It is as fashionable today as it was in the 1960s to suppose that the origin of human kind is the death drive, in one interpretation or another. Human culture lies 'between two deaths', the death of blissful animal homeostasis on on end, before an unbearable excitation shattered that homeostasis, and a return to homeostatic bliss by means of the detour of the entire history of civilization - or perhaps even to a nothingness simpler and more serene that life or matter. Certainly it is undeniable that a void of antagonism and contradiction is the driving force of economic development and technological innovation under capitalism. I'm not sure where I stand on this topic. Lets take the Deleuzean version articulated in Difference and Repetition: here the death drive is an utterly cosmic principle from the start: is is the very caesura between virtual problems and their actual solutions, functioning not just as a logic of human culture but also of (at least) biological evolution, and perhaps even geological formations and so on. If I were to explore this more deeply, I'd ask what originary excitation was too much to bear, so that the world began. Deleuze, as far as I've read, never addresses the question. I think it's in chapter 4 of DR that he says that God calculates, and calculates badly, which is why there is time - so God generates the virtual problems and natura naturata takes over from there to provide solutions - repeating partial ones over and over. But why does God calculate badly? The only answer would be from Lurianic Kabbalah: God accidentally shattered the world. Anyway, it would be possible to propose a more limited role for the death drive - perhaps it only accounts for human civilization, and we have atoms and galaxies for some other reason (or no reason at all). My only point right now is that Deontology has to posit an ethics on the basis of a theory about why we are (or at least I am) alive. The theory can only be speculative, if ethics is to be anything more than an administration of emotion in the name of smoother functioning. There are no fact about this topic. It is rational to accept the basic scientific account - that genetically modern humans have been around for about 1 million years, that the neolithic began 10 thousand years ago and so on. We don't really understand sexuality and natural selection well enough to explain scientifically why change happens... maybe sexuality, sublimation, fantasy and everything that makes human life meaningful has its source in biological tensions, or maybe it written more directly into the logical fabric of reality