Woodhill Publishing The Purpose of Life

    The Purpose of Life
    by Donald Cameron
    Woodhill Publishing (2001)

The Purpose of Life is an entirely non-mystical solution to the problem of moral philosophy derived with the aid of current ideas in biology and mathematical decision theory. Dr Cameron makes the ambitious claim to have solved the problem, for the first time providing objective answers to questions of values and ethics.

Statements about value, purpose or morality are fundamentally different from statements about fact and scientific attempts to prove them from premises of fact must fail. The philosophers' principle that you cannot derive an "ought" from an "is" is valid. A value conclusion cannot be drawn from premises consisting only of facts. There must be at least one value premise.

This result has been used by philosophers as a licence to pull complex value statements out of their culturally conditioned feelings before applying reasoning to them. The author uses a different approach. That is to seek the most basic, self-evident axioms of value. These are (a) to wish not to hold contradictory beliefs about values, (b) to reject nihilism (the idea that nothing matters at all) and (c) to wish one's values not to be a result of random accidental events, but to have a source of information.

The only source of non-random information, which has created human values, including the human instinct to build an ethical culture, is the force of natural selection. The fact of evolution and, in particular, the modern analyses of the evolution of altruism and social behaviour are essential to understand any philosophy of values. It is astonishing that so many investigators of ethics have felt able to ignore them.

From these starting points, every question of value and ethics can be answered without making any further value assumptions. The results are surprisingly close to traditional common sense, but indicate a few exceptions, which are food for thought. The claim is so ambitious that many will seek to refute it and the layout is designed to make it convenient to attempt this. All that is necessary to do so is set out in the Summary of the Main Argument, which forms pages 9 to 17 of the book, and is reproduced here. The Contents Page of the book is also reproduced to show its general scope. To order go to the Order Form or to contact us see our Contact Details.

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