Impartiality, Eudaimonic Encroachment, and the Boundaries of Morality

Many hold that morality is essentially impartial. Many also hold that partiality is justified. Susan Wolf argues that these commitments push us toward downgrading morality’s practical significance. To use her iconic phrase, not everyone should strive to be a moral saint. Here I argue that there is a way of pushing morality’s boundaries in a partialist direction in a way that respects Wolf’s insights. According to this theory, there is eudaimonic encroachment on morality. This means that non-moral eudaimonic considerations can impact what morality demands of us without themselves being moral. This allows us to do justice to the non-moral pursuits Wolf values and allows us to vindicate the idea that being morally ideal is compatible with being ideal.

Die Angst vor dem Sinnverlust nach der Diagnose Demenz. Eine Rekonstruktion unter Bezug auf Susan Wolf

ZusammenfassungVerbunden mit dem drohenden Verlust von kognitiven Kapazitäten und der Veränderung der eigenen Persönlichkeit, ist zu vermuten, dass bei Demenzerkrankungen ein Sinnverlust vom Erkrankten befürchtet wird. Es ist Aufgabe dieses Papers aufzuklären, was es mit einer solch meist diffus empfundenen Angst auf sich hat. Dazu wird ein Deutungsangebot gemacht, das auf die Sinnkonzeption Susan Wolfs zurückgreift. Es wird gezeigt, dass es möglich ist, bis zu einem gewissen Grad der Demenz ein sinnvolles Leben zu führen – ein Leben, bei dem subjektiv Anziehendes und rational (bzw. objektiv) Wertvolles zusammengreifen müssen. Dies ist möglich, weil ein Mensch mit Demenz noch über entsprechende Fähigkeiten der Wertschätzung verfügt und eine Hilfsbedürftigkeit der Befähigung zu einem sinnvollen Leben nicht widerspricht. Bei einer sehr schweren Beeinträchtigung der kognitiven Kapazitäten wird es hingegen nicht mehr möglich sein, ein solches Leben zu leben; die solcherart erkrankte Person wird dies aber auch nicht mehr vermissen. Wenn das, was man mit der Demenzerkrankung zu verlieren befürchtet, durch das Sinnverständnis Wolfs getroffen ist, dann sollte man diese Überlegungen bei der Beurteilung einer empfundenen Angst berücksichtigen.

Meaning in Life and Becoming More Fulfilled

Subjectivism about meaning in life remains a viable option, despite its relative unpopularity. Two arguments against it in the literature, the first by Susan Wolf and the second by Aaron Smuts and Antti Kauppinen, fail. Pace Wolf, lives devoted to activities of no objective value need not be pointless, unproductive, and futile, and so not prima facie meaningless; and, pace Smuts and Kauppinen, subjectivism is perfectly compatible with people being mistaken about how meaningful their own lives are. This paper elaborates a novel subjectivist view according to which becoming more fulfilled is what makes a life meaningful for a person. Becoming more fulfilled is a process that has being more fulfilled as its end-state, and, as with any process, it can come to a halt before it is complete. More substantively, this process is a dynamic interaction between a person and the activities she does that are of a goodness-fixing kind, wherein her doing them changes her cares in a way partly explained by her antecedently caring about doing activities of that kind. Finally, this paper shows why the becoming more fulfilled view is to be preferred to the standard subjectivist theory, the being fulfilled view, and how it produces intuitive results.

What makes a life meaningful? Folk intuitions about the content and shape of meaningful lives.

It is often assumed that most people want their life to be “meaningful”. But what exactly does this mean? Though numerous researches have documented which factors lead people to experience their life as meaningful and people’s conceptions about the best ways to secure a meaningful life, investigations in people’s concept of meaningful life are scarce. In this paper, we investigate the folk concept of a meaningful life by studying people’s third-person attribution of meaningfulness. We draw on hypotheses from the philosophical literature, and notably on the work of Susan Wolf (Study 1) and Antti Kauppinen (Study 2). In Study 1, we find that individuals who are successful, competent, and engaged in valuable and important goals are considered to have more meaningful lives. In Study 2, we find that the meaningfulness of a life did not depend only on its components, but also on the order in which these elements were ordered to form a coherent whole (the “narrative shape” of this life). Additionally, our results stress the importance of morality in participants’ assessments of meaningfulness. Overall, our results highlight the fruitfulness of drawing on the philosophical literature to investigate the folk concept of meaningful life.

Personal Identity and Impersonal Ethics

On the Reductionist View, the fact of a person’s existence and that of her identity over time just consist in the holding of certain more particular facts about physical and mental events and the relations between these events. These more particular facts are impersonal—they do not presuppose or entail the existence of any person or mental subject. In Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit claims that if the Reductionist View is true, then ‘it is … more plausible to focus, not on persons, but on experiences, and to claim that what matters morally is the nature of these experiences’. But why think that the Reductionist View has this implication? As critics such as Robert Adams, David Brink, Mark Johnston, Christine Korsgaard, and Susan Wolf have suggested, it is not clear why the Reductionist View should have any implications regarding the moral importance of persons. This chapter argues that in contrast to Non-reductionist views, Psychological Reductionism, a version of the Reductionist View that assumes a psychological criterion of personal identity, supports the kind of impersonal moral outlook that Parfit describes.

Being Moral Isn't Quite Enough

Attempts to define morality or stress its importance are the center of ethical debates that aim to provide guidance for human life. Deviating from this goal, Susan Wolf shines a light on the significance of “nonmoral virtues” by discussing how a moral saint’s life, too immersed in morality, could be lacking in other spheres. She states that a moral saint’s life would be unattractive or dull, as one is not able to value or pursue nonmoral activities such as the arts or cooking due to one’s commitments under moral sainthood. I challenge this argument, which belittles moral sainthood in an attempt to give more credit to nonmoral qualities in life, by arguing that nonmoral virtues could be necessary and valuable for a moral saint in carrying out her duties.

Love, Morality, and Alienation

Is love incompatible with morality? A popular criticism of standard moral theories such as consequentialist theories and Kantian ethics—any theory that holds that the reasons of morality are impartial—is that such theories cannot accommodate the reasons of love. Either the reasons of love are not moral reasons, yet outweigh moral reasons in many situations, or they are moral reasons that are partial, not impartial. Many moral theorists try to retain both impartiality and the special moral nature of partial reasons for close relationships by presenting approaches that justify partial norms on the basis of impartial reasons. These writers are divided on the issue of whether or not such approaches need to be self-effacing. For those who argue that the indirection need not be self-effacing, and that people should be able to step back and evaluate all of their normative commitments, a problem is raised by writers such as Susan Wolf who argue that even considering the possibility of violating a close relationship norm for the sake of morality is problematic to the relationship in question. This article challenges this view of Wolf’s, arguing that, in effect, we can provide justifications for “silencing” when it really is practically appropriate in standard moral theories that do not threaten good relationships.

Being Moral Isn’t Quite Enough

Attempts to define morality or stress its importance are the center of ethical debates that aim to provide guidance for human life. Deviating from this goal, Susan Wolf shines a light on the significance of “nonmoral virtues” by discussing how a moral saint’s life, too immersed in morality, could be lacking in other spheres. She states that a moral saint’s life would be unattractive or dull, as one is not able to value or pursue nonmoral activities such as the arts or cooking due to one’s commitments under moral sainthood. I challenge this argument, which belittles moral sainthood in an attempt to give more credit to nonmoral qualities in life, by arguing that nonmoral virtues could be necessary and valuable for a moral saint in carrying out her duties.

Death Wish

Chapter 6 examines Ezekiel Emanuel’s reasons for thinking that after a “complete life” (by around age seventy-five) it can be reasonable (at least for some) to omit easy preventive measures (e.g., flu shots) that would extend life even when such life would not be worse than death. To better understand such a position the chapter makes use of the views of Susan Wolf and Bernard Williams on meaning in life and reasons to go on living, and also considers different ways of judging the worth of activities. It further compares Emanuel’s views with those of Atul Gawande, B. J. Miller, and Douglas MacLean. Finally, it considers whether Emanuel’s arguments succeed and also whether they support the moral permissibility of suicide and assisted suicide.

“Would my life still be meaningful?”: Intersubjectivism and changing meaning in life

Susan Wolf maintains that the meaningfulness of a life arises when someone acts upon the subjective desire of doing something objectively valuable. This amounts to a hybrid view, which contains both subjectivist and objectivist elements. Wolf’s tentative definition of what is objectively valuable amounts to what, in this article, we define as ‘intersubjectivism’. As it will be argued, however, intersubjectivism poses a number of problems, which are exacerbated in contemporary society and which shed a new light on the problem of meaning in life.