Why do men stay alive in the face of the preponderance of pain over pleasure, of meaninglessness over sense? Camus’ answer is, in effect, that suicide, as a response to the generale condition of human life, is a contradiction, because the condition to which it would be a response is life’s absurdity, and suicide does not respond to this absurdity, but removes it. That seems a very academic way of putting the problem. Camus is right that this is the philosophical problem, because until it is answered one’s chance for moral existence has not begun — or ended; one has not taken one’s life into one’s own hands. And after it is answered the supposed need for a philosophical “foundation” for morality vanishes, which is the reason all such foundations — metaphysical, epistemological, political or religious — strike one as conceived in bad faith.
[Stanley Cavell, Ending the waiting game
from Must we mean what we say?]