Thank you, Daryl John Dumanig Panibon, for this important question.
One way to begin answering a question is by making the question itself more precise. I propose that we understand the question, “is life worth living?” as equivalent to the question, “is there a reason to continue existing?” Since it is within our power at any moment to either cease or continue to exist, we can ask whether there are any considerations that favor the latter over the former.
For most of us, the answer seems to be yes. Most of us have made commitments to people and projects that we all recognize as generating reasons for us to act. For example, if you have made a promise to a person that you perform some action, that gives you a reason to do it; and since you can do it only if you exist, this gives you a reason to continue to exist. One reason that social isolation and boredom can be so debilitating may be that on some level, we recognize that without taking on responsibilities to others and engaging in worthwhile projects, we have less reason to exist. In addition, besides our voluntary undertakings, there are various goods that we have reason to obtain, such as pleasure, knowledge, virtue, and so on. We have reasons to pursue these goods simply because of their intrinsic nature, and we could not pursue them if we did not exist.
Of course, there are also many bad things that we have reasons to avoid. One view is that when the balance of bad in one’s life as a whole outweighs the good, and the bad is unavoidable, then we have more reason not to exist than to exist. But, as many are apt to point out, this line of reasoning neglects the reasons provided by our voluntary commitments.
We might worry that from a certain perspective neither our voluntary commitments nor the various goods of human life matter. After all, within some amount of time no one will know, much less care, about anything we did or experienced in our lives; perhaps in time there will not even be anyone who could care about these things. (Here we are assuming an atheistic universe; the existence of a personal God would alter our analysis). To this there are two possible responses. First, if value and reasons are objective facts, then the fact that no one will care about our pursuits, promises, and enjoyments in a couple of million years has no bearing on whether these things matter. But suppose that value and reasons are not objective, that they depend upon the cares, commitments, and experiences of existing people. In this case, on a human spatial and temporal scale, plenty matters; on cosmic scale, perhaps nothing matters. The question is, what reason do we have to adopt the latter perspective over the former when evaluating our lives? The mere fact that we can does not mean that we should. Moreover, any reason we could adduce for favoring the cosmic perspective would be a reason from the human perspective. But that makes any justification of adopting the cosmic perspective somewhat self-defeating: we would in effect be offering a reason for adopting a perspective according to which that reason, and all other reasons, do not have any force.
What do you think? Is life worth living? Why? Let us know in the comments.
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I received my BA in philosophy from the University of Chicago and my PhD from the University of Notre Dame. I specialize in ethics, with a particular focus on the nature of normative reasons and the ethics of hypocrisy in its myriad forms. My favorite philosopher is Henry Sidgwick, since I believe—to borrow a line from Alfred North Whitehead, speaking about Plato—that much of analytic ethics in the 20th century is a series of footnotes to Sidgwick.