Meaning, Doing Good, and Being Good
摘要
Does a meaningful life have to be good for someone? And if so, for whom must it be good—for the one who lives it or for others? It is often assumed that it needs to be good for others, from which it would seem to follow that the life of someone who had a harmful impact on many other people’s lives such as, paradigmatically, Hitler, cannot possibly have been meaningful. Hauskeller defends meaning subjectivism against the supposedly disqualifying charge that it cannot rule out that people like Hitler lived a meaningful life and argues that it is even more difficult for the objectivist to rule this out, due to the externalist and largely utilitarian understanding of morality that objectivists tend to rely on, thus blurring the line between doing good and being good. Hauskeller also discusses the novel concept of “anti-meaning” and how to interpret the fact that some of us try to make their life more meaningful by embracing morally repulsive ideologies.