Michael Cholbi
Class 4.2 Cholbi - Goods and Bads in an Infinite Life
For Monday’s class we read and discussed Bernard Williams’ challenge that an immortal life would be inevitably boring. This argument has been responded to many times, and so in our next three classes we are going to consider a small sampling of such responses. This week we will stick to our theme of pessimism about immortality and read Michael Cholbi’s ‘Immortality and the Exhaustibility of Value’.
Michael Cholbi
Michael Cholbi now teaches at the University of Edinburgh, but for most of his career has taught at Cal Poly Pomona, right in our backyard in Southern California. Most of his philosophical work concerns death - for example, he has written a lot about suicide and if you take Phil 166: Contemporary Moral Issues with me, you will read some of his work about the death penalty. If you are good at Google, you can find footage of him as a contestant on Jeopardy.
Goods and Bads
I’m assigning Cholbi’s article for a few different reasons. One is that it is a much better example of the style of clear argumentative prose that I want you to aspire to for your writing for this class than any of the most “classic” texts that we are reading this semester, including Nagel and Williams. Another is that he gives us a redescription of what he understands Williams’ argument to be that can help us to continue to process Williams’ argument as well as continue to think about new things. And a third is that his article combines a similar pessimistic conclusion to Williams’, allowing us to continue our theme of pessimism this week, with rejecting Williams’ argument for that conclusion rather than merely trying to elaborate on or defend it, as other defenders of pessimism sometimes do.
Reading
As you read Cholbi’s article, ‘Immortality and the Exhaustibility of Value’, ask yourself, “What does Cholbi understand Williams’ argument to be?” “Is that a fair description of Williams’ argument, or does it leave something important out?” “Is it convinving that an infinite life would contain both infinite goods and infinite bads?” “How can we measure or count up the goodness of a life that contains both infinite goods and infinite bads?” “What is Cholbi’s argument against such a life?” and “Do I find this persuading and if not, why not?”