The Why/Because Regress

Definition

Ask "why" of any action and you get a "because"; ask "why" of that reason and you get another, and so on. Baggini argues, following Aristotle, that this "why/because series" must terminate somewhere in an answer for which a further "why" is unnecessary, misguided, or nonsensical — something valuable for its own sake, not for the sake of anything further. If it never terminates, nothing in the chain is ever actually justified; if it only terminates in a goal lying in the future, mortality guarantees the chain gets cut off before it completes.

In the Book

Chapter 2 builds the idea through a child's infinite "why" game (why do people go to work? why do they need money? ...) and Aristotle's requirement that teleological explanation "terminate with something which is an end in itself." Baggini then shows the regress is not purely temporal — a restaurant's staff justify their roles to each other in the present, not by appeal to past or future — and uses a real dialogue (driving to Doncaster to scatter a relative's ashes) to show why/because chains weave through past, present, and future before bottoming out. The chapter's sharpest case against locating meaning in a future goal is the "Can I die now?" problem: Sergio Leone gunslingers and Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry ("there's always next year... if 'winning isn't everything, it's the only thing,' then 'the only thing' is nothing") illustrate that achieving a goal that was the whole point of living leaves emptiness, because a life organized entirely around a future terminus has nothing to justify itself once that terminus arrives — or, if immortal, is "a donkey wearing a hat with a carrot suspended two feet in front of its eyes," never getting there at all.

Why It Matters

This gives a general diagnostic for any system of justification — personal, organizational, scientific — that seems to run forever without settling anything: check whether it has, or even could have, a terminus that is valued in itself rather than instrumentally. It also explains a recurring real-world failure mode (the promotion, the exit, the launch that leaves people empty once achieved) as a structural problem with locating all value in a future state rather than in something sustainable across it.