IS LIFE WORTH LIVING?

THIS grave question is, according to Mr. Herbert Spencer, one which must be “definitely raised and answered before entering on any ethical discussion” (Data of Ethics, § 9). He goes on to restate it in the form: Does life yield “a surplus of pleasurable feeling over painful feeling?” and he argues that “goodness or badness can be ascribed to acts which subserve life or hinder life only on this supposition” (§ 10). But can one really strike a balance between pleasures and pains in human life? Mr. Spencer himself admits, later on, that pleasures and pains, “unlike in their kinds, intensities and times of occurrence, are incommensurable” (§ 57). Moreover, the maintenance of life in the present day means passing it on for countless generations ahead, and how can we feel satisfied that the conditions then existing will make more for pleasure than for pain, even assuming that they do so now? The question, then, whether it is good to maintain life does not seem capable of philosophic decision on this ground.

Mr. Spencer’s sense of logic, however, seems to me to be here at fault as well as his fundamental conception of ethics. The question which he begins by asking is not the question which he ends by answering. In the original question, Is life worth living? a comparison is set up between living and not-living. But we find this merging, in Mr. Spencer’s mind, into the quite different comparison of one kind of living with another kind of living—the pleasurable and the painful. Let us translate the original question into the language of Mr. Spencer’s ethical system. In that system “the good is universally the pleasurable” (§ 10). The word ‘worth,’ then, connotes pleasure, and the question resolves itself simply into this, Is it more pleasurable to live than not to live? Seeing that in not-living there is no pleasure at all, the only possible answer is an affirmative—the question answers itself. And in fact this must always be the case whatever connotation we attach to the word ‘worth,’ for life has at any rate possibilities, whereas not-living has none. The question, then, “of late so much agitated,” is really a nonsense question, and the reason why it is necessarily devoid of meaning will appear at once when we analyze the terms. For ‘worth,’ ‘goodness,’ ‘blessedness,’ ‘pleasure,’ and so forth, are simply terms of life and have no significance whatever apart from it. So the question, Is it better to live than not to live? is merely the same thing as to ask, Is there more life in living than in not living? Instead, therefore, of the unverifiable assumption on which Spencer bases his system of ethics, that life yields on the whole a surplus of pleasure over pain, we merely affirm the indubitable proposition that it yields a surplus of life.

From another side than that of the Spencerian ethics, however, it may be argued, against the conception which we are trying to substitute for it, that, if Life is something more than the physical phenomena attending it on earth, if, in fact, it is what we call ‘immortal,’ we need be at no pains to preserve it for ourselves or others in the form in which we find it going on here, since death can merely have the effect of translating it into another form.

True; but suppose us to hold as lightly by that form as we are urged to do by this—suppose us to show no persistence in any of the forms of being into which our life may pass, what kind of life would be realizable under such conditions of eternal volatility? Could life ever have risen above the stage of the Amoeba if the Amoeba had not the instinct to maintain itself on earth? Can Man ever hope to rise to anything higher without a strong element of continuity, of fixity, of ‘fighting it out on these lines’ in his feeling about the form of life in which he actually finds himself? It is through the thousand ties of duty and service, love and joy, which we form with the visible world around us that we realize the highest life of which we are at present capable. A light-minded readiness to snap those ties would imply an incapacity for forming them. Here, as always, we find that Nature tells us nothing to any good purpose unless we look at her as an organic whole. One cannot live by any isolated principle or factor, however great and true.