Thaddeus Metz

Many major historical figures in philosophy have provided an answer to the question of what, if anything, makes life meaningful, although they typically have not put it in these terms. Consider, for instance, Aristotle on the human function, Aquinas on the beatific vision, and Kant on the highest good. While these concepts have some bearing on happiness and morality, they are straightforwardly construed as accounts of which final ends a person ought to realize in order to have a significant existence. Despite the venerable pedigree, it is only in the last 50 years or so that something approaching a distinct field on the meaning of life has been established in analytic philosophy, and it is only in the last 25 years that debate with real depth has appeared. Concomitant with the demise of positivism and of utilitarianism in the post-war era has been the rise of analytical enquiry into non-hedonistic conceptions of value grounded on relatively uncontroversial (but not universally shared) judgments or “intuitions,” including conceptions of meaning in life. Englishspeaking philosophers can be expected to continue to find life's meaning of interest as they increasingly realize that it is a distinct line of enquiry that admits of rational enquiry to no less a degree than more familiar normative categories such as well-being, right action, and distributive justice.

As part of a special issue on the intersection between bioethics and political philosophy, I argue that strong intuitions about how the state ought to allocate healthcare are incompatible with quite influential autonomy-centric and neutral strains of liberal political theory. Specifically, I maintain that it is uncontroversial that we should routinely distribute medical treatments in public hospitals in ways that have little to no bearing on patients’ ability to pursue a wide array of ends and further that we cannot easily avoid making judgments of which ways of life are good (or bad) when making such distributions. These intuitions tell against the principles that the state in general should aim merely to protect individuals’ rights to choose their own ways of life and should not take sides on which lives are good (or bad) when adopting policy or law. I show that this tension, which has not been thoroughly addressed in the literature, manifests in at least three types of healthcare decisions, viz., which types of treatments should be offered to patients, how to prioritize among types of treatments, and who should receive a certain type of treatment. I do not prescribe how to resolve the tension, that is, whether to reject autonomy-centric and neutral forms of liberalism or revise judgments about how public medical facilities should allocate healthcare, but instead establish the point that one must choose between them.

This article is a reply to six contributions to a special issue of Ethical Theory and Moral Practice that is devoted to critically discussing A Relational Moral Theory: African Ethics in and Beyond the Continent. In this book I articulate a comprehensive principle of rightness that is substantially informed by relational values salient in the African philosophical tradition (and some others in the Global South) and defend it as preferable to some major moral-theoretic rivals, including standard versions of utilitarianism and Kantianism. Some contributions argue for a method of undertaking cross-cultural ethics different from mine in RMT, while others consider to what extent its general ethic can entail and powerfully explain particular duties or at times aspects of morality beyond duties. The latter topics include: when biotechnological enhancements are permissible, how to respond emotionally to injustice, how solitude is morally significant, what we owe the environment, and what the obligations of a private business are. I work to clarify and motivate my approach within the constraints of a brief reply.

This chapter is a reflection on three kinds of intellectual moves that tend to be revealing and influential in English-speaking philosophy, set in an autobiographical context. One move is to apply a new method to an issue that has been treated for a long while in other ways. A second is to look for data that are not entailed or adequately explained by existing theories and then to develop a theory that accounts for them while also making sense of data for which existing theories can account. A third is to find an assumption common to two long-standing disputants and advance an alternative to them both that does not rely on it. The essay includes strategic advice for budding philosophers who might want to take these kinds of approaches to their work.

I draw on ideas salient in contemporary literate African philosophy to construct two new theoretical ways of capturing the essence of duties to oneself. According to one theory, a person has a foundational duty to “relate” to herself in ways similar to how the African field has often thought that a person should relate with others, viz., harmoniously. According to the second, one has a foundational duty to produce liveliness in oneself. In addition to articulating these novel attempts to capture what all duties to oneself might have in common and showing that each one captures several intuitions about them, I offer some reasons to think that the harmony theory is more attractive than the vitality one. I conclude that there are values prominent in the African tradition that, upon some reformulation, ground comprehensive accounts of what one owes oneself that merit consideration by a global audience as rivals to, say, Kantian-rationalist approaches common in the West.

There are two ways that philosophy could transform a philosopher’s life to make it substantially more meaningful: on the one hand, philosophical inquiry might reveal other activities beyond it that would make the life meaningful, enabling a philosopher to live meaningfully as a result of the inquiry, while, on the other hand, it might be that doing philosophy is in itself one way to make the philosopher's life notably meaningful. In this chapter I explore the latter path. I argue against views of meaning in life entailing that philosophy could not itself be particularly meaningful or only rarely could be, after which I critically reflect on respects in which philosophical reflection might enhance the meaning in the philosopher's life. In particular, I critically discuss views of Bertrand Russell, W. D. Ross, Joseph Mintoff, and Robert Nozick that purport to explain how philosophy itself confers meaningfulness in terms of the extensiveness of its object, contending that their explanations are not as comprehensive and explanatorily deep as the new one I provide.