LIFE AFTER DEATH LESSON 5 KANT ON LIFE

LIFE AFTER DEATH (LESSON 5)

KANT ON LIFE AFTER DEATH • Life after death is necessary for moral reasons 1724 • As humans, we have an innate sense that we should 1804 behave morally because doing good is the right thing to do • We ought to act in a certain way • We should strive to achieve the highest good summum bonum • If we ought to strive for something, “ought implies can” • Therefore, it must be possible to achieve the summum bonum, and that we are in fact, rewarded with happiness

KANT CONTINUED • However, goodness is not always rewarded with happiness. • Kant came to the conclusion that we have to postulate (to assume the existence of something, for the purposes of reasoning) the existence of God and the existence of an afterlife in order to achieve Justice. • Without God and without an Afterlife, our sense that we ought to be good would be pointless • Therefore, our innate sense of moral actions comes from our innate ideas of justice, which was given to us by God. Consequently, to fulfil justice in what we ought to do, there must be an afterlife.

1923 2010 ANTHONY FLEW ON LIFE AFTER DEATH • Wrote a book entitled Merely Mortal: Can you Survive your own Death? • “To say that someone survived death is to contradict yourself; while to assert that all of us live forever is to assert a [misunderstanding]. For when, after some disaster, the ‘dead’ and the ‘survivors’ have both been listed, what logical space remains for a third category? ” • The whole idea of life after death is meaningless • Survival of death is incapable of being tested, as well as being an incoherent concept. • Asked the question: “Can a man witness his own funeral? ” The response would be that one would have to survive death and this is self-contradictory. • Words such as “you” “her” “I” “Sean” are person words referring to physical organisms and only have meaning in this context. • For Flew, it is non-meaningful to apply such words to immaterial or spiritual bodies.

1910 1989 AJ AYER ON LIFE AFTER DEATH • Challenged the views of Flew by stating the following: • “There is no reason why the meaning of words should be inseparably tied to the contexts in which they were originally learnt. ” • Ayer felt that if there could be disembodied existence (an existence without a body), the language used (i. e. I, him, her) would not be important, and does not change that it could potentially be a reality.