I think that, you know, it makes sense to me the speech that you gave like that you gave it to. I also was giving my speech to people of roughly that age,. So there's a big part of what we see college as being about is giving students a kind of exploratory space for figuring that out. That is, it's bigger than one human life. And so not all rules are equal. We're doing it with respect to social norms.
Suppose all of humanity was infected by a virus that left us all infertile--no one will come along after us. How would you react to such a world? Agnes Callard of the University of Chicago says she would be filled with despair. But why does this seem worse than our own inevitable deaths? Callard speaks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the meaning of life, and what exactly about the end of humanity is so demoralizing. The conversation concludes with a discussion of whether humanity is making progress.