Matthew Hammerton points out that a meaningful life and a life that goes well for you might not be the same thing.
Picture two people on their deathbeds. The first lived comfortably, surrounded by loving family and friends, enjoying diverse pleasures and achievements throughout a long life. The second dedicated herself entirely to fighting injustice, achieving remarkable social change, but at great personal cost. Who lived the better life?
Your answer might depend on what you mean by ‘better’. Philosophers have long recognized that when we call a life ‘good’ we can mean different things. So we could be talking about a life’s moral goodness – how virtuous the person was – or its prudential goodness – how well the life went for the person living it. But there’s a third dimension we often overlook: how meaningful the life was. This gives us three distinct questions we can ask about any life: 1. Was it morally good? 2. Did it go well for the person living it? 3. Was it meaningful?
These questions pull in different directions. A morally exemplary life might involve suffering for others’ sake, making it less prudentially good. A meaningful life might also require sacrifices that reduce personal well-being. Understanding these tensions can help us navigate our choices about how to live.
Is Meaning Just Well-Being in Disguise?
Here’s where things get philosophically interesting. When we examine what makes lives meaningful, we find striking similarities to what makes lives go well. Theories of both meaning and well-being come in subjective and objective varieties, appealing to overlapping goods, such as love, knowledge, achievement, and aesthetic experience. This raises an uncomfortable question: Is ‘meaning in life’ just another way of talking about well-being? Perhaps then when someone complains that their life lacks meaning, they’re really just saying it lacks important components of well-being.
Consider the parallels. Subjective theories of well-being say your life goes well when you’re satisfied, your desires are fulfilled, or you experience pleasure. Some theories of meaning make identical claims about meaningfulness. Objective theories of well-being point to goods like knowledge, love, and achievement as being valuable for the person who has them. Theories of meaning point to exactly the same goods as sources of life’s significance.
This similarity is puzzling. If meaning and well-being are genuinely distinct, why do their theories look so alike? The most obvious explanation is that they’re actually the same thing – that ‘meaning’ is just a fancy way of talking about certain aspects of well-being…
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