A life without hope, as a widespread intuition suggests, is not worth living – if a life without hope is even possible at all. According to common belief, hope is a good thing. However, the situation is not so simple, as evidenced by the oldest Western story about hope, the Pandora myth in Hesiod. The myth presents hope as an evil, as part of a punishment that Zeus imposes on humanity. This assessment of hope contradicts the intuition of many interpreters and has led to various interpretations of the myth that portray hope no longer as an evil. However, hope can be deficient in many ways. For instance, we talk about hopes that deceive or mislead. In harmless cases, this simply means that these hopes do not come to fruition, making it seem hopeless to continue hoping. In less harmless cases...