Here I wish to discuss whether or not the value, or "worthiness", of a life can be determined only by the one living it, or if there are independent reasons to believe a life is of some worth.

Say I personally tell a person in a wheelchair that their life is not worth living. They'd probably tell me to fuck off.

What I find strange, however, is how a pessimist (such as myself, perhaps) can say that all, or at least the vast majority, of lives are not worth living and not really be seen as a personal attack or a breach of authority. It's as if as soon as the denouncement is applied to everyone equally, and includes the life of the denouncer, that it no longer is a "personal" attack.

But isn't it still? I do, as a matter of fact, believe that basically all lives are not worth living, out of their general mediocrity, the threat of extreme trauma, and some other reasons. But say I make a list of every single person on the planet and show how much their lives suck on a personal level. It's just as accurate, but it's also more precise and thus more personal.

Now, it could of course be said that the pessimistic analysis is born from compassion and empathy towards other people. But the same could be said about me telling a person in a wheelchair that their life is not worth living. I might sincerely believe that not only the person in the wheelchair, but every life, is not worth living - but it seems wrong for me to tell the person in the wheelchair that while it doesn't seem wrong to generalize and apply this same reasoning to people in general.

This is wholly inconsistent. If I say that all lives are not worth living, then it stands that the particular life of the person in the wheelchair is not worth living. Yet it seems, to me at least, that telling the person in the wheelchair personally is a kind of breach of authority: I don't have the authority to tell someone whether or not their life is worth living. Telling someone that to their face is insulting and damaging in a way generalizing through a philosophical analysis of the human condition is not. Reading Schopenhauer, for example, is enjoyable and illuminating (in my opinion) - but if Schopenhauer straight up told me to my face that my life was shit and not worth living, I'd probably want to punch him in the face. Why am I not insulted, then, when I read his work?

Perhaps, as I mentioned before, the issue is mitigated when it's seen that people like Schopenhauer see humanity as a "brotherhood of suffering" - it's not just me, but everyone who is suffering. But this doesn't seem, to me, to fully get rid of the "schizophrenic" ascription of value. Indeed, if I had a friend who had a comparatively-worse life than anyone else I knew and who was contemplating suicide, I would have a hard time telling him that he really ought to kill himself. That doesn't seem like my call, I don't have the authority to tell him to kill himself (and neither do I have the authority to tell him to keep living...)

But if this is the case, then what truth do broad, general value-laden observations have?

The point being made is that any general abstract account intrinsically applies to all particular accounts as well. While it seems morally innocuous to say the general account, it seems wrong to say the particular account, EVEN THOUGH the particular account is guaranteed by the general account.

It's a slippery slope.

Edit: to add on, then, it seems to me that evaluations of the human condition, pessimistic ones in particular, seem to use some sort of fictional "archetype" as a subject of predication. Maybe that's why I'm not insulted when I read Schopenhauer - he's utilizing a sort of "universal" human Form or something to abstract away personal identities and focus on the shared characteristics between different human beings. Schopenhauer isn't addressing just me - he's addressing everyone as a collective whole, pointing out what we all experience. Perhaps the real thing that prevents me from being insulted, then, is that this requires some sense of humility and equality (even though Schopenhauer was fairly misanthropic...). The attitude is not of malevolence but of sad, melancholic sympathy.

I'm actually having a hard time pinning down what makes these two cases different, though. How should we interpret these value-laden assessments of the human condition? Do they have truth aptness? And what do they actually mean, anyway? That the speaker personally would/wouldn't want to live a life (i.e. "life is not worth living" = "I would personally not want to live anyone's life", or "your life is not worth living" = "I would personally not want to live your life.")? Or something else?

I'm also sort of fiddling around with the idea that maybe this is a reason why general accounts of the human condition ought to be rejected. It reminds me of Nietzschean perspectivism in some way, and also of Nietzsche's focus on the individual and that an Overman holds a rational and objective picture of his own life, but not necessarily of anyone else's.

Notice how this is an issue for any value-laden observation of the human condition: that the human condition is good or bad. This doesn't seem to apply to "factual" accounts of the human condition - for example, that we age, die, get diseases, suffer, rejoice, despair, laugh and cry. The value-laden account of the factual-account comes afterwards.

Obviously I'm a dick if I tell someone their life is not worth living to their face, but apparently if I write it in a book and direct it at everyone, it's not insulting? It's a strange psychological inconsistency, from what I can tell.