Assuming there is no afterlife, why would it be wrong to blow up the entire earth?

Because you are on it too.....

And so?

Only those who believe that they have a (bad) afterlife or those who are leaving people behind or those who are, unfortunately, idealists, care to die.

Would the difference between right and wrong matter?

Whom are you hurting?

Not true, on the contrary is is the above people who are WILLING to die.....

True. It works both ways. But if someone will know nothing once he's dead, and won't hurt anyone, and isn't an idealist, he has no logical reason to be unwilling to die.

Most people have an instinctive drive towards self preservation.....

It's not logical. Unless you're an idealist.

It's not logical, it's hard wired way deeper than logic......

But it is sort of logical, because if someone's life is all they have, they aren't so quick to give it up.

Rule #83497: Don't only have your life.

If there's no afterlife, then this life is all we have, and by killing someone you'd be robbing them of all they have. It's incredible how entrenched the "this world is worthless and it's all about olam habah" line is. 

Agreed. Given the possibility that there is in fact no afterlife, you are ending human experience period. Even the oddest value systems would agree that that is evil.

In fact, I believe this is a viable defense to Pascal's Wager- as a measure of proportion, clamping current experience is much more severe, or at least as severe, as blowing the afterlife.


This gives rise to euthanasia questions, like is it better to be alive and suffering than dead. Which one?

Assuming you are a duck, why would it be wrong to dip an umbrella in a tow truck?

That makes about as much sense as your question.

I'm not trying to prove that. In fact, I believe quite the opposite.


Why is it evil? I thought that even the oddest value system would only consider hurting another person evil. Killing another person is evil because you hurt his family and friends and possibly any future advances that would help all humanity (though that last is a dumb argument because he could grow up to be a Hitler, too). Once you blow up the world, no one is left to be hurt.


I respectfully disagree.

Is knowledge or memory of past injury a pre-requisite for such injury haven taken place? If i deprive you of something that was in fact coming your way and you never realize that you were supposed to get it, or thought that you were supposed to get it, but never realized that you in fact did not, is that not evil? Deprivation is evil, in my opinion, and ending life in general would be to deprive many people of experience. People do not get hurt after the act of murder, but are hurt as their deprivation is caused by that murder.

So that's what got me thinking. Is deprivation something bad? Well, you're making someone's life be less happy or pleasant or enjoyable, so yes, it probably is. But once said person is dead, s/he cannot 'feel' the deprivation. When alive, the person is affected by the lack of whatever it may be, even if the person doesn't know it. But once dead, there's nothing to feel.
So yes, the comparison is confusing and it shows a point, but in the end, the two aren't equal.
Sometimes I go to sleep thinking of this*. Why do I want to wake up tomorrow morning? And often the answer is something dumb like there's so much math I still want to learn, but really a far more compelling reason to wake up is (or should be) because my room is a mess and it wouldn't be fair to my roommates to leave it that way. Not because I'm depriving myself, because in theory it won't matter to me, but because I'm depriving the still-among-the-living of their neat room. And the jump is from there.

*in part to give me a rough idea of what I want to accomplish the next day, although I generally proceed to ignore any conclusions. Which is why I know little math and my room is still a mess.