Lucas Scripter

Is artificial intelligence a threat to meaningful work and living? In both popular and academic press, concerns are often expressed that AI threatens not only people’s livelihoods but also the meaning they derive from their work. A common response to these worries stresses that the goods derived from work can be found elsewhere, often in better activities, suggesting that the proliferation of AI-powered automation does not threaten the meaningfulness of people’s lives. This argument, however, fails to consider the embeddedness and thickness of meaning in human lives. Even if there are rich non-work sources of meaning, this does not entail that there is not a significant and multi-faceted loss of meaning, one that cannot be compensated for or offset elsewhere. I will argue that thick subjectivist theories of meaning in life and meaningful work—those theories that emphasize that meaning-conferring activities are historically formed—enable us to appreciate how some losses cannot be made up, even if there are in principle ample alternative sources of meaning to be found elsewhere.

Ours is an age of incessant hustle, where resting increasingly seems like a privilege out of reach for many or else a liability to be undertaken sparingly and with discretion. In this context, we might wonder whether we have lost sight of the importance of taking a break. What place might rest have in leading a meaningful life? Unfortunately, recent philosophical theories of meaning in life have not only neglected the importance of rest but also reinforced our cultural obsession with the value of activity and the pursuit of achievements. In contrast to this prevailing tendency, this article will begin by offering an analysis of rest as the temporary suspension of active involvement in projects for the sake of rejuvenation. I then argue that rest can genuinely imbue our lives with meaning, yet not all conceptions of meaningful rest are equally existentially significant.

John Danaher and Sven Nyholm have argued that automation, especially of the sort powered by artificial intelligence, poses a threat to meaningful work by diminishing the chances for meaning-conferring workplace achievement, what they call “achievement gaps”. In this paper, I argue that Danaher and Nyholm’s achievement gap thesis suffers from an ambiguity. The weak version of the thesis holds that automation may result in the appearance of achievement gaps, whereas the strong version holds that automation may result on balance loss in possibilities for workplace achievements, i.e., in the appearance of an overall gappier work landscape. Against the strong version of the achievement gap thesis, I characterize situations where automation may result in boons to meaning-conferring workplace achievements: the appearance of what I call achievement spread and achievement swaps. Nevertheless, Danaher and Nyholm are right to worry about some uses of automation whereby human workers become subservient to AI. But these situations are better framed, I argue, as autonomy gaps rather than achievement gaps.

Might aesthetic imperfections play an edifying role in the lives of moral agents? Drawing on the work of Aurel Kolnai, R. F. Holland, Yuriko Saito, and Soetsu Yanagi, this paper argues that aesthetic imperfections, especially of the everyday variety, can sustain our sense that life is worth living, thereby ethically edifying our lives. Cultivating the ability to find beauty in everyday aesthetic imperfections helps to preserve us in dark times. The beauty of the chipped, gnarled, and otherwise blemished can reveal the goodness of a flawed world, indeed in a more powerful way than can the beauty of less flawed objects.

Masahiro Morioka has introduced the concept of “the joy of life” as an element of his critique of prevailing tendencies toward comfort and the alleviation of suffering, which he calls “painless civilization.” I argue that this concept problematizes Bernard Williams’s idea of the “ground projects” that organize and imbue lives with meaning. In light of Morioka’s analysis, ground projects cannot be the exclusive or even primary carrier of meaning in life. Our various undertakings and pursuits may organize and orient life, but they do not hold a monopoly on meaning. Even in the face of destroyed ground projects, we can find joy in living. The dynamic that emerges from considering Williams’s view through the lens of Morioka’s conception of joy, I argue, points to the possibility of the existential transcendence of our reified selves.

What can one person teach another about living meaningfully? Recent discussions about the relationship between education and finding meaning in life have tended to focus on institutional and curricular matters and, as a consequence, have sidelined the importance of the vocation of teaching. Drawing on Raimond Gaita’s philosophy of education, I suggest that his view of the love of a subject embodied in and demonstrated by teachers illuminates both the nature of leading a meaningful life as well as an important role that education might play in helping students to live meaningfully. I argue that a significant way for teachers to aid students in leading meaningful lives is to show them what it is to love a subject or field of inquiry.

What place do experiences of beauty have in a meaningful life? A marginal one, at best, it would seem, if one looks at the current literature in analytic philosophy. Treatments of beauty within so-called “analytic existentialism” tend to suffer from four limitations: beauty is neglected, reduced to artistic production, saddled to theology, or taken as a mere application of a broader theoretical framework. These discussions fail to engage with the rich tradition of philosophical aesthetics. In this essay, I begin by responding to the contention that experiences of beauty cannot lend life meaning because they are passive. Drawing on work in philosophical aesthetics, I then argue that encounters with the beautiful count as genuinely meaning-conferring because they have features commonly taken as marks of meaningfulness.

A common idea about assessing meaning in life is that one draws up a list of those various positive values that one has achieved and subtracts from it one's negative deeds in life. The resulting balance is the meaningfulness of one's existence. I call this the ledger theory. Drawing on the work of Raimond Gaita and Julian Barnes's novel The Sense of an Ending, I argue for a phenomenology of remorse that gives us reason to reject the ledger theory. Even those agents whose lives have been exceptionally meaningful in some respects may remain haunted by their past. Certain sorts of misdeeds – those that involve significant, irreparable damage – leave life marred in such a way that the negative remains, even in the face of all the meaningful deeds of life.

Neil Levy has argued that “superlative meaning” can be attained only through “inherently open-ended” projects. This implies a two-tier system of meaning: one for elites, the other for ordinary people. It sets lives characterized by “open-ended” work over and against those that find meaning in commonplace sources, e.g., personal relationships. I argue that Levy’s argument rests on two mistakes. First, it confuses two senses of “superlative meaning”—superlative abundance and superlative safety. Even if his argument succeeds, it merely shows that certain sorts of work produce the most reliably meaningful lives rather than the most abundantly meaningful. Second, contra Levy, who assumes that only work can generate superlative meaning, I build on Thaddeus Metz’s argument that loving relationships can count as superlatively meaningful. I argue that recognition of this point undermines the philosophical basis for Levy’s two-tier system of meaning. Ordinary lives are not doomed to be second-class meaningful lives.

Does the rise of artificial intelligence pose a threat to human sources of meaning? While much ink has been spilled on how AI could undercut meaningful human work, John Danaher has raised the stakes by claiming that AI could “sever” human beings from non-work-related sources of meaning—specifically, those related to intellectual and moral goods. Against this view, I argue that his suggestion that AI poses a threat to these areas of meaningful activity is overstated. Self-transformative activities pose a hard limit to AI’s impingement on meaningful human activities. Contra Danaher, I suggest that a wider range of sources for meaning will continue to exist in a world dominated by AI.