Abstract
Meaningfulness is the dimension of importance that exists for beings capable of adjudicating between competing kinds of normative reasons. The way an agent decides to rank competing values in terms of importance reflects that agent’s understanding of what counts as meaningful. We can imagine agents who do not engage in this kind of deliberation. Agents who fail to adjudicate between kinds of normative reasons can still act in ways that are prudentially valuable, aesthetically pleasing, and morally praiseworthy. While the actions of such agents can be good in a variety of ways such actions can also be meaningless. This paper explains how meaningfulness is connected to deliberation, how one can be mistaken in one’s judgments of meaningfulness, and how some lives and practices can be more meaningful than others.
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Notes
Tim Oakley (2010) argues that while there might be some content to the notion of meaninglessness, the diverse range of emotions or psychological dispositions that are associated with “meaningfulness” makes it an unsuitable object of philosophical analysis. There is certainly a lack of agreement concerning the subjective states associated with meaningfulness. According to Susan Wolf, some practice or activity counts as meaningful if it results in “fitting fulfillment”, the moment when “subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness” (1997, 221). On her conception “meaning arises from loving objects worthy of love and engaging with them in a positive way” (2010, 8). Others, like Antti Kauppinen emphasize achievement (2011, 346). From a cross-cultural perspective, we find considerable variability also. For example, the Japanese concept of ikigai, (roughly translated as “reason for being” or “source of value in life”) for example does not place the concept of love or achievement at the foreground, but instead indicates calmness, skill, and a sense of freedom from compulsion (See Matthews 2008). This paper does not focus on the wide range of subjective experiences associated with the idea of meaningfulness.
I am grateful to Don Marquis, Richard De George, and an anonymous reviewer for this journal for emphasizing the moral rationalist objection to this argument.
See for example: https://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/righteous/ulma.asp (last accessed Feb 15, 2020)
Thanks to Jada Strabbing for raising this objection.
My own view is that there are additional kinds of value, but for the purposes of the remaining argument we can assume that the reductionist argument against meaningfulness assumes that value comes in just two flavors.
An anonymous reviewer for this journal has objected that this line of reasoning would be unacceptable to philosophers like Kant or Augustine who insist on an internal connection between the exercise of human freedom and moral action. While I am broadly sympathetic to the Christian conception of the connection between freedom and morality, it is very different from Kant’s. The Kantian faces a fascinating problem in these cases. For example, should one take a pill that would make one invariably act in the future according to the categorical imperative? Would the categorical imperative require you to take such a pill? Some might argue that the categorical imperative would require you not to take it, because doing so would bind all future behavior in ways that eliminate the very possibility of praise and blame - one’s future actions wouldn’t really be actions insofar as the action of the pill would constitute a heteronomous determination of the will. Assuming that this is the correct way to characterize future behavior, one can still argue that the initial decision to take the pill itself would be free. Notice also that freely deciding to follow the categorical imperative in one’s future actions cannot be a violation of the categorical imperative. Consider making the higher-order decision to guide one’s future decisions according to the categorical imperative, that decision cannot be a violation of the categorical imperative. However, it still might be wrong on other grounds to take the pill insofar as arguably, it is wrong to turn a moral agent into a being whose actions, while unfree, have a perfect outward correspondence with moral actions. In that case one is assuming that it is morally wrong to freely eliminate the active presence of free choice as one of the motives of a willing agent. Notice that this argument values the freedom of the agent independently of the actions of the agent and regards the elimination of free agency as wrong.
The fact that it is difficult to imagine a completely unreflective opera singer is instructive.
An anonymous reviewer for this journal has suggested that there are strong connections between the arguments in this paper and arguments about the relationship between agency and freedom that one finds in existentialist and Christian philosophical writings. This is certainly true, but explicitly making these connections would require a much longer paper.
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Symons, J. Meaningfulness and Kinds of Normative Reasons. Philosophia 49, 459–471 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-020-00258-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-020-00258-7