Meaning Autonomy and Objective Meaning in Life

Abstract

Subjectivism states that meaning in life is determined by what subjects regard as meaningful. Objectivism denies this. The main argument against subjectivism is that it allows for seemingly worthless, or even immoral, sources of meaning. Objectivism, on the other hand, does not do justice to the role of subjective perspectives in the quest for meaning. This paper addresses the shortcomings of both positions by referring to the objective value of ‘meaning autonomy’, defined here as the freedom to determine for oneself what is meaningful in life. While the notion of meaning autonomy is compatible with realist objectivism, objectivity is understood in a non-realist sense in this paper, as being based on cultural standards of meaningfulness. Subjective meaning may be attached to ‘worthless’ activities, but it cannot contradict the moral norms of the society that grants its members meaning autonomy.

Introduction

What has meaning in your life? Subjectivism holds that it is up to you to answer this question. To use Cheshire Calhoun’s term, subjectivism considers meaning to be agent-dependent. Perhaps the purest account of agent-dependency is what Calhoun calls ‘attitudinal subjectivism’, the view ‘that what makes an activity meaningful are mere positive personal attitudes, quite apart from the agent’s evaluative reasons for having those attitudes. You simply enjoy, feel satisfied by, care about, or love what you’re doing’ (Calhoun, 2018, pp. 40–41). ¹

Objectivism, by contrast, conceptualizes meaning as agent-independent, or more precisely, as independent of how people evaluate their own lives. As Calhoun explains, this

need not mean ‘independent of any and all evaluating activity’. Indeed, you might think that nothing could be valuable were there no beings capable of evaluation, and thus that there are no agent-independent values in that sense. But you still might think that values are independent of what any particular agent thinks. (Calhoun, 2018, p. 19, FN 1)

In the next section, I will distinguish between realist and non-realist conceptions of objectivity. For non-realism, meaning in life is not ‘independent of any and all evaluating activity’ because it is defined by a culture’s accepted standards of meaningfulness. ² In Section 3, I will review three arguments against objectivism, which indicate that subjective evaluations cannot be entirely ignored when it comes to meaning in life. Section 4 addresses subjectivism and the fact that seemingly worthless or even immoral activities can be subjectively meaningful. In Section 5, I will argue that seemingly worthless activities can be objectively meaningful if they are expressions of ‘meaning autonomy’. This is the term I will use for the freedom to determine for oneself what is meaningful in life. I will also argue that meaning autonomy is governed by moral constraints.

The terminology in the philosophical, psychological and sociological literature on meaning is not uniform. In particular, the term ‘meaning in life’ is often used synonymously with ‘meaning of life’, and authors switch between these two and various other terms, including ‘life’s meaning’, ‘meaningfulness’ and ‘meaningful life’. However, some psychologists and philosophers distinguish between ‘in’ and ‘of’, describing the meaning of life as ‘cosmic’ or ‘ultimate’ meaning (Kim & Seachris, 2018, p. 3; Wong, 1989, p. 519), ‘where the human species as a whole is what can be meaningful or not’ (Metz, 2021). Acknowledging this distinction, I will speak of ‘meaning in life’ and avoid the term ‘meaning of life’ altogether. This paper deals with meaning in the lives of individual people. Subjectivists and objectivists disagree about the nature of this meaning.

The Objectivity of Meaning

Objectivism holds that meaning in life is independent of how people evaluate their own lives. This objectivity has often been construed in a realist sense. The term ‘realism’ is commonly used to express that something—in our case, meaning in life—is independent of the human mind. According to realist objectivism, meaning exists independently of all human attitudes and judgments. In principle, everyone could be mistaken on whether a particular part of life is meaningful. That part could be objectively meaningful despite nobody recognizing it as such, or it could be meaningless but valued by many people. Thaddeus Metz understands ‘objective’ in this strong sense when he writes that ‘there are particular ways of being and behaving in the physical world that constitute a significant existence apart from being the object of anyone’s pro-attitude’ (2013, p. 20). Similarly, Iddo Landau refers to things having ‘real value, that is, objective, transcendent value, independent of specific cultural or individual standards’ (2017, p. 128). ³

Such a realist view of the objectivity of values raises several well-known problems. One of them concerns the ontological status of values. Most importantly, there is disagreement on whether they are natural or non-natural properties. Unfortunately, this distinction is not entirely clear, as the term ‘natural’ has no precise meaning. However, it is often assumed that natural properties can in principle be described by natural science. A common assumption among non-naturalists is that values cannot be reduced to psychological features such as needs, pleasures or aversions. If this were true, values would probably belong to a special ontological category beyond the physical and the mental. Some philosophers hold that their existence can be traced back to divine attitudes, actions or commands, which implies that a thing or activity is valuable when it is valued by God. This would make the ontology even more problematic, as divine beings are notoriously controversial.

Other problems of value realism are epistemological in nature. We do not know which cognitive faculty, if any, enables us to acquire knowledge of objectively real values. For example, we have the strong intuition that murder is morally wrong. Is this intuition an independent source of moral knowledge or just the outcome of cultural conditioning? Moreover, value judgments differ between people and cultures. In some societies, certain types of murder were accepted, such as human sacrifice in Aztec culture. If values were real, we would have to assume that either the Aztecs did not see the values we recognize, or vice versa. But who is value-blind, and why? Finally, as the notion of cultural conditioning suggests, the development of evaluative attitudes and behaviour can probably be explained without presupposing that we have cognitive access to objectively real values, namely as the result of biological dispositions, education, social influences and so on.

Of course, I am not saying that the various versions of realism that have been proposed so far have nothing to offer in response to the above problems. ⁴ My point is that these problems can be avoided altogether by adopting non-realist objectivism (which I will do in section 5, when construing the notion of meaning autonomy in this weaker sense of objectivity). The key idea of non-realist objectivism is that the objectivity of meaning is based on cultural standards of meaningfulness. These standards are objective in that they are independent of individual ascriptions of meaningfulness—particularly of how people evaluate their own lives. It seems clear, though, that they cannot be independent of all evaluations within a given society. Social assessments of meaningfulness manifest themselves in different ways, and not necessarily by people saying (or writing) that certain things in life are valuable. ⁵

For example, when someone is congratulated for receiving a job promotion or for becoming a parent, the implication is that career success and parenthood are meaningful things. However, assessments of meaningfulness need not be expressed through speech acts. They are also reflected in the organization of institutions, as when societies offer their members certain educational paths and specify the desired goals to be met. Even if meaningfulness may be rarely mentioned explicitly in the classroom, school education is supposed to provide young people with the requisite tools and purposes for leading a meaningful life. In addition to such norms of education, many other elements of society can be understood as involving implicit assessments of meaningfulness, such as salary levels, one’s popularity on social media or the authority of role models. (It is well-known that the lifestyle of social media influencers is currently a paradigm of meaningfulness for many people, especially in the younger generations.)

Arguments Against Objectivism

Although the chances of leading a meaningful life seem to differ across societies, some objectivist theories of meaning focus on universal features of life that might be accessible under almost all social and political conditions. Susan Wolf, for example, argues that meaning arises from ‘acting in a way that positively engages with a worthy object of love’ (2010, p. 6). These objects could be ‘human individuals, other living creatures, or activities, ideals or objects of other sorts’ (pp. 5–6). Even environments marked by violence, poverty or other causes of misery could at least offer some ‘worthy objects of love’.

Other objectivist proposals can only be put into practice under favourable conditions. One example is Berit Brogaard and Barry Smith’s definition of meaningfulness: ‘What matters to meaningfulness is that through realizing your goals you impose a valuable pattern on reality, as evaluated (actually or potentially) against the relevant public measures of success, and that this pattern is ultimately a reflection of your abilities and character’ (2005, pp. 457–458). Imposing a valuable pattern on reality by achieving one’s chosen goals is only possible in societies that allow a high degree of personal freedom. Metz sets even more demanding requirements when suggesting that meaningful activities are oriented towards ‘fundamental conditions of human existence’ (2013, p. 226). His examples of such activities reflect this high standard of meaningfulness. They include ‘freeing people from discrimination and tyranny and providing them urgent medical assistance’ (2013, p. 227), ‘knowledge of human life and of human reality’ (p. 230), as well as ‘great art, whether it is literature, painting, or music’ (p. 230).

What we can learn from these views is that objectivists disagree widely on what gives meaning to life. While Wolf traces it back to reasons of love, which she distinguishes from ‘reasons of self-interest’ and ‘reasons of morality’ (2010, p. 6), Brogaard and Smith define it in terms of goals and success, and there is no need to suppose that these goals could not be motivated by self-interest and morality as long as they ‘impose a valuable pattern on reality’ reflecting ‘your abilities and character’. Metz’s ‘fundamental conditions of human existence’ seemingly exclude many of the goals that Brogaard and Smith would allow.

In summary, objectivists select certain sources of meaning and exclude others which fellow objectivists would accept. Even relatively generous views significantly narrow down the concept of meaningfulness, such as by eliminating self-interest as a possible path to meaning. This narrowness of objectivist conceptions is one reason why Calhoun rejects them: ‘If being agent-independently valuable is what enables the items in the conception to be recognized as meaningful, then what rationale could there be for excluding other valuable ways of living?’ (p. 24). Subjectivism, by contrast, does not exclude any potential sources of meaning. It leaves the search to the individual, and as we know, people can be very inventive in finding and creating subjective meaning.

Calhoun further argues that objectivism fails to answer the following question: ‘Which activities, relationships, projects, experiences would be most meaningful for me to choose?’ More precisely, objectivist answers to this question are incomplete as they leave ‘a plurality of options that rank equally’ (2018, p. 24). Calhoun gives the example of a person deciding between an academic career in philosophy or biology. Both options might be on par from an objective point of view, so the decision would have to be made on the basis of subjective considerations. This suggests that meaning is subjective or has a subjective component, at least in cases that cannot be settled objectively.

A third argument against objectivism concerns ‘the motivational role the sense of meaningfulness plays for us’ (Wolf, 1997, p. 306; see also Calhoun, 2018, p. 27). As Wolf writes, ‘if a person is lucky […] she will be struck, inspired, drawn by some value or some object of value in a way that moves her to respond—by honouring, preserving, creating, studying, loving—so as to attach or identify herself with that value’ (p. 305). Since meaningfulness requires this kind of attachment or identification, meaning cannot be entirely objective: ‘the meaningfulness of a person’s life depends on her seeing it, or being disposed to see it as meaningful’ (p. 304). This argument is clearly related to the previous one, as meaningfulness-for-me and personal motivation are psychologically linked. ⁶ After all, the person who tries to choose between philosophy and biology is looking for a motive to decide and to act accordingly.

Objectivists who deny the relevance of subjective evaluations will probably reply that a life can have meaning even when the subject does not draw any motivation from this fact. They could also point out that there are other motivations besides meaningfulness. The dilemma in Calhoun’s example does not have to be couched in terms of meaning but could instead be solved by invoking other criteria. People in such situations might ask themselves which option they like better, which would make them happier in the long run, for which they have more talent, and so on. Objectivists also need not accept the first argument regarding the narrowness of their respective position. They might say that a stricter definition of meaning is needed in order to avoid subjectivism’s permissiveness.

Responses such as these are possible because we are not dealing with knock-down arguments. The above counterarguments can be evaded by making appropriate assumptions, such as claiming that the choice between philosophy and biology is not a choice between the more and the less meaningful. On the other hand, these additional assumptions are not entirely convincing either. An overly narrow conception of meaning distances philosophy from every-day life and reduces the chances for ordinary people to find their own meaning. Moreover, it seems natural to think that major life decisions, such as choosing one’s future profession, would fall within the scope of the notion of meaning. And regarding motivation, imagine someone being told that life has objective meaning, but who disagrees with this assessment and hence cannot draw motivation from it. This person would hardly believe that a purely objectivist account contains the whole truth about meaning in life.

In conclusion, the arguments reviewed in this section provide reasons for complementing objectivism with the subjective perspectives of those who seek meaning. The least we can say is that objectivism would become more persuasive if it made room for these perspectives. In Section 5, I will describe how we can think of the role of subjectivity in (non-realist) objectivism.

Arguments Against Subjectivism

People who think about the meaning in their lives sometimes wonder if the things and activities they consider meaningful are really meaningful. They want to know whether life has a meaning that goes beyond personal attitudes and social approval. ⁷ Both subjectivism and non-realist objectivism answer this question in the negative: There is no ‘objective’ meaning in the sense of realist objectivism. This answer is not refuted by the fact that some people wish that such a meaning existed. Those who are troubled by its absence must either despair or learn to cope with this situation. This may seem disappointing, especially to those who expect too much from philosophy. However, philosophy is not obliged to deliver only pleasant truths, and by no means is it a substitute for religion and its promise of a ‘higher’ meaning. From Socrates and Epicurus to Nietzsche and Camus, philosophers have frequently dispelled the illusions of their contemporaries. The idea of an objectively real meaning is only one such illusion.

While the potential frustration with subjectivism cannot be used against it, there is another counterargument that cannot be dismissed so easily. Subjectivism is accused of being too permissive as it allows for meaningful activities that are seemingly worthless. In principle, a person could find subjective meaning in collecting bottle tops, solving Sudoku puzzles or watching TikTok videos all day long. In the view of Metz, examples such as these prove that subjectivism ‘has seriously counterintuitive implications about which lives count as meaningful’ (2013, p. 175). Susan Wolf claims that ‘at an untheoretical, or what many philosophers refer to as an intuitive, level’ we can see the inadequacy of activities such as ‘rolling a stone uselessly up a hill, making handwritten copies of War and Peace, solving Sudoku puzzles, or caring for one’s pet goldfish’ (2010, p. 36). Even Calhoun, who advocates a type of subjectivism herself, criticizes attitudinal subjectivism for its ‘sharply counterintuitive judgments of what lives are meaningful’ (2018, p. 41).

As these quotes demonstrate, the charge that subjectivism is too permissive is based on an appeal to intuition. Sometimes intuitions lead astray and must be discarded on theoretical grounds. The account of meaning autonomy to be presented in the following section will show that the rejection of seemingly worthless activities is unjustified. However, worthlessness is one thing, immorality another. Collecting bottle tops does not typically have impact on others, but as Norman Dahl asks,

how is one to deal with someone whose chosen way of life essentially involves interference with the chosen ways of life of others? How can something be valuable when by its very nature its existence prevents the existence of value in the lives of others? (Dahl, 1987, p. 12)

Think of religious fanatics who deny girls the right to go to school, or economic activities that negatively affect the natural environment and health of future generations; not to mention violent crimes which the perpetrator finds meaningful. In such cases, we encounter a conflict between meaning and morality, which is one of the main reasons why many philosophers reject subjectivism and take meaning in life to be determined by objective values that cannot be immoral.

My account of meaning autonomy will also imply that meaning in life must not be immoral—but with one qualification: Immorality is to be understood in terms of the moral norms accepted in the respective society. If a society gives its members the freedom to define what is meaningful in their lives, this freedom cannot contradict the moral norms of that society. I am aware that this is not the answer to Dahl’s questions that many objectivist philosophers would hope for. It should, therefore, be noted that realist objectivists might as well adopt the notion of meaning autonomy if they interpret it in line with their own conception of objectivity. They could regard meaning autonomy as a value that does not depend on any human attitudes or judgements. ⁸ However, since this view has its problems—as we have seen in the previous section—I will proceed on the basis of non-realist objectivism.

Meaning Autonomy

The view that the objectivity of meaning is based on cultural standards of meaningfulness is compatible with the existence of the same, or similar, standards in different societies. In fact, however, there are significant cultural differences as to meaning in life. Above all, the standards of meaningfulness can be more or less restrictive. Karl Popper characterized an ‘open society’ as one ‘in which individuals are confronted with personal decisions’ (Popper, 1966, p. 173), while societies are ‘closed’ to the extent that personal freedom is curtailed by such factors as collectivist thinking, totalitarian politics, authoritarian education or the power of traditions. We can assume that a society’s openness—its liberality, to use the more common term—also affects its standards of meaningfulness.

For example, in societies where women are forced to marry and are excluded from earning money through employment, their options for finding meaning are limited to family, social life and private occupations. A further example would be the Indian caste system, which restricts the options for meaningful work to those professions traditionally associated with one’s caste. More liberal societies, by contrast, tend to offer their members greater choice in the search for meaning than those on the ‘closed’ side of the spectrum. They have produced a cultural standard that gives individuals meaning autonomy. Searching and finding subjective meaning is regarded as valuable in such societies.

Let us consider an example from jurisprudence. In a famous 1992 United States Supreme Court case, three justices delivered a plurality opinion in which the right to subjective meaning appears as one component of personal autonomy: ‘At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.’ ⁹ This declaration was made to defend the right to abortion. For our purposes, however, the interesting thing is that it involves an appeal to meaning autonomy. In addition, it helps to understand why the arguments against objectivism in section 3 appeared convincing. These arguments were directed at readers familiar with the idea of defining ‘one’s own concept of existence, of meaning’, and who are likely used to deciding for themselves what is, or is not, meaningful.

It would go beyond the scope of this paper to discuss whether, or to what extent, life and politics in the United States or other countries conform to the ideals enshrined in their laws. Besides that, laws are certainly not the only factors that shape how people think about meaning in life. What people find meaningful is influenced by their socio-economic background, education and religion; their consumption of social media, video games, films and newspapers, and by much more. However, it is fair to say that in the United States and comparable countries, the majority of these influences produce an ideology of personal freedom that also affects the socially accepted standards of meaningfulness. Simply put, people learn in these countries that meaningfulness is a subjective matter.

This is supported by the fact that empirical psychology also works with a subjectivist concept of meaning when studying how people think about meaning in life. ¹⁰ Most of these studies are conducted in the rather liberal societies of Europe and North America. Only few cross-cultural studies have thus far been made, and these tend to deal with groups that are influenced by ‘Western’ values. Previous research on meaning in life in Chinese culture was conducted in Hong Kong (Shek, 2012, p. 336) ¹¹ ; a recent study compared undergraduate psychology students in Turkey and the United States (Fischer et al., 2021).

In any culture shaped by liberal ideals, the value of meaning autonomy is likely to be appreciated to some degree. And since today almost no part of the world is not influenced by Western thinking and lifestyle, we can expect that meaning autonomy has the status of an objective value in many parts of the world. This makes the objections against subjectivism in the previous section all the more troublesome: Do many people around the world live under the spell of ideas that justify worthless and immoral sources of meaning?

As far as ‘worthlessness’ is concerned, the answer to this question is that the respective activities are not worthless if meaning autonomy is an objective value in a society. For then the result of exercising this freedom will also be objectively valuable as an expression of meaning autonomy. Collecting bottle tops or watching TikTok videos may not be valuable actions in themselves (let us leave this open). However, in a society that endorses meaning autonomy by giving people the freedom to determine for themselves what is meaningful in their lives, any subjective meaning that arises from this freedom is not worthless. Its value lies in the very fact that people have freely chosen to live that way. If meaning autonomy is objectively valuable, then so is the subjective meaning resulting from it. ¹²

Admittedly, this does not solve the problem of immorality. Some philosophers tackle this problem by drawing a sharp line between the concepts of meaning and morality, which implies that meaningful behaviour can be morally wrong. Harry Frankfurt is particularly clear on this point:

It is possible, I am sorry to reveal, that immoral lives may be good to live. In my view, at least, the value to Hitler of living the life he chose would have been damaged by the immorality of that life only if morality was something that Hitler actually cared about, or if the immorality of his life somehow had a damaging effect on other matters that he cared about. (2002, p. 248)

Other philosophers include morality as an additional premise in the definition of meaning. Julian Baggini, for example, is willing to take this step: ‘I have argued that a meaningful life has to have value for us, but if it is also true that a meaningful life has to be moral, all we have to do is add that as a condition of a meaningful life’ (2005, p. 176). A similar combination of meaning and morality follows from Wolf’s view ‘that meaning arises in a person’s life when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness’ (1997, p. 305), assuming that immoral acts and goals cannot be objectively attractive. ¹³ These combinations of subjective meaning with morality obviously solve the problem of immorality; however, their weakness lies in the fact that they do not indicate any deeper connection between the two conditions. This is the reason why Calhoun rejects Wolf’s hybrid account of meaning as being ‘ad hoc’ (Calhoun, 2018, p. 27).

The notion of meaning autonomy, by contrast, involves more than just an ad hoc combination, as it links meaning to moral norms. When people enjoy the freedom to choose a subjective meaning, this freedom is restricted by the morality of their society. We could also frame this as a potential conflict between two norms: the permission to choose a subjective meaning in life and the prohibition to act against the socially accepted moral standards. Conflicts of this kind are typically resolved by setting limits to the freedom in question, for example, when a society decides that the freedom of speech must not be misused for inciting crimes. In the same way, subjective meaning must not violate the moral norms of the respective society. More precisely, while immoral behaviour may be subjectively meaningful, it cannot be the result of exercising meaning autonomy, because the latter is constrained by morality. Therefore, such behaviour cannot acquire objective meaning as an expression of meaning autonomy.

None of this implies, however, that Hitler’s life was not objectively meaningful. We could only draw this conclusion if realist objectivism were true, provided that Hitler’s life was objectively immoral according to this strong sense of objectivity. Without resorting to value realism, the concept of objectivity merely relates subjective meaning to the moral norms of a given society. Hitler’s actions and decisions were horribly immoral from our point of view, but they arguably conformed to the norms of Nazi ideology. In terms of this ideology, they were objectively valuable.

Fortunately, one does not have to be a realist objectivist to despise this ideology. This is a case where moral practice transcends ethical theory, that is, where it is not possible to justify one’s moral attitude on theoretical grounds. The problem of the immorality of subjective meaning can only be ‘solved’ by creating social and political conditions that enable meaning autonomy while encouraging or demanding moral behaviour. As a non-realist objectivist, I will promote the view that meaningful behaviour must not harm other people. I will defend moral norms that prohibit excesses of subjective meaning and guarantee that no one prevents others from leading a meaningful life. At the same time, however, I must be aware that my position reflects the moral norms of my culture, and that I will not be able to criticize a different culture or ideology from some ‘more objective’ moral standpoint.

Conclusion

The main argument against subjectivist conceptions of meaning in life is that they do not exclude seemingly worthless, or even immoral, sources of meaning. While objectivist conceptions avoid this problem, they neglect the importance of how people assess their lives’ meaning. The notion of meaning autonomy provides a link between subjectivism and objectivism. For non-realist objectivism—the preferred view of this paper—the objective value of meaning autonomy explains how subjective meaning can become objectively valuable, why it can in principle be found in ‘worthless’ activities, and why it must agree with the moral norms of a society whose members enjoy the freedom to determine for themselves what is meaningful in their lives.