Video: Three Mysteries of the Concrete

Alexander Pruss, “Three mysteries of the concrete: Causation, mind and normativity”, Christian Philosophy 2022, online, Cracow, Poland, September, 2022.

The afterlife of humans and animals

I’ve been thinking a bit about the afterlife for non-human animals. The first thought is that there is a relevant difference between human and non-human animals in terms of flourishing. There is something deeply incomplete about the eighty or so years a human lives. The incompleteness of our earthly life is a qualitative incompleteness: it is not just that we have not had enough pieces of cake or run enough miles. Typically, whole areas of virtue are missing, and our understanding of the world is woefully incomplete, so that one of the most important things one learns is how little one knows. The story of the life is clearly unfinished, even if life has gone as well as it is reasonable to expect, and flourishing has not been achieved. Not so for non-human animals. When things have gone as well as it is reasonable to expect, the animal has lived, played and reproduced, and the story is complete.

If we think of the form of an entity as specifying the proper shape of its life, we have good reason to think that the human form specifies the proper shape of life as eternal, or at least much longer than earthly life. But there is little reason to think that form of an animal’s life specifies the length of life as significantly longer than the typical observed life-span of in its species.

If we accept the thesis which I call “Aristotelian optimism”, namely that things tend to fulfill their form or nature, we have good reason to think there is more to human life than our earthly life, but not so for non-human animals. In the case of humans, this line of argument should worry typical atheistic Aristotelian ethicists, because it would push them to reject Aristotelian optimism, which I think is central to ensuring knowledge of the forms in Aristotle’s system.

By the way, there may be an exception in the above argument for animals whose flourishing consists in relationships with humans. For there its flourishing might be incomplete if it cannot be a companion to the human over its infinite life-span. So there is some reason to think that species that are domesticated for human companionship, like dogs and to a lesser extent cats and horses (where companionship is less central to flourishing), might have an afterlife.