Part IX: The Meaning of Life

Chapter 27

Study questions for Must Your Life Never End for it to be Meaningful?

  1. Illustrate the difference between retributive and restitutive justice by coming up with your own examples.
  2. It seems true that the natural world, as we know it, does not make perfect justice possible. However, it is not obvious that only a supernatural realm could make it possible. How might someone try to argue that in some other, metaphysically possible physical universe, perfect justice could be realised?
  3. Are you tempted to look at your life from the sub specie aeternitatis? Does it best explain why you are striving to get an education, or why you want a family, or why you have been proud of various facets of your life?
  4. Which strategies do you use to avoid getting bored? How likely would they work over the very long haul, viz., in the course of eternity?
  5. This chapter did not really discuss the common religious view that both God and a soul are jointly necessary and sufficient for meaning in life. How might an appeal to God promise to help the defender of soul-based theory respond to objections either to her theory or to the arguments for it?

Multiple Choice Questions

Weblinks for Must your life never end for it to be meaningful?

Kass, L. (2001). ‘L’Chaim and Its Limits: Why Not Immortality?’. First Things 113: 17–24, http://www.firstthings.com/article/2007/01/lchaim-and-its-limits-why-not-immortality. [Argues that immortality would be sufficient for a meaningless life for many reasons, such as that we would neither appreciate life if we lived forever, nor have the opportunity to perform heroic deeds.]

Metz, T. (2003). ‘The Immortality Requirement for Life’s Meaning’. Ratio 16: 161–77, https://ujdigispace.uj.ac.za/handle/10210/2285. [Contends that the major arguments for thinking that immortality is necessary for meaning in life are weak, and works to reconstruct them so that they are stronger.]

Schopenhauer, A. (1851). ‘On the Vanity of Existence’, http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_the_Vanity_of_Existence. [Maintains that our lives are pointless in part because they are so short and inconsequential.]

Trisel, B. A. (2002). ‘Futility and the Meaning of Life Debate’. Sorites 14: 70–84, http://www.sorites.org/Issue_14/trisel.htm. [Contends that immortality is not necessary for a meaningful life since many values and worthwhile goals could be realised in a finite life span.]

Introductory further reading for Must your life never end for it to be meaningful?

Belshaw, C. (2005). 10 Good Questions about Life and Death. Blackwell. [Composed for the undergraduate, this text addresses a variety of questions about meaning in life and related topics such as whether it is bad to die and whether one should drink an ‘immortality elixir’ if one could.]

Ellin, J. (1995). Morality and the Meaning of Life, esp. pp. 306–22. Harcourt Brace College Publishers. [In this textbook, the author critically explores Tolstoy’s and others’ concerns that our finitude is incompatible with meaningfulness, and also argues that immortality would get boring.]

Heinegg, P. (ed.) (2003). Mortalism: Readings on the Meaning of Life. Prometheus Books. [Accessible snippets on the bearing of death on life’s meaning from more than 50 thinkers from a variety of different time periods.]

Advanced further reading for Must your life never end for it to be meaningful?

Baier, K. (1997). ‘A Good Life’. In his Problems of Life and Death: A Humanist Perspective, 59–74. Prometheus Books. [Contends that the proper way to appraise the worth of a human life is in terms of what is normal for, and accessible to, our species, which implies that if none of us is immortal, death cannot make our lives meaningless.]

Bruckner, D. (2012). ‘Against the Tedium of Immortality’. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 20: 623–44. [Offers several reasons for thinking that an immortal life could avoid boredom, including the ideas that humans tend to forget what they have experienced and are good at finding new things to do.]

Chappell, T. (2009). ‘Infinity Goes up on Trial: Must Immortality Be Meaningless?’. European Journal of Philosophy 17: 30–44. [Defends the idea that a meaningful life is compatible with (but does not require) living forever, responding to a variety of objections to that idea.]

Davis, W. (1987). ‘The Meaning of Life’. Metaphilosophy 18: 288–305. [Argues that an afterlife is necessary for a meaningful life, particularly since the injustices of this world would otherwise go uncorrected by God.]

Fischer, J. M. (1994). ‘Why Immortality Is Not So Bad’. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 2: 257–70. [Probably the most widely read defence of the idea that living forever need not get boring, the author points to a variety of pleasures that human beings welcome experiencing over and over again, at least after a certain amount of time has passed.]

Goetz, S. (2012). The Purpose of Life: A Theistic Perspective. Continuum. [Unlike a very large majority of those who have reflected on meaningfulness, this author contends that it amounts to being perfectly happy, which entails experiencing pleasure forever.]

Williams, B. (1973). ‘The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality’. In his Problems of the Self, 82–100. Cambridge University Press. [A difficult but widely discussed work about whether it would be desirable to live forever; in it the author was one of the first to argue systematically that it would not, since one could not avoid becoming bored.]