No answer to the question would change anything about how to live

The argument

Proponents of this position offer a test. Take each candidate answer to the question and ask what would be different if it were true. Suppose we exist because a creator intended it: a person still has to work out what to do tomorrow, still faces the same choices between kindness and cruelty, work and idleness, and still has to decide what the intention requires of them, which is the whole of the difficulty. Suppose instead that we exist because our ancestors reproduced: the same tomorrow, the same choices. The answers differ in what they assert and not in what they recommend. The argument is that a question whose answers make no practical difference is not a deep question but an idle one. Holders of the view are not claiming that nothing matters. They are claiming that what matters is reachable without settling this, and that the things people actually find worth doing, such as caring for others, making something well, or understanding how the world works, neither wait on an answer nor change their character once one is given. On this reading the question has the form of a problem while lacking the function of one. Defenders add an observation about the history of the question. It has been asked for as long as there are records of anyone asking anything, by people of great ability, and no answer has been found that commands assent even within a single tradition. A question that resists every method brought to it may be hard, they concede, but it may instead be defective, and the second possibility deserves more attention than it usually gets. Treating it as idle is not a refusal to think; it is a judgement about where thinking pays.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics argue that the practical test is too narrow. Many things worth knowing change nothing about tomorrow, and nobody calls them idle on that ground. They also dispute the claim that nothing would change: people who take their existence to be intended frequently report that it alters what they regard as owed to them and by them, which is a practical difference even if it does not dictate particular acts. Others note that the position is itself an answer, namely that there is no reason behind existence, rather than a refusal to answer, and so stands in need of the same defence as its rivals.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The answers do differ in practice for many people, who report that taking existence to be intended changes what they regard as owed and permitted. [Rejecting P2] That something can be done without an answer does not show the answer is unimportant, since much of what makes an activity worth doing lies in what it is part of. [Rejecting C] Declaring the question idle takes a position on it, and that position needs defending rather than exempting itself from the demand it makes of its rivals.