Abstract
This article argues for the elimination of the concept of life worth living from philosophical vocabulary on three complementary grounds. First, the basic components of this concept suffer from multiple ambiguities, which hamper attempts to ground informative evaluative and classificatory judgments about the worth of life. Second, the criteria proposed to track the extension of the concept of life worth living rest on unsupported axiological assumptions and fail to identify precise and plausible referents for this concept. And third, the concept of life worth living is not shown to serve any major evaluative or classificatory purpose besides those served by already available axiological concepts. By eliminating the concept of life worth living, philosophers will free themselves of the task of addressing ill-posed axiological questions and ground reflection about the worth of life on more rigorous conceptual foundations.
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Notes
Below I focus on lives taken as a whole (from birth to death) rather than lives in specific contexts or at a given moment, without taking a position on metaphysical issues such as the hypothetical existence of an afterlife. In particular, I use the term ‘life’ to indicate the life of a human person (as opposed to non-human animals, extraterrestrial organisms, etc.) because most debates about LWL focus on human persons’ lives. In doing so, I gloss over the debate concerning what conditions a life has to satisfy to be regarded as the life of a human person (see e.g. Finnis 1989; Gormally 1993), since my call to eliminate LWL does not directly rest on what position one advocates about such conditions.
I employ the expression ‘proponents of LWL’ broadly to indicate both occasional users of LWL and those who deem LWL judgments to be meaningful and informative, where the expression ‘LWL judgments’ designates claims stating that specific lives (or lives in particular conditions) are (or are not) worth living. I expand in later sections on the conceptual and epistemic differences between various types of LWL judgments (see e.g. Sect. 4.4 on comparative and absolute LWL judgments).
The three ambiguities I examine in this section highlight both definitional disagreements concerning the concept of LWL and substantive disagreements concerning what facts putatively determine whether specific lives are worth living. These two types of disagreements are often intertwined, but are conceptually distinct (see e.g. footnote no. 5). I discuss both types of disagreements since my critical evaluation targets not just the concept of LWL, but also LWL judgments.
I speak of ‘goods’ and ‘experiences’ broadly to encompass the events and the states of affairs corresponding to persons’ obtaining such goods and living such experiences. Also, I focus primarily on the concept of life worth living rather than the concept of life worth continuing, i.e. a life whose remaining period is worth living (see e.g. Benatar 2006, ch. 2; Smuts 2013). The alleged fact that a person’s life is not worth continuing after a specific time does not imply that such life on the whole is not worth living for this person (as a putative example, think of a person who lives ninety years of amazing bliss and achievements but faces a final week of unbearable pain and loneliness). Conversely, the past period in a person’s life may conceivably include so much physical and psychological suffering that although the period ahead may be worth living, this person’s life may fail to be worth living on the whole.
LWL judgments may vary remarkably also depending on whether one asks the persons whose lives are evaluated or some other persons. To give one example, LWL judgments about the lives of persons with disabilities frequently vary depending on whether one asks the persons whose lives are evaluated, healthcare providers or the general public (see e.g. Wilkinson 2006). Indeed, these variations occur not just interpersonally but also intertemporally for the same persons (see e.g. Kon 2008, on how various persons’ LWL judgments vary before and after these persons have to cope with a disability). These variations often make LWL judgments controversial, but do not directly reflect ambiguities inherent in the LWL concept itself.
In this section, I examine the most prominent criteria proposed to track the extension of LWL, individually taken (for other critical evaluations of some criteria, see e.g. Baier 1988; Blumenfeld 2009; Smuts 2013). I lack the space here to consider hypothetical combinations of distinct criteria. For my purposes, it suffices to note that no detailed combinations of criteria have been developed, and that the profound tensions between distinct sets of criteria (see e.g. Sect. 2 on subjectivist versus objectivist criteria) hinder the development of such combinations.
The quote in the text is not meant to imply that Singer endorses subjectivist criteria such as the Desire Criterion (see e.g. Sect. 3.2 on Singer’s claims in favour of objectivist criteria such as the Quality of Life Criterion). In this section, I use the term ‘desire’ broadly to cover a variety of pro-attitudes, including wishes, wants and intentions. I take my critique of the Desire Criterion to hold mutatis mutandis also for the Belief Criterion, according to which a person’s life is worth living iff this person believes that her life is worth living (see e.g. James 1912, 62), and the Resentment Criterion, which holds that a person’s life is worth living iff this person does not resent being born (see e.g. Smilansky 1997; Williams 1995, for discussion).
The criterion assumes that the involved person would not remember her former life when repeating it, since remembering such life would prevent this person from re-living a qualitatively identical life.
Even less plausible is the Nietzschean Eternal Recurrence Criterion, according to which a person’s life is worth living iff this person would prefer to live a qualitatively identical life over and over again for infinitely many times rather than never to exist. Indeed, it is questionable whether anyone’s life could be plausibly categorized as worth living under the extremely demanding evaluative standard imposed by such criterion (see e.g. Trisel 2007).
The criterion assumes that the caretaker is benevolent to rule out cases where the caretaker regards a person merely as a means to achieve some of the caretaker’s own ends without taking this person’s good or interests into account.
A proponent of LWL might hold that the Ideal Caretaker Criterion helps us to develop a theory of what makes life worth living by providing an epistemic indicator of when worth obtains (see e.g. Smuts 2013, 442 and 459). Even so, it is hard to see how exactly the criterion is supposed to serve this purpose. For the criterion provides no informative insight as to how all facts that putatively determine whether a person’s life is worth living combine to determine whether such life is worth living.
One might object that the worth of a state of non-existence is zero (see e.g. Feldman 1991). Yet, it seems more plausible to hold that non-existence has no determinate worth, and having no determinate worth is not the same as having a determinate worth of zero (see e.g. Broome 1993). One might further object that LWL judgments refer to a state of nothingness (rather than non-existence) and that nothingness constitutes a well-defined state of affairs. The idea would be that “if a certain kind of life is [worth living], it is better than nothing. If it is [not worth living], it is worse than nothing” (Parfit 1984, 487). However, even assuming that nothingness constitutes a well-defined state of affairs, it is dubious that the worth of a state of nothingness can be meaningfully ascribed a determinate worth (see e.g. Fumagalli 2012).
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Luc Bovens, John Broome, Susanne Burri, Jeff McMahan, Thaddeus Metz, Attila Tanyi, Alex Voorhoeve and an anonymous referee for their detailed comments on former versions of this paper. I also thank audiences at the University of Bayreuth and Duke University for their helpful and thought-provoking feedback.
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Fumagalli, R. Eliminating ‘life worth living’. Philos Stud 175, 769–792 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-0892-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-0892-7