An Assessment of the Nonmorality-Approach to Life after Death

Document Type : The Quarterly Jornal

Author

Assistant professor, Iranian Institute of Philosophy, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

Of the supernatural doctrines of religions, life after death encounters the significant epistemic-moral question of whether the belief in it is moral or nonmoral. The question might sometimes be asked based on the well-known problem of ethics of belief and analysis of the components of be-lief under moral duties and norms which says that such a belief lacks a plausible epistemic support and is, therefore, nonmoral. And sometimes in consequentialist terms, such a belief is said to give rise to nonmoral outcomes, which is thereby rendered as nonmoral by itself—outcomes such as its entailment of horrors such as punishment, abuses by the powerful, exploitation of ordinary people, justification of social injustic-es, prevention of full-fledged mundane life, putting the fate of the earth at risk, and putting man in place of God. In this paper, I draw upon an analytic-critical method to evaluate the extent to which the belief in af-terlife accompanies such consequences, showing that there is no undeni-able interconnection between the belief in afterlife and such conse-quences, because, for one thing, some of these consequences might not be nonmoral, such as punishment, and for another, most of the un-doubtedly nonmoral consequences are not closely tied to religions and are indeed refuted by religious doctrines, although they are common among religious communities and individuals.

Keywords

References

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