Should You Want To Live?
Should you want to live? Read that again. Should you want to live? It's not an obvious question. It's a fishy question. The term "should" implies a moral basis for an action. For an Objectivist, the purpose of morality is enjoyment, long-range, i.e. life. The whole problem of morality is that we often want to do things detrimental to that goal . Moral thinking reveals the ideas and the courses of action that further our interest , rather than our immediate pleasure or satisfaction. If you don't want to live, moral arguments are irrelevant, because you've given up what moral argumentation appeals to: the desire for durable joy . The choice to live is pre-moral. Morality is about how to live. Before you can care about morality, you must choose to live—to pursue happiness. Morality cannot make the choice for you. Some think that because "man's life" is the standard of value in Objectivism, bare survival is all that Objectivist morality invol