Dan's Wager

Here is what I actually believe, laid out as plainly as I can manage. There are two possibilities for a human being: something after death, or nothing. Everything I think about how to live follows from taking both seriously.

Start with nothing. If death is the end, then when you expire, every experience you ever had vanishes with you. They never happened, as far as you're concerned. You can't take it with you.

The vacation, the wine, the promotion, the ten thousand pleasant evenings: gone so completely that having had them and not having had them become the same thing. It could not matter less that those things happened to you. In fact, once you're dead, they never did happen to you.

This scenario usually comes bundled with the accidental universe, in which love, loyalty, and joy are evolutionary strategies, chemical tricks for getting genes into the next round. I know there are philosophers who find meaning in this picture. But in this case, I can't see much point in doing much of anything, and I can see no point at all in the pursuit of pleasure, since pleasure is precisely the thing that dies with its owner. If nothing matters, that includes the fun.

Some philosophers have objections to that first picture, but they're weak arguments made out of desperation, like, "But the pleasure was real while it happened!" Or, "Nothing matters, but that doesn't matter either." I don't really feel the need to address these types of arguments.

One argument does land for me, though. Samuel Scheffler proposes a thought experiment: imagine learning that thirty days after your death, everyone else dies too. The whole human world. The strange discovery is that this news would drain your life of meaning now. The research you'd never finish, for people who would never be cured. The building nobody would live in. The orchard no one would pick. Which reveals that what gave our projects meaning was never our own survival. It was everyone else's. Even the atheists, it turns out, believe in an afterlife; it just isn't theirs. Meaning, in their universe too, runs entirely through other people. The philosophers who escape my bleak scenario escape it by walking, by their own road, to the same conclusion that I reach by betting against a meaningless universe.

And here are those possibilities, which all presume that "Something" continues, and the universe contains some kind of meaning. This splits into three branches. First, maybe there is some sort of life after death, and it is earned by works, by how you treated people, especially the sick and the poor, which is the consistent testimony of most of the traditions that believe in an afterlife. This is what most human beings believe today and what the vast majority have believed throughout history. Then good works are the entire game, and you should immediately go start doing some.

Second possibility: maybe instead the afterlife is unconnected to behavior, granted to everyone or to no one on some other basis. Then what you do doesn't matter there either, but doing good couldn't hurt. And maybe, in the last branch, doing good could hurt you, and the universe punishes mercy. I refuse to plan for that universe, because a universe that damns you for feeding the hungry is a sick universe that should not be.

Lay the branches side by side and the table collapses into one answer. The only rational strategy, from pure logic, before any faith enters into it, is to bet on the do-good universe and live as if it were true: help the suffering, and be the best person you can manage to be.

If nothing follows death, all self-interested activity might as well have never happened. If Scheffler is right, doing good is still the one activity that holds meaning in that universe. If there is an afterlife, and it has an element of justice that somewhat runs on the works of the free will, doing good was the only thing that ever mattered. If the afterlife ignores works, doing good is harmless. There is no livable branch in which helping the sick and the poor was a mistake.

I recognize the shape of this, of course. It's Pascal's wager. However, Pascal's wager is about belief, and my wager is all about conduct, because, presuming the existence of free will, in accordance with a universe of meaning, shaping one's conduct can be done by anyone. It also survives the old objection about wagering on the wrong God, because the proposed heavens disagree about nearly everything, the names, the books, the days of rest, except one thing, which is mercy toward the weak, kindness, goodness, justice. These are the only bets that are honored in every system worth considering.

Addendum: Prior Art

The closest relative in perspective to the above is Marcus Aurelius. There is a quotation that circulates under his name: live a good life, because if the gods are just they will judge you by your virtues and not your devotions; if the gods are unjust, you should not want to worship them; and if there are no gods, you will have lived nobly anyway, and live on in the memory of the people who loved you. That is my wager, branch for branch, down to the refusal of the unjust universe.

Kant is the closest in rigor, arriving from the opposite direction. He argued that we can never know whether God or immortality exist, but that the moral life requires us to live as if the universe ultimately supports justice, because a moral law that commanded us to pursue an impossible good would be incoherent. That is my refusal of the sick universe, formalized. Kant reasons from morality to the just universe. I reason from the possible just universe to morality. Same bridge, crossed in opposite directions.

Pascal himself turns out to be closer to me than the textbook version suggests. When his bettor protests that he cannot simply make himself believe, Pascal tells him: then act. Attend the masses, take the holy water, live as believers live, and belief will follow conduct. So even the original wager collapses into a conduct wager at the practical step. The real difference is what conduct he prescribed. His was ritual. Mine is mercy. That is the difference between betting on a church and betting on the sick man.

Three more, briefly. William James defended the structure: when a question is momentous and the evidence cannot decide it, committing is rational and suspending judgment is itself a bet, often the worst one. The Bhagavad Gita teaches right action without attachment to outcomes, which is the same center of gravity reached from another civilization. And John Hick, the philosopher of religious pluralism, spent a career documenting the claim my last paragraph rests on: that the great traditions disagree about doctrine and converge on compassion.