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Summary Issues in quality of life and value of life/lives.Related concepts: good life, meaning, worth, dignity, wellbeing, welfare, commensurability, sanctity.
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  1. Animal Rights and the Wrongness of Killing.Leslie Allan - manuscript
    This essay explores the moral reasoning underpinning the common view that it is worse to kill a human compared with killing an animal. After examining the serious deficiencies of traditional approaches, the author develops an alternative utilitarian-based framework that proportions the seriousness of killing to levels of sentience. He demonstrates how this new approach avoids the problems faced by the application of standard utilitarian formulae in weighing the seriousness of killing many low-sentience animals vis-á-vis killing a single human. The author (...)
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  2. What Is the Meaning of Life?Jonathan Birch - manuscript
    This is an edited transcript of a lecture given at the LSE in March 2023. The lecture introduces the “meaning of life” question via Tolstoy’s Confession, then considers the strengths and limitations of religious and secular answers to the question.
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  3. A Happy Possibility About Happiness (And Other Subjective) Scales: An Investigation and Tentative Defence of the Cardinality Thesis.Michael Plant - manuscript
    There are long-standing doubts about whether data from subjective scales—for instance, self-reports of happiness—are cardinally comparable. It is unclear how to assess whether these doubts are justified without first addressing two unresolved theoretical questions: how do people interpret subjective scales? Which assumptions are required for cardinal comparability? This paper offers answers to both. It proposes an explanation for scale interpretation derived from philosophy of language and game theory. In short: conversation is a cooperative endeavour governed by various maxims (Grice 1989); (...)
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  4. A Life Worth Living.Aaron Smuts - manuscript
    Theories of well-being tell us what makes a life good for the one who lives it. But there is more to what makes a life worth living than just well-being. We care about the worth of our lives, and we are right to do so. I defend an objective list theory of the worth of a life: The most worthwhile lives are those high in various objective goods. These principally include welfare and meaning. By distinguishing between worth and welfare, we (...)
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  5. Some qualities of life are not worth living.H. T. Engelhardt - forthcoming - Bioethics, Readings and Cases, Prentice-Hall, New Jersey.
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  6. Meaningfulness and Importance.Guy Kahane - forthcoming - In Iddo Landau (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Meaning in Life.
    Some lives are more meaningful than others. Some lives are more important than others. What is the relationship between meaning in life and importance? Because both can be described as relating to significance, the two are often conflated. But these are rather different concepts and the meaningful and the important can easily come apart. They do, however, interact in important ways. When importance also meets the conditions for meaningfulness, it amplifies it, and importance on a large scale is a key, (...)
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  7. The Value of Consciousness to the One Who Has It.Uriah Kriegel - forthcoming - In Geoffrey Lee & Adam Pautz (eds.), The Importance of Being Conscious. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    There is a strong intuition that a zombie’s life is never good or bad for the zombie. This suggests that consciousness has a special role in making life good or bad for the one who lives it. What explains this? In this paper, I consider five possible explanations of the intuition that a zombie’s life is never worth living, plus the option of rejecting the intuition. I point out the considerable costs of each option, though making clear which option strikes (...)
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  8. Schopenhauer's Pessimism.Byron Simmons - forthcoming - In David Bather Woods & Timothy Stoll (eds.), The Schopenhauerian Mind. Routledge.
    Optimism and pessimism are two diametrically opposed views about the value of existence. Optimists maintain that existence is better than non-existence, while pessimists hold that it is worse. Arthur Schopenhauer put forward a variety of arguments against optimism and for pessimism. I will offer a synoptic reading of these arguments, which aims to show that while Schopenhauer’s case against optimism primarily focuses on the value or disvalue of life’s contents, his case for pessimism focuses on the ways in which life (...)
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  9. On the Subjective Value of Life.Ognjen Arandjelović - 2023 - Philosophies 8 (2):23.
    Claims (or the implicit assumption of the inherent worth of life) are pervasive and remain virtually unchallenged. I have already argued that these outright moral dictates are thinly veiled vestiges of theological ethics which, following the removal of their theological foundations, remain little more than nebulous claims supported only by fear of the consequences of a challenge. In my previous work, I rejected an a priori claim of an objective life’s worth, which is the worth that we should assign to (...)
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  10. The Neutrality of Life.Andrew Y. Lee - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (3):685-703.
    Some philosophers think that life is worth living not merely because of the goods and the bads within it, but also because life itself is good. I explain how this idea can be formalized by associating each version of such of a view with a function from length of life to the value generated by life itself. Then I argue that every version of the view that life itself is good faces some version of the following dilemma: either (1) good (...)
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  11. A Kantian critique of Benatar's argument from the cosmic perspective.Byeong D. Lee - 2023 - Philosophical Forum 54 (3):185-198.
    Benatar argues that the absence of cosmic meaning is part of the reason why our lives are so bad that we had better not procreate. The goal of this paper is to argue against this claim from a Kantian point of view. For this goal, I argue first that the fact that human life is a product of blind evolution is not a reason for justifying that our lives are overall bad, mainly on the grounds that the concepts of good (...)
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  12. Wasted Potential: The Value of a Life and the Significance of What Could Have Been.Michal Masny - 2023 - Philosophy and Public Affairs 51 (1):6-32.
    According to the orthodox view, the goodness of a life depends exclusively on the things that actually happened within it, such as its pleasures and pains, the satisfaction of its subject’s preferences, or the presence of various objective goods and bads. In this paper, I argue that the goodness of a life also depends on what could have happened, but didn’t. I then propose that this view helps us resolve ethical puzzles concerning the standards for a life worth living for (...)
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  13. We Should Not Use Randomization Procedures to Allocate Scarce Life-Saving Resources.Roberto Fumagalli - 2022 - Public Health Ethics 15 (1):87-103.
    In the recent literature across philosophy, medicine and public health policy, many influential arguments have been put forward to support the use of randomization procedures to allocate scarce life-saving resources. In this paper, I provide a systematic categorization and a critical evaluation of these arguments. I shall argue that those arguments justify using RAND to allocate SLSR in fewer cases than their proponents maintain and that the relevant decision-makers should typically allocate SLSR directly to the individuals with the strongest claims (...)
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  14. The Mathematics of Desert: Merit, Fit, and Well-Being.Stephen Kershnar & Michael Tooley - 2022 - Philosophies 7 (1):18.
    Here, we argue for a mathematical equation that captures desert. Our procedure consists of setting out principles that a correct equation must satisfy and then arguing that our set of equations satisfies them. We then consider two objections to the equation. First, an objector might argue that desert and well-being separately contribute to intrinsic goodness, and they do not separately contribute. The concern here is that our equations treat them as separate contributors. Second, our set of desert-equations are unlike equations (...)
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  15. Aristotle on the Goodness of Unhappy Lives.David Machek - 2022 - Journal of the History of Philosophy 60 (3):359-383.
    For Aristotle, the happy life is the highest human good. But could even unhappy human lives have a grain of intrinsic goodness? Aristotle’s views about the value of the “mere living,” in contrast to the good living, have been neglected in the scholarship, despite his recurrent preoccupation with this question. Offering a close reading of a passage from Nicomachean Ethics IX.9, I argue that, for Aristotle, all human lives are intrinsically good by virtue of fully satisfying the definition, and thus (...)
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  16. A dilemma for lexical and Archimedean views in population axiology.Elliott Thornley - 2022 - Economics and Philosophy 38 (3):395-415.
    Lexical views in population axiology can avoid the Repugnant Conclusion without violating Transitivity or Separability. However, they imply a dilemma: either some good life is better than any number of slightly worse lives, or else the ‘at least as good as’ relation on populations is radically incomplete. In this paper, I argue that Archimedean views face an analogous dilemma. I thus conclude that the lexical dilemma gives us little reason to prefer Archimedean views. Even if we give up on lexicality, (...)
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  17. An Argument Against Treating Non-Human Animal Bodies as Commodities.Marc G. Wilcox - 2022 - Journal of Value Inquiry:1-13.
    Some animal defenders are committed to complete abstinence from animal products. However the strongest arguments for adopting veganism only seem to require that one avoid using animal products, where use or procurement of these products will harm sentient animals. As such, there is seemingly a gap between our intuition and our argument. In this article I attempt to defend the more comprehensive claim that we have a moral reason to avoid using animal products, regardless of the method of procurement. I (...)
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  18. Two Pessimisms in Mill.Joshua Isaac Fox - 2021 - Utilitas 33 (4):442-457.
    Mill defines utilitarianism as the combination of a “theory of life” and a moral claim: only pleasure and freedom from pain are desirable as ends, and the promotion of happiness is the sole goal of moral action. So defined, utilitarianism is open to ad hominem pessimistic objection: a “theory of life” which entails the impossibility of happiness fits poorly with a morality centered on its promotion. The first two challenges Mill confronts in Utilitarianism share this pessimistic structure. Interestingly, however, these (...)
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  19. Living Your Best Life.August Gorman - 2021 - Analysis 81 (3):568-576.
    In Almost Over: Aging, Dying, Dead, Frances Kamm seeks to make sense of people’s widely variant choices about which lives they would choose to continue living. She does this by defending the Prudential Prerogative, which, in analogy to the Moral Prerogative, holds that in a fairly wide range of conditions we are under no intrapersonal rational obligation to choose either to die or to live on. I argue against Kamm's case for the Prudential Prerogative in favor of Life Holism, the (...)
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  20. Autonomy, identity and health: defining quality of life in older age.Sara Kate Heide - 2021 - Journal of Medical Ethics 48 (5):353-356.
    Defining quality of life is a difficult task as it is a subjective and personal experience. However, for the elderly, this definition is necessary for making complicated healthcare-related decisions. Commonly these decisions compare independence against safety or longevity against comfort. These choices are often not made in isolation, but with the help of a healthcare team. When the patient’s concept of quality of life is miscommunicated, there is a risk of harm to the patient whose best interests are not well (...)
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  21. Doing Valuable Time. [REVIEW]Antti Kauppinen - 2021 - Philosophical Review 130 (1):154-158.
    This is a book review of Cheshire Calhoun's 2018 book, Doing Valuable Time.
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  22. Dying for a Cause: Meaning, Commitment, and Self-Sacrifice.Antti Kauppinen - 2021 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 90:57-80.
    Some people willingly risk or give up their lives for something they deeply believe in, for instance standing up to a dictator. A good example of this are members of the White Rose student resistance group, who rebelled against the Nazi regime and paid for it with their lives. I argue that when the cause is good, such risky activities (and even deaths themselves) can contribute to meaning in life in its different forms – meaning-as-mattering, meaning-as-purpose, and meaning-as-intelligibility. Such cases (...)
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  23. Transfinitely Transitive Value.Kacper Kowalczyk - 2021 - Philosophical Quarterly 72 (1):108-134.
    This paper develops transfinite extensions of transitivity and acyclicity in the context of population ethics. They are used to argue that it is better to add good lives, worse to add bad lives, and equally good to add neutral lives, where a life's value is understood as personal value. These conclusions rule out a number of theories of population ethics, feed into an argument for the repugnant conclusion, and allow us to reduce different-number comparisons to same-number ones. Challenges to these (...)
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  24. "Life" and "Death". An Inquiry into Essential Meaning of These Phenomena.Andrii Leonov - 2021 - Actual Problems of Mind. Philosophy Journal 22 (22):108-136.
    In this paper, I am dealing with the phenomena of “life” and “death.” The questions that I attempt to answer are “What is life, and what is death?” “Is it bad to die?” and “Is there life after death?” The method that I am using in this paper is that of phenomenology. The latter I understand as an inquiry into meaning, that is, what makes this or that phenomenon as such. Thus, I am approaching the phenomena in question from the (...)
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  25. Assessment of the Quality of Life in Parents of Children With ADHD: Validation of the Multicultural Quality of Life Index in Norwegian Pediatric Mental Health Hettings.Ingunn Mundal, Petter Laake, Juan Mezzich, Stål K. Bjørkly & Mariela Loreto Lara-Cabrera - 2021 - Frontiers in Psychology 12.
    Background: The brief generic Multicultural Quality of Life Index is a culturally informed self-report 10-item questionnaire used to measure health-related quality of life. QoL is an important outcome measure in guiding healthcare and is held as a substantial parameter to evaluate the effectiveness of healthcare. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in children might negatively influence the parents’ QoL. Having a validated questionnaire to measure QoL for this population will therefore be a vital first step in guiding healthcare for parents of children (...)
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  26. Against Exclusive Survivalism: Preventing Lost Life and Protecting the Disadvantaged in Resource Allocation.Govind Persad - 2021 - Hastings Center Report 51 (5):47-51.
    When life-saving medical resources are scarce and not everyone can be saved, is the only relevant goal saving the most lives? Or can other factors be considered, at least as tiebreakers, such as how early in life the people we don't save will die or how much future life they are likely to lose? This commentary defends a multiprinciple allocation approach that considers objectives in addition to saving more lives, including preventing early death and preventing harm in the form of (...)
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  27. The quality of life, meaning in life, positive orientation to life and gratitude of Catholic seminarians in Poland: A comparative analysis.Jacek Prusak, Krzysztof Kwapis, Barbara Pilecka, Agnieszka Chemperek, Agnieszka Krawczyk, Marcin Jabłoński & Krzysztof Nowakowski - 2021 - Archive for the Psychology of Religion 43 (1):78-94.
    The aim of the article is to examine differences in the quality of life as well as gratitude, meaning in life and positive orientation to life between diocesan and religious seminarians and secular students. The influence of religiosity on quality of life and subjective well-being is the subject of numerous studies, but seminarians have rarely been included in them. The present research was carried out for the first time with a group of diocesan and religious seminarians in Poland and secular (...)
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  28. A thousand pleasures are not worth a single pain: The compensation argument for Schopenhauer's pessimism.Byron Simmons - 2021 - European Journal of Philosophy 29 (1):120-136.
    Pessimism is, roughly, the view that life is not worth living. In chapter 46 of the second volume of The World as Will and Representation, Arthur Schopenhauer provides an oft-neglected argument for this view. The argument is that a life is worth living only if it does not contain any uncompensated evils; but since all our lives happen to contain such evils, none of them are worth living. The now standard interpretation of this argument (endorsed by Kuno Fischer and Christopher (...)
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  29. The Sanctity of Human Life, Qualified Quality-of-Life Judgments, and Dying Well Enough.Patrick T. Smith - 2021 - The National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 21 (3):427-440.
    This essay claims that one can consistently maintain a sanctity of human life principle that is explicitly grounded in theology, while making a kind of quality-of-life judgment regarding withholding or discontinuing life-sustaining treatments for those with advanced illnesses. For those who embrace them, resources that are specific to the Christian tradition delineate the parameters of responsibility for people dying with advanced illness and those who care for them. Those who embrace the sanctity of human life for the theological reasons provided (...)
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  30. Transformative Experiences.Marcus Arvan - 2020 - In International Encyclopedia of Ethics. Wiley-Blackwell.
  31. Either/Or: Subjectivity, Objectivity and Value.Katalin Balog - 2020 - In John Schwenkler & Enoch Lambert (eds.), Becoming Someone New: Essays on Transformative Experience, Choice, and Change. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
    My concern in this paper is the role of subjectivity in the pursuit of the good. I propose that subjective thought as well as a subjective mental process underappreciated in philosophical psychology – contemplation – are instrumental for discovering and apprehending a whole range of value. In fact, I will argue that our primary contact with these values is through experience and that they could not be properly understood in any other way. This means that subjectivity is central to our (...)
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  32. Quality of Work Life and Work–Life Balance.Pravin Bhende, Nandakumar Mekoth, Varsha Ingalhalli & Y. V. Reddy - 2020 - Journal of Human Values 26 (3):256-265.
    The purpose of this article is to unearth the dimensions of quality of work life and work–life balance and to find the impact of the quality of work life on work–life balance. Data have been gather...
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  33. Worth living or worth dying? The views of the general public about allowing disabled children to die.Claudia Brick, Guy Kahane, Dominic Wilkinson, Lucius Caviola & Julian Savulescu - 2020 - Journal of Medical Ethics 46 (1):7-15.
    BackgroundDecisions about withdrawal of life support for infants have given rise to legal battles between physicians and parents creating intense media attention. It is unclear how we should evaluate when life is no longer worth living for an infant. Public attitudes towards treatment withdrawal and the role of parents in situations of disagreement have not previously been assessed.MethodsAn online survey was conducted with a sample of the UK public to assess public views about the benefit of life in hypothetical cases (...)
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  34. Population Axiology and the Possibility of a Fourth Category of Absolute Value.Johan E. Gustafsson - 2020 - Economics and Philosophy 36 (1):81-110.
    Critical-Range Utilitarianism is a variant of Total Utilitarianism which can avoid both the Repugnant Conclusion and the Sadistic Conclusion in population ethics. Yet Standard Critical-Range Utilitarianism entails the Weak Sadistic Conclusion, that is, it entails that each population consisting of lives at a bad well-being level is not worse than some population consisting of lives at a good well-being level. In this paper, I defend a version of Critical-Range Utilitarianism which does not entail the Weak Sadistic Conclusion. This is made (...)
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  35. Quality of Life and Value Assessment in Health Care.Alicia Hall - 2020 - Health Care Analysis 28 (1):45-61.
    Proposals for health care cost containment emphasize high-value care as a way to control spending without compromising quality. When used in this context, ‘value’ refers to outcomes in relation to cost. To determine where health spending yields the most value, it is necessary to compare the benefits provided by different treatments. While many studies focus narrowly on health gains in assessing value, the notion of benefit is sometimes broadened to include overall quality of life. This paper explores the implications of (...)
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  36. The Quality of Life: Aristotle Revised, by Richard Kraut.Daniel M. Haybron - 2020 - Mind 129 (515):947-956.
    The Quality of Life: Aristotle Revised, by KrautRichard. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. x + 249.
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  37. Prudence, Sunk Costs, and the Temporally Extended Self.Antti Kauppinen - 2020 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 17 (6):658-681.
    Many find it reasonable to take our past actions into account when making choices for the future. In this paper, I address two important issues regarding taking past investments into account in prudential deliberation. The first is the charge that doing so commits the fallacy of honoring sunk costs. I argue that while it is indeed irrational to care about sunk costs, past investments are not sunk costs when we can change their teleological significance, roughly their contribution to our excellence (...)
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  38. Benatar on the Badness of All Human Lives.Iddo Landau - 2020 - Philosophia 49 (1):333-345.
    This paper presents a critique of David Benatar’s arguments on the badness of all human lives. I argue that even if Benatar is right that there is an asymmetry between the good and the bad in life so that each “unit” of bad is indeed more effective than each “unit” of good, lives in which there is a lot of good and only little bad are still overall good. Even if there are more unfulfilled than fulfilled desires in life, a (...)
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  39. Deciding when a life is not worth living: An_ _imperative to measure what matters.Monica E. Lemmon - 2020 - Journal of Medical Ethics 46 (1):18-19.
    As a neonatal neurologist, I serve families facing tragic decisions in which they must balance trade-offs between death and life with profound disability. I often find myself in complex discussions about future outcome, in which families sort through in real-time what information they value most in making such a choice. Will he laugh? Will he be in pain? Will he know how much he’s loved? In this month’s feature article, Brick et al share the results of an online survey aimed (...)
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  40. The deep error of political libertarianism: self-ownership, choice, and what’s really valuable in life.Dan Lowe - 2020 - Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 23 (6):683-705.
    Contemporary versions of natural rights libertarianism trace their locus classicus to Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia. But although there have been many criticisms of the version of political libertarianism put forward by Nozick, many of these fail objections to meet basic methodological desiderata. Thus, Nozick’s libertarianism deserves to be re-examined. In this paper I develop a new argument which meets these desiderata. Specifically, I argue that the libertarian conception of self-ownership, the view’s foundation, implies what I call the Asymmetrical (...)
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  41. The Worthwhileness of Meaningful Lives.David Matheson - 2020 - Philosophia 48 (1):313-324.
    The M → W thesis that a meaningful life must be a worthwhile life follows from an appealing approach to the axiology of life. Yet one of the most prominent voices in the recent philosophy of life literature, Thaddeus Metz, has raised multiple objections to that thesis. With a view to preserving the appeal of the axiological approach from which it follows, I here defend the M → W thesis from Metz’s objections. My defense yields some interesting insights about both (...)
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  42. Death and prudential deprivation.Matthew W. G. McClure - 2020 - Pense (Edinb.) 1:29–41.
    Dying is (sometimes) bad for the dier because it prevents her from being the subject of wellbeing she otherwise would (the deprivation account). I argue for this from a (plausible) principle about which futures are bad for a prudential subject (the future-comparison principle). A strengthening of this principle yields that death is not always bad, and that the badness of death does not consist in that it destroys the dier.
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  43. The Meaning of Life and Death: Ten Classic Thinkers on the Ultimate Question, MichaelHauskeller, 2020. London, Bloomsbury Academic. xv + 236 pp. £ 45.50 (hb) £ 13.99 (pb). [REVIEW]Lantz Fleming Miller - 2020 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 37 (4):681-683.
    This book is at once incisive and exploratory, interpretive and historic scholarship. It appeals to both general and specialized readers. It uniquely takes a common philosophical theme, the meaning of life, and traces it through many philosophers’ and novelists' works. Sometimes the theme is buried and implicit, and offers a plausible distillation of each author's view. The result is a title that may sound like a self-help book’s—except the contents expand in manifold directions rather than narrow to easy advice. The (...)
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  44. Public views about quality of life and treatment withdrawal in infants: limitations and directions for future research.Ryan H. Nelson - 2020 - Journal of Medical Ethics 46 (1):20-21.
    Work done within the realm of what is sometimes called ‘descriptive ethics’ brings two questions readily to mind: How can empirical findings, in general, inform normative debates? and How can these empirical findings, in particular, inform the normative debate at hand? Brick et al 1 confront these questions in their novel investigation of public views about lives worth living and the permissibility of withdrawing life-sustaining treatment from critically ill infants. Mindful of the is-ought gap, the authors suggest modestly that their (...)
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  45. A Fresh Look at 'Relational' Values in Nature: Distinctions Derived from the Debate on Meaningfulness in Life.Stijn Neuteleers - 2020 - Environmental Values 29 (4):461-479.
    Some recent policy-oriented publications have put forward a third category of environmental values, namely relational or eudaimonic values, in addition to intrinsic and instrumental values. In this debate, there is, however, much confusion about the content of such values. This paper looks at a fundamental debate in ethics about a third category of reasons besides reasons from morality and self-interest, labelled as reasons of love, care or meaningfulness. This category allows us, first, to see the relation between relational and eudaimonic (...)
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  46. Samuel Scheffler on Valuing and Considering Valuable.Jonathan Stanhope - 2020 - Philosophia 48 (4):1609-1616.
    Consider the utterances ‘our friendship is valuable’ and ‘I value our friendship’. On the face of it, these aren’t semantic equivalents: the former ascribes a property to our friendship, whereas the latter reports something about how I relate to our friendship. In this short paper, I first outline Samuel Scheffler’s account of valuing and of the difference between valuing and considering valuable. I then propose an amendment to his account of valuing, one which concerns how we interact with our value-related (...)
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  47. Why would very bad lives be worth continuing?Matej Sušnik - 2020 - South African Journal of Philosophy 39 (3):285-295.
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  48. The Tragi-Comic Lives of Theory: Values of a Simmelian Existence.Thomas Kemple - 2019 - Digithum 24.
    The philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel made repeated efforts throughout his career to address the crisis of modern culture by drawing on a wide repertoire of scholarly discourses and imaginative fictions. An overlooked and unique feature of his early works include humorous vignettes and free-verse poems in pseudonymous pieces published in the avant-garde journal Jugend. In later writings, he advances his own life-philosophy through an idiosyncratic use of Goethe’s scientific, autobiographical, and literary works in an attempt to articulate what is (...)
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  49. Considering Quality of Life while Repudiating Disability Injustice: A Pathways Approach to Setting Priorities.Govind Persad - 2019 - Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 47 (2):294-303.
    This article proposes a novel strategy, one that draws on insights from antidiscrimination law, for addressing a persistent challenge in medical ethics and the philosophy of disability: whether health systems can consider quality of life without unjustly discriminating against individuals with disabilities. It argues that rather than uniformly considering or ignoring quality of life, health systems should take a more nuanced approach. Under the article's proposal, health systems should treat cases where quality of life suffers because of disability-focused exclusion or (...)
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  50. Is Coming into Existence Always a Harm? Qoheleth in Dialogue with David Benatar.Jesse Peterson - 2019 - Harvard Theological Review 112 (1):33–54.
    Contemporary philosopher David Benatar has advanced the self-evidently controversial claim that “coming into existence is always a harm.” Benatar’s argument turns on the basic asymmetry between pleasure and pain, an asymmetry he seeks to explain by the principle that those who never exist cannot be deprived. Benatar’s import is almost incredible: humans should cease to procreate immediately, thereby engendering the extinction of the species—a view known as “anti-natalism.” According to many of his readers, the ancient Hebrew sage Qoheleth expresses a (...)
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