"Suppose you believe in the afterlife, or at least the possibility of an afterlife, and you're worried that you might go to hell. Well, then fear makes some sense. If there's a possibility, nonnegligible in your mind, that there'll be a painful experience after you die — not guaranteed — if you're a bad enough sinner so that you're certain you're going to hell, then again I think condition number three...
(Condition number three, I think, is somewhat more controversial, but for all that it still seems correct to me, and that's this. We need to have a certain amount of uncertainty in order to have fear be appropriate. You need to have some — it's not clear how much — but at least some significant amount of uncertainty about whether the bad thing will occur, and/or how bad the bad thing will be.)
...isn't satisfied. But if like most of us you wouldn't know if you were a bad enough sinner or not, and so there's some nonnegligible chance of this bad thing, without certainly, well, somebody like that who says they're afraid of being dead, for fear that they might find themselves in hell, at least I understand that."
© Shelly Kagan
Yale Lectures on Philosophy of Death, 2007
(Condition number three, I think, is somewhat more controversial, but for all that it still seems correct to me, and that's this. We need to have a certain amount of uncertainty in order to have fear be appropriate. You need to have some — it's not clear how much — but at least some significant amount of uncertainty about whether the bad thing will occur, and/or how bad the bad thing will be.)
...isn't satisfied. But if like most of us you wouldn't know if you were a bad enough sinner or not, and so there's some nonnegligible chance of this bad thing, without certainly, well, somebody like that who says they're afraid of being dead, for fear that they might find themselves in hell, at least I understand that."
© Shelly Kagan
Yale Lectures on Philosophy of Death, 2007
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