As far as the species is concerned, it’s a personal problem.\u00a0 The rest of the universe doesn’t care one way or the other.\u00a0 There is no objective reason why we should survive.\u00a0 Basically, it depends on our own whims, and there’s no reason to suggest that any one person’s whim should carry more weight than another’s.\u00a0<\/p>\n
My own whim is in favor of survival.\u00a0 I can give no objective reason for preferring it to the alternative.\u00a0 However, the thought has occurred to me that we only exist in the first place because we have been good at surviving.\u00a0 If I were to prefer not to survive, then, from a biological point of view I would be dysfunctional, and I find that thought distressing.\u00a0 Subjective as it is, I can think of no more fundamental “good” than survival.\u00a0 It may not be a good in itself, but, as a subjective good, it trumps all the rest.\u00a0 After all, our very perception of good and evil, and the way in which we experience these categories, are themselves artifacts of evolution.\u00a0 They exist for no other reason whatsoever than the role they have played in promoting our survival.\u00a0 In that sense, then, all other goods and all other evils, fundamentally irrational emotional entities that they are, are ancillary to survival.\u00a0 Survival, then, becomes the subjective “good of goods.”<\/p>\n
Again, I am by no means claiming that survival is good in itself.\u00a0 I am merely describing my own, personal emotional response to the circumstances I find myself in.\u00a0 To put it in the broadest possible terms, I desire the survival of the life I carry, regardless of the manner in which it evolves in the future to accomplish that end.\u00a0 It has been alive for billions of years.\u00a0 In that sense, it is really who “I” am, as opposed to the consciousness writing these lines.\u00a0 It would distress me to know that, after all those eons of survival, its fate was only to be extinguished in a universe that doesn’t care.<\/p>\n