In think the “death gives meaning to life” meme is a great example of “standard wisdom”. It is apparently paradoxical (right form to be “deep”), it provides a comfortable consolation for a nasty situation. But I have seldom seen any deep defense for it in the bioethical literature. Even people who strongly support it and ought to work very hard to demonstrate to fellow philosophers that it is a true statement seem to be content to just rattle it off as self-evident (or that people not feeling it in their guts are simply superficial).
Being a hopeless empiricist I would like to check whether people today feel life being less meaningful than a century ago, and whether people in countries with short life expectancy feel more meaning than in countries with none. I’m pretty certain the later is not true, and the first looks iffy (hard to check, and lots of confounders like changed social and cultural values, though). I did some statistics on the current state, http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2006/12/a_long_and_happy_life.html
and found no link between longer life and ennui, at least on a national level.
In think the “death gives meaning to life” meme is a great example of “standard wisdom”. It is apparently paradoxical (right form to be “deep”), it provides a comfortable consolation for a nasty situation. But I have seldom seen any deep defense for it in the bioethical literature. Even people who strongly support it and ought to work very hard to demonstrate to fellow philosophers that it is a true statement seem to be content to just rattle it off as self-evident (or that people not feeling it in their guts are simply superficial).
Being a hopeless empiricist I would like to check whether people today feel life being less meaningful than a century ago, and whether people in countries with short life expectancy feel more meaning than in countries with none. I’m pretty certain the later is not true, and the first looks iffy (hard to check, and lots of confounders like changed social and cultural values, though). I did some statistics on the current state, http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2006/12/a_long_and_happy_life.html and found no link between longer life and ennui, at least on a national level.