Reply #11: I'm an existentialist: I think we choose our "ultimate values." One could, I suppose,

[struggle4progress]

choose to take the point of view that life is meaningless -- but those, who say life is meaningless, are announcing that they regard everything as meaningless, so their subsequent utterances can consistently be dismissed as things they themselves consider meaningless, and hence not much deserving my attention

When I say that we choose our "ultimate values," I do not mean that it does not matter what we choose: I instead mean that we choose something about the world we live in and how we live in that world, and those choices determine who we are and who we become. As a practical matter, I think it is more or less a waste of time to try to sort out "where values come from" -- what matters is choosing our values and trying to live them. If one has no real notion distinguishing justice from injustice, or cannot see that love trumps hatred, no philosophical arguments will help

In the same way that one could choose not to live in a world where gravity rules (say, by jumping off a high cliff wearing a pair of halloween costume wings), one could choose not to live in a world where people object to throwing live babies into crematoria. Either seems to me the wrong choice, but this is an axiomatic matter, not a matter for deduction