Samuel Scheffler: Death & the Afterlife of Values

Life & Context

Samuel Scheffler was born in 1951 and grew up in the United States. He studied at Harvard College and completed a doctorate in philosophy at Princeton University in 1977, where he worked under Thomas Nagel, one of the most influential moral philosophers of the postwar generation. He taught for many years at the University of California, Berkeley, before joining New York University, where he holds the title of University Professor — the university's highest faculty rank. Over a distinguished career he has written at the intersection of normative ethics, moral psychology, and political philosophy, and his work is known for its combination of analytical rigor and genuine human seriousness.

His early reputation rests on The Rejection of Consequentialism (1982), one of the most important works of normative ethics of its decade. In it, Scheffler defended a middle position in the debate between consequentialism and deontology: agents are permitted, though not required, to give greater weight to their own interests and projects than to the impersonal good. This "agent-centered prerogative," as it came to be called, gave a precise shape to an intuition that common-sense morality had always honored — and it set the agenda for the subsequent decades of debate in ethics, engaging directly the tradition of Thomas Nagel, Bernard Williams, and Derek Parfit.

The work for which he is best known to a wider public grew out of his Tanner Lectures at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2012, published as Death and the Afterlife (2013). The book — a compact masterpiece of philosophical imagination — asks a question that seems at first almost frivolous and turns out to be deep: why do we care so much about the survival of humanity after our own deaths? And why should that caring change how we think about death, meaning, and value? The lectures were published with responses from Harry Frankfurt, Susan Wolf, Seana Shiffrin, and Niko Kolodny, and the exchange sharpened the book's claims into one of the liveliest recent debates in the philosophy of death.

Core Philosophy

Scheffler's core philosophical commitments lie in the structure of moral theory and the nature of value. His signature idea from The Rejection of Consequentialism — the agent-centered prerogative — captures the intuition that while we have strong reasons to promote the good, we are not merely instruments of the good: each of us has a legitimate claim to live our own lives, pursue our own projects, and favor our own commitments. This "hybrid" structure, neither strictly consequentialist nor strictly deontological, has been widely adopted as the most accurate map of our moral phenomenology.

But his most distinctive contribution to philosophy is a claim about the nature of value itself: that much of what we value is irreducibly relational. The value of many things in our lives depends on there being other people to share them with, to remember them, to continue them. A beautiful place is more valuable if others can see it; a discovery is more valuable if others can use it; a life's work is more valuable if others can build on it. Value, on this view, is not a property that objects carry intrinsically; it is a property of our relations to things, to each other, and to the future. This insight is what connects his ethics to his philosophy of death: the value we place on our own lives is partly a value placed on a world that will outlast them.

The famous thought experiments of Death and the Afterlife make the point vivid. Scheffler asks us to imagine that humanity will be painlessly annihilated thirty days after our own deaths — everyone alive will finish their natural lives, but no new people will ever exist. Or, alternatively, that we are immortal but humanity is doomed. His claim is that the first prospect would drain our lives of meaning almost completely: we would lose interest in projects that once seemed central — curing diseases, building institutions, writing books — because their point was always tied to a human future. If we really confront this, we discover something surprising about ourselves: we care about the continued existence of humanity after our deaths more than we care about our own continued existence. The "afterlife" that matters, Scheffler argues, is not our personal survival but the survival of human life — the "collective afterlife" of the species.

On Death & Mortality

Scheffler's contribution to the philosophy of death is to shift the question. The classic debate, from Epicurus to Thomas Nagel and Shelly Kagan, asks whether death is bad for the person who dies: the deprivation account says yes, because death deprives us of goods; the Epicurean says no, because there is no subject to suffer it. Scheffler accepts that this debate matters, but he argues that it is downstream of a deeper phenomenon. What actually organizes our attitudes toward death, he claims, is not the value we place on our own continued existence but the value we place on the continuation of the human enterprise.

The "afterlife conjecture" is his name for this discovery: most of us, most of the time, care more about the future of humanity than about our own survival. If this is right, several things follow. First, the fear of death is not simply self-regarding; it is bound up with our investment in a world that will go on without us. Second, the meaning of our lives is not self-contained: our projects, relationships, and achievements draw their value from a shared human future that we will not personally see. Third — and this is the radical turn — death itself may be a condition of value rather than merely its enemy. Scheffler argues that the finiteness of human life is part of what gives human activities their urgency and significance: if we were truly immortal, as Bernard Williams argued in "The Makropulos Case," we might find everything eventually boring and meaningless. Mortality, in this sense, is not the opposite of meaning but its setting.

Scheffler is careful not to overclaim. He does not think the afterlife conjecture shows that death is good, or that the fear of death is irrational, or that personal survival does not matter to us at all. His claim is more precise: that our attitudes toward death are inseparable from our attitudes toward the future of the collective, and that any adequate philosophy of death must reckon with this. This makes his work a bridge between the analytic philosophy of death — the literature of the deprivation account and the symmetry argument — and the existentialist tradition that asked what it means to live a finite life. It also gives him something distinctive to say about the ethics of future generations: if the survival of humanity is what underwrites the value of our lives, then our obligations to posterity are not peripheral moral duties but conditions of our own flourishing. The theme returns in Why Worry About Future Generations? (2018), where Scheffler develops the intergenerational ethics implicit in Death and the Afterlife.

Scheffler's argument has a striking implication for the fear of death. If we care more about humanity's future than about our own survival, then the terror of personal death — the terror that Ernest Becker and the existentialists placed at the center of the human condition — is not the whole story of our attitudes toward mortality. Much of what we feel about death is bound up with the fate of the projects and people we love, which is to say with the future of the collective. The fear of death, properly understood, may be inseparable from a commitment to life — a discovery that reframes both the psychology of death anxiety and the ethics of our responsibility to future generations.

Legacy & Influence

Scheffler's influence runs through three conversations. In normative ethics, The Rejection of Consequentialism redefined the debate over the demandingness of morality and remains a reference point for every attempt to chart a middle course between consequentialism and deontology. In moral and political philosophy, his essays on loyalty, boundaries, and the claims of co-nationals (Boundaries and Allegiances, 2001) are standard reading. And in the philosophy of death, Death and the Afterlife has become the most discussed contribution of the past decade — the book that every serious treatment of death and meaning now must engage, from the analytic literature to the philosophical literature on the meaning of life.

His significance for the study of death and mortality is twofold. He has enlarged the questions we ask: not only "is death bad?" but "what do our attitudes toward death reveal about the sources of value in our lives?" And he has connected the philosophy of death to the philosophy of the future: if the value of our lives is hostage to the survival of humanity, then mortality, meaning, and intergenerational obligation are one continuous subject. Readers who come to him from the philosophy of death find a thinker who takes the Epicurean challenge seriously, honors the deprivation account defended by Nagel, and then opens a new door — showing that our finitude is not merely a fact about us but the framework within which value and meaning become possible. In an age of climate change, pandemic, and extinction anxiety, his claim that we care more about humanity's future than our own survival has the strange double quality of all great philosophy: it is a discovery about ourselves, and a call to responsibility.

Sources

• Scheffler, Samuel. Death and the Afterlife. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. The Tanner Lectures and the afterlife conjecture.
• Scheffler, Samuel. The Rejection of Consequentialism. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. The agent-centered prerogative and the structure of moral theory.
• Scheffler, Samuel. Why Worry About Future Generations? Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. The intergenerational ethics that extends the argument.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Death." The analytic debate over death's badness that Scheffler reframes. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/death/

Related Topics

• The Philosophy of Death — the field his afterlife conjecture transformed
• Ethics — the moral theory his work spans
• Thomas Nagel — the deprivation account of death's badness
• Bernard Williams — the argument that immortality would be boring
• What is death? — the definitional backdrop to his thought experiments
• Mortal Questions — Nagel's collection containing the classic essays on death and the absurd