Shiffrin, Seana Valentine - Preserving the Valued or Preserving Valuing?

2014/11/07

Comments to Death and the Afterlife, by Samuel Scheffler, Oxford University Press, 2013

Author generally agrees with Scheffler's afterlife conjecture in how it gives an non-experientialist account of value and how humans have a limited egoistic self-conception that is deeply social Author wants to explore the conceptual connection between valuing something and wanting it sustained, and also the supposed human "interest in being a part of human history" (pg144).

Author starts with the "conservatism thesis" about preserving what we care about. Author posits that the dismay over losing an afterlife (doomsday) is not the destruction of valuable projects, but the general loss of the human practice of "acting on reasons and of valuing" (pg145). Author plays with the thought that a simple interpretation of the conservatism thesis is not correct, since some valuable things need to end, including our own lives (pg145-6). Thus a more nuanced understanding might be necessary, particularly around understanding the conservation of value as not necessarily temporal (pg147-8), or perhaps that values can change (pg149). The theme of changing values over time is what offers the separation between the conservatism thesis and an explanation for the despair over doomsday: while losing past values to present or future ones can be difficult, it isn't the loss of those values that is dispiriting; instead the problem of doomsday is that valuable things will go away "for no reason or for bad reasons" (pg151), which is an alternative explanation to the despair over doomsday (pg151-4).

The second portion of the paper talks about the value of being in a human history, or, perhaps, just in a history of rational value. If a different species came after humans and they were rational and had values, and "appreciated what we valued and why" (pg155), this seems less troubling to author than doomsday, even if humans were all to die out. Author also describes and explores an asymmetry over humans not being troubled about the lack of value pre-human species, but troubled by the same lack post-human existence (doomsday) (pg156-7). Author uses an example of being created by aliens very recently (but they leave evidence that we had a past, which we eventually discover was false). This example is meant to show that while discovering humans didn't have a rich history is unsettling, it isn't nearly as bad as discovering they don't have a future.