collective. Shauna talked about humanity or rational collective, but something in that ballpark.
That’s row one. Row two is doesn’t require the continued existence of a rational collective, and under that is 2A, but does require an afterlife, a personal afterlife of the sort you talked about yesterday, and 2B doesn’t even require
(coughs)
the existence of a personal afterlife. And that row 2B, I think what, what, uh–
[01:30:39] SAMUEL SCHEFFLER:
Sir, is there an– Uh, this is, is terrific. I, I’m gonna–
[01:30:42] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
You’re–
[01:30:42] SAMUEL SCHEFFLER:
I’m gonna get this.
[01:30:43] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Hold on, you’re gonna like it.
(laughter)
[01:30:45] SAMUEL SCHEFFLER:
But I can’t follow it because–
[01:30:47] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Yes, you can. There they go. It’s personal, impersonal, and the roles are about the things that, that Sam Scheffler is talking about.
The thing about is that, is I think you should address whether those things that are– don’t require a collective rational continuation and don’t require a personal afterlife, whether they are more valuable or less valuable than the things that do. Not whether what’s gonna happen when people believe that they, that they, that they don’t have this continued existence or not. It’s a strictly philosophical question, which is more valuable?
That’s point one. Point two is about-
[01:31:26] MODERATOR:
That’s terrific, but we’re running out of time for this.
[01:31:27] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Hold on, hold on.
[01:31:29] MODERATOR:
We can’t. We’re gonna need-
[01:31:30] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
These are all central questions to what Sam’s talking about.
[01:31:33] MODERATOR:
They are, but we also need to hear questions from other people, So thank you very much. It’s terrific, but we need to hear the answers.
[01:31:38] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Can I continue, Sam? Would you let me continue?
[01:31:40] SAMUEL SCHEFFLER:
Okay. Um.
[01:31:43] MODERATOR:
There will be time during the reception for people to chat some more. Please go ahead, Sam.
[01:31:50] SAMUEL SCHEFFLER:
Okay. Um, So, um, Yeah, I don’t know that I, um- um… That was the suggestion of a line of thought.
Sounds interesting. I, I don’t think that there was actually a question posed, so I don’t really have, um, uh, exactly an answer. It’s, um, if I get the, the drift of what you’re saying, um, you’re suggesting a different way of, um, a different way of, um, isolating the importance of the goods that depend on afterlife of one sort or another, and trying to, um, without relying on issues about doomsday scenarios or the elimination of life on Earth at all, but to classify these goods, uh, independently by thinking about their dependence of this kind.
I guess what I’m not sure about is how we would be sure of their dependence, uh, if not by thinking about what it would be like if the, if, if, if people, if the afterlife weren’t available. Um, but I agree with what perhaps is the drift of that, that that’s just an, a heuristic, as it were, and that the goods could be classified in principle that way independently, and that that might be a useful, uh, line to pursue.
[01:33:08] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
So how do you think the human reaction to the Cold War, especially the Cuban Missile Crisis, confirm or not confirm your conjecture in the doomsday scenario? There wasn’t exactly determinancy, but everyone lived with the fear of an imminent nuclear apocalypse, so
[01:33:29] SAMUEL SCHEFFLER:
Um, It’s an interesting question. Uh,
(coughs)
It was a fear, but people didn’t think that it, they weren’t convinced that it was inevitable. It was definitely going to happen, and that human life– I mean, it was a fear of something terrible happening that would have terribly destructive effects. It fell still considerably short of, as it were, the perceived certainty that human life as a whole was going to end imminently.
Um, there was the fear that there was going to be a nuclear war. Many, many people would be killed, that it was going to be horrible, and people were terrified of it. But it’s not quite close enough, I think, to the kind of doomsday I’m talking about for people’s reactions in those circumstances to be, um, to be a good guide.
Um, that’s my initial sense of it anyway. It did spawn a lot of sort of doomsday, apocalyptic films and novels and so on, which imagine more drastic things, and so there’s room there to sort of play around with oth- with other takes people had on that possibility. But I think people’s actual reactions to the Cuban Missile Crisis, um, don’t provide, uh, a good enough test.
(unintelligible)
[01:35:03] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
So Sam, I find your line of argument extremely compelling. Um, and so much so that I find myself tempted to, uh, towards a stronger conclusion than yours. Um, although I suspect that you might find this stronger conclusion less congenial.
Um, and the thought is that maybe our valuing depends for each of us, not just on the survival of human beings in general, but on the survival of people who stand in a kind of recognizable personal connection to us, the survival of the people we love, and then in turn, you know, like past a couple of generations, the people that they love. I suppose in a way, the conclusion that I’m tempted towards is in a sense broader than yours, because I’m suggesting that we don’t need to think of this as going on beyond more than a few generations. And what– in a, in a way, this is, uh, the–
(coughs)
in a way, the converse of what Shauna was suggesting when she was wondering whether it had to be human beings or whether it could be other forms of rational beings who, but who nonetheless shared our values. But I’m wondering if maybe something narrower is needed, And the considerations that tempt me towards this is actually a part of your talk that I found, your lectures that I found the most convincing, which was about the need to personalize our relation to the future, the idea that we want to feel like the party is going on. We’ve left it, but there is still a recognizable place for us.
And I think for many people who aren’t doing things like finding cures for cancer or writing books that they expect to be read in many, you know, uh, in, by future generations. Uh, many people who have jobs that they don’t feel actually make much of a contribution, but who feel like where they’re really making a contribution is to the welfare of their friends and their family and people dear to them. I’m wondering if it might not be enough for them to think of humanity as a whole as surviving.
What they care about is this more immediate, uh, collective afterlife.
[01:37:08] SAMUEL SCHEFFLER:
Yeah. Well, Um, as you know,
(clears throat)
I certainly agree that people, obviously, ha– it matters to them intensely that, um, people to whom they have personal connections should survive and flourish, and that, uh, a lot of people’s concern about the various kinds of catastrophe scenarios that I was, uh, articulating, um, do derive from sort of particularistic attachments of various kinds, um, whether it’s personal relations, family relations, re- Uh, relations of affection,
(clears throat)
relations of group membership, uh, relations of shared values and so on. I was, um, arguing that that wasn’t all there was to it. That even if you factor out all of those things, there’s a further thing, which is a concern about the, um, survival of humanity itself.
And, um, and, uh, one way of hearing what you’re saying is, um, as expressing a kind of skepticism about that, which I understand but don’t share. Um, so I still am inclined to, uh… I mean, I agree you can-
you could think of our reactions even in those doomsday scenarios. You could interpret them along the lines you suggest. I mean, I emphasize that nobody you now know who’s alive would be affected directly.
Their lun– lives wouldn’t be cut short. But you could interpret that as, uh, our– the fact that we’d be up, you know, disturbed despite that as an evidence that we care about, you know, the next generation of affectional ties or the descendants of the people we care about and so on. You could, and again, this may be one of those places where we’re just trading different intuitions.
I guess I don’t think that’s all there is to it, though I certainly agree at least in part with the idea that there are various forms of particularistic attachment that would be thwarted, um, even if there are some that wouldn’t by the, um, by these kinds of doomsday scenarios. Now, there is, I mean, one way of objecting to my view would be to say, or at least to the particular way I formulated it, would be to see me as trying to occupy a kind of unstable middle ground that, you know, on the one hand, we could try to explain all of these reactions in purely particularistic terms, either of the kind you’ve described or of other variant kinds. But if we’re not going to do that, if we say that there’s something more general that people are moved by, then why not go all the way to what Seana was suggesting, and maybe it’s just, you know, roughly rational agency or beings capable of engaging in reason-giving practices and having values and changing their values for reasons, and so on.
Whereas I seem to want to, you know, although I’m not firmly committed to it, I want to perch somewhere in the middle, and I seem to be oddly attached to the species, you know? Um, and, um, And, um, you know, so maybe in the end, for me, that’s just a big particularism, as it were, that I think that, um, I’m kind of fond of human beings and it, um, um… So, um, and I, you know, I, I accept that as, um, a challenge that I haven’t really, um, addressed satisfactorily to try to e-explain a little better about why that some middle ground of that kind would be the right place, uh, to occupy.
I’ve met– I said, you know, as a matter of fact, I am moved by some inchoate thoughts about the significance of history and biology and so on, um, that lead me not to wanna go all the way to Shauna’s picture without a bit more of a struggle. Um, but on the other hand, I do think that, I think that, um, I do think that those same considerations provide a basis for a considerable degree of distress and, um, demoralization even in the absence of particularistic concerns, though it’s hard to prove it ’cause it’s hard to factor out all the particularistic possibilities.
[01:41:44] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Um, I was struck by, uh, the thought or the, the word you used when you were describing, um, various, uh, activities we no longer find valuable. You, you mentioned the word contribution. Um, and I wondered if some of the divergence of intuitions about what we could continue to value in the case where we don’t see a collective afterlife has something to do with, um, a, the creative act and, and what’s– and what it makes sense to– whether it makes sense to continue to create things, um, given that there won’t be people after us.
Something that might make sense, though, is a sort of backward-looking valuation that happens when you think of, like, nostalgia and, and the kind of, you know, attitudes people have when they look back on, you know, past activities that are done now and that they’re appreciating. And you might be able to kind of factor in our ability to appreciate music in that way. Even in that scenario, maybe there’s a kind of nostalgia or backward-looking thought of, wow, wasn’t that a great human endeavor?
And I wonder maybe, maybe others– after Sam responds, maybe the others could say a little bit about whether they think the activities they have in mind are mostly that kind, where the way we’re valuing them is kinda backward-looking, nostalgic way, rather than enabling us to create or making us think creation makes sense.
[01:43:00] SAMUEL SCHEFFLER:
Um, yeah. All stations would be oldies stations, I guess, and the, uh um,
(laughter)
the, um… It’s hard to know. Nostalgia under actual circumstances serves certain kinds of functions, um, that I’m not sure it would serve under doomsday kind of conditions. I agree that backward-looking attitudes of some kind would still be available.
Um, my sense is that they might be incredibly painful. Um, I don’t know, so I, I, I inclined to agree people might go in for a lot of that.
Um, I don’t know that I see it as a promising vehicle for recovering value in a way, but I certainly agree that it seems plausible that people should want to think about better times or past values or something like that. Um- I don’t
[01:44:12] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
think it seems very promising. It just seems like-
[01:44:14] SAMUEL SCHEFFLER:
A natural kind of, uh, uh, sort of a natural temptation under those conditions. Is that the thought? Yeah, I, I mean, I agree. I agree with that.
[01:44:24] MODERATOR:
Do the other members of the panel have thoughts?
[01:44:28] SUSAN WOLF:
Um, I believe it was Alvy Singer, although it might have been another character in a Woody Allen movie, who, um, met a young woman and wanted to ask her out, asked her, “What are you doing Saturday night?” And she said, “Committing suicide.” And he said, “How about Friday night?”
(laughter)
And, and to me, this, this illustrates the
(laughter)
extent to which you may be underestimating how hedonistic and optimistic
(laughter)
and narrowly focused people are. I mean, that he was willing to embark on a relationship that
(laughter)
would last less than 24 hours.
[01:45:09] SAMUEL SCHEFFLER:
Um, so,
(laughter)
so, uh, but th-but this also leads to another question, which is about suicide. And as I recall, the initial doomsday scenario or the afterlife scenario, um, it was that one would live one’s life and then know that thirty days after one died, Everybody else’s life would end, and or the, the Earth would blow up or whatever. Yeah.
So I’m wondering whether you think somebody who was in that situation would be inclined to commit suicide knowing that, you know,
[01:45:44] SUSAN WOLF:
he is– he or she is in great despair and could b-put him or herself out of that misery, but knowing that thirty days afterwards everybody else is going to be gone.
[01:45:55] SAMUEL SCHEFFLER:
Um, gee, I hope not. Um, they, um, of course, I was imagining it. Um, uh, I was imagining that, um, the day of your death was independently fixed, and that it was thirty days after that independently fixed date that the asteroid was going to collide with Earth, so that it wasn’t a matter of whenever you die, thirty days after that, it would, like you, you’ll be detonating an asteroid or something like that.
Um, if we imagine some case of that kind, you’re sort of holding some, you know, cosmic tripwire or something that’s gonna all the- The asteroid will be, will, uh, will be released when you die. Um, you know, I don’t know what to say about what people would do under those circumstances.
Um, um, I, you know, can I imagine the psychology of someone who decides to end it all for everybody now rather than I guess I can imagine the psychology of such a person. I don’t know. Um, I don’t know.
I don’t have the faintest idea how, how likely it is that there would be someone with that psychology, or how many people would share it. And as for Woody Allen, uh, yeah, well, um,
(laughter)
what can I say? He really w- You know, he really wanted to… He really wanted that day.
(laughter)
[01:47:26] MODERATOR:
Um, are there any questions for the– Also, if you have questions for other members of the panel, feel free to… Um, so, uh, the young lady at the back.
[01:47:35] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Hi. Um, you, uh, say that people fall into despair under these scenarios, but if you’re losing value, and presumably you’re losing– these things lose meaning, so, um, why do you lose, uh, so basically, why do you fall into despair and not into apathy?
[01:47:54] SAMUEL SCHEFFLER:
Um, yeah, I, um, I think I said apathy was one of the things I would expect to increase. I, um, if I emphasized despair, uh, I shouldn’t have, because certainly in the written text, I did talk about apathy and anomie and loss of confidence. Um, and I think that is one of the things that, um, that I imagined increasing under those circumstances.
Just a loss of confidence in there being values in a way. And I, I take the point of your, um, question to be that despair actually itself presupposes a kind of commitment to value and that, of, of course, that’s right. Um, I, I think there would be despair too, no doubt, but I think that apathy is one of the things I would expect to increase.
It certainly is a feature of P.D. James’s actual novelistic description of what happens. Um, one of the things she emphasizes is just apathy. People like become unresponsive to values that previously galvanized them, and it’s not that they’re exactly despairing in any obvious way.
They just are kind of listless and, you know, sort of, um, detached. But I, I– it’s a good point, and you’re right to pick up on the, the, the different, um, the, the different, um, resonances of those two terms.
[01:49:25] MODERATOR:
So I thought I’d pause for a second to see if other members of the panel wanted to.
[01:49:29] PANELIST:
I, I actually thought one of the ways despair manifests itself is by apathy. So I, I, I mean, maybe this is just a difference in words, but depression, which is of- which is often A reaction to something awful in someone’s life, uh, l-leads to a kind of apathy, I mean, listlessness. So I, I, you know, there…
But I, I guess I agree with Sam. There’s just, um, there’s being upset and sad, and that’s different from being, um, unmotivated, and it’s quite reasonable to think the second is as, as likely or more likely than the first
(cough)
.
[01:50:14] SEANA SHIFFRIN:
I, I suppose I was convinced by both because these people would understand what it would be to live under conditions in which one could have aspirations, so they would know that a capacity they had was frustrated. Uh, and that seems to me to be more connected to despair than to apathy, um, because you feel like something’s been taken from you that you can conceive fully well of having, having had, and having had a history in which others around you had had those opportunities. And that all seems more connected to despair, though I agree apathy would also be a likely consequence.
But so that’s why it seems like both seem correct.
[01:51:01] SAMUEL SCHEFFLER:
Okay. Well… Oh, yeah. Um, just let me- Wait for a second. Sorry. Let me give you the microphone.
[01:51:07] AUDIENCE MEMBER 1:
Uh, this goes back to a point Professor Shiffrin raised. I was curious if there is a val- if there’s a value to value, or is does that give us a reason to populate the afterlife if there is one? And I, I don’t know if Professor Sh-Shiffrin wanted to comment on that.
[01:51:23] AUDIENCE MEMBER 2:
I wanted to raise the question.
(laughter)
[01:51:29] SAMUEL SCHEFFLER:
I take it that’s a no. Um. You want me to comment on it?
[01:51:35] AUDIENCE MEMBER 1:
If, if you would like to, yes.
[01:51:36] SAMUEL SCHEFFLER:
Uh, no. Uh, I, I mean No, actually, I mean, I’d be happy to if I, if I, um, if I thought I had something sensible to say about it, but I’m not sure that I do.
[01:51:50] MODERATOR:
Well, I’m, I’m put in mind of, um, Shauna’s remarks yesterday that, uh, that it’s for, for many valuable things, it’s important to bring them to a, to a timely end. So, um, perhaps you could join me in, uh, thanking our lecturer and our commentators.
(applause and cheering)