Matthew Hammerton (Singapore Management University), "Well-Being and Meaning in Life"

Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 2022

By Matthew Hammerton

What makes a life meaningful? For most of the 20^th century, this question was largely ignored by analytic philosophers. However, since the turn of the century, the philosophical literature on this topic has been growing in volume and depth. A standard idea in this literature is that meaning in life is a key evaluative category that stands alongside well-being and moral goodness. Our lives are assessed not only by how well they go for us and how morally good they are, but also by their meaningfulness.

When I was a graduate student, I attended a conference where a well-known speaker gave a talk on meaning in life. It was my first introduction to this topic and my immediate reaction was one of skepticism. It seemed to me that theories of meaning in life were talking about important things. But what I couldn’t see, was how the things they were talking about were distinct from well-being.

My suspicions were roused by the overlap between theories of meaning in life and theories of well-being. Both came in subjectivist, objectivist, and hybrid flavours, and appealed to the same goods. For example, goods like knowledge, love, beauty, moral excellence, achievement, and creativity can be found in objectivist theories of well-being and of meaning in life.

A further concern was that well-being and meaning in life appeared to be concerned with the same general kind of goods—goods that we ought to want in our lives for their own sake. By contrast, moral goods are standardly understood as goods that we ought to want in the world for their own sake, which distinguishes them from well-being. In the years that followed, I heard several others voice similar suspicions.

In my article “Well-Being and Meaning in Life”, recently published in the Canadian Journal of Philosophy, I call the challenge raised by these suspicions “the deflationary challenge” to meaning in life. I identify four main strategies used in the literature on meaning in life that attempt to distinguish it from well-being and argue that each strategy fails (you can read more about this in my article). Overall, I suggest that the strength of the challenge has been underestimated by those writing on meaning in life and that substantial work needs to be done to adequately answer it.  

Now, let me confess to you that when I first started working on this project, all I had was this “negative” thesis. I started out only with arguments about why the current literature did not have a good answer to the deflationary challenge. However, in the course of thinking through these arguments, a promising “positive” thesis came to mind. I realized that there is a novel way to understand what meaning in life is that can answer the deflationary challenge and explain why meaning and well-being are distinct.

The starting point for this positive thesis is Thomas Hurka’s idea that, when we aggregate the goods in a particular life, we should be concerned with not only the total quantity of goods but also with how well the life balances the various final goods within it. A simple way to motivate this idea is to compare two lives that have the same total quantity of goods in balanced and unbalanced distributions.

Consider someone who becomes an exceptional moral leader in her community, yet as a result, has limited time to develop her theoretical knowledge, aesthetic sensibilities, and loving personal relationships. Contrast this with an unexceptional, yet well-rounded, life of moderate achievement in all of these domains. Suppose that each of these lives ends up with the same total quantity of goods in it. Which would be the best life for the person living it? If all that matters is the total sum of good in our lives, then these are equally good lives to live. However, intuitively, the well-rounded life is a better life for the person living it. When all else is equal, having a reasonable amount of each prudential good is preferable to having a lot of one and only a little of the others.      

Hurka’s idea can be pushed further. If we accept that balance can make a life prudentially better when all else is equal, then shouldn’t big differences in balance also be able to make up for smaller deficits in quantity? Imagine a lopsided life focused solely on theoretical knowledge that produces 100 units of good. Compare this with a well-balanced life containing 98 units of goods like knowledge, loving relationships, aesthetic appreciation, and moral excellence. Despite containing slightly less good, wouldn’t the second life be a better life for the person living it because of the excellent balance of goods it contains?

If you are with me so far, then you accept that when we aggregate prudential goods, we should be concerned not only with the total quantity but also with the balance between different goods. However, it is understandable for someone who sees the prudential appeal of the well-rounded life to decide that living a lopsided life containing a greater quantity of overall good is more important to her. This is because among the things that matter to people is having a positive impact and “making a mark” on the world through the goods that their life contains. This kind of significance only comes from the total quantity of goods in your life and is not directly affected by balance.   

This suggests that there are two normative considerations that sometimes pull us in opposite directions. On the one hand, we want to live lives that go well for us. On the other hand, we want our lives to contain goods that make them more significant and impactful. When these two things clash we often experience them as two different sources of normative authority tugging us in different directions.

We already know that the first source of normative authority is well-being. I suggest that the second source is meaning in life. On this view, the meaningfulness of your life is the degree to which it contains personal goods that make it significant and positively impactful. It follows from this that meaning and well-being both arise from the same set of personal goods. Yet, they come apart in the aggregation of these goods. An aggregation function combining quantity of goods and balance has much appeal when thinking about how well our lives go for us. However, when it comes to the meaning in our lives, balance seems unimportant. What matters is sheer quantity. The greater the quantity of goods in your life, the more significance and meaning it has.

Let me finish by explaining three attractive features of this account of meaning in life. The first is that it answers the deflationary challenge. The challenge arises because meaning and well-being appeal to the same basic personal goods. However, this account of meaning in life shows how they can nonetheless be distinct. Their difference lies not in the goods they accept, but in how they aggregate these goods.

Second, this account of meaning fits well with paradigm cases of highly meaningful lives. The lives of Confucius, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Pablo Picasso, and Mother Teresa are held up in the literature as some of the most meaningful lives that humans have ever lived. It’s striking that all these figures lived lopsided lives focused on only one, or a small number, of final goods rather than spread evenly among many goods. This fits well with the idea that meaning is determined by the quantity of goods in your life, and is insensitive to whether those goods are balanced or unbalanced. Sheer quantity of good alone is plausibly what made these lives highly meaningful.

The life of Leonardo Da Vinci provides a helpful comparison here. Leonardo’s total level of achievement is of the same calibre as those listed above, and he could certainly be added to the list. Yet, in contrast to their lives, his life was exceptionally well-rounded, involving achievements across several different domains. Although we might admire this aspect of his life, it does not seem to directly enhance its meaning. When we compare Leonardo’s life to lopsided lives of a similar calibre, we do not think of his life as more meaningful because it contained an exquisite balance that theirs lacked.

Finally, this account of meaning gives a plausible picture of trade-offs in which you can opt for either a more meaningful life or a life that goes better for you. Sometimes we must choose between having a greater quantity of goods in our life (and thus greater impact) or having a lesser quantity of goods that is compensated for by a more well-roundedness. According to my account, our choice in such circumstances is between a life of greater meaning and a life that goes better for us.

As a case study, consider the life of Derek Parfit. Early on in his life, Parfit showed outstanding promise in several different areas. As Simon Beard writes:

[He] was, by all accounts, one of the most brilliant history students of his generation. Having won a scholarship to Eton in 1955, he sailed through the school at the top of every class (except, perhaps, mathematics) before winning another scholarship to Balliol College Oxford. Not only did he excel academically, but he would edit Isis, the leading Oxford student magazine, play Jazz trumpet, write poetry, get involved in student politics and generally be everything a 1960's Oxford student was supposed to be.

Given such broad talents, a well-rounded life of high achievement was one direction that Parfit’s life might have taken. However, Parfit instead chose to live a highly specialized life, devoting himself to the pursuit of philosophical excellence. Indeed, he was notorious for the fanatical way in which he pursued this goal. As his sister, Theodora Ooms, recalled:

Since his first book had taken 20 years to write roughly, it is no wonder to me that Derek became acutely aware of the diminishing amount of time he had left to accomplish his daunting agenda. He became even more focused on his work and, in Jeff’s terms, ‘quite monomaniacal’, and increasingly eccentric in his eating, clothing, and other behaviours, many of which were designed to save thinking time. He no longer went on his annual photographic visit to Venice and Petersburg, and he and Janet took only two vacations in 35 years . . . spending time with family was simply not a priority for Derek.

On one way of looking at Parfit’s life, his decision to monomaniacally pursue a single good was wise. After all, he was arguably the most important moral philosopher of his era, and will probably influence generations to come. If he had spread his talents widely, he may have lived a rich and varied life with several notable achievements. However, it is unlikely that the total quantity of goods in such a life could match what Parfit achieved through his singular focus on philosophy.

On another way of looking at his life, Parfit chose unwisely because the additional good he was able to realize in his life could not compensate for its extreme lopsidedness. This judgment is supported by the fact that many of us, if asked to contemplate living an extremely lopsided life as Parfit did, would find something repulsive about it, even if we knew that it would allow us to make a much greater mark on the world.   

On my account, these different perspectives arise from the contrast between evaluating a life in terms of its meaning and evaluating it in terms of its well-being. By choosing as he did, Parfit was able to live an exceptionally meaningful life. Yet, doing so came at a cost, causing his life to go less well than it might have gone for him. Given his views about personal identity and egoism, it’s unsurprising that Parfit chose as he did. However, others facing the same trade-off would choose differently.