Last week, a post I made called Evanescent on the Meaning of
Life left me with two related tasks for this week. I need to
answer emu sam question about how we can have rights without
suggesting some sort of 'rights particle' or some other strange
ontological invention. At the same time, I need to demonstrate
to Evanescent that the proposition, "Life is the ultimate
value," is false. I am going to start with refuting Evanescent's
thesis. Life is necessarily the ultimate value, because IF it
wasn't, you would act with death as your objective! IF that was
the case, you should up and die as soon as possible, in which
case you wouldn't need a guide to how to live your life, because
you wouldn't have life as your goal! This is a classic example
of a false dichotomy. There are many things in the universe
other than life and death. The 'ultimate value' (if there is
such a thing) could be a third thing, such as happiness or the
absence of pain. In these cases, life would be useful insofar as
life is conducive to happi