Abstract
The inference that things do not matter because they will end is a source of despair for reflective people that features in literature, popular culture, and philosophy. Are there sound arguments in support of the inference? I first review three arguments that have been put forward in the existing philosophical literature and consider the objections that can be made against them. While the objections appear persuasive, these arguments do not exhaust the plausible justifications for the inference. Drawing on examples from philosophy and literature, I introduce two previously undiscussed time-bias arguments in support of the inference that seem to be psychologically powerful. I conclude, however, that the time-bias arguments are also unsound. They involve an inconsistent shift between a temporally neutral and a temporally biased perspective on how the passage of time affects what matters. However the inconsistency is resolved, the conclusion does not follow.
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Notes
Analytic ethicists have tended to focus on concepts like rightness, permissibility, or happiness much more than what makes life worth living (Benatar, 2017, xv; Metz, 2002, 781–2; Kahane, 2014, 746; Schmidtz, 2001; Wolf, 2010, 7–8). Nevertheless, the question is of significant philosophical interest and not reducible to happiness or morality. One potential reason for the lack of attention to meaningfulness in analytic philosophy is the worry that the question “What is life’s meaning?” is itself meaningless. This view is less prevalent in the analytic tradition today than it once was (Metz 2013, 21–2). Regardless, certain answers to questions like this are better than others, and dismissing the question as meaningless can have the unintended side effect of increasing confidence in bad answers. This paper focuses on one such answer: “it doesn’t matter because it will end.”
See Metz (2013, 164–5) for a more thorough analysis of naturalism.
In addition to pleasure and achievement, objective views can focus on many other things, such as moral supererogation or aesthetic creativity (Metz 2013, 181). I focus on achievement and pleasure, and combinations thereof, because they are the most strongly associated with the it-doesn’t-matter-because-it-will-end inference.
I say “almost” because it is conceivable that physical things might last forever even if naturalism is true. Thus, the inference might be obviated for a naturalist who holds such a belief. I thank an anonymous referee for pointing this out.
Bradley’s writing is preceded by similar comments from Schopenhauer (2005, 18–9) supporting a strong form of future bias: “Something of great importance now past is inferior to something of little importance now present, in that the latter is a reality, and related to the former as something to nothing.” Considering this, Schopenhauer continues, we might easily be led to the “folly” of thinking that we should maximize the enjoyment of the present. We should resist this conclusion because “that which in the next moment exists no more, and vanishes utterly, like a dream, can never be worth a serious effort.”
The quote initially appeared as part of an essay in the October 1950 issue of Scouting magazine.
See also Irving Singer (2010, 115–7).
For example, Singer’s discussion in How Are We to Live? is particularly inspiring when it touches on themes that are relevant to idealized desires. He writes, “An ethical approach to life does not forbid having fun or enjoying food and wine, but it changes our sense of priorities. The effort and expense put into buying fashionable clothes, the endless search for more and more refined gastronomic pleasures, the astonishing additional expense that marks out the prestige car market from the market in cars for people who just want a reliable means of getting from A to B — all these become disproportionate to people who can shift perspective long enough to take themselves, at least for a time, out of the spotlight. If a higher ethical consciousness spreads, it will utterly change the society in which we live” (233–4).
If one’s source of worry is the fact that one’s impact on the world will not last quite long enough, then it is plausible that shifting from self-interested goals to altruistic ones could help alleviate it (on the assumption that the achievement of altruistic goals concerned with improving things for future generations makes a positive impact over a longer amount of time than the achievement of self-interested goals like owning a fancy car).
Cf. Benatar (2017, 38): “If you were created to help your fellow, and your fellow was created to help you, we are still left wondering why either of you (and by extension any being) was created. This purpose smacks of circularity.”
See also Bradley (2015, 416) and Kahane (2014). Though, pace these authors, the temporal and spatial worries are not exactly in parallel. If one were to become very large, such that one’s activities affected the entire universe, then that would satisfy the worry about our spatial smallness (even though this, of course, might be an instance of “worshipping mere size”). However, the same does not hold for the temporal case. For those affected by the it-doesn’t-matter-because-it-will-end inference, the problem is the end, rather than our temporal smallness, and that problem cannot be solved by making one’s life long-but-finite.
Quoted in Klemke (2008, 4).
There is a large literature on the relative value of mortal and immortal lives, and it would be impossible to summarize it here. For an overview, see Greene (2017).
See Craig (2008) for a more recent defense.
Psychological research in the heuristics and biases tradition suggests the “peak-end rule,” according to which the ending period of a sequence has an outsized effect on people’s judgments of it (see Frederick 2006 or Kahneman 2011, Chp. 35). However, this rule concerns retrospectiveevaluations, and not forward-looking ones.
There are several instances of this in the bible. The most prominent occur in Ecclesiastes, which chide the “vanity” of man. This vanity is misplaced because “For of the wise man, even as of the fool, there is no memory forever, since in the days to come all will have been long forgotten. Indeed, the wise man dies just like the fool!” [World English Bible, Ecclesiastes. 2:16] Again, this seems to follow the formula: the pride of the wise man is misplaced because at some future point — the point of death or the “days to come” when everything is forgotten — it seems that whether one was wise or foolish doesn’t really matter. Therefore, it doesn’t matter now.
F. H. Bradley’s (1876, 87) argument (see Section 2) seems to use the first time-bias argument to attack the objective-hedonism view. His argument proceeds in the same way as Taylor’s. We imagine the state of the world in which whatever pleasure we are feeling has ended. If it doesn’t seem that the pleasure matters then, then we shouldn’t think that it matters now.
The first time-bias argument also models a possible attack on the subjective view of life’s worth, especially when the view concerns idealized desire. Indeed, Tolstoy’s argument seems to be about idealized desire. He argued that the things we ultimately desire, and the satisfaction of which supposedly make for a meaningful life, cannot withstand full reflective scrutiny once one has an accurate understanding of what the future holds. Tolstoy (1983, 30, emphasis added) writes, “It is possible to live only as long as life intoxicates us; once we are sober we cannot help seeing that it is all a delusion.”
These theories should not be confused with future bias and temporal neutrality with regard to one’s hedonic preferences. See Greene and Sullivan (2015, 948) for a description of such attitudes.
The inconsistency is even more apparent when applied to Bradley’s and Schopenhauer’s arguments against hedonism (discussed in Section 2). We must choose, one way or the other, how time affects the value of pleasure. If future bias is true, then pleasures are valuable for as long as they are in the present or future. If temporal neutrality is true, then pleasures have the same value regardless of where in time they exist. Neither option allows for the conclusion that pleasures have no value because they will end.
Some philosophers claim that future bias is justified only for hedonic events, such as pleasures and pains, and that time neutrality is the correct perspective on non-hedonic events (see Hurka 1993 and Hare 2013). Metz (2017) discusses this claim explicitly within the context of life’s meaning; he concludes that meaning in life is neutral with respect to time.
I say “seem” because we are concerned with justifications for the it-doesn’t-matter-because-it-will-end inference, which, presumably, do not concern recherché metaphysical facts supporting an asymmetry between the physical possibilities of traces and precursors of which most people would not be aware.
Nozick (1981, 581–2) applies a similar test to the permanence principle. He asks why the lack of an infinite future is more unsettling than the lack of an infinite past. Since an infinite future and an infinite past are mirror images of each other, a principle involving some sort of bias toward the future would help justify, or at least explain (if, as Lucretius argued, we actually ought to have the same attitude to both), the asymmetry in attitudes.
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Greene, P. ‘It Doesn’t Matter Because One Day it Will End’. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 24, 165–182 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-020-10140-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-020-10140-w