Is Life Worth Reliving?

Abstract

For most of us life is worth living. This means not only that we usually do not entertain thoughts of suicide but that we also do whatever is in our power to prolong life. It also seems true that most of us regard our past life as having been worth living, that is to say, we usually do not regret having lived it. But do we find an analogous wish to prolong our past life? This is hard to answer, because the laws of nature make such an aspiration impracticable. Yet, extending our past is made a logical possibility by the apparently simple idea of reliving it. An appropriate Gedankenexperiment may be created to test our attitude towards the question whether the fact that our life is (and has been) worth living implies that it is also worth re-living. Or, to put it in reverse order, can we, by reliving our bygone years, prolong our life? As a matter of fact, David Hume suggests exactly this thought experiment in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion: 'Ask yourself, ask any of your acquaintance whether they would live over again the last ten or twenty years of their life. 1 Hume conjectures that the answer will be 'No! but the next twenty . .. will be better' and points out the irrationality of preferring 'the dregs of life' (the next twenty years) to the twenty 'sprightly' years which we have already lived. According to Hume, only hope reconciles the contradiction between complaints about the misery of life (as we have experienced it) and the almost universal desire to live longer. Hume's pessimistic view tallies with the myth of Pandora's Box, of whose contents only hope proposed consolation for misfortune. Hume's question is rhetorical and is used as an evocative challenge to the argument from design. God cannot be deemed benevolent and omnipotent at the same time, because the world allegedly created by him is manifestly evil. Life is so miserable and painful that even life-cherishing human beings would not relive any