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Meaning from the cosmic perspective would be good for extensions of the same reasons that meaning from the other perspectives is good. People, quite … - David Benatar
" "Meaning from the cosmic perspective would be good for extensions of the same reasons that meaning from the other perspectives is good. People, quite reasonably, want to matter. They do not want to be insignificant or pointless. Life is tough. It is full of striving and struggle; there is much suffering and then we die. It is entirely reasonable to want there to be some point to the entire saga. The bits of terrestrial meaning we can attain are important, for without them, our lives would be not only meaningless but also miserable and unbearable. It would be hard to get up each day and do the things that life necessitates in order to continue. One writer has sniffed at this suggestion, saying that the “idea that the natural consequence of finding one’s life meaningless is to commit suicide is somewhat ridiculous.” In fact, however, failed social belonging is, at least according to some, the most important factor in predicting suicide. Failed social belonging is one consequence of perceiving one’s life to have no meaning from the perspective of some other humans.
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About David Benatar
(born 1966) is a South African philosopher, academic and author. He is best known for his advocacy of antinatalism in his book , in which he argues that coming into existence is a serious harm, regardless of the feelings of the existing being once brought into existence, and that, as a consequence, it is always morally wrong to create more sentient beings.
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D. Benatar
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Additional quotes by David Benatar
Creating new people, by having babies, is so much a part of human life that it is rarely thought even to require a justification. Indeed, most people do not even think about whether they should or should not make a baby. They just make one. In other words, procreation is usually the consequence of sex rather than the result of a decision to bring people into existence. Those who do indeed decide to have a child might do so for any number of reasons, but among these reasons cannot be the interests of the potential child. One can never have a child for that child's sake.
The psychological trait of comparison is obviously also a factor. Because the negative features I have described are common to all lives, they play very little role in how people assess the quality of their lives. It is true for everybody that the worst pains are worse than the best pleasures are good, and that pains can and often do last much longer than pleasures. Everybody must work hard to ward off unpleasantness and seek the good things. Thus, when people judge the quality of their own lives and do so by comparing them to the lives of others, they tend to overlook these and other such features.
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[T]he somewhat good news is that our lives can be meaningful—from some perspectives. One reason that this is only somewhat good news is that even by the more limited standards, there are some people whose lives either are or feel meaningless. Moreover, the prospects for meaning generally diminish as the scope of the perspective broadens. That the prospects tend to diminish in this way does not imply that lives that are meaningless from a more limited perspective are never meaningful from a broader perspective. There are those, for example, who have no family left or who have no meaning for their family or community, perhaps because they have been shunned, but who make an impact at a broader level. Another reason why the news so far has been only somewhat good is that even those whose lives have meaning from more expansive terrestrial perspectives are rarely satisfied with the amount of meaning their lives have. Not only do people typically want more meaning than they can get, but the most meaning that anybody is capable of attaining is inevitably significantly limited.
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