Seneca says that life is such that “it is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it.” And again: life “has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested.” (On the Shortness of Life)
I agree with him that many waste their lives. I grant the importance of wise investment. And I grant that a well-lived life is desirable, and perhaps even enough to warrant saying “enough” given the undesirable aspects of the human condition. But is a well-lived life truly long enough for its liver? If you are living well, might not more life be better? Doesn’t death deprive the flourishing person of opportunities for experiencing and possessing intrinsic goods that he would experience and have were he to continue living?
Indeed, pace Bernard Williams, I doubt that an immortal life must grow intolerably boring. It depends on the kind of life and the kind of liver. If the life is a mix of weal and woe, well, perhaps so. If the liver is ill-equipped for flourishing, perhaps again. But I can imagine a life of ever new and interesting opportunties to flourish, and to help others do the same — a life such that its liver maintains diachronic identity and has a developing state of well-being for eternity. (Think, for example, of Kant’s postulate of immortality according to which one lives an endless life, forever increasing in virtue toward perfection, and possesses a correspondingly growing degree of happiness proportioned to that asymptotic virtue.) This kind of life is desirable, if one is prepared for it; our pre-mortem life, no matter how well-lived, is not long enough for it.
Even if you think that immortal life would eventually grow tiresome and unworthy of your involvement, still, it seems there is much more good living available to us (were we to reside longer in the land of the alive) than we can fit into this span of a mere twelve decades or less.
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Blarney or baloney? Baloney!!