ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about four things: personal aims or purposes, communal purposes, common purposes, and transcendent purposes. The first three are internal, i.e., they are part of mundane life. Schubert wrote music nearly every day and doubtless this was for him the most important activity in his life. Schopenhauer believed that not only human beings but every other kind of being is dominated by the Will to Life. Many utilitarians hold that everyone is engaged in a search for happiness. Death is not an event in life, moreover the aim itself doesn’t necessarily presuppose the long-term survival of other people. ‘Life has no transcendent meaning’ is analogous to the proposition ‘Joe’s job has no impersonal purpose’. The idea that life has intrinsic value goes with the idea that life is sacred, hence people who deny that life has intrinsic value sometimes do so because according to them the idea of sanctity is an outmoded and empty shibboleth.
