IN THE PREVIOUS LECTURE, I argued that philosophical models of human psychology that divide all motives and reasons into the self-interested and the moral, or the personal and the impersonal, were simplistic and distorting, failing to capture the character of our relationships with many of the things and activities that are most important to us. Further, I claimed that insofar as such models encourage us to think about our lives in terms only of happiness and morality, they lead us to neglect another important dimension along which lives can be better or worse—namely, the dimension of meaningfulness.
But what is meaningfulness? I argued in the last lecture for a conception that combined aspects of two popular views. Like the Fulfillment View, which tells us to find our passions and pursue them, my view acknowledges a subjective component in the meaningful life. A person who is alienated from her life, who gets no joy or pride from the activities that comprise it, can be said to lack meaning in her life. Like the view that associates meaning with involvement in something “larger than oneself,” however, my view also recognizes an objective component. According to what I called the Fitting Fulfillment View, a life is meaningful insofar as its subjective attractions are to things or goals that are objectively worthwhile. That is, one’s life is meaningful insofar as one finds oneself loving things worthy of love and able to do something positive about it. A life is meaningful, as I also put it, insofar as it is actively and lovingly engaged in projects of worth.
Throughout most of its history, moral philosophy has ignored the dimension of meaningfulness. Indeed, most philosophers have failed to notice it altogether. In this lecture I shall bring out some of the costs of this neglect. But before turning to this topic, there is some unfinished business to address.
My abstract characterization of meaningfulness leaves many questions open and many challenges unanswered. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the most pressing questions and most serious challenges have to do with the “objective” side of the proposal; that is, with the category I have variously referred to in terms of fittingness (for fulfillment), worthiness (of love), and independent, as well as objective, value. Which projects, one wants to know, are fitting for fulfillment? Which objects are worthy of love? How does one determine whether an activity is fitting or worthy or of independent value? For that matter, why accept the legitimacy of these judgments at all?
These questions raise issues that go to the heart of my proposal. If there is no such thing as (the relevant kind of) objective value, or if talk of distinctions in worth is nonsensical, then meaning in life, as I understand it, is impossible. These issues, then, are too central to my conception of meaningfulness for me not to acknowledge them here. Although, as you will see, my answers to all these questions are tentative, I do not think this is a reason to be skeptical of the conception of meaningfulness that evokes them.
After elaborating and defending my views on these matters, I shall turn finally to the topic promised in this lecture’s title; namely, to the question of why it matters, especially in light of the tentativeness, vagueness, and openness of the category under discussion, that we think of life’s possibilities in terms not only of happiness and morality but in terms of meaning as well.
To address the first set of questions, let me begin at an un-theoretical, or what many philosophers refer to as an intuitive, level. It will be useful to recall from the previous lecture that the idea that there must be some objective condition on the kinds of projects or passions that could form the basis of a meaningful life arose in connection with the observation that some projects, such as rolling a stone uselessly up a hill, making handwritten copies of War and Peace, solving Sudoku puzzles, or caring for one’s pet goldfish, were in some way inadequate. By noting what is lacking from such projects, we can form hypotheses about what features make an activity more fitting as a grounding for meaning. As many of the problematic cases cited seem to exemplify useless activity, it seems plausible to propose that activities that are useful are to that extent better candidates for grounding claims of meaningfulness. And, as many involve activities that are routinized or mechanical—in other words, activities that would be boring to a normal human being of moderate intelligence and ability—we may conjecture that an activity’s or project’s suitability as a meaning-provider rises as it becomes more challenging, or as it offers greater opportunity for a person to develop her powers or realize her potential.
It is noteworthy what a broad and diverse range of projects and activities meet these standards. In particular, though it will include the projects and activities recognized as morally valuable by conventional standards, embracing both positive relationships with family and friends and engagement with political and social causes, the range extends far beyond that. Creating art, adding to our knowledge of the world, preserving a place of natural beauty all seem intuitively to deserve classification as valuable activities, even if they do not bring about obvious improvement in human or animal welfare. So do efforts to achieve excellence or to develop one’s powers—for example, as a runner, a cellist, a cabinetmaker, a pastry chef.
It is in part because the range of activities that seem to qualify as fitting for fulfillment, and so as able to ground claims of meaningfulness, is so large and so varied that the words I have used to characterize this condition are so general and so vague. Perhaps the best of the expressions I have used in this connection is that which says that the project or activity must possess a value whose source comes from outside of oneself—whose value, in other words, is in part independent of one’s own attitude to it. That expression has the advantage of being minimally exclusive. It makes the point that a project whose only value comes from its being pleasing, or interesting, or fulfilling to the person whose project it is—a project, that is, whose value is entirely individually subjective—is not the kind of project that can make a person’s life meaningful, but it makes no other restrictions as to either the kind or the source of value the project or activity may have. Intuitively, however, this condition may be too minimal if taken literally. When we imagine lives in which various sorts of activities play prominent roles, with an eye to their meaningfulness, some sort of proportionality condition seems to operate in the background. Strictly speaking, it may not be right to say of the woman whose life revolves around her pet goldfish, or of the man who painstakingly copies War and Peace by hand, that their activities have no value independent of their own psychologies. Perhaps the life and comfort of a goldfish is worth something independently, as is an extra copy of a literary masterpiece, easily available in libraries and bookstores though it be. Even so, the corresponding endeavors do not seem valuable enough to merit the kind of time, energy, and investment that these characters are imagined to devote to them, particularly in light of the wealth of other possible activities that we assume they might be engaging with instead.
Furthermore, there seems good reason to ask why, if an activity’s value to oneself is insufficient to give meaning to one’s life, an activity’s value to some other creature should make it any more suitable. Are we to understand the condition that an activity be of value “independent of oneself” to be met by anything that is of value to another (in the sense of being enjoyed by, or of use to her)? If, in addition to Sisyphus, a third party was pleased or fulfilled by watching Sisyphus roll stones up a hill, or if, in addition to the goldfish owner, all the woman’s neighbors were deeply concerned about the well-being of her pet, would that make a difference in the assessment of these lives as meaningful? If so, it is puzzling why this should be so significant. If not, the condition of “independent value” stands in need of further specification.
To make matters worse, the difficulty of answering these questions may begin to make one wonder whether we should accept any such condition at all. Despite the discomfort we may have with the idea that the lives of the goldfish lover, the Tolstoy copier, and the satisfied Sisyphus are meaningful, perhaps we should resist the temptation to exclude them by way of a condition of fittingness or a requirement of worth. There are two sorts of reasons that tend to fuel such suspicions, and they are worth distinguishing and responding to separately. On the one hand, there are worries of a moral, or quasi-moral nature, having to do with the dangers of parochialism and elitism. On the other, there are philosophical concerns about the metaphysics of value.
The first set of concerns is important, and expressive of values that I wholeheartedly support, but I believe their acknowledgement is wholly compatible with the spirit and intention of the view I am presenting. I have in mind concerns that might most naturally be expressed by the rhetorical question, “Who’s to say?—Who’s to say which projects are fitting (or worthy or valuable) and which are not?” The worry is that the views of any one person or any group that sets itself up as an authority on values are liable to be narrow-minded or biased. No doubt the examples I use to illustrate my views, reflective as they are of my bourgeois American values, make this concern all the more salient.
To be sure, elitism and parochialism are dangers that we need to be wary of, especially perhaps when making judgments about the relative value of what other people do with their lives. But we can minimize these dangers if we keep our fallibility in mind, if we regard our judgments as tentative, and if we remind ourselves, when necessary, that the object of thinking about the category of meaningfulness in life is not to produce a meaningfulness scale for ranking lives.
To the question, “Who’s to say which projects are independently valuable and which are not?” my answer is, ‘”No one in particular.” Neither I, nor any group of professional ethicists or academicians—nor, for that matter, any other group I can think of—have any special expertise that makes their judgment particularly reliable. Rather, questions like, “Which projects are valuable?” and “Which activities are worthwhile?” are open to anyone and everyone to ask and to try to answer, and I assume that we will answer them better if we pool our information, our experience, and our thoughts. Our initial pretheoretical or intuitive judgments about what is valuable and what is a waste of time are formed in childhood, as a result of a variety of lessons, experiences, and other cultural influences. Being challenged to justify our judgments, being exposed to different ones, broadening our range of experience, and learning about other cultures and ways of life will lead us to revise, and, if all goes well, improve our judgments. Presumably, this is a never-ending enterprise, not only because, as fallible creatures, our judgments of value will always be somewhat tentative, but also because the sorts of things that have value are apt to change over time. If the history of the arts is any model for the history of value more generally, human ingenuity and a continually changing universe will ensure that new forms of value will evolve.1Perhaps old ones will atrophy as well. The absence of a final authority on the question of which things have value, however, does not call into doubt the legitimacy or coherence of the question itself or of the enterprise of trying to find a more or less reasonable, if also partial, tentative, and impermanent answer.
The second set of concerns to which I earlier referred does call the category of objective value into doubt. Whereas worries about elitism call our attention to the dangers of thinking one knows which things, activities, or projects have value, the second set of concerns, more purely philosophical, raises questions about the idea that there is such a thing as an objective standard of value at all, or more precisely, an objective standard that distinguishes some projects, activities, and interests from others as being more fitting for or more capable of contributing to the meaningfulness of one’s life.
In addressing these concerns, it is important to keep in mind what kinds of objectivity are at issue, for the term is notoriously slippery. In the context at hand, the reference to objectivity can be associated with two very different ways in which, in order for a project to be capable of contributing to the meaning of a person’s life, its value must be at least partly independent of that person.
One way is suggested by the grain of truth to be found in the popular view that one’s life gets meaning from engagement with something “larger than oneself,” at least if, as I argued in the last lecture, we can understand this to refer more literally to the condition that one must be in some positive relationship with things or activities the value of which lies at least partly outside of oneself. A central thought here seems to be that a life lacks meaning if it is totally egocentric, devoted solely toward the subject’s own survival and welfare, and realizing no value that is independent of the subject’s own good. Meaning comes rather from successful engagement with values that are not just values for the person herself—for only then, it seems, will one be able to say that one has lived in a way that can be claimed to be worthwhile from a point of view external and potentially indifferent to oneself.
From a certain perspective, it may seem puzzling that while a life devoted to oneself, and realizing no value that is independent of oneself, is to be regarded as meaningless, a life engaged positively with some other person or creature or valuable activity has meaning. If finding food and shelter for one’s child, nursing one’s partner back to health, rescuing one’s wounded comrade from the hands of death, are worthwhile activities, why shouldn’t feeding, sheltering, healing, and rescuing oneself be worthwhile as well? It may seem odd that if I benefit you and you benefit me, our activities may contribute to the meaningfulness of each other’s lives, but if we each tend to our own well-being, our actions will have no such effect.
This puzzle disappears, however, when we recall the distinctiveness of the category of meaningfulness and recognize that activities, projects, or actions may be valuable in some way without being valuable in a way that contributes to meaningfulness. Certainly, if there is value in saving another person’s life, there is value in saving one’s own; certainly, taking care of oneself, seeking happiness, and avoiding pain, are sensible and worthwhile things to do. It can even be perfectly reasonable to do a Sudoku puzzle once in a while, or to keep a goldfish. But whether a life is meaningful has specifically to do with whether one’s life can be said to be worthwhile from an external point of view. A meaningful life is one that would not be considered pointless or gratuitous, even from an impartial perspective. Living in a way that connects positively with objects, people, and activities that have value independent of oneself harmonizes with the fact that one’s own perspective and existence have no privileged status in the universe. This is why engagement with things that have value independent of oneself can contribute to the meaningfulness of one’s life in a way that activities directed at one’s own good and valuable in no other way do not.2
The notion that some of the things that engage us have nonsubjective value in this sense—value, that is, that is not just value for the subject—is not metaphysically mysterious or conceptually problematic. It is easy enough, at least in principle, to distinguish activities that are valuable only to oneself from those that are not. It is good for me that I get to eat fine chocolates, or watch Friday Night Lights, or take a walk in the woods, but no one else in the world is benefited by these things, nor is any independent value realized or produced. By contrast, what good there is in my helping someone else, or even in my writing a good book, is not exclusively goodness for me. What values there are in these activities are at least partly independent of my own existence and point of view.
There is, however, another kind of subject-independence that is more philosophically problematic and has more to do with traditional worries about the metaphysics of value. Specifically, in order for one’s activities or projects to contribute to the meaningfulness of one’s life, not only must the locus or recipient of value lie partly outside of oneself, the standard of judgment for determining value must be partly independent, too. According to the Fitting Fulfillment View, thinking or feeling that one’s life is meaningful doesn’t make it so, at least not all by itself. One can be mistaken about whether a project or activity has the kind of value necessary to make it a potential provider of meaning.
Examples I gave yesterday, like Sisyphus Fulfilled, were meant to suggest the conceivability of a person finding an activity fulfilling that we might find inadequate for meaning from a third-person perspective. Insofar as (this version of) Sisyphus thinks his life is meaningful, he is mistaken, finding something in stone-rolling that isn’t really there. Realistic examples may be more controversial, but they are easy enough to find: On drugs, one may find counting bathroom tiles fascinating, or one may watch reruns of Father Knows Best with rapture. A member of a religious cult may think that obedience to her leader’s commands and dedication to his empowerment are worthwhile goals. An attorney fresh out of law school may see his ardent defense of an unscrupulous corporate client as a noble expression of justice in action; a personal assistant to a Hollywood star may be seduced by the glitter and fame that surround her into thinking that catering to her employer’s every whim is a matter of national significance. Such people may think a life devoted to the advancement of their goals and heroes is a meaningful one. They may feel fulfilled by activities that foster what they take to be worthwhile ends. But, according to the Fitting Fulfillment View, they would be mistaken.
The judgment that what seemed worthwhile wasn’t really so may be made by the person himself, looking back on a past phase of his existence. One might even “wake up” more or less suddenly to the realization that an activity one has been pursuing with enthusiasm is shallow or empty. As these examples make plausible the idea that a person may find meaning in an activity that really isn’t there, other examples suggest the converse possibility: We can imagine Bob Dylan’s mother thinking her son was wasting his time messing around with that guitar; or Fred Astaire’s father wishing his son would quit dancing and get a real job. Tolstoy went through a period when he could not see the value of his own literary accomplishments, magnificent as they were. The realization that he had done much that had made his life meaningful was unavailable to him. These examples suggest that a person may judge an activity to be worthless that others can see to be valuable. With respect to negative as well as positive judgments of value, it appears that one can be wrong.
If we accept the idea that a person’s judgment about the value of an activity can be wrong, then we accept the legitimacy of a kind of value judgment that is subject-independent.3 According to the conception of meaningfulness I am proposing, that sort of judgment is essential to understanding what a meaningful life is.
Accepting the legitimacy of this type of subject-independent value judgment and thereby denying radical subjectivism with respect to value, seems a far cry from accepting the sort of metaphysically mysterious conception of objective value sometimes associated with Plato or more recently with G. E. Moore. To acknowledge that a person may be mistaken about what has value, and that finding something valuable doesn’t necessarily make it so, is hardly to commit oneself to a view that value is a nonnatural property, or that, as John Mackie has put it, it is built into “the fabric of the world.”4 Nor does believing that one can be mistaken about value, or even that everyone can be mistaken about value, imply that values might even in principle be independent of human (or other conscious beings’) needs and capacities.
There are many accounts of value that fall in between the radically subjective and the radically objective. In claiming that meaningfulness has an objective component, (that certain projects and not others are fitting for fulfillment; certain objects worthy of love, and so on), I mean only to insist that something other than a radically subjective account of value must be assumed. Nonetheless, I must confess that I have no positive account of nonsubjective value with which I am satisfied. Radically objective accounts of value are implausible and obscure, but the most obvious conceptions of value that fall between those and the radically subjective are problematic as well.
Thus, for example, some people are attracted to intersubjective accounts, according to which whether something is valuable depends on whether it is valued by a community of valuers. If an individual’s valuing something isn’t sufficient to give the thing real value, however, it is hard to see why a group’s endorsement should carry any more weight. If one person can be mistaken about value, why can’t five people, or five thousand? The history of art, or for that matter of morals, seems ample testimony to the view that whole societies can be wrong.
More promising, I think, are accounts that link value to the hypothetical responses of an idealized individual or group. Whether something is valuable on such a view is associated with the claim that it would be valued by someone sufficiently rational, perceptive, sensitive, and knowledgeable, to be, as John Stuart Mill would say, “a competent judge.”5 Yet this view, too, seems inadequate as it stands, for if it is interpreted as claiming that what makes something valuable is its being able to evoke such a reaction in such an individual, the view needs further explanation and defense. Why should an object’s capacity to be valued by an imaginary individual make the object valuable if its being actually valued by me or my friends or my fellow countrymen does not? If, on the other hand, the reference to these hypothetical responses is understood as a way to track value rather than as an account of what constitutes it, then the view seems to leave the question with which we are most concerned—the question of what is being tracked (or, if you will, of what value is)—untouched.
On my view, then, finding an adequate account of the objectivity of values—that is, of the ways or respects in which value judgments are not radically subjective—is an unsolved problem in philosophy, or perhaps better, an unsolved cluster of problems. Though I believe we have good reason to reject a radically subjective account of value, it is far from clear what a reasonably complete and defensible nonsubjective account will look like.
The absence of such an account gives us all the more reason to be tentative in our judgments about what sorts of project deserve inclusion in the class of activities that can contribute to the meaningfulness of a life. We must admit the reasonableness of controversy not only about the value of particular activities, such as cheerleading, ultimate Frisbee, and analytic philosophy, but also about whole categories of activity, such as aesthetic expression, self-realization, or communion with nature. My own inclination is to be generous in my assumptions about what is valuable in the sense required to qualify as a potential contributor to meaning. I expect that almost anything that a significant number of people have taken to be valuable over a long span of time is valuable. If people find an object or activity or project engaging, there is apt to be something about it that makes it so—perhaps the activity is challenging, the object beautiful, the project morally important.
Still, these expectations may not be supportable. A quick glance at the Guinness Book of World Records or at a list of internet chat rooms will remind one that people, indeed, large numbers of people, do the darnedest things. They race lawn mowers, compete in speed-eating contests, sit on flagpoles, watch reality TV. Do these activities merit the investment of time and money that people put into them? Do they contribute to the meaning of these people’s lives? There may be something to be said on both sides of these questions.
As some will have been critical of my endorsement of the idea of nonsubjective value and the associated thought that such value distinguishes some projects from others as more or less able to contribute to a meaningful life, others will be frustrated or annoyed by my reluctance confidently to apply the notion, to make substantive judgments that actually identify meaningful projects, and to contrast them to meaningless ones. If you are unwilling to take a stand on which lives are meaningful, they might ask, why bother discussing the subject at all? What is the point of insisting that there is such a thing as a meaningful life if you cannot give any kind of guidance for how to live one? Why, in other words, in light of your caution in attributing meaning or the lack of meaning to specific concrete lives, does recognizing the abstract category of meaningfulness matter?
An answer we might consider is that, even without being able to say anything more systematic or definite about meaningfulness, the mere reference to it as an explicit element of what is to be desired and aimed for in life may make us more likely to attain it than we would otherwise be. After all, even if we don’t have a good philosophical account or theory about which projects, activities, and interests possess the kind of nonsubjective value that makes them potential contributors to meaning in our lives, we are not totally clueless about these matters in practice. The mere mention of meaningfulness might remind a person at least to notice whether his life is (or seems to be) satisfying in this respect, and this may be enough to make a difference in the shape he gives to it.
I would not place too much weight on this suggestion, however. Many, perhaps most, people manage to live meaningful lives without giving the idea of meaning a moment’s explicit thought, and those whose lives are not satisfactorily meaningful are not likely to be able to remedy this shortfall simply by having it called more explicitly to their attention.6
If our lives or the lives of our students and our children are to become more meaningful as a result of thinking about meaningfulness, this will more likely happen by an indirect route. The immediate benefits of thinking abstractly about meaningfulness are apt to be more purely intellectual. Specifically, attention to the category of meaningfulness may help us to better understand our values and ourselves and may enable us to better assess the role that some central interests and activities play in our lives.
In fact, much of what I think is valuable about thinking about meaningfulness has to do with thinking about what meaningfulness is not. At the beginning of the previous lecture, I remarked that it is not (equivalent to) happiness, and it is not (equivalent to) morality. Recognizing that meaning is something desirable in life, something we want both for ourselves and for others, means recognizing that there is more to life than either of these categories, even taken together, suggests. This means, among other things, that it need not be irrational to choose to spend one’s time doing something that neither maximizes one’s own good nor is morally best.
Moreover, realizing that there are things worth doing that do not contribute maximally to either happiness or morality may change the way we understand these concepts themselves.
As I mentioned in the previous lecture, much of what we do is not obviously justified by either morality or self-interest. I visit my friend in the hospital; I study philosophy; I bake an elaborate dessert. If the framework in which we conceptualize our reasons and our actions recognizes only self-interested and moral value, then we will have to fit our understanding of these choices into these categories if we are not to regard them as irrational or mistaken. Given the inconvenience and the difficulties involved in these enterprises, however, it is far from clear that they are in my self-interest. Yet to regard them as morally valuable, much less as morally better than any alternatives, is to puff them up in a way that seems both pompous and hard to sustain. Insofar as we feel the need to explain and justify ourselves in terms of these two categories, we will be tempted to distort the character and importance of our interests or to replace them with projects more obviously beneficial to ourselves or more morally admirable.
It might be suggested that the problem here is with thinking that our actions and choices need to be so fully justified. Why can’t we sometimes do things just because we want to, without any further justifying reason? We can, but to regard the activities I have I mind as mere arbitrary preferences is also misleading, in a way that sells them short. In fact, I don’t perform these acts just because I want to. I do want to, but for reasons. I visit my friend because he can use the company, or at least the assurance that his friends care about him (or perhaps I visit him knowing that he is in a coma, just to express my concern for him to myself); I study philosophy because it is interesting and mind-expanding, or, because, in my case, it is part of doing my job well; and I bake because I take pride in my skill as a baker, because I love good food and want to share my enthusiasm for it with others.
Though at least some of these acts have merit that is recognizably moral and are morally preferable to others that might be as good or better for me, and all contribute in some way to my happiness—at the least, I feel the satisfaction of being able to do what I have chosen to do—neither the moral nor the egoistic perspectives capture my perspective in acting, and if we think of such acts only in these terms we will miss the role they play in my or others’ lives. I act in these cases not for my sake or the world’s; I act neither out of duty nor self-interest. Rather, I am drawn by the particular values of my friend, of philosophy, of a great chocolate cake.7 These are “objects” whose value has a source outside myself. They would be good, or interesting, or worthwhile whether I like or care about or even notice them or not. But they are values I respond to, for which I have an affinity—a subjective attraction, if you will.
Understanding this is important in part because, as I have already said, it enables us to approve of these sorts of interests and activities without distorting the character of their value. It is also important for a proper understanding of self-interest and morality, and of the roles these two types of value and the perspectives they define play and should play in our lives.
One implication that the recognition of meaningfulness as a value has for our concept of self-interest is obvious and familiar. Specifically, if meaningfulness is acknowledged as an ingredient of a good life, and so as an aspect of an enlightened conception of self-interest, and if, as I have argued, meaningfulness cannot be understood as a purely subjective feature of a life, then a hedonistic conception of self-interest, that identifies the best life with a life of maximally good qualitative experience, will not do. An adequate conception of self-interest must include something more than happiness, subjectively construed. Further, we can recognize a paradox of meaningfulness, similar to but deeper than the paradox of hedonism. Because meaning requires us to be open and responsive to values outside ourselves, we cannot be preoccupied with ourselves. If we want to live meaningful lives, we cannot try too hard or focus too much on doing so.
Accepting meaningfulness as an aspect of the good life should also lead us to acknowledge a certain indeterminacy in the concept of self-interest. At least, one will acknowledge this if one thinks, as I do, that meaning is one ingredient of a good life, among others (like subjective happiness). Many things that would contribute to the meaning of a life are difficult, stressful, demanding; they may leave one open to danger or vulnerable to pain. Consider, for example, adopting a child with severe disabilities, or moving to a war-torn country to help its victims find safety or food. Is the more meaningful life better for oneself than the one that is easier, safer, more pleasant? There may be no answer to this question. Nor is it obvious that meaning is something it makes sense to want to maximize in one’s life, even if it does not compete with other self-interested goods.
If the introduction of meaning into one’s conception of self-interest makes the latter concept more indeterminate and difficult to apply, it also makes self-interest less significant from a practical perspective. Acknowledging the possibility and desirability of meaning involves accepting the idea that there are values independent of oneself that provide reasons for the activities from which meaning comes. Though it may not be clear whether the woman whose life has been made more meaningful by the adoption of a child is, all things considered, better off because of it, the woman herself may not care about this. The fact that her relationship with the child adds meaning to her life implies that the relationship engages and, at least partly, fulfills her. Thus, she will have other reasons for being glad to have adopted the child—namely, reasons of love.8
The recognition of meaningfulness as a distinct category of value has implications not only for the concept of self-interest, but for our understanding of morality as well. In fact, as with the concept of self-interest, there are implications both for the content of morality and for the role morality can be expected to play in our thoughts and our lives. When thinking about morality, philosophers, if not others, tend to assume that what limits there are to morality are set by the normative and the motivational pull of self-interest. Here perhaps more than anywhere else, a framework that invokes the dichotomy of self-interest and morality tends to be assumed. As we have seen, however, this framework distorts. Relying on it leads us to misunderstand the value of our interests and the actions they motivate us to perform in terms of their contribution to either happiness or moral good, and to cast many of our interests in either a more selfish or a more virtuous light than they deserve.
Curiously, it seems that in practice we do recognize a difference between meaning-enhancing activities and merely self-interested ones in our moral judgments. We give a wider moral berth to people’s engagement with the projects or realms from which they get meaning than we do to people’s pursuit of happiness, pure and simple. We are less critical of a woman (if critical at all) who misses office hours to go to a philosophy lecture across town than we would be if she were to miss them in order to soak in a hot bath; we are less apt to accuse an amateur musician of decadent expenditure for buying an expensive cello than we would be if he were to spend the same amount on a flat-screen TV. Lying to protect a friend or loved one tends to be regarded as morally quite different (and less blameworthy) than lying to protect oneself. In our theoretical discussion of such judgments, however, the fact that the acts in question do or do not have a role in the meaningfulness of the person’s life is frequently obscured. Rather, the value to the agent, or to the world, of the individual’s action gets exaggerated, or appeal is made to the questionable idea of a person’s duties to herself.
Recognizing explicitly that those activities that sustain the meaningfulness of our lives have a different kind of moral weight than purely self-interested activity is rare in moral theory, but it is not especially problematic. From a moral point of view, we have at least as much reason to want to encourage and increase people’s opportunity to live meaningful lives as to live happy ones; we have at least as much reason to recognize the legitimacy of agents’ reasons to pursue the realization of values whose source lies outside of the agents themselves as we have to recognize the legitimate pursuit of the agents’ own well-being. If the content of our moral principles has not often been framed explicitly to recognize the special place of meaning, there is no obvious reason why it cannot be.
The role of meaning in a person’s life, and the character of a person’s attachment to the things that give her life meaning, however, have implications not only for the content of morality but for its place in our lives, and these implications are more difficult to accommodate. Bernard Williams, one of the few contemporary philosophers to have noticed the distinctive relevance of meaning for morality, has brought this problem vividly to light.
As is well known, Williams criticized both utilitarian and Kantian moralists for failing to appreciate the possibility and nature of a conflict between morality and meaning. In A Critique of Utilitarianism, he asks us to consider a man who “is identified with his actions as flowing from projects and attitudes which in some cases he takes seriously at the deepest level, as what his life is about.” “It is absurd to demand of such a man,” he continues, “when the sums come in from the utility network . . . that he should just step aside from his own project and decision and acknowledge the decision which utilitarian calculation requires.”9 In a later essay, Williams goes on to argue that “the Kantian, who can do rather better than [the utilitarian], still cannot do well enough. For impartial morality, if the conflict really does arise, must be required to win; and that cannot necessarily be a reasonable demand on the agent. There can come a point,” he writes, “at which it is quite unreasonable for a man to give up, in the name of the impartial good ordering of the world of moral agents, something which is a condition of his having any interest in being around in the world at all.”10
Though most philosophers have wanted to acknowledge some truth in Williams’s criticisms, few have accepted his conclusions. In response to Williams, many have agreed that of course morality should take account of the agent’s possible sacrifices, weighing them in the balance against the goals and interests of others that morality is concerned to address and protect. Still, most say, there are limits to what a person is morally permitted to do, and if the world conspires to put someone in a position where holding on even to a project “he takes seriously at the deepest level” would require him to cross those limits, morality must stand its ground. After all, they will point out, one man’s ground-projects are still one man’s, and his interests, however fundamental, must be balanced against the interests and rights of others with which their pursuit would interfere.
This response, though not altogether wrong, seems to me to miss the point of Williams’s remarks in a way that suggests a failure, on the part of the moralists, to appreciate the difference between self-interest and meaning. One difference, which Williams himself points out, has to do with the special connection meaning has with having a reason to live. What gives meaning to our lives gives us reasons to live, even when we do not care much, for our own sakes, whether we live or die. What gives meaning to our lives gives us reasons to live even when the prospects for our own well-being are bleak. Indeed, what gives meaning to our lives may give us reasons beyond that. As Camus pointed out, if something is worth living for, it is also worth dying for.11 The objects, people, activities, that give meaning to our lives may serve as anchors for our having any interest in the world at all.
Further, we have seen that insofar as our interests and relationships give meaning to our lives, it is because the objects of those interests and relationships have an independent value that draws us out of ourselves, linking us to a larger community or world in a positive way. When we act or want to act in the context of these attachments, out of love or passion for their objects, we do not do so purely or primarily for our own sakes (not even, therefore, for the sake of being able to live a meaningful life), but at least partly for the sake of the person or project or value that is the object of our love.
If we keep these features in mind, the moralists’ injunction that the agent should sacrifice that which gives meaning to his life for the sake of morality is liable to take on a hollow ring. For first, the suggestion that, hard as it might be, one must sacrifice one’s own interests for the sake of the moral order, neglects the possibility that the action one is being asked to take may not present itself under the description of “a sacrifice of one’s own interests.” One’s reasons for wanting to take the contrary action are apt rather to be a reflection of one’s seeing that action or its goal as independently worthwhile. Second, it is hard to see how reasons for staying within the moral order could override one’s reasons for doing something without which one would lose interest in the world, and so presumably in the moral order of the world, altogether.
Ordinarily, people have a number of reasons for wanting to be moral: they have sympathy for others; they want to live on open and equal terms with them; they want to be able to justify their actions to those whom they affect; and, not unimportantly, morality tends to align with self-interest. If, however, being moral would require a person to do something that would deprive him of all interest in the world, it would undermine all these reasons. It is hard to see why nonetheless these reasons should be trumps.
This is not to say that the content of morality should be revised so as to permit people to do anything they need to do in order to maintain an interest, if not in their own lives, at least in the world. Williams’s concerns may be best understood as making a point, not about the content of morality but about the place it can reasonably be expected to play in a person’s life.
Moralists, including the great majority of moral philosophers, tend to assume that morality should occupy an overarching place in one’s practical and evaluative outlooks, that it should function unconditionally as a filter through which all a decent person’s choices must pass. According to Williams, however, this assumption is unwarranted. To return to the passages I quoted earlier, he thinks that, if it comes down to a conflict between morality and meaning, it is “absurd” or, at any rate, “unreasonable” to demand that morality must win.12
Williams himself offers no analysis of meaning, and so the conclusion he leaves us with—namely, that it is not always reasonable to expect a man to be moral—has seemed to many to be either morally subversive or terribly depressing. If I am right, however, about what meaning and our interest in meaning are, we can see his conclusions in a different light.
Meaning, I have argued, comes from active engagement in projects of worth, which links us to our world in a positive way. It allows us to see our lives as having a point and a value even when we take an external perspective on ourselves. It is not clear, however, that the external standpoint from which we ask whether our lives are meaningful need be the same external standpoint as the one from which moral judgments may be thought to issue. Morality, at least as I understand it, is chiefly concerned with integrating into our practical outlook the fact that we are each one person (or perhaps one subject) in a community of others equal in status to ourselves. It requires us to act and to restrain our actions in ways that express respect and concern for others in exchange for our right to claim the same respect and concern from them. But there is another perspective, possibly even more external, in which the demands and interests of morality are not absolute. Viewed from the perspective of our place in the universe, as opposed to our place in the human or sentient community, a person’s obedience or disobedience to moral constraints may itself seem to be only one consideration among others.
A religious view that allows for the possibility that God’s will might diverge from the dictates of human morality is perhaps the most obvious example of such a perspective. But, as Nietzsche has shown us, belief in a deity is not necessary in order for it to seem plausible that some values are independent of and in potential conflict with moral values. Furthermore, moral values, or morally valuable projects may themselves conflict. The goodness of one such value or project and the reasons to pursue it may compete with ends and principles that morality itself demands. From a perspective that steps back, not just from one’s own interests, but from an absolute commitment to morality itself, if a value or project with which one’s life is bound up (a value or project, in other words, that gives meaning to one’s life) conflicts with a demand of impartial morality, there is, as Williams believes, no guarantee that the moral demand will win. This perspective, however, is not egocentric, nor are the values and reasons it recognizes expressions of selfishness. This has at least two implications for the way we look at the relation of meaning to morality and at the possibility of conflict between them.
First, it might make us more ambivalent in our judgment of people who face such conflicts than we would otherwise be. That people should live, and should care about living meaningful lives is, quite generally, a good thing, even if it means that on occasion such people might reasonably be moved to violate moral constraints. When people face a conflict between meaning and morality, we have reason to be sympathetic, and sometimes even to be grateful if they decide not to do what morality requires.
Second, since meaning has an objective (that is, a nonsubjective) component, we do not have to take every individual’s claim to face a conflict between meaning and morality at face value. An individual cannot get meaning from worthless projects, much less from projects of wholly negative value. Thus a child-molester cannot get meaning from molesting children, whatever he may think or feel about the matter. The vague proportionality condition on meaning that I mentioned earlier may further limit the kinds of conflict that can plausibly be understood to be ones in which obedience to moral requirements would jeopardize a person’s ability to sustain meaning in his life.
Furthermore, the fact that a project’s contribution to meaningfulness in a person’s life comes in part from her appreciation of the project’s independent value may provide a basis for reinterpreting the dilemma in a way that might allow even the person herself to move beyond the impasse the conflict initially appears to present. A woman who gets meaning from her relationship with her daughter might reasonably find the question of whether to break the law to save her daughter’s life a difficult one. But not every conflict between morality and the daughter’s welfare should be judged to be a difficult choice. Breaking the law to get one’s daughter into an elite private school should not be regarded as analogous even if in some sense the woman’s relationship with her daughter would be strengthened by the act. The independent, nonsubjective value of the relationship, and of the daughter’s good, on which the action’s contribution to meaning depends, may be compromised by construing them in a way that insulates them from morality. The meaningfulness of the relationship, if not its strength, might in this case be better preserved by respecting morality rather than by showing oneself willing to give it up.
It cannot be expected that all conflicts between morality and meaning will be resolvable in this way. The possibility that what gives a person’s life meaning will come apart from what morality permits will always remain open. This implies that morality is no better suited to serve as an absolute standard for practical reason than self-interest. Still, meaning and an interest in meaning are likely more often than not to complement and reinforce moral concerns. For meaning involves an appreciation of what is valuable independently of one’s own interests and attitudes, and an interest in meaning involves an interest in realizing and affirming what is valuable in this way. Moral concerns are perhaps the most obvious and most typically engaging of such valuable aims. Though few people are likely to get meaning in their lives from the abstract project of “being moral”—a passion for morality would be a peculiar and puzzling thing—many if not most people get meaning from more specific projects and relationships that morality should applaud: from being good and doing good in their roles as parent, daughter, lover, friend, and from furthering or trying to further social and political goals.
If we pay increased attention and give increased weight to people’s interest in getting and sustaining meaning in their lives, morality and the importance of obedience to its requirements will necessarily occupy a correspondingly smaller place in our practical and evaluational outlooks. But it is arguable that the goals of morality will be as likely or more likely to be achieved, and in a way that is more rewarding to the people who are achieving them, for they will be doing so not out of obedience to duty but out of love.13
These last remarks rely not just on the idea of meaningfulness as a category of value in life, but on the particular conception of it that I have urged in these lectures—a conception according to which meaning arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness; that is, a conception according to which meaning comes from active engagement in projects of worth. This conception of meaning manifestly relies on some idea of nonsubjective value, and on the corresponding acceptance of the ideas that some projects, relationships, and activities are better than others, and that the person whose projects and relationships they are may be wrong about their value. These ideas are notoriously controversial and, in secular academic as well as popular culture, we tend to avoid them. The popular Fulfillment View of meaning which I spoke about in the previous lecture, according to which meaning comes from finding and pursuing one’s passions, whatever they are, may be understood as implicitly rejecting the idea of objective value, thus conceptualizing meaning in wholly subjective terms. The equally popular view that identifies meaning with involvement with something “larger than oneself” is opposed to this, but by shying away from any reference to objective value, it deprives itself of the resources necessary to answer the challenge, What has size got to do with anything?, or to explain why caring for an infant (presum-ably smaller than oneself!) can be meaningful while being a groupie for a rock band might not.
Perhaps we avoid talk of objective value out of a desire to stay clear of controversy, perhaps out of fear of being chauvinistic and elitist. Controversy, however, should not be avoided, particularly perhaps in academic and public discourse, and, as I have argued, a belief in the objectivity of values need not be narrow-minded or coercive. One can find the question, What has objective value? intelligible and important while remaining properly humble about one’s limited ability to discover the answer and properly cautious about the uses to which one’s partial and tentative answer may be put. In any event, I have argued that unless we accept the idea of objective value, the concept of meaningfulness, understood to refer to a type of value distinct both from morality and from self-interest, will not be fully intelligible. If we cannot understand what meaningfulness is, our interest in it will diminish and may eventually disappear altogether.
1 See Joseph Raz, The Practice of Value (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) 33. He writes, “As art forms, social relations and political structures are created by social practices . . . so must their distinctive virtues and forms of excellence depend on social practices that create and sustain them. In these cases, it would seem that not only access to these values, but the values themselves, arise with the social forms that make their instantiation possible.”
2 For an extended discussion of this point, see my “The Meanings of Lives” and “Meaningful Lives in a Meaningless World” (Lecture One, fn 12, above).
3 That is, the truth of the judgment that an activity is worthwhile is independent of whether a subject, such as Tolstoy or Sisyphus, thinks that the activity is worthwhile.
4 J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977).
5 John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (1861), Chapter 2.
6 Many people, through no fault of their own, simply lack the opportunity for meaning: their physical, economic, or political circumstances deprive them of the freedom or the leisure to explore and pursue activities they would love. Others may have temperaments that make it difficult to love anything in the right sort of way. One cannot find something engaging at will.
7 For a good recipe, see http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/chocolate-mousse-cake-with-cinnamon-cream-14010.
8 I discuss the relation between meaningfulness and self-interest at greater length in “Happiness and Meaning: Two Aspects of the Good Life,” Social Philosophy & Policy 14/1 (Winter 1997) 207–225.
9 J.J.C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism: For & Against (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) 156.
10 Bernard Williams, “Persons, Character and Morality,” in Moral Luck (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) 14.
11 Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955).
12 The situations of Anna Karenina and of (the fictionalized version of) Gauguin that Williams discusses in the essay “Moral Luck” may be understood as examples of this sort of conflict. See Moral Luck, fn 10, above.
13 A related discussion of the relation between meaning and morality is in Susan Wolf, “Meaning and Morality,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 97 (1997) 299–315.