In his Death and the Afterlife, Samuel Scheffler provides a compelling argument that people would see less reason and be significantly less motivated to pursue most of their life's projects if they were to discover that there is no collective afterlife (i.e. future generations of humans continuing to exist after they die). Scheffler focuses on how people would react to learning there is no collective afterlife. In this paper, I focus on issues concerning how people ought to react to learning (...) there is no collective afterlife. Answers to this question lead to surprising conclusions that challenge some of the normative claims Scheffler seems disposed to endorse. This paper has two central aims. First, I attempt to show that negative attitudes toward the lack of a collective afterlife are warranted for two reasons that have been heretofore overlooked. Interestingly, such reasons leave open the possibility that it can be appropriate to lament the lack of a collective afterlife even if it is not bad, all things considered, for anyone. Second, I argue that the lack of a collective afterlife need not be bad, all things considered, for most people. This is because there could be a sufficient number of meaningful projects available to people that would compensate for the loss of pro tanto value caused by the lack of a collective afterlife. These considerations lead to the somewhat paradoxical conclusion that the lack of a collective afterlife need not negatively affect the total value of anyone's life, yet it may still be appropriate to lament the fact that there is no collective afterlife. (shrink)

Perhaps death’s badness is an illusion. Epicureans think so and argue that agents cannot be harmed by death when they’re alive nor when they’re dead. I argue that each version of Epicureanism faces a fatal dilemma: it is either committed to a demonstrably false view about the relationship between self-regarding reasons and well-being or it is involved in a merely verbal dispute with deprivationism. I first provide principled reason to think that any viable view about the badness of death must (...) allow that agents have self-regarding reason to avoid death if doing so would increase their total well-being. I then show that Epicurean views which do not preserve this link are subject to reductio arguments and so should be rejected. After that, I show that the Epicurean views which accommodate this desideratum are involved in a merely verbal dispute with deprivationism. (shrink)

Deprivationism cannot accommodate the common sense assumption that we should lament our death iff, and to the extent that, it is bad for us. Call this the Nothing Bad, Nothing to Lament Assumption. As such, either this assumption needs to be rejected or deprivationism does. I first argue that the Nothing Bad, Nothing to Lament Assumption is false. I then attempt to figure out which facts our attitudes concerning death should track. I suggest that each person should have two distinct (...) attitudes toward death: one determined by agent’s reasonable expectations about when she will die and one determined by the amount of metaphysically possible good one reasonably believes death precludes. (shrink)

Many of us feel existential terror when contemplating our future nonexistence. I examine several attempts to rationally justify existential terror. The most promising of these appeals to the effects of future nonexistence on the meaningfulness of our lives. I argue that even this justification fails, and therefore existential terror is irrational.

In The Human Predicament, David Benatar develops and defends the annihilation view, according to which “death is bad in large part because it annihilates the being who dies.” In this paper, I make both a positive and negative argument against the annihilation view. My positive argument consists in showing that the annihilation view generates implausible consequences in cases where one can incur some other (intrinsic) bad to avoid the supposed (intrinsic) bad of annihilation. More precisely, Benatar’s view entails that would (...) be prudent for someone to incur a non-trivial amount of pain in order to avoid being annihilated, even in cases in which the additional life one would live would not be good at all for the person living it. Yet, it seems imprudent to incur any amount of pain to continue living a life that isn’t good for the person living it, so annihilation itself cannot be (intrinsically) bad. Avoiding the implausible consequences I identify requires denying that annihilation is itself bad. My negative argument consists in demonstrating that standard forms of deprivationism can avoid all three of the major problems that Benatar attributes to them without having to posit that annihilation itself is bad. (shrink)