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Immorality and the Meaning of Life

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Notes

  1. Richard Taylor, “The Meaning of Life,” in Richard Taylor, Good and Evil (New York: Macmillan, 1970), p. 265.

  2. A. J. Ayer, “The Meaning of Life,” in A. J. Ayer, The Meaning of Life and Other Essays (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990), p. 196; see also p. 194.

  3. Paul Edwards, “The Meaning and Value of Life,” in E. D. Klemke, ed., The Meaning of Life, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 143–144.

  4. Ibid., p. 144.

  5. See John Kekes, “The Meaning of Life,” in Peter A. French and Howard K. Wettstein, eds., Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 24: Life and Death (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000), p. 32.

  6. Ibid., p. 30.

  7. Laurence Thomas, “Morality and a Meaningful Life,” Philosophical Papers, vol. 34 (2005), p. 405.

  8. Peter Singer, Practical Ethics, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 334.

  9. Ibid., p. 335.

  10. Ibid., p. 334.

  11. Berit Brogaard and Barry Smith, “On Luck, Responsibility and the Meaning of Life,” Philosophical Papers, vol. 34 (2005), pp. 446–447.

  12. See David Wiggins, “Truth, Invention, and the Meaning of Life,” Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 62 (1976), pp. 348–349; see also Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 4, 17–20; Thaddeus Metz, “The Concept of a Meaningful Life,” American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 38 (2001), pp. 150–151; Susan Wolf, “Happiness and Meaning,” Social Philosophy and Policy, vol. 14 (1997), pp. 208–213; Kai Nielsen, “Linguistic Philosophy and the ‘Meaning of Life,’” in Klemke, op. cit., pp. 237, 242–50. R. W. Hepburn, “Questions about the Meaning of Life,” in Klemke, op. cit., p. 262. Brogaard and Smith, op. cit., p. 457.

  13. See Thaddeus Metz, “Utilitarianism and the Meaning of Life,” Utilitas, vol. 15 (2003), pp. 60–61.

  14. Kekes, op. cit., p. 34.

  15. See ibid.

  16. See ibid., pp. 20 & 32.

  17. See ibid., p. 26.

  18. See Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 36; see also Erik J. Wielenberg, Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press 2005), pp. 18–23.

  19. Wolf, “Happiness and Meaning,” p. 211.

  20. See Metz, op. cit., p. 63.

  21. Ibid.

  22. I would like to thank Thomas Magnell, the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Value Inquiry, for his comments and help. I am also grateful to Ran Lahav, Saul Smilansky, and Daniel Statman for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. An earlier version of the paper was read at the Central States Philosophical Association Conference in Detroit, September 2010.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Haifa University, Haifa, 31905, Israel

    Iddo Landau

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Iddo Landau Immorality and the Meaning of Life. J Value Inquiry 45, 309–317 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-011-9293-x

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