I do not have time to write up an outline or notes. Fortunately, the basic point of these lectures is fairly easy to state without an outline.
The core idea is that, for many people, there is a significant difference between their own deaths and the extinction of all humanity.
We all know we are going to die and many of us think that will be the end; there will be no personal afterlife in which we will live on after the death of our earthly bodies. While this is a sad thing, it does not leave most of us with despair. We manage to find meaning in our lives despite knowing that they will end.
By contrast, Scheffler thinks, knowing that humanity will end shortly after we die would fill us with despair and deprive most of our projects and pursuits of meaning.
That is unexpected and interesting.
In place of an outline, I am going to offer some quotations from the lectures that capture his thinking.
It is my contention that the existence of an afterlife, in my nonstandard sense of “afterlife,” matters greatly to us. It matters to us in its own right, and it matters to us because our confidence in the existence of an afterlife is a condition of many other things that we care about continuing to matter to us. (Scheffler 2013, 131)
His argument for this thesis involves two doomsday scenarios. In one, you are asked to imagine that an asteroid will destroy humanity shortly after your death. In the other, you are asked to imagine that humanity ends in a far less violent fashion. Rather than being killed, people no longer have children, meaning that the species will end after a generation.
These are the conclusions he draws after discussing these scenarios.
Although one of the primary reasons the personal afterlife matters to people is that it offers the prospect of personal survival, and although many people desperately wish to survive for as long as possible, a failure to believe in the existence of the personal afterlife is actually much less likely to erode people’s confidence in the value or importance of their worldly pursuits than is a failure to believe in the existence of the collective afterlife, which offers no prospect of personal survival. It is much less likely to lead people to think, to reason, to feel, and to act as if little or nothing was important to them. In these concrete respects, the collective afterlife matters more to people than the personal afterlife. In other words, our confidence that there will be a collective afterlife is, to a much greater extent than our confidence that there will be a personal afterlife, a condition of other things mattering to us here and now. (Scheffler 2013, 174)
In some very basic respects, our own survival, and even the survival of those we love and care about most deeply, matters less to us than the survival of strangers, the survival of humanity itself. … I am not underestimating our powerful impulses to personal survival or the deep terror that many people feel when contemplating their own deaths. Nor am I denying the importance of self-interested motivations in ordinary human behavior. My point is that despite the power of these attitudes, there is a very specific sense in which our own survival is less important to us than the survival of the human race. The prospect of the imminent disappearance of the race poses a far greater threat to our ability to treat other things as mattering to us, and, in so doing, it poses a far greater threat to our continued ability to lead value-laden lives. (Scheffler 2013, 174–75)
I made a couple digressions in class that I wanted to back up.
First: the dark forest hypothesis. This is one, disquieting, explanation of why we have not found alien life. It will sound familiar. And if you like this kind of thing, Liu Cixin’s trilogy starting with The Three Body Problem is very interesting.
Second: projections of world population.
Most people now live in countries where two or fewer children are born for every two adults. If all people in the United States today lived through their reproductive years and had babies at an average pace, then it would add up to about 1.66 births per woman. In Europe, that number is 1.5; in East Asia, 1.2; in Latin America, 1.9. Any worldwide average of fewer than two children per two adults means our population shrinks and in the long run each new generation is smaller than the one before. If the world’s fertility rate were the same as in the United States today, then the global population would fall from a peak of around 10 billion to less than two billion about 300 years later, over perhaps 10 generations. And if family sizes remained small, we would continue declining.
Finally, I mentioned something I called the “discount rate.” Wikipedia has a reasonable introduction to the concept.