‘WHY should I do anything?’ Two of the many ways of taking that question are these: as an expression of despair or hopelessness, when it means something like ‘Give me a reason for doing anything; everything is meaningless’; and as sounding a more defiant note, against morality, when it means something like ‘Why is there anything that I should, ought to, do?’

Even though we can paraphrase the question in the first spirit as ‘Give me a reason …’, it is very unclear that we can in fact give the man who asks it a reason – that, starting from so far down, we could argue him into caring about something. We might indeed ‘give him a reason’ in the sense of finding something that he is prepared to care about, but that is not inducing him to care by reasoning, and it is very doubtful whether there could be any such thing. What he needs is help, or hope, not reasonings. Of course it is true that if he stays alive he will be doing something, rather than something else, and thus in some absolutely minimal sense he has some sort of reason, some minimal preference, for doing those things rather than other things. But to point this out gets us hardly anywhere; he does those things just mechanically, perhaps, to keep going, and they mean nothing to him.