I can see three plausible connections. The lives of many of the victims are blighted by their traumatic experiences. Even if money cannot undo this damage, it can brighten the lives of the victims. It can do so by enabling them to afford therapy and counseling, for instance, or simply a more worry-free existence in which they don't have to think twice about a movie ticket or a fancy birthday present for their children. In such ways, the money makes the victims' lives less dire than they would otherwise have been. There can be great symbolic value in receiving an official acknowledgement and apology. This can be given without money, to be sure. But if the Archdiocese had been let off with a simple apology, the victims might well have felt that the gravity of the long string of offences (enabled by decades of official indifference far beyond this archdiocese) had been overlooked. The large sum appropriately symbolizes to the entire country the enormity of the crime, how the church has allowed...

How you live will have effects long after your death (see also question 1689). But if these effects carry no message of your character and personality, of your thoughts and emotions, loves and successes, they may not mitigate the feeling of looming utter insignificance. The dreadful feeling is that there will come a time after which you, along with everything in your life, will never again mean anything to anyone. Even the greatest authors face this feeling -- only the vainest don't. I see two ways to allay this feeling, both articulated in Derik Parfit's work. One is to dissociate what you care about from yourself. Say you care greatly about the environment or the preservation of animal species. If you really care for such a goal, and believe that people in the future will also work for it and will help achieve it tolerably well, then you can feel that -- even if your own contribution is entirely forgotten -- what you worked for is achieved. The other way of allaying the feeling of...

"Every scenario I can think of proves otherwise," you write, but where is the proof? The mere fact that, for every piece of conduct I point to, you can think up a selfish motive does not prove your point because the motive you thought up may not be the agent's real motive. What you have in mind, as proof, may be something along these lines: The fact that the agent did what she did proves that she preferred it over her alternative options. So she followed her preference and acted selfishly. But this line of thought conflates a conceptual point (the option an agent chooses = the option the agent prefers = the selfish option) with a substantive insight. This is clear from the fact that the conceptual point does not rule out that an agent may (prefer to) do, for the sake of others, what she regards to be worse for herself. Indeed, she may sacrifice her own life for another. One could respond that she must have regarded what she did as best for herself, for otherwise she would/could not have...

There are really three questions here, worth distinguishing clearly. Question 1 is whether pleasure and the avoidance of pain are the sole ends of human life or whether we rather have reason to value and seek other ends (as well). Here you may think about whether the value of pleasures is unaffected by the fact that they rest on false beliefs (e.g., the belief that you are loved and admired when in fact you are despised, etc.). An extreme case of this is Nozick's experience machine which, attached to your brain, stimulates in you the most wonderful experiences. Also, think about the burden of proof here. Why should it be somehow obvious that pleasure is worth pursuing while other ends (knowledge, wisdom, love, artistic excellence) stand in need of justification? It seems more plausible to start with a very general notion of well-being and then to examine with an open mind what one's well-being might consist in. Questions 2 and 3 were perhaps most interestingly (though...

That an ideal is achieved is no more impossible in principle than that a concept is instantiated or exemplified. In the latter case, we find something in the world that has all the properties that are definitive of the concept -- e.g., all the properties something must have to count as a plate. To be sure, such a thing, i.e. a plate, is not a concept -- it merely realizes a concept. Now why can't we think about ideals in this way as well? Think of your ideal of the perfect professor, and fill this in with all the properties such a professor would have. Then see whether you can find (or create) such a person in the real world. If you achieve this, you'd have an exemplification or instantiation of the ideal professor. But this professor would not be the ideal, s/he would be one realization of it. This is obvious from the fact that the actual professor would have many additional properties over and above those s/he must have to be an ideal professor (e.g., a height, weight, gender, etc., which...

I find this hard to respond to because the meaning of the relevant expressions and especially the background assumptions are not clear to me. For example: Why do you so easily deny that life it not worth living (while also denying that it is worth living)? What's the third possibility here? Why do you think (or at least suggest) that life is rendered objectively meaningless by there being no God or by there being an end to the universe or to human life? W(hy w)ould life be objectively meaningful if there were a God or if the universe and its inhabitants were sure to hum along forever? What is the thought behind connecting the three ideas the way you do: Life's being objectively meaningless, why does this make it neither worth nor not worth living? (E.g., could life's being subjectively meaningful make it worth living?) And why does life's being objectively meaningless make it harder to justify staying alive? Why does it not, for instance, also make it harder to justify suicide)?

It's probably okay just to be mediocre and content, but what you write suggests you don't really have the option, at this stage, of being content with mediocrity. Should you try to be so content? Is it selfish not to be? Hardly. The question then is whether you have a good alternative to mediocrity. You suggest doing something great, something you and everyone else would recognize as extraordinary. This merits further thought. You would not want to make a name for yourself by doing something that's extraordinarily silly or evil, obviously. So, think about whether there is some goal that you recognize as truly important (whether lots of others do may not matter so much), that you are in an especially good position to promote, and that would interestingly engage your abilities and personal strengths. Think through two or three of the more plausible candidate goals in some detail and see whether one grabs you and might sustain your commitment. If you can come up with such a special goal, you have a...