Reflections on Meaning and Immortality

Abstract

This article revisits Bernard Williams’s influential argument that an immortal human life would be meaningless and argues for a shift in focus. There’s good reason to keep Williams’s framework for evaluating the prospects of meaning in continued life. But there’s also good reason to abandon the conception of human psychology that he, and most of the vast literature in response, uses to fill in that framework. Focusing on values, as opposed to desires, reveals that the most pressing threats to a meaningful immortal human life are not repetition or satisfaction, but rather changes in what the world has to offer.