Chapter 3: The Meaning of Life
I. Nihilism
Nothing has value. Everything is meaningless. Life, itself, is meaningless.
In my quest to discover what “better” was, I had to address the possibility that “better” simply does not exist. It could be just another fiction or myth that the human mind has invented.
On this view, I cannot make the world better than it would have otherwise been, because there is no such thing as ‘better’. According to this view, we live. We die. Everything is pointless and meaningless. Whoever assigns value to something is inventing a fiction — pretending, and probably doing so because he or she can’t handle the truth.
Part of the defense of this view is that the universe does not care about us. Whatever we do, however we act, the universe will look down upon us and shrug. We are insignificant insects on an insignificant speck of dust in an insignificant cloud of gas in an apathetic universe.
My first question, why is it that what the universe cares about determines what has value? If the universe cares about us, then we are significant. However, if I care about us, that does not matter. What is it that makes the universe’s caring “better” than my caring?
My second question, doesn’t the very assumption that the universe’s caring matters itself refute the claim that nothing matters?
To me, the existence of value was as obvious as the existence of gravity. I would not see it, but I could certainly see its effects, in all that went on around me.
Imagine the civil war soldier, laying in a wheat field far from home, coughing up blood, remembering the last time he saw his wife and little girl, knowing that he will never see them again. Imagine another soldier, climbing over a stonewall, feeling a musket ball small through his face, shattering teeth and jaw. These examples appear to fly directly in the face of the claim that “nothing matters”.
Consider a decision to drop a bomb on a building that one thinks holds terrorists, that instead holds school children, and cutting short a collection of young lives while leaving others to grow without limbs, senses, and organs that they would have certainly been better off keeping.
Consider the woman whose cash is ripped from her by purse-snatcher, leaving her unable to buy food for the next month.
Consider the child beaten and abused in school by classmates who think ‘different’ is the same as ‘bad’.
Consider the straight-A high school student, forced to work as a day-laborer after graduation, rather than go to college, because her parents brought her to this country illegally.
There is no such thing as “better” (or “worse”)? That hardly seems true.
The universe does not care, but so what? The soldiers, the bombed and abused children, the hungry woman, their friends, their families, they all care. That fact is obvious.
II. The Value of My Life
There came a time, in my second year of college, when I confronted the question, “What is the value of life?” full force.
I remember a cold, February morning. I woke up, bundled up for the Montana winter weather, collected my books, and marched off to class. I had not been attending class recently, and I was determined to put an end to that.
My first course of the day was Philosophy of Human Nature, in the Wilson Building on the Montana State University campus. Professor Allard was the teacher. However, a different class occupied the room before my class started. Even though I showed up a good 20 minutes before class started, I had to wait outside for the earlier class to end.
As time passed, other students from my class arrived. They also had to stand around and wait for the previous class to end. The waiting area outside the classroom began to grow crowded.
People made me uncomfortable. I moved away, down the hall, where there were no people.
The class before ours ended. Its students left the room, and my classmates for the Philosophy of Human Nature class filed in. I watched the room fill up, growing even more uncomfortable at the idea of entering that classroom with all of those people in it. The room was hardly packed; it was not a huge class. However, it was too full for me. I stayed outside.
Dr. Allard always arrived just as class was supposed to start. His office was on the second floor of the same building. He would walk down the second floor hallway to the stairs closest to the classroom, come down the stairs, and enter the class. Before he showed up, I stepped outside the building, and watched through the window. He was right on time. Oblivious to my presence, he entered the classroom and closed the door.
Finding myself once again alone, I took my books, and I went home.
This was not good.
At the time, I blamed my condition on the abuse I had received from my classmates when younger. I was shy when my classmates learned of my atheism and began harassing me. They taught me that I had every reason to fear what others may do to me.
When I was in the seventh grade, I went to a Junior High school that had a municipal swimming pool a block away. For part of the year, our PE classes were held at the pool. Usually, we had some sort of organized activity; diving, or water-polo, or races. Sometimes, the teacher simply gave us free time.
One particular time, I was in the deep end of the pool, I had just completed a dive as a part of the class and was in the deep end of the pool when the teacher called “free time”. The gang immediately jumped into the water, and was on me before I could reach safety.
They pushed me under the water, and they held me there. I felt my lungs tighten. I needed to breathe and began to panic. Panic causes strange behavior. In my case, I screamed for help. I was being held five feet under the surface, but I screamed anyway, because I was out of options and out of time. I remember the stream of bubbles leaving my mouth as I shouted. However, even I did not hear anything. I knew that nobody else would hear me either.
A few seconds later, perhaps because my tormentors noticed the bubbles, they let me up.
This was only the worse of a series of events that had gone on since the fifth grade, since my atheism became known. As a result, I kept out of sight, and grew increasingly uncomfortable whenever there were other people around. By the time I had reached my second year of college, I could not walk into a classroom.
I had things that I enjoyed doing that did not involve other people. For example, I liked to write.
My English teacher, when I was in the eighth grade, asked us each to write a story. She read the stories in front of the class, for those students who said that they were willing to have theirs read. I wrote on mine that I would like to have it read, but she did not read it. She said it was just too long. I did not doubt that it was.
I continued to go to school, as required, but I think it is safe to say that I no longer attended school, strictly speaking. My body was there, my mind was not. My mind stayed home, working on my stories.
However, my stories were not simple flights of imagination. I enjoyed science fiction, and I felt that the science needed to be scientifically accurate. When I was writing a story about a group of explorers visiting all of the planets in this solar system, I bought a book called “space mathematics”. I used it to work out all of the physics associated with such a mission — the speed of rotation and the spin required to simulate gravity, the amount of fuel needed to generate the thrust to reach the next planet, and where the planets were, how long it would take to get there, the path of the spaceship as it traveled, and where the other planets were.
In my senior year of High School I was barely passing my math class because I never did the homework. I cared nothing about my grades, and cared nothing about anything that was happening at school. However, I was in an advanced math class (for some reason) and required to take part in some statewide (or nationwide, I do not recall) standardized math test. I went at the assigned time, took my assigned seat, took my assigned test, and handed it in to the assigned test monitor. When the scores came back, my math teacher — the same teacher warning me that my course grade was barely passing — handed me an award for scoring in the top three percent of those who took the test. He did not say a word to me about it. He gave me my award, and everything went on as before. I also passed my math class, but just barely.
When I went to college (which I did because that is what people do when they leave high school), I discovered that I was no longer required to attend class. As time went by, I found it harder and harder to do so. On this cold February day, I could no longer step into a class, if it has other people in it.
One advantage of being unwilling to talk to people is that one does not spend a lot of money. When the school informed me that I was suspended due to my grades, I still had some savings. Eventually, the money would run out. After that happened, I would be taking more from the world than I would be giving to it. So, at that point, consistent with my resolution to leave the world better than it would have otherwise been, and not be a drain or an imposition on the world, I decided I would end my life.
Obviously, I never took that next step. I did some reflecting on the meaning of life, eventually went back to college, got very good grades while I pursued degrees in philosophy (value theory) and ethics. However, I started much of that investigation here, when I was asking myself about the meaning of (my) life.
III. Suicide, Euthanasia, and Torture
Actually, the cliché philosophical question, “What is the meaning of life?” always struck me as a stupid question. There is no way to answer any question until one knows what is being asked. This question in specific has a problem, because we can’t answer the question about the meaning of life, until we know the answer to the question, “What is the meaning of ‘meaning’?”
The real question to ask is not, “What is the meaning of life?” but “What is the value of (a given) life?”
I knew, at the time, that some people contemplate suicide when it is not, in fact, the best option available for them. I knew that there are conditions where medication and the simple passage of time will allow unbearable pain to become bearable again. I knew that I might actually be one of those people for whom suicide was not really the best option and that it was just as likely that my personal story was one in which intervention could have been justified, or not. I was not a good test case for either side of the argument. But I had a vantage point from which it was easier to see both sides.
I thought a lot about the ethics of suicide and, related to this, the ethics of euthanasia. I could easily see cases in which allowing, or even assisting a person in ending his own life would clearly make the world better than it would have otherwise been.
Let us take, for example, the case of a patient who can rationally expect only mind-numbing pain through the last few months of life that he has left. While he is awake, his suffering is worse than that of people who have been put through the most horrendous tortures that humans have invented. Iron maidens and hot irons do not compare to what nature can inflict on an innocent person. If it is reasonable to prohibit the use of iron maidens and hot irons and the suffering that they inflict, then it seems quite reasonable to take steps that allow people to avoid the torture that nature can inflict.
Religious doctrines that require people to endure the torture that nature can inflict are really little different from the religious doctrines that required people in the middle ages to endure the torture that man could inflict. In fact, a case can be made that the evils inflicted on the torture victims of the middle ages was far less odious than the evils forced on the terminally ill people of the world today. Torture victims, after all, were given an option to end the torture with a simple confession. If they wanted death, then the right words spoken to the right people would result in a swift execution. Their release from pain came far easier than it did for those suffering the slow and painful deaths that some diseases inflict.
The victims of torture, in other words, often had the option of choosing to die that religious doctrine denies to the victims of disease.
It does no good for those who oppose suicide or euthanasia today to assert that they know that this is right because their religion tells them so. Their ancestors — the inquisitors, the crusaders, the burners of witches — were just as certain that the same religion was telling them that their actions were correct. They derived their certainty from the same source, and they were probably more devout than many of their contemporary counterparts.
Yet, they were wrong. Their contemporary counterparts are equally likely to be wrong.
IV. ‘Health’ and ‘Illness’ and a Value-Laden Language
My situation also gave me cause to wonder about the concepts of ‘health’ and ‘sickness’. Seriously, I could not ignore the question of whether or not there was something wrong with me.
I have known of people to use health as an example of something that has intrinsic value. However, they are mistaken. Value is to health as roundness is to a circle or like being single is to being a bachelor — it is built into the very meaning of the word. Health simply means, “Physical or mental functioning that is good — that people ought to pursue.” Illness, on the other hand, means, in part, “Physical or mental functioning that is bad — that people ought to avoid having.” Both of these terms involve an evaluation. They require attributing goodness or badness to whatever the word was referring to.
In realizing this, I realized that the realm of value was ar larger than I had originally imagined.
However, one of the implications of this is that if value is not real — if it is just pretend, then health itself is just pretend.
As I thought about it, the list of terms that I could put into this category grew larger. For example, evaluations are also an inherent part of the term injury. When a person suffers a broken arm we say that he has been injured. For something to be called an injury, it must contain some element of badness. Injuries are not things that just so happen to be bad, injuries are bad — or contain an element of badness — by definition. An injury that produces nothing but good for the people it afflicts is as incomprehensible as a square circle.
Defect, sickness, disease, disability, sanity, sanitation, risk, harm, damage, poison, and so many others, are all value-laden terms; meaning that an evaluation of one sort or another is written into the very meaning of each term. Abuse, neglect, exploitation, destruction, are also value-laden terms. The same fact applies as well to words like warning, caution, hazardous, dangerous, beware, and similar alerts, as well as counterpoint terms such as security and safety.
There is no place that one can go to find more signs of value than in a store. Here, I am not talking solely about the common use of terms like improved, enriched, and fortified, but the price stickers themselves, which are the most blatant physical representations we have of the phenomena of value.
We are surrounded by value. Yet, we are surrounded by people who claim it does not exist.
Try speaking without making use of value-laden terms like those mentioned above. If value is not real, we should be able to do this and still not lose anything in our discussion of the real world. We cannot. Rather, we see that nobody can understand the world, at least the world as it exists today, if they do not understand it as a world that contains, from one end to the other, values so thick and numerous that they are often packed too tight to allow us to easily distinguish one from another.
Value is real.
V. A Bit of a Conflict
In Chapter 2, I mentioned Hume’s argument about the difficulty in deriving ‘ought’ from ‘is’. But, here, I said that values are real.
This raised a question. How can values be real, and, at the same time, for ought to be distinct and separate from is?
Let’s take an example of a person who realizes that he has an illness (e.g., a drug addiction, or a terminal case of shyness) who then seeks help. When we talk about him seeking help, this is an event in the real world. It involves, among other things, the motion of matter through space and time, governed by all of the rules of physics that concern the motion of matter through space and time.
When we seek to explain this movement, when we look at its causes, we see that those causes include some element of evaluation. Value, whatever it may be, causes the movement of physical matter through space.
Specifically, value has the capacity to cause a person to stop and provide assistance to an injured man laying on a sidewalk. It has the capacity to cause a person to write a check to pay his bills, to tell the truth instead of a lie, to hand coins over to a needy stranger, to pick an item off of a store shelf, to delete a sentence in a book and replace it with another, to turn away from the area marked “Warning”, and countless other events.
Our actions, themselves, take place in the material world. Scientists are very much aware of the cascading waves of electrical potential that transmit signals down a nerve, which cause muscles to contract, which in turn cause action. These are physical events; they exist in the physical world.
Values have the capacity to influence these events. They alter the speed and direction of atoms through the universe.
If this is the case, then is it not a bit strange to say that value is not a part of the world that is, that it is somehow distinct and separate from it? How can value, if it exists in a realm that is distinct from the world of is, influence the motion of matter in the world of is?
I often hear people say that values are just a matter of opinion, and that science can tell us nothing about values. However, values, whether they are opinion or not, are part of the explanation for the movement of real things in the real world. The movement of real things in the real world is something that scientists are expected to study and explain.
If it is true that values are beyond the scope of scientific investigation, then it seems equally necessary to say that values have never influenced anything in the physical universe. They have not in fact had any impact on what any person has ever done — never influenced any action that any person has ever taken.
That seems to be a problem.
VI. Three Options Relating Is and Ought
The question is: How can ought exist in a realm of reality distinct from is, and still have any effect at all on the motion of physical material through time and space?
We seem to have three options.
A. Option 1: Is/Ought Metaphysical Dualism
Under this option, fact or is terms refer to one type of entity having to do with things like the age of the earth, the atomic weight of gold, and the like.
Ought or value terms refer to another type of entity, having to do with what things are worth.
Somehow, in spite of the fact that these terms refer to two different kinds of things, they interact with each other. Values cause things to happen in the real world that would not otherwise happen. Somehow, people in the fact universe have the capacity to sense these ought properties, and, in sensing them, make choices and decide upon different courses of action on the basis of them. Through our ought-perception and our choices, this ought-property can alter the course of physical matter, even though the ought-property is not a part of the same reality.
B. Option 2: Ought Eliminativism
This option says that there is no such thing as ought. Only the universe of is is real. The fact that ought refers to something entirely different and distinct means that it simply does not exist. It belongs in the realm of fiction.
If we accept this option, we need to drop all discussion of ought out of the conversation when we are dealing with the real world. We can still tell stories of ought and ought not, just as we tell stories of Santa Clause and Zeus. However, we need to realize that they are just stories. Using an ought to justify a law or an action would be little different from justifying those laws or actions on the basis of their effect on leprechauns.
C. Option 3: Is/Ought Reductionism
A third option suggests that ought statements are a subset of is statements. Somewhere, out there, is a bridge across the is/ought chasm, waiting to be discovered. This bridge identifies ought statements as referring to something in the real world — something in the world of the is.
The advantage of this view is that there is no need to wonder how we sense or come to know about ought. It interacts with the world of is in just the same way every other fact interacts with the world of is. Ought is real, so naturally it participates in causal chains. It has its effects on real-world items (particularly, our bodies) causing fingers to move and mouths to form words. We can refer to them to explain why we do the things we do.
However, the question to answer here is, “What types of things are these oughts?”
D. Analysis
(a) Problems with Option 1
It is difficult to take the first option seriously. If there is a mysterious ought property in the universe, what is it? How does it interact with the real world? Most importantly, can we even conceive of a situation in which a scientist, studying the motion of even the smallest pieces of matter, observes and measures the effect of a mysterious ought force as distinct from the physical forces he is already familiar with?
The problem is not simply that we cannot easily imagine answers to these questions, but the questions themselves suggest that there are no answers to be found. We have three roads ahead of us, and these questions warn us that we should not even start down the road in which we postulate the existence of an ought-property independent of, but with the capacity to influence, the world of is. We should start down that road only if we are forced to, as a last resort.
(b) Problems with Option 2
Okay, what about the road of eliminating value-laden terms from our language? The first part of this chapter suggests that this has a very significant problem. How can we eliminate a family of terms that includes health, disease, harm, dangerous, useful, beneficial, and the like? As I mentioned, our lives are surrounded by value, and filled with choices, all of which require some sort of value judgment or other. If we replace all value terms, what do we replace them with? More importantly, can we really understand the real world — the world of is without making at least some reference to value? It seems, at best, unlikely.
(c) Problems with Option 3
This leaves the third road, that ought is a part of the world of is. It is a necessary part of the explanation and the prediction of real-world events. The problem with this option is that it requires us to give up many very popular platitudes concerning the nature of ought and is.
It means that we must admit, at the start, that somewhere out there is a bridge across David Hume’s is/ought chasm. To Hume, the existence of such a bridge seemed “inconceivable”. However, to agree with Hume on this, forces us either into the dualist or eliminativist views above. It may well be difficult to imagine where we may find such a bridge, but that such a bridge exists is far more conceivable than any of the alternatives.
It means that we must deny the claim that science can tell us nothing about the difference between right and wrong, good and evil, art, beauty, and the meaning of life. All of these things are real, a part of the ineliminable explanation for observable changes in the physical world around us. As a result, ought is a perfectly legitimate object of scientific study. This means that somewhere in the world, evil exists, and once we find it we can put it under a microscope, see how it works, offer up theories of cause and effect, experiment in ways to alter it, or to eliminate it.
I understand that, to some this option is bizarre. However, it is far less implausible than metaphysical dualism or ought eliminativism. To resort to a cliché from Sherlock Holmes, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
VII. Conclusion
Eventually, I went back to college. I had things that I still wanted to learn, and that was where I needed to go to learn them. This was when I made the decision to pursue two undergraduate degrees at the same time. I would go ahead and get a history degree. However, at the same time, I would get an undergraduate degree in philosophy as well, focusing on moral theory.
When I returned, I simply did not care about what other people were thinking enough to keep me from learning. I had a job to do. I still needed to figure out how to make the world better than it would have otherwise been.
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