(Nashe's is, according to McEleney, a " futilitarian style" [154], crafted as the ultimate response to those sixteenth-century humanists who inveighed against "unprofitable" romances and insisted that the delights of poetry were merely sugar-coating for the bitter pill of moral philosophy.) This claim inevitably casts its shadow back across the volume as a whole.

But the final decision about the matter isn't his wife's: Under futilitarian Texas law, it belongs to committees of bioethicists and doctors. Futilitarians assert that patients have an absolute right to refuse life-sustaining treatment but are not similarly entitled to insist that their lives be maintained.

Given these general beliefs, fear of a future Soviet military and political threat was not a major factor in anyone's thinking, although it was occasionally invoked to bolster the " futilitarian " argument against American intervention.

The barbed hook baited with the illusions of progress." (4) At the end of the novel we struggle to reconcile the alleged last word of the narrative's composition, the novel's title, Victory, with Davidson's futilitarian conclusion, "There was nothing to be done there....

For if it doesn't, there is little hope that stabilizing the world economy will ever become more than a futilitarian effort.

The Futilitarians : Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving, and Reading seamlessly melds together Gisleson's story, New Orleans' ongoing recovery and existential discovery.

Thus when he denounced his fellow intellectuals as " futilitarians ," his complaints seemed mere hectoring.