Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Sources
- 1 Death
- 2 The Absurd
- 3 Moral Luck
- 4 Sexual Perversion
- 5 War and Massacre
- 6 Ruthlessness in Public Life
- 7 The Policy of Preference
- 8 Equality
- 9 The Fragmentation of Value
- 10 Ethics without Biology
- 11 Brain Bisection and the Unity of Consciousness
- 12 What is it like to be a bat?
- 13 Panpsychism
- 14 Subjective and Objective
- Index
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Sources
- 1 Death
- 2 The Absurd
- 3 Moral Luck
- 4 Sexual Perversion
- 5 War and Massacre
- 6 Ruthlessness in Public Life
- 7 The Policy of Preference
- 8 Equality
- 9 The Fragmentation of Value
- 10 Ethics without Biology
- 11 Brain Bisection and the Unity of Consciousness
- 12 What is it like to be a bat?
- 13 Panpsychism
- 14 Subjective and Objective
- Index
Summary
Most people feel on occasion that life is absurd, and some feel it vividly and continually. Yet the reasons usually offered in defense of this conviction are patently inadequate: they could not really explain why life is absurd. Why then do they provide a natural expression for the sense that it is?
Consider some examples. It is often remarked that nothing we do now will matter in a million years. But if that is true, then by the same token, nothing that will be the case in a million years matters now. In particular, it does not matter now that in a million years nothing we do now will matter. Moreover, even if what we did now were going to matter in a million years, how could that keep our present concerns from being absurd? If their mattering now is not enough to accomplish that, how would it help if they mattered a million years from now?
Whether what we do now will matter in a million years could make the crucial difference only if its mattering in a million years depended on its mattering, period. But then to deny that whatever happens now will matter in a million years is to beg the question against its mattering, period; for in that sense one cannot know that it will not matter in a million years whether (for example) someone now is happy or miserable, without knowing that it does not matter, period.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Mortal Questions , pp. 11 - 23Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012
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