Topics Value

Question Your life isn't of much significance; there have been billions of other humans in existence, throughout multiple epochs and countless places. Very few of them have changed the world in any palpable way, and even for the ones that have changed the world in a significant way, the fact remains that humans occupy an infinitesimally small part of a gargantuan and indifferent universe, living lifes of grotesquely short duration. However, your life is actually of incalculable significance. If you die the whole universe may as well cease to exist; your perception is reality itself. Which one of these extremes contains the most truth?

Accepted:
September 22, 2009

Comments

You describe two different standards for judging the significance of one's life. The first measures its significance by the size of its contribution to a long history that includes billions of other human lives. The second measures its significance by the degree to which it matters to oneself. One could quarrel about just how small one's contribution to human history really is, or just how important one's own life is to oneself, but the tension that is created between these two standards remains.

Some philosophers (e.g. Lucretius) have recommended that we adopt the longer, more "objective" view, and cease to view our own lives as particularly important. Others (e.g. Sartre) have insisted that a truly "objective" view makes no distinctions between what is significant and what is not, for there is no value at all apart from the cares and concerns of a particular subject. Still others (e.g. Thomas Nagel) have suggested that human life requires us to sustain both of these irreconcilable perspectives -- by adopting an ironic stance, for example.

My own view is that values are dependent on what we care about, but that we can (and should) care about many people other than ourselves. Insofar as we care about parents who are no longer living, and about grandchildren who are not yet born, the significance of our lives is measured by reference to those people as well as to ourselves; but insofar as we do not care about the lives of the first homo sapiens, or about the lives of whatever humans there might be 2 billion years in the future, the significance of our lives should not be measured by reference to them. Likewise, insofar as we care about the residents of a nearby city, they do provide some measure of the significance of our lives; but insofar as we do not care about the residents of a distant planet, they are not part of the measure of our lives. With respect to the total number of people whose lives affect the significance of my life, this may locate the 'truth' closer to your second extreme (since the lives of most people will be irrelevant to the significance of mine); but in terms of a continuum that runs between extreme self-centeredness and all-inclusive caring about others, I am endorsing something closer to your first extreme.