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Utilitarianism and the Meaning of Life

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2009

Thaddeus Metz
Thaddeus Metz
Affiliation:
University of Missouri-St Louis, [email protected]
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Abstract

This article addresses the utilitarian theory of life's meaning according to which a person's existence is significant just in so far as she makes those in the world better off. One aim is to explore the extent to which the utilitarian theory has counter-intuitive implications about which lives count as meaningful. A second aim is to develop a new, broadly Kantian theory of what makes a life meaningful, a theory that retains much of what makes the utilitarian view attractive, while avoiding the most important objections facing it and providing a principled explanation of their force.

I have been very much puzzled as to the meaning of the question ‘What is the meaning or purpose of life?’ … But at last it occurred to me that perhaps the vague words of this question are often used to mean no more than ‘What is the use of a man's life?’ … A man's life is of some use, if and only if the intrinsic value of the Universe as a whole (including past, present, and future) is greater, owing to the existence of his actions and experiences, than it would have been if, other things being equal, those actions and experiences had never existed.

G. E. Moore

Type
Articles
Information
Utilitas , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , March 2003 , pp. 50 - 70
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2003

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References

1 Moore is quoted in The Meaning of Life, ed. Moorhead, H., Chicago, 1988, pp. 128 fGoogle Scholar.

2 In this article I must rely on an intuitive sense of the question of what makes a life meaningful. For a recent analysis of its sense, see Metz, Thaddeus, ‘The Concept of a Meaningful Life’, American Philosophical Quarterly, xxxviii (2001)Google Scholar.

3 For a survey of contemporary analytic reflection on life's meaning, see Metz, Thaddeus, ‘Recent Work on the Meaning of Life’, Ethics, cxii (2002)Google Scholar.

4 Singer, Peter, Practical Ethics, 2nd edn., New York, 1993Google Scholar, ch. 12, and How Are We to Live?, Amherst, 1995Google Scholar, chs. 10 f.

5 Of course, some classical utilitarians, e.g. Bentham and Mill, do think in terms of degrees of rightness.

6 Some utilitarians have challenged this type of appraisal on the ground that commonsensical beliefs are likely to be conservative, cultural biases. I do not address this challenge here, taking for granted the critical method predominantly employed in normative philosophy.

7 Singer, , Practical Ethics, pp. 333 fGoogle Scholar.

8 See also William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, repr., New York, 1976, pp. 169 f., 176, 395 f.

9 For discussion of meaning in such a context, see Frankl, Viktor, Man's Search for Meaning, New York, 1959Google Scholar.

10 A plausible response to make on behalf of UTM1 here is that this point assumes a subjective account of welfare. If welfare were construed in more objective terms, then the notion that meaning can come from benefiting oneself might be more attractive. However, one must remember that the Bear case also applies to objective theories of welfare. That case suggests that it is incorrect to think that your life would be more meaningful for promoting your own welfare, however the welfare is conceived. I make several additional replies to the objective welfare line of argument later in this section.

11 Singer, Irving, Meaning in Life, vol. 1, The Creation of Value, Baltimore, 1996, pp. 115, 120Google Scholar. Despite these remarks, other passages (pp. 117, 127 f.) suggest that Singer holds UTM1.

12 One could try to invoke a utilitarian account of morality here to buttress the utilitarian account of meaning. However, Humiliation and Prostitution arguably apply equally well to utilitarian morality; even if one thought that these actions are morally permissible, it would be implausible to hold that they are morally required.

13 Later I will suggest that artistic activity can be meaningful apart from any benefits to others.

14 An alternative explanation might appeal to the directness of the causation involved. In Prostitution and Humiliation, violation of the moral rule is the proximate cause of the welfare produced, whereas in Gaugin, it is not. Perhaps violating a moral rule confers meaning on a life if it indirectly promotes others' welfare. However, this proposal counter-intuitively entails that one's life would be meaningful for letting others humiliate one, so long as people enjoyed hearing about it later.

15 For similar claims in the contemporary literature, see Taylor, Richard, ‘Time and Life's Meaning’, Review of Metaphysics, xl (1987)Google Scholar; and Gewirth, Alan, Self-Fulfillment, Princeton, 1998Google Scholar, ch. 5.

16 In addition, recall from section II that rule-utilitarianism is better motivated as a moral theory than as a theory of life's meaning.

17 At this point, some utilitarians will question whether UTM1 should have been given up so easily; reflection on cases of objective well-being might suggest that making oneself well off can in fact sometimes make one's life meaningful. Rather than reconsider the Bear case against UTM1 or the latter's overall plausibility, I instead note other serious problems facing the attempt to rescue any version of UTM with an objective theory of welfare.

18 Raz, Joseph, Value, Respect, and Attachment, Cambridge, 2001CrossRefGoogle Scholar, ch. 1.

19 Wolf, Susan, ‘Happiness and Meaning: Two Aspects of the Good Life’, Social Philosophy and Policy, xiv (1997)Google Scholar.

20 Wolf, 211.

21 Readers will notice that I do not examine Bernard Williams's influential objection that utilitarianism requires one to forsake one's ground projects, realization of which is necessary for ‘one's existence to have a point’ or to ‘give a meaning to one's life’. See Williams's ‘Persons, Character, and Morality’, repr. as the first chapter of his Moral Luck, New York, 1981. I do not examine this objection since it has already been extensively discussed and relies on a subjective account of reasons and meaning. I am more interested in criticisms of UTM that have received less attention and are grounded on an objective view of reasons and meaning.

22 I first sketched this view in ‘Contributions Toward a Naturalist Theory of Life's Meaning’, Dialogue and Universalism, viii (1998)Google Scholar.

23 Taylor, esp. 680–3; Gewirth, esp. pp. 182–6.

24 Hurka, Thomas, Perfectionism, New York, 1993Google Scholar, esp. ch. 5. Hurka is professedly putting forth what he takes to be an attractive moral theory, but one could fairly read his view as an account of meaning in life.

25 Two of the most developed discussions can be found in Anderson, Elizabeth, Value in Ethics and Economics, Cambridge, 1993Google Scholar; and Scanlon, T. M., What We Owe to Each Other, Cambridge, 1998Google Scholar, pt. 1.

26 I would like to thank Roger Crisp, Sigurdur Kristinsson, Darrel Moellendorf, David Phillips, Eric Wiland, and an anonymous referee for Utilitas for providing comments on a previous draft of this article. I would also like to acknowledge the helpful input received at the 2000 Conference of the British Society for Ethical Theory (Leusden, The Netherlands) and at a colloquium sponsored by the Rand Afrikaans University Philosophy Department (Johannesburg, South Africa). Finally, I am grateful to the University of Missouri Research Board for the summer salary and research award that gave me the freedom to write this article.