Mala Chatterjee (Columbia Law School) has posted The Will to Outlive Ourselves (Time, Meaning, and Value: The Significance of the Past and the Future for the Present (Volume Honoring the Work of Samuel Scheffler) (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2025)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
In Death and the Afterlife, Samuel Scheffler asks us to consider a thought experiment: If you came to learn that—although you yourself will live a normal lifespan—the earth will be destroyed by a giant asteroid thirty days after your death, how would this affect your attitudes for the remainder of your life?
It is Scheffler's conjecture that—for the overwhelming majority of us—this "doomsday scenario" would induce paralyzing grief, despair, and disinterest in our plans and projects, despite the fact that our own lives would not be cut short by it at all. Thus, Scheffler argues, the doomsday scenario casts into relief something deeply counterintuitive about our lives and values: namely, that there is an important sense in which the existence of future generations matters far more to us than our own survival (or the survival of those we care about).
In this essay, I challenge Scheffler’s interpretation of what exactly the doomsday scenario elucidates about our lives, our values, and the future. Drawing upon philosophical insights from the literature on personal identity, I argue that our doomsday despair does not reveal that we collectively care more about future generations but rather that we will to outlive ourselves. I then canvass some substantive implications of this proposal and its background idea that we can "survive" our biological deaths in normatively significant ways, as well as some further questions to be explored in future work.