Sam Harris believes that all questions of value depend on consequences in terms of “the well-being of conscious creatures like ourselves.” (The Moral Landscape, p. 62) The major flaw in his ethics is that he doesn’t understand the overriding importance of the question of whether our fate is eternal death or everlasting life. He argues convincingly that the thinking of a Muslim suicide bomber is not a repudiation of consequentialism, given his or her expectation of experiencing an eternity of happiness after death and that he or she will also gain admittance for seventy close relatives. Of course Harris believes—and I agree—that there is no good reason to believe such behavior will please God, but for Harris the reason is that there is no God, whereas for me the reason is that God hates cruelty in this world or in any world. But if God (in Harris’s terms, “if the universe were so designed that . . .”—but if you’re going to talk about the universe being designed, why shy away from “God”?) gave us life, consciousness, and self-consciousness for a limited time after which we would become permanently unconscious, God would be a cruel god. It isn’t that an afterlife makes what happens in this life irrelevant. It’s the opposite. The prospect of one’s ultimate fate being the complete and permanent loss of consciousness is what would make what happens in this life irrelevant.
I used to think, as Harris no doubt thinks, that even if one becomes permanently unconscious upon dying, the objective fact will remain that one did have exactly the life that one had. But I have become convinced, at least partly by reading Unamuno, that that objective fact will be worthless because eventually it won’t be experienced by anyone other than God, if He exists—and God would have no reason other than cruelty to create me with an abhorrence of the very thought of permanent unconsciousness and then make that my fate.
Harris rightly rejects a worldview according to which the universe is so designed that it is justified for suicide bombers to kill themselves and other people because they will be rewarded in the afterlife for doing so. But he endorses a worldview according to which the universe is so designed that living, conscious, and self-conscious creatures exist for a time who love life and love others and want themselves and those they love to go on living, but who inevitably die, once and for all, and become permanently unconscious. He has no more reason to accept the second worldview than he has to accept the first one.