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Christopher Belshaw, Death and the Afterlife, The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 64, Issue 255, April 2014, Pages 326–328, https://doi.org/10.1093/pq/pqu004
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Extract
This book—an introduction, three lectures, responses from four commentators, a reply by Scheffler—threatens to mislead in two respects. The title, acknowledged to be ‘a bit of a tease’ (p. 15) might suggest it considers whether we in any way survive death. It doesn’t. Some people will be disappointed, others relieved. So what does it do? Here there's a risk of being misled in another, and more important, way. The dust jacket tells us that Scheffler's ‘arresting conclusion is that, in order for us to lead value-laden lives, what is necessary is that we ourselves should die and others should live’. The introduction notes an ‘astonishing’ contrast: ‘the collective afterlife—the existence of people unknown to us and, indeed, as yet unborn—actually matters more to us than the continued existence of ourselves or anyone else now alive’ (p. 8). Scheffler himself puts the point—one he says is ‘remarkable’—very similarly: ‘the collective afterlife—the coming into existence of people we do not know and love matters more to us than our own survival and the survival of the people we do know and love (p. 45).
