I WOULD LIKE TO APPLAUD Susan Wolf for standing in front of an interdisciplinary crowd and declaring: I am conducting research with no practical implications that I know of, and I am proud. Philosophy, even the philosophy of human values—and for that matter the search after knowledge and understanding in general—needs practical justification like a fish needs a bicycle. In fact, of the various things that tell us apart from other apes, the ability and inclination to pursue nonpractical interests is one of the truly priceless.
Which leads us to another thing for which I would like to thank Wolf. I would like to thank her for simply reminding us that our motives are not restricted to the usual twin suspects—self interest and moral duty, and that situations in which we act from neither are not rare. There are other things that people care about for their own sake, ranging from Truth and Beauty to the New England Patriots. One might think that this point is a simple one, but that would be to overlook the significant fact that so many of us still write as if this simple point had never occurred to us—perhaps taking a cue from Kant and his drama of duty and inclination. The oversight is particularly amazing to me because while acting for non-moral, unselfish reasons is common to all humans, we philosophers are among those most often subjected to the question, “Why on earth do you do this?” Even among ourselves we do not escape such inquiries. In a forgetful moment, with a lamentable lack of empathy, a philosopher who writes about the paradoxes of time travel will dare to wonder aloud why her colleague is interested in so obscure a topic as demonstratives. The “why” question posed to us (as well as to oologists, for example) by more conventional segments of the workforce is a constant reminder of “the things we do for love.” “We” here means “everyone,” and the locution is borrowed from the characters of A Chorus Line, who themselves are pondering their motives for pursuing the lives of poor actors.
What I would like to question is the necessary role Wolf claims objective worth has in providing meaning in life. Suppose one takes a fulfillment view along the following lines: one has a meaningful life if the ten things she cares most about and the things she does all the time are related in a certain good way, whereas one is up for a midlife crisis if the ten things she cares about most and the things she does all the time have nothing to do with each other. To that, Wolf adds a constraint: those ten things (or however many there are) should have a modicum of objective worth. She appeals to our intuitions with her goldfish case: if what I care about most is my goldfish, and what gives me fulfillment is simply caring for my goldfish, then regardless of that fulfillment I still lead a meaningless life. Devotion to something that is not worthwhile cannot give meaning to my life. I do not wish to attack this claim but merely to point out ways in which the fulfillment theorist might be able to account for “goldfish” cases, and to explain why we look with pity at the goldfish monomaniac’s life without either dismissing our pity or appealing to some objective value that is missing from the theorist’s picture.
I will make the following claim about the normal adult human who receives full satisfaction in her life from keeping a goldfish: she does not exist. There is no such person. No doubt there exists at least one person who claims, believes, and even feels that her goldfish and only her goldfish makes her life meaningful. After all, the goldfish case is not so far removed from the cases of many actual people who credit all the meaning in their lives to some delightful dog or elegant cat, at times making assertions about the importance of the furry creature in making their lives meaningful that would sound exaggerated even if they were talking about, say, adult offspring. If you don’t believe me, visit www.marryyourpet.com, where you and your pet are invited to tie the knot if you, like many other humans, realize that your relationship with your pet gives you much more than any human partner can. The decor of the page is hearts and flowers, and the testimonials from happy couples are full of passion: they might once have had trouble finding fulfillment in their lives, but that was before they found their dog . . . .
But if we were to meet Wolf’s Goldfish Nut and her real life counterparts we would not believe their testimonials, even if we were otherwise quite inclined to believe what people say about themselves. Why is this? The first answer that leaps off the Web page is: because they are deluded. Never mind absolute values: they are deluded about facts. That is, they say things like, “Hey look, my goldfish knows when I am talking about him,” or “Nobody understands me except my cat.” These claims contradict what we know about the brains of cats and fish. The delusion can go further: people who marry their pets, for example, must think of them as capable of meaningfully saying “yes” to a marriage proposal and of respecting a human ceremony. This is, again, a rather straightforward misrepresentation of dogs and cats—and an even greater misrepresentation of goldfish. Even if the Goldfish Nut makes no such openly deluded statement, we suspect a misrepresentation somewhere. Why? Because the Goldfish Nut’s life appears to be one in which some basic human needs are not being met, where things that we know are necessary for fulfillment are absent. For example, how likely is it that any human other than a severely autistic one could be fulfilled absent intimate relationships with other humans—whether of friendship, romantic love, sexual attraction, parenthood, identification with a group, or small everyday intimacies, such as those of play? Consider too that much of Goldfish Nut’s brain remains unused. She does not experience the satisfaction of learning or even of gradually becoming better at a task, or the satisfaction of doing something that is appreciated by other humans or that merits taking pride in her skill. Basic emotional needs, even very general and disjunctive ones, remain unsatisfied for her. If she still says that she is fulfilled, we wonder, is she perhaps severely depressed, no longer remembering what fulfillment feels like? Did she get too burnt when her last project or relationship failed, so that she wants to believe, self-deceptively, that she can do well without attempting anything in the least challenging? Does staring at her goldfish constitute some kind of Buddhist experiment or art project that she won’t tell us about? The alternative—to simply accept her claim that she is fulfilled and satisfied—means seeing her as so immensely removed from our experience of healthy adult humans that we might need a global revision of what we believe about our species.
We could, of course, try and imagine a case in which a life based on caring for a goldfish would not have these grim implications. Take a retarded child, living in an institution, who suddenly develops a fascination with goldfish after seeing them on TV. With help, and with immense effort on his own part, he manages to learn how to keep his own goldfish, and this achievement puts a spring in his step. The staff, comparing him to his peers who do nothing but doze in front of the TV, might wish that the others might find such meaningful projects for themselves. They might find the child’s interest in the fish heartwarming, and they would not be wrong. Goldfish care can give a retarded child fulfillment, because it gives him what it cannot give an adult. In caring for the fish, the child, unlike the adult, may well be working at the edge of his abilities, giving himself challenges and reasons to feel pride. The arrival of the fish in his life probably results in more interactions with other humans rather than fewer (children and others come to see the pretty fish, rapport is achieved with the adults who help) and more expressions of social approval come his way. Knowing how to do something on his own gives him a sense of self-efficacy. In short, being in charge of a beloved goldfish or two can give the retarded child a measure of fulfillment that would require much bigger projects in a normal adult—but for the same reasons and via the same mechanisms. Thus, in the case of the child it is not strange to say that goldfish keeping gives his life meaning. Both the implausibility of the meaningful adult goldfish-based life and the plausibility of a retarded child’s meaningful (fairly) goldfish-based life can both be explained without appealing to any objective value (or disvalue) that fish-raising might have, but simply by citing intuitions and the occasional empirical study on what makes humans fulfilled.
Let us move to a second point. Wolf presents “meaning” as a value and a motive—a third party to the usual suspects, duty and self-interest. As examples of people who act from considerations of meaning, she suggests people who act from parental love, from aesthetic ideals (the perfect pastry), and from love of any number of possible people and objects. Here she is surely mistaken. Those who act, say, for the love of art, do not act for the sake of a meaningful life but rather for the sake of art. Their reason for action is not “doing so will make my life more meaningful,” but rather “doing so will help art.” If I love the Basque language, I believe that the Basque language is valuable for its own sake, whether or not it contributes meaning to the life of the individual that is me (whether or not, in fact, I exist). Bernard Williams convinced many of us that if you are faced with a situation in which you can help either your wife or a stranger, and you think, “I am going to help my wife because she is my wife and in such conditions it is morally permissible to prefer your wife,” then you have thought one thought too many. But imagine a person who thinks, “I am going to help my wife because she is my wife and love for my wife is among the things that make my life meaningful.” That, too, is one thought too many. It may not be egotistical, but it is inappropriately agent-centered. So read properly, Wolf’s position does not introduce a “third party” value—that of meaning in life—but rather asserts the legitimacy of many, many values that people might hold: each wife or husband truly loved presents their spouse with a value consideration independent of any other, including “meaning.” I see no problem here for Wolf, except that if she wishes to make claims specifically about meaningfulness as a value, she needs to keep clear the distinction and relation between that and one’s wife as a value or one’s art as a value.
But does she want to? I would like to end with a question—maybe a few questions. In her previous writing, Wolf has stated that it is wrong to expect a neat hierarchy of values with morality on top. I understood her to be saying that the same would be true of a hierarchy of values with prudence on top, or truth, or beauty, or even a “healthy balance” or eudaimonia. There is no top. From the point of view of morality, one must always be moral, from the point of view of prudence one must always do the prudent thing, and much the same is true of any value. When deciding between two values, we are “on our own”—that is, there exists no argument that can, independently of the point of view embodied by each value, tell us which of the choices would be right for us. It appears that Wolf has changed her mind over the years, though she still opposes the idea of a hierarchy and a “top,” and still takes it that in some cases we are on our own when choosing between values. She can now say, for example, that pursuing your love of art is a great idea unless it entails extreme immorality. It is as if there may be a top, but instead of commanding our every deliberative move it is restricted to issuing such commandments as, “Let’s not get carried away!” I would like to ask Wolf how she sees the relationships between the plethora of values that she is talking about. Is there a top? If there is not, where do “within reason”-type statements come from? How much can we say about relationships between values? Should the notion of particularism come to mind? Or perhaps the idea of incomparable or incommensurable choices? What does it take for there to be—even sometimes—a truth as to which love I should follow when my loves conflict, a truth that is both independent of my own concerns and strongest inclinations? Could it be that morality does have some kind of privileged status among values, after all? It may be that I am posing too many questions here, that what I really want is not so much immediate and specific answers as a sequel. Not that I understand why anyone would want to do metaethics, anyway!