Abstract
In “Happiness Is the Wrong Metric,” Amitai Etzioni largely argues that human beings are motivated by more than just their own happiness, whether conceived in terms of pleasant experiences or fulfilled preferences, and that the state should attend to more than merely people’s happiness. He contends that we are often disposed to seek out, and that public policy ought to promote, what is morally right and good for its own sake. While not disagreeing with this thrust of Etzioni’s position, I maintain in my contribution that it is too narrow. There is a large range of goods that people tend to pursue, and that social and political institutions should plausibly foster, which are reducible to neither happiness nor morality. They are values that are instead well captured by the concept of what makes a life meaningful. If Etzioni is correct that the state ought to enable people to live morally upright lives, then it has no less reason to enable them to live meaningful ones, too.
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Notes
This and a few other sentences in this article have been cribbed from Thaddeus Metz, “Life: Meaning of,” in Henk ten Have (ed.), Encyclopedia of Global Bioethics (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015).
At least since the work of Lawrence Kohlberg, John Rawls, and Jürgen Habermas appeared.
See especially the book-length treatments by Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); John Cottingham, On the Meaning of Life (London: Routledge, 2003); Garrett Thomson, On the Meaning of Life (South Melbourne: Wadsworth, 2003); Susan Wolf, Meaning in Life and Why It Matters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010) and Thaddeus Metz, Meaning in Life: An Analytic Study (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
One prominent social theorist who has in effect made this claim is Michael Lerner. See especially his The Politics of Meaning (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1996).
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Metz, T. Meaning in Life as the Right Metric. Soc 53, 294–296 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-016-0015-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-016-0015-7