What’s the point of it all?
What reflective person hasn’t asked that question? After all, the lives of sentient beings, human and nonhuman, are at best a mixed bag. They contain not just good but also bad ‒ in many cases, lots of bad. What could be the point of living through that mix?
Whatever your answer to that question, the first thing to recognize is this: Your answer can reasonably be questioned. If you say that the bad comes as the price of the good, then we can reasonably ask whether the price is worth paying. If you claim that in sentient lives the good outweighs the bad, then we can reasonably ask whether it does and for which lives it does.
Acknowledging doubts about whether the good in sentient existence really does outweigh the bad, some people answer my title question by citing something otherworldly, such as God. But, as I’ve argued elsewhere, we can reasonably question any answer in that category too. Indeed, Laura Ekstrom’s SEP entry on theodicies raises serious doubts about all of the standard God-citing answers to the question.
The second thing to recognize is this: Because every answer to my title question can reasonably be questioned, no answer to it should strike us as satisfying. The quest for “the point of it all” owes its very origin to the fact that we can reasonably question any of the purposes we standardly hear for slogging through this vale of tears. A quest-ending answer, therefore, must be one that we couldn’t reasonably query. But there’s literally no answer to which we can’t reasonably and sincerely respond, “What’s so great about that?” This of course includes any answer we get to that last question. We begin to see that the quest itself is hopeless: given the reason that we seek it in the first place, there couldn’t be any such thing as the point of it all.
