Comments?
I’d love to hear.Robert Bass
Life (let us suppose) is bad. Is it therefore meaningless? The goodness or badness of life and its meaningfulness or meaninglessness both seem to be dimensions of evaluative appraisal, but it is not altogether clear what the relation between them is. If a life is bad, then something has gone wrong with it (leaving it, for the time being, an open question whether what has gone wrong is something that might not have gone wrong instead). Similarly, if a life is meaningless, something has gone wrong with it. Is it, however, the same thing – or some measure or degree of the same thing – that has gone wrong in the two cases? If what has gone wrong when a life is meaningless is not the same as what has gone wrong when a life is bad, does the meaningfulness of a life depend on its goodness (or, at least, upon its non-badness1) in such a way that a life cannot be both meaningful and bad?
It is best to go slowly. What do we mean by the goodness or badness of a person’s life? In what sense are we supposing that life is bad? I shall take it that we are referring to some measure of a person’s welfare. That is, we are not speaking about whether a person’s life is morally good or bad, but of whether his welfare is achieved or not (to some acceptable degree),2 whether his interests are furthered or not, whether his needs are met or not. Then, to say that a person’s life is bad is to say that his welfare is not achieved, his interests (or perhaps his most basic interests) are not furthered, his needs are not met,3 There will be at least some necessary condition of his life going well that is not satisfied.
What can be said about meaningfulness? Here, I feel much less confident that I even understand the notion. Perhaps, however, some progress can be made by considering what relations4 there might be between the badness of a life and its meaninglessness.
Plainly, only a few relations are possible. First, it might be that bad lives and meaningless lives are (or, on adequate analysis, would turn out to be) identical.5 All bad lives would be meaningless and all meaningless lives bad. Second, it might be that bad and meaningless lives are disjoint. Knowing that a life is bad would not tell you that it is also meaningless nor would knowing that a life is meaningless tell you whether or not it is bad. Third, it might be that bad lives are a proper subset of meaningless lives. All bad lives would be meaningless, but not all meaningless lives would be bad. Fourth, it might be that meaningless lives are a proper subset of bad lives. All meaningless lives would be bad, but not all bad lives would be meaningless. Fifth, it might be that the sets of meaningless and bad lives intersect. Some meaningless lives will be bad, while others will not; some bad lives will be meaningless, while others will not.6
This classification of possible relations makes matters more tractable. If any of the second, fourth and fifth possibilities correctly depicts the relation between badness and meaninglessness, then the question is settled in one direction: there can be bad lives that are not meaningless. If, on the other hand, either the first or the third possibility obtains, then the question is settled in the opposite direction: all bad lives must also be meaningless lives. Since this appears to be an exhaustive classification of the possible distinguishable relations,7 we can confine ourselves to examining either the members of either the first or the second group of possibilities, knowing that if we can rule each of the possibilities in that group out, we will have shown (depending on which group we start with) either that bad lives can be meaningful or will have shown that they cannot. Since I am inclined to think that bad lives may nevertheless be meaningful, I can confine myself to consideration of the two possibilities that badness and meaninglessness are identical or that bad lives are a subset of meaningless lives. If those can both be ruled out, my case is made.8
Is badness the same as meaninglessness? There may be some hints in the way we talk about the two that they are identical. To say that a life is “not worth living” may seem to support equally the claims that it is bad and that it is meaningless. If a life is correctly said to be not worth living, that can easily be understood as a claim that that person’s needs are unmet or her interests are frustrated or her welfare is not achieved, to wit, that her life is bad. It can also easily be understood as a claim that there is no point to (her) living or continuing to live – which seems very close to saying that her life is meaningless. Even if we accept the claim that both badness and meaninglessness may be inferred from the (true) claim that a life is not worth living, this is not a decisive consideration, for there may be other ways that a life could be bad without its being the case that it is not worth living. So far, things seem inconclusive.
Consider the other possibility: Could it be that bad lives are a subset of meaningless lives? In trying to answer this, I find two problems. First, though it seems to me that I have a reasonably definite conception of welfare – sufficiently definite that I can recognize at least some cases in which welfare is definitely absent – it is also open-ended enough that I feel uncertain whether meaningfulness is a necessary condition for one’s life to go well (or, at least, not badly). Second, I don’t see how it could be decided whether meaningfulness is necessary to welfare without some more definite conception of meaningfulness – and I have been laboring under the difficulty that I am most unsure what meaningfulness or its absence is. To this point, I have been trying to pursue the question whether we can infer meaninglessness from badness, limiting myself to a formal approach that doesn’t rely on my (very thin) understanding of meaningfulness. Now, it seems that something more is required.
What I am going to do is propose a minimalist definition of meaningfulness, one that I think most people would accept whatever more specific account they would prefer:
A life is meaningful if and only if something of significant value is achieved or brought about in or through that life (or through large tracts of that life) which either would not be achieved in the absence of that life (or those large tracts of life) or if that life (or those tracts) were significantly different.
If that is accepted, I think we can make further progress.
The claim that badness and meaninglessness of lives are identical will be false unless it is also the case that there is nothing of significant value that can be brought about through a life (that would not otherwise be realized) other than that person’s welfare. Similarly, the claim that bad lives are a subset of meaningless lives will be false unless there is nothing of significant value that can be brought about through a life (that would not otherwise come about) other than that person’s welfare.
But it is vastly implausible to claim either that nothing but a person’s own welfare is of significant value or that no other significant value than that person’s welfare can be brought about through her life (that would not otherwise be realized). To the extent that these claims are implausible, it is also implausible that the badness of lives is either identical to their meaninglessness or that their badness is a sufficient condition of their meaninglessness. So, it appears that a bad life can be meaningful – if, that is, some significant value is achieved through that life that would not otherwise be achieved.
1. One factor that makes the relevant questions difficult to discuss is that the pair, “good-bad,” does not seem to articulate an exhaustive contrast, while the pair, “meaningful-meaningless,” does. Between “good” and “bad,” there might be something that is neutral, neither good nor bad, but there does not (to my ear, at any rate) seem to be any similar alternative to a life’s being either meaningful or meaningless. For the purposes of the present paper, I shall stipulate that I will be taking “good” to be equivalent to (just) “not-bad.” This shouldn’t substantively affect the subsequent discussion since we are concerned with the relation between a life’s being bad and its being meaningless, not with whether a life might be meaningful if it is neither good nor bad.
2. This qualification should be added to each of the other characterizations of welfare as well. I do not mean any of the characterizations of welfare (or all of them together) to be an adequate definition. Rather, I am trying to indicate the neighborhood in which the relevant considerations lie.
3. If it is going to be true for everyone that life is bad, I suspect that will require that one have or assume an objectivist account of what makes a person’s life go well. If welfare is simply, as subjectivists think, some function of one’s desires, beliefs, etc., then it will be hard to deal with the case of those who believe their lives are going well. We will need to say they are somehow deceived or self-deceived in thinking their lives are going well and that that deceived state is itself bad even if it does not (or would not) disturb them to know the facts or inferences with respect to which it is alleged that they are deceived.
4. I assume that the relations we are interested in are intensional rather than extensional. If there were, say, a perfect extensional correlation between bad and meaningless lives, that would not tell us whether a bad life could be meaningful.
5. I have confined myself to speaking of the possible relations between badness and meaninglessness. With appropriate changes, these could be converted into descriptions of possible relations between goodness and meaningfulness, etc.
6. This kind of relation would hold if a sufficient but not necessary condition for one of the pair (badness-meaninglessness) were also a sufficient but not necessary condition for the other while it is also the case that there is some sufficient condition for one which is not a sufficient condition for the other. Suppose, for example, that ill-health were a sufficient but not necessary condition for one’s life to be bad and also sufficient but not necessary for one’s life to be meaningless, while friendlessness is sufficient for one’s life to be bad but not sufficient for it to be meaningless. Then, some lives would be bad and meaningless, some bad and not meaningless, some meaningless and not bad. However, this is not equivalent to saying that the two are (intensionally) disjoint because some inferences would be possible from one to the other: if it was known that a person's life was bad in a way that included ill-health, we could infer that her life was also meaningless.
7. I am omitting the possibility that either “bad” or “meaningless” is cognitively empty in a sense that implies that the term can neither be truly predicated nor denied of lives.
8. How can we proceed, though? I see no way but to rely on intuitions about badness and meaninglessness – and I fear I haven’t got a sufficiently rich supply!
