Another version of the question focuses not on our individual lives but on the whole scheme of things: what is the point of it all? An implication of this, in the spirit if not in the letter, seems to be that without some overall purpose in things all our own projects are somehow worthless or doomed to frustration. But why should that be so? Often the underlying thought seems to be that real values can only exist if they are permanent. But why should something in itself valueless acquire value by being permanent, or belonging to a set of things which is permanent? The value of my having just passed my exam and the disvalue of having painfully stubbed my toe are surely not affected if the sun will explode in eight billion years and I myself face annihilation somewhat sooner? Perhaps the thought is that our projects will fail unless ultimately "God is on our side". But our short-term projects often succeed. Sometimes events may later make us wish they had not done so, but this is relatively rare, and often success is definite and there are no hidden snags.
But now perhaps the question broadens into something else: what are the conditions for our lives to reach ultimate success? Many philosophers have held, with Sidgwick, that ultimately nothing can be of value but certain conscious states, for how could values exist without conscious beings to appreciate them? But recently this inference has been attacked. No doubt a lifeless desert would lack value (pace G. E. Moore, who thought that if it was beautiful it would not), but perhaps the value of at least many conscious states presupposes that their owners value other things; how, for instance, could one see any value in the state of mind consequent on fulfilling one's ambition to climb Everest if one saw no value in having climbed Everest (which is not itself a state of mind)? The question then becomes: how should we assess these further values? Can any rational grounds be given for pursuing some of them rather than others; or one life plan rather than another?
A further, and age old, question which arises out of this concerns the value to us of things that happen after our deaths, so that we cannot know about them. "Call no man happy until he is dead" said the Greek sage Solon; but how can he be happy then? Suppose someone dies after an apparently happy and successful life, but his achievements are then shown to be nugatory, for reasons he could not have anticipated, and his children all come to grief: would we still call him a happy man, who lived a happy life? If not, happiness cannot be a state of mind, and even if the meaning of life is to acquire happiness, it cannot be simply to acquire a state of mind.
Dr Alan Lacey
R. Nozick, The Examined Life (New York, 1989), ch. 10.
H. Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics,
D. Wiggins, Needs, Values, Truth (London, 1987), essay
From The Oxford Companion to Philosophy
