Meaning Without Morality

Definition

If a meaningful life is defined as one that is worth living for the person living it, a troubling case follows: someone could find genuine meaning and purpose in joining the Gestapo. Baggini's response is not to deny the case but to separate the two questions cleanly. Value-to-the-person-living-it is a necessary condition for meaning, but it need not also be treated as sufficient — morality can be added as a second, independent necessary condition, so that a life counts as meaningful only if it is both valuable to its owner and morally acceptable. Which route you take (deny the link between meaning and morality, or add morality as a further condition) matters less than seeing clearly that they are two different axes being evaluated, not one.

In the Book

Chapter 11 takes on John Cottingham's objection (from On the Meaning of Life) that any account grounding meaning purely in what an "agent systematically committed to certain projects" finds worthwhile ends up calling a Gestapo officer's life meaningful "irrespective of its moral status." Baggini grants the logical force of the worry but shows it doesn't force despair: either bite the bullet and say meaning and morality are separable — the Gestapo officer's life can be meaningful and immoral at once, which is odd-sounding but not contradictory — or fold morality in as a second necessary condition, making meaningfulness require both value-to-the-liver and moral acceptability. He notes this isn't an ad hoc patch, because his account already treats every human life as having an equal claim to the good things in life, which is itself a moral commitment sitting underneath the whole framework.

Why It Matters

This names a mistake that recurs whenever people evaluate a choice, career, or project along a single scale when it is really being scored on two independent axes — is it good for me, and is it good, period. Recognizing the two axes prevents the two easy failure modes: dismissing a subjectively meaningful life as worthless because it fails a moral test it was never a candidate for, or excusing a morally bad life because it feels meaningful to the person living it.