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Notes and Renderings

How People Who Don’t Yet Exist Matter More to Us Than People Who Do

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Samuel Scheffler of NYU LawUniversity Professor Samuel Scheffler delivered the prestigious, three-day Tanner Lectures on Human Values in March at the University of California, Berkeley. At the lectures, a multi-university series across nine institutions recognizing the lecturers’ remarkable achievements in the field of human values, Scheffler spoke about the idea of a “collective afterlife”—the survival of other people after one’s death. He expounded on this theme in two separate talks, titled “How People Who Don’t Yet Exist Matter More to Us Than People Who Do” and “How the Present Depends on the Future.”

Past philosophers who have given the Tanner Lectures include NYU Law’s Ronald Dworkin, Thomas Nagel, and Jeremy Waldron.

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