Learning to be Hedonists in Paradise
In the name of God, the Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate In the course of his Tanner lectures, Death and the Afterlife (p p. 96-100), Samuel Scheffler argues that valuing something in a recognisably human way requires being temporally bounded (i.e. not living forever). This is because to value x involves making decisions to prioritise x in the background of scarcity, i.e. where we choose x over y , for instance, and where we fear the loss of x . For instance, I value reading novels, and so I make active choices to choose novel-reading over cooking, knowing that I only have a limited time to do so. The prospect of being unable to read makes me anxious and I fear the loss of being able to read (e.g. if I lose my books in a fire). Decision-making under scarcity is not possibly in an everlasting life. Whatever such an eternity might be, it is not a recognisably human way of valuing something. And so, a biological, mortal existence is necessary to valuing something: The point is no...
