What Is Scheffler's Argument That Death Matters?

Quick Answer

Samuel Scheffler's Death and the Afterlife (2013), based on his Tanner Lectures, argues that philosophers have been asking the wrong question about death. Instead of asking whether death is bad for the person who dies, Scheffler asks what the fact of mortality does to the living — and his answer is that it does almost everything. Our sense that life is worth living, that our projects matter, that our loves and commitments have point, depends on a background assumption we rarely notice: that there will be a future — that other people will continue to live, love, and work after we are gone. Scheffler calls this the "collective afterlife," and he argues that it is a condition of meaning in our own lives.

What Is

Scheffler's argument turns on a distinction between two deaths. There is the death of an individual — the event we usually mean by "death" — and there is the death of humanity, the extinction of the human species. Scheffler argues that the second matters much more than we think, and that reflecting on it reveals why the first matters as well.

His central thought experiment is simple and devastating. Imagine that, unknown to you, the human race will be wiped out thirty days after your own death. You will not suffer; you will not know; your own life will run its course exactly as before. Would anything in your life change?

Scheffler's claim is that almost everything would change. The knowledge that humanity would end would drain value from the projects that now give your life meaning — the scientific research that will not be finished, the art that will not be seen, the community that will not continue, the children who will have no future. You might still find comfort in immediate pleasures, but the larger structures of value — the sense of contributing to something ongoing, the love of a world that will outlast you — would collapse. The thought experiment shows that our valuing is not self-contained: it reaches forward in time, into a future we will never see.

From this, Scheffler draws conclusions about death proper. Our own death matters, in part, because it ends our participation in the ongoing world we love — the world of people, projects, and possibilities. Death is not just the end of our experiencing; it is the loss of our place in a continuing story. And that is why the fear of death, however painful, is not the whole story: what makes our lives worth living is inseparable from our being part of something that outlasts us.

Historical Background

Scheffler (born 1951) is a moral philosopher at New York University, known for his work on value, reasons, and the nature of normativity. Death and the Afterlife grew out of his 2012 Tanner Lectures at Berkeley, with responses from Harry Frankfurt, Seana Shiffrin, and Niko Kolodny, published in the book. It is a work of "philosophy of death" in the contemporary analytical tradition — the tradition shaped by Epicurus's question, Thomas Nagel's deprivation account, and Bernard Williams's reflections on immortality — but Scheffler deliberately redirects the field.

Where Nagel asked whether death harms the person who dies, and Williams asked whether immortality would be boring, Scheffler asks what death and its collective counterpart do to the living. The shift is characteristic of his broader philosophy: Scheffler has long argued that our reasons and values are less self-centered than we suppose — that we care about things beyond our own welfare in ways that structure the whole of our practical lives.

The argument also connects to a long line of thought about mortality and meaning — from Heidegger's claim that being-toward-death individualizes us, to the religious idea that human life is part of a larger divine story, to contemporary debates about our obligations to future generations in the face of climate change. Scheffler's innovation is to make the connection precise and to show that it does not depend on any particular metaphysics: it is a fact about our psychology of value.

Key Arguments

The doomsday thought experiment. If humanity will end shortly after your death, your projects lose their point. Scheffler uses this intuition to show that the value we find in our activities presupposes a continuing human world. The argument is not that we only care about the long-term future; it is that caring about anything at all is embedded in a web of forward-looking concerns.

The collective afterlife as a condition of meaning. Scheffler argues that the "afterlife" that matters for the meaning of life is not a personal afterlife in a religious sense but the afterlife of the collective — the continued existence of other people. This is what makes our lives feel significant: we contribute to, and participate in, a world that will go on.

The revaluation of death. If the collective afterlife is a condition of meaning, then our own death matters in a new way. It matters because it separates us from the ongoing world — not because it is a harm experienced by a subject (the Epicurean worry) but because it removes us from a context of value that we love. Scheffler thus gives the fear of death a rational core without conceding that death is an evil in the Epicurean sense.

Ethical consequences. The argument has immediate ethical bite. If our valuing presupposes the continued existence of future people, then we have powerful reasons to care about the future of humanity — reasons grounded not in abstract duty but in the very structure of our caring. Scheffler develops this in Why Worry About Future Generations? (2018), where he argues that concern for posterity is not an optional extra but integral to a meaningful life.

Contemporary Relevance

Scheffler's argument has become one of the most discussed contributions to the recent philosophy of death. It reframes the ancient debate: rather than arguing about whether death harms the dead, it asks what mortality does to the living — a question that speaks directly to the anxieties of a century defined by climate change, pandemic risk, and technological disruption. If Scheffler is right, our deepest concern for the future of humanity is not a luxury but a condition of our own flourishing.

The argument also enriches the philosophical literature on death's meaning. Where existentialists emphasize the individualizing power of my own death, Scheffler emphasizes the social and forward-looking character of value: meaning is not a solitary achievement but a participation in a continuing human world. Both perspectives are needed, and together they show why the question "Does death give life meaning?" cannot be answered without asking what we love, what we hope for, and who will be here after us. This page is philosophical and educational in purpose.

Sources

1. Samuel Scheffler, Death and the Afterlife (Oxford University Press, 2013).
2. Samuel Scheffler, Why Worry About Future Generations? (Oxford University Press, 2018).
3. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Death.
4. Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge University Press, 1979), "Death."

Related Topics

• Does Death Give Life Meaning? — the question Scheffler answers through the collective afterlife.
• Would Immortality Be Boring? — Williams's challenge to the value of endless life.
• Scheffler — the philosopher behind the argument.
• Is Death Bad for the Person Who Dies? — the debate Scheffler reorients.
• Immortality vs Mortality — comparing the value of finite and infinite life.