I was once discussing what I was reading with a friend of mine. He wanted to know why I was reading a book that supported the Christian religion since this was not my position on the subject. I responded that it was not a good idea to limit your reading to books that confirm ideas that you already have. Then I asked, “What if I'm wrong?”

He responded, “What if your wrong?”

I had meant the question in the sense that you should investigate other points of view so that you can correct errors in your own. I believe that he meant it in the sense of Pascal's wager. That is that I should adopt the other position in case I'm wrong.

I asked whether he meant wrong about God's existence or Christianity. He responded by saying both, which might indicate that he didn't understand the question. In any case it's a rather ambiguous response as it might indicate either that he wanted me to consider each possibility individually or that he wanted me to consider if I was wrong about both. I took it that he meant the latter.

My response was that I wasn't wrong. To this he laughed and said that if I was right then life was pointless.

There are at least two problems with his position on this. The first is that if I'm wrong about the existence of God, that doesn't mean that he's right about Christianity. That may have been my response.

In any case I pointed this out to him on another occasion. I pointed out that no matter what the truth was, the majority of humans are wrong about religion. This follows from the fact that there is no majority opinion on the subject. This should tell us that humans aren't particularly good at determining which religion is true.

Somewhere between a third and a quarter of the people in the world are Christians of one sort or another. About a fifth are Muslim. Hinduism and Buddhism are the next two most popular religions. Both of these taken together have almost as many adherents as Islam. So we see that Christianity is the most popular religion. If it is true then over two thirds of the people in the world are wrong about religion. If some other religion is right, then Christianity is wrong, and so is every other religion except the right one. This would mean that an even greater proportion of the world is wrong about religion.

At one point when I was explaining this to him, he said “I see what you're trying to do.” I found this to be a rather puzzling response. It was as if he understood my point, but didn't feel the need to consider it, like he felt that it was appropriate to dismiss it without presenting a counter-argument.

The other problem with my friend's response is that it is based on the assumption that a temporary life is not worth living. I don't think this is true. The idea here is that a finite stretch of life would be so bad that it would be better to shorten it, but an infinite stretch would be good. If a finite stretch was truly worthless, then an infinite stretch would be even worse. Not only that, but there would be no way to end it.

I think that the problem here is that contemplating death can be unpleasant. If you imagine a finite stretch of life when you are contemplating non-existence, perhaps that would be bad. However, most of us spend the vast majority of our time on more immediate concerns. Christians don't spend all their time thinking about heaven.

To a large extent the happiness or unhappiness that we experience in life adjusts to the circumstances that we are in. Recognizing that you are truly mortal probably won't make you all that much less happy overall. Believing that you are not mortal will not make it any less so that you are.

Nietzsche addressed the problem that the consensus of thinking people was that life was not worth living in Twilight of the Idols. I don't approve of his amoralism, but I think he makes a few good points along with some really bad ones. He suggests that the reason why they have come to this conclusion is that they have all made their lives less pleasant by denigrating this world, the senses, humanity and this life.

The afterlife that the religious imagine serves the purpose of making this life seem insignificant or even undesirable. This one is finite. That one has no end. We experience pain and suffering. The afterlife has neither. All this makes this life seem bad by comparison.

I would add that what the afterlife does for this life, god does for humanity. We see a world that has no animal or plant quite as intelligent as ourselves, and yet we invent a god so that we can consider ourselves to be stupid by comparison. Our own intelligence is limited, although less so than for anything else that we see, but the intelligence of god is without limit.

He goes on to claim that the ideal world that the philosophers imagine serves much the same purpose. I suspect he is right here. If we are to imagine an ideal world and then point out every feature of our own world that differs from it, then this will likely detract from our experience of this world.

The philosopher John Rawls even goes so far as to say that a moral philosophy would not be complete if it didn't include a picture of the ideal state of the world. Nietzsche might agree with this, but he would have a different opinion about the desirability of moral philosophy.

I see this as a problem for moral philosophy. I don't think that imagining an ideal world is the best way of assigning blame and credit to certain behaviors. Contrary to Nietzsche I think that such assignments are necessary. We will want to deter people from actions that are harmful to others and encourage them to do things that are helpful. What is not useful is inventing some imaginary, ideal world and then blaming this one for not conforming to your ideal.

This brings me to a point where I part company with Nietzsche. He denies free will and claims that it is an excuse to blame people. He calls this the metaphysics of the hangman. However, if we don't blame people, then how can we say that it is wrong to be a hangman. What we need to acknowledge is that we harm people by blaming them. Sometimes this harm is justified. At others it is not.

As a final point I would like to say that Nietzsche's amoralism failed to help him in one important respect.  His life and career were both probably cut short due to his having contracted syphilis.  This may have also adversely effected his later work.  It is hard to tell.  He saw the Greek custom of the orgy as a celebration of life.  This view probably carried over into his own habits concerning prostitution.  Sleeping with prostitutes led to syphilis, which prematurely ended his life and career.  There is a lesson to learn here.

There are reasons why we have the sexual moral and ethical values that we have.  First, in that people value exclusivity in sexual relationships we do them harm by sleeping with people that we have little reason to believe are unmarried or contributing to an atmosphere which makes it easier for people to cheat on a spouse.  Secondly, sexuality is tied to ideas of purity, and with good reason.  These ideas help us avoid illness.