## 1. The Meaning of "Meaning"



One of the field's aims consists of the systematic attempt to
identify what people (essentially or characteristically) have in mind
when they think about the topic of life's meaning. For
many in the field, terms such as "importance" and
"significance" are synonyms of
"meaningfulness" and so are insufficiently revealing, but
there are those who draw a distinction between meaningfulness and
significance (Singer 1996, 112-18; Belliotti 2019, 145-50,
186). There is also debate about how the concept of a meaningless life
relates to the ideas of a life that is absurd (Nagel 1970, 1986,
214-23; Feinberg 1980; Belliotti 2019), futile (Trisel 2002),
and not worth living (Landau 2017, 12-15; Matheson 2017).



A useful way to begin to get clear about what thinking about
life's meaning involves is to specify the bearer. Which life
does the inquirer have in mind? A standard distinction to draw is
between the meaning "in" life, where a human person is
what can exhibit meaning, and the meaning "of" life in a
narrow sense, where the human species as a whole is what can be
meaningful or not. There has also been a bit of recent consideration
of whether animals or human infants can have meaning in their lives,
with most rejecting that possibility (e.g., Wong 2008, 131, 147;
Fischer 2019, 1-24), but a handful of others beginning to make a
case for it (Purves and Delon 2018; Thomas 2018). Also under-explored
is the issue of whether groups, such as a people or an organization,
can be bearers of meaning, and, if so, under what conditions.



Most analytic philosophers have been interested in meaning in life,
that is, in the meaningfulness that a person's life could
exhibit, with comparatively few these days addressing the meaning of
life in the narrow sense. Even those who believe that God is or would
be central to life's meaning have lately addressed how an
individual's life might be meaningful in virtue of God more
often than how the human race might be. Although some have argued that
the meaningfulness of human life as such merits inquiry to no less a
degree (if not more) than the meaning in a life (Seachris 2013;
Tartaglia 2015; cf. Trisel 2016), a large majority of the field has
instead been interested in whether their lives as individual persons
(and the lives of those they care about) are meaningful and how they
could become more so.



Focusing on meaning in life, it is quite common to maintain that it is
conceptually something good for its own sake or, relatedly, something
that provides a basic reason for action (on which see Visak 2017).
There are a few who have recently suggested otherwise, maintaining
that there can be neutral or even undesirable kinds of meaning in a
person's life (e.g., Mawson 2016, 90, 193; Thomas 2018, 291,
294). However, these are outliers, with most analytic philosophers,
and presumably laypeople, instead wanting to know when an
individual's life exhibits a certain kind of final value (or
non-instrumental reason for action).



Another claim about which there is substantial consensus is that
meaningfulness is not all or nothing and instead comes in degrees,
such that some periods of life are more meaningful than others and
that some lives as a whole are more meaningful than others. Note that
one can coherently hold the view that some people's lives are
less meaningful (or even in a certain sense less
"important") than others, or are even meaningless
(unimportant), and still maintain that people have an equal standing
from a moral point of view. Consider a consequentialist moral
principle according to which each individual counts for one in virtue
of having a capacity for a meaningful life, or a Kantian approach
according to which all people have a dignity in virtue of their
capacity for autonomous decision-making, where meaning is a function
of the exercise of this capacity. For both moral outlooks, we could be
required to help people with relatively meaningless lives.



Yet another relatively uncontroversial element of the concept of
meaningfulness in respect of individual persons is that it is
logically distinct from happiness or rightness (emphasized in Wolf
2010, 2016). First, to ask whether someone's life is meaningful
is not one and the same as asking whether her life is pleasant or she
is subjectively well off. A life in an experience machine or virtual
reality device would surely be a happy one, but very few take it to be
a prima facie candidate for meaningfulness (Nozick 1974: 42-45).
Indeed, a number would say that one's life logically could
become meaningful precisely by sacrificing one's well-being,
e.g., by helping others at the expense of one's self-interest.
Second, asking whether a person's existence over time is
meaningful is not identical to considering whether she has been
morally upright; there are intuitively ways to enhance meaning that
have nothing to do with right action or moral virtue, such as making a
scientific discovery or becoming an excellent dancer. Now, one might
argue that a life would be meaningless if, or even because, it were
unhappy or immoral, but that would be to posit a synthetic,
substantive relationship between the concepts, far from indicating
that speaking of "meaningfulness" is analytically a matter
of connoting ideas regarding happiness or rightness. The question of
what (if anything) makes a person's life meaningful is
conceptually distinct from the questions of what makes a life happy or
moral, although it could turn out that the best answer to the former
question appeals to an answer to one of the latter questions.



Supposing, then, that talk of "meaning in life" connotes
something good for its own sake that can come in degrees and that is
not analytically equivalent to happiness or rightness, what else does
it involve? What more can we say about this final value, by
definition? Most contemporary analytic philosophers would say that the
relevant value is absent from spending time in an experience machine
(but see Goetz 2012 for a different view) or living akin to Sisyphus,
the mythic figure doomed by the Greek gods to roll a stone up a hill
for eternity (famously discussed by Albert Camus and Taylor 1970). In
addition, many would say that the relevant value is typified by the
classic triad of "the good, the true, and the beautiful"
(or would be under certain conditions). These terms are not to be
taken literally, but instead are rough catchwords for beneficent
relationships (love, collegiality, morality), intellectual reflection
(wisdom, education, discoveries), and creativity (particularly the
arts, but also potentially things like humor or gardening).



Pressing further, is there something that the values of the good, the
true, the beautiful, and any other logically possible sources of
meaning involve? There is as yet no consensus in the field. One
salient view is that the concept of meaning in life is a cluster or
amalgam of overlapping ideas, such as fulfilling higher-order
purposes, meriting substantial esteem or admiration, having a
noteworthy impact, transcending one's animal nature, making
sense, or exhibiting a compelling life-story (Markus 2003; Thomson
2003; Metz 2013, 24-35; Seachris 2013, 3-4; Mawson 2016).
However, there are philosophers who maintain that something much more
monistic is true of the concept, so that (nearly) all thought about
meaningfulness in a person's life is essentially about a single
property. Suggestions include being devoted to or in awe of
qualitatively superior goods (Taylor 1989, 3-24), transcending
one's limits (Levy 2005), or making a contribution (Martela
2016).



Recently there has been something of an "interpretive
turn" in the field, one instance of which is the strong view
that meaning-talk is logically about whether and how a life is
intelligible within a wider frame of reference (Goldman 2018,
116-29; Seachris 2019; Thomas 2019; cf. Repp 2018). According to
this approach, inquiring into life's meaning is nothing other
than seeking out sense-making information, perhaps a narrative about
life or an explanation of its source and destiny. This analysis has
the advantage of promising to unify a wide array of uses of the term
"meaning." However, it has the disadvantages of being
unable to capture the intuitions that meaning in life is essentially
good for its own sake (Landau 2017, 12-15), that it is not
logically contradictory to maintain that an ineffable condition is
what confers meaning on life (as per Cooper 2003, 126-42;
Bennett-Hunter 2014; Waghorn 2014), and that often human actions
themselves (as distinct from an interpretation of them), such as
rescuing a child from a burning building, are what bear meaning.



Some thinkers have suggested that a complete analysis of the concept
of life's meaning should include what has been called
"anti-matter" (Metz 2002, 805-07, 2013, 63-65,
71-73) or "anti-meaning" (Campbell and Nyholm 2015;
Egerstrom 2015), conditions that reduce the meaningfulness of a life.
The thought is that meaning is well represented by a bipolar scale,
where there is a dimension of not merely positive conditions, but also
negative ones. Gratuitous cruelty or destructiveness are prima facie
candidates for actions that not merely fail to add meaning, but also
subtract from any meaning one's life might have had.



Despite the ongoing debates about how to analyze the concept of
life's meaning (or articulate the definition of the phrase
"meaning in life"), the field remains in a good position
to make progress on the other key questions posed above, viz., of what
would make a life meaningful and whether any lives are in fact
meaningful. A certain amount of common ground is provided by the point
that meaningfulness at least involves a gradient final value in a
person's life that is conceptually distinct from happiness and
rightness, with exemplars of it potentially being the good, the true,
and the beautiful. The rest of this discussion addresses philosophical
attempts to capture the nature of this value theoretically and to
ascertain whether it exists in at least some of our lives.


## 2. Supernaturalism



Most analytic philosophers writing on meaning in life have been trying
to develop and evaluate theories, i.e., fundamental and general
principles, that are meant to capture all the particular ways that a
life could obtain meaning. As in moral philosophy, there are
recognizable "anti-theorists," i.e., those who maintain
that there is too much pluralism among meaning conditions to be able
to unify them in the form of a principle (e.g., Kekes 2000; Hosseini
2015). Arguably, though, the systematic search for unity is too
nascent to be able to draw a firm conclusion about whether it is
available.



The theories are standardly divided on a metaphysical basis, that is,
in terms of which kinds of properties are held to constitute the
meaning. Supernaturalist theories are views according to which a
spiritual realm is central to meaning in life. Most Western
philosophers have conceived of the spiritual in terms of God or a soul
as commonly understood in the Abrahamic faiths (but see Mulgan 2015
for discussion of meaning in the context of a God uninterested in us).
In contrast, naturalist theories are views that the physical world as
known particularly well by the scientific method is central to
life's meaning.



There is logical space for a non-naturalist theory, according to which
central to meaning is an abstract property that is neither spiritual
nor physical. However, only scant attention has been paid to this
possibility in the recent Anglo-American-Australasian literature (Audi
2005).



It is important to note that supernaturalism, a claim that God (or a
soul) would confer meaning on a life, is logically distinct from
theism, the claim that God (or a soul) exists. Although most who hold
supernaturalism also hold theism, one could accept the former without
the latter (as Camus more or less did), committing one to the view
that life is meaningless or at least lacks substantial meaning.
Similarly, while most naturalists are atheists, it is not
contradictory to maintain that God exists but has nothing to do with
meaning in life or perhaps even detracts from it. Although these
combinations of positions are logically possible, some of them might
be substantively implausible. The field could benefit from discussion
of the comparative attractiveness of various combinations of
evaluative claims about what would make life meaningful and
metaphysical claims about whether spiritual conditions exist.



Over the past 15 years or so, two different types of supernaturalism
have become distinguished on a regular basis (Metz 2019). That is true
not only in the literature on life's meaning, but also in that
on the related pro-theism/anti-theism debate, about whether it would
be desirable for God or a soul to exist (e.g., Kahane 2011; Kraay
2018; Lougheed 2020). On the one hand, there is extreme
supernaturalism, according to which spiritual conditions are necessary
for any meaning in life. If neither God nor a soul exists, then, by
this view, everyone's life is meaningless. On the other hand,
there is moderate supernaturalism, according to which spiritual
conditions are necessary for a great or ultimate meaning in life,
although not meaning in life as such. If neither God nor a soul
exists, then, by this view, everyone's life could have some
meaning, or even be meaningful, but no one's life could exhibit
the most desirable meaning. For a moderate supernaturalist, God or a
soul would substantially enhance meaningfulness or be a major
contributory condition for it.



There are a variety of ways that great or ultimate meaning has been
described, sometimes quantitatively as "infinite" (Mawson
2016), qualitatively as "deeper" (Swinburne 2016),
relationally as "unlimited" (Nozick 1981, 618-19;
cf. Waghorn 2014), temporally as "eternal" (Cottingham
2016), and perspectivally as "from the point of view of the
universe" (Benatar 2017). There has been no reflection as yet on
the crucial question of how these distinctions might bear on each
another, for instance, on whether some are more basic than others or
some are more valuable than others.



Cross-cutting the extreme/moderate distinction is one between
God-centered theories and soul-centered ones. According to the former,
some kind of connection with God (understood to be a spiritual person
who is all-knowing, all-good, and all-powerful and who is the ground
of the physical universe) constitutes meaning in life, even if one
lacks a soul (construed as an immortal, spiritual substance that
contains one's identity). In contrast, by the latter, having a
soul and putting it into a certain state is what makes life
meaningful, even if God does not exist. Many supernaturalists of
course believe that God and a soul are jointly necessary for a
(greatly) meaningful existence. However, the simpler view, that only
one of them is necessary, is common, and sometimes arguments proffered
for the complex view fail to support it any more than the simpler
one.


### 2.1. God-centered Views



The most influential God-based account of meaning in life has been the
extreme view that one's existence is significant if and only if
one fulfills a purpose God has assigned. The familiar idea is that God
has a plan for the universe and that one's life is meaningful
just to the degree that one helps God realize this plan, perhaps in a
particular way that God wants one to do so. If a person failed to do
what God intends her to do with her life (or if God does not even
exist), then, on the current view, her life would be meaningless.



Thinkers differ over what it is about God's purpose that might
make it uniquely able to confer meaning on human lives, but the most
influential argument has been that only God's purpose could be
the source of invariant moral rules (Davis 1987, 296, 304-05;
Moreland 1987, 124-29; Craig 1994/2013, 161-67) or of
objective values more generally (Cottingham 2005, 37-57), where
a lack of such would render our lives nonsensical. According to this
argument, lower goods such as animal pleasure or desire satisfaction
could exist without God, but higher ones pertaining to meaning in
life, particularly moral virtue, could not. However, critics point to
many non-moral sources of meaning in life (e.g., Kekes 2000; Wolf
2010), with one arguing that a universal moral code is not necessary
for meaning in life, even if, say, beneficent actions are (Ellin 1995,
327). In addition, there are a variety of naturalist and
non-naturalist accounts of objective morality--and of
value more generally--on offer these days, so that it is
not clear that it must have a supernatural source in God's
will.



One recurrent objection to the idea that God's purpose could
make life meaningful is that if God had created us with a purpose in
mind, then God would have degraded us and thereby undercut the
possibility of us obtaining meaning from fulfilling the purpose. The
objection harks back to Jean-Paul Sartre, but in the analytic
literature it appears that Kurt Baier was the first to articulate it
(1957/2000, 118-20; see also Murphy 1982, 14-15; Singer
1996, 29; Kahane 2011; Lougheed 2020, 121-41). Sometimes the
concern is the threat of punishment God would make so that we do
God's bidding, while other times it is that the source of
meaning would be constrictive and not up to us, and still other times
it is that our dignity would be maligned simply by having been created
with a certain end in mind (for some replies to such concerns, see
Hanfling 1987, 45-46; Cottingham 2005, 37-57; Lougheed
2020, 111-21).



There is a different argument for an extreme God-based view that
focuses less on God as purposive and more on God as infinite,
unlimited, or ineffable, which Robert Nozick first articulated with
care (Nozick 1981, 594-618; see also Bennett-Hunter 2014;
Waghorn 2014). The core idea is that for a finite condition to be
meaningful, it must obtain its meaning from another condition that has
meaning. So, if one's life is meaningful, it might be so in
virtue of being married to a person, who is important. Being finite,
the spouse must obtain his or her importance from elsewhere, perhaps
from the sort of work he or she does. This work also must obtain its
meaning by being related to something else that is meaningful, and so
on. A regress on meaningful conditions is present, and the suggestion
is that the regress can terminate only in something so
all-encompassing that it need not (indeed, cannot) go beyond itself to
obtain meaning from anything else. And that is God. The standard
objection to this relational rationale is that a finite condition
could be meaningful without obtaining its meaning from another
meaningful condition. Perhaps it could be meaningful in itself,
without being connected to something beyond it, or maybe it could
obtain its meaning by being related to something else that is
beautiful or otherwise valuable for its own sake but not meaningful
(Nozick 1989, 167-68; Thomson 2003, 25-26, 48).



A serious concern for any extreme God-based view is the existence of
apparent counterexamples. If we think of the stereotypical lives of
Albert Einstein, Mother Teresa, and Pablo Picasso, they seem
meaningful even if we suppose there is no all-knowing, all-powerful,
and all-good spiritual person who is the ground of the physical world
(e.g., Wielenberg 2005, 31-37, 49-50; Landau 2017). Even
religiously inclined philosophers have found this hard to deny these
days (Quinn 2000, 58; Audi 2005; Mawson 2016, 5; Williams 2020,
132-34).



Largely for that reason, contemporary supernaturalists have tended to
opt for moderation, that is, to maintain that God would greatly
enhance the meaning in our lives, even if some meaning would be
possible in a world without God. One approach is to invoke the
relational argument to show that God is necessary, not for any meaning
whatsoever, but rather for an ultimate meaning. "Limited
transcendence, the transcending of our limits so as to connect with a
wider context of value which itself is limited, does give our lives
meaning--but a limited one. We may thirst for more"
(Nozick 1981, 618). Another angle is to appeal to playing a role in
God's plan, again to claim, not that it is essential for meaning
as such, but rather for "a cosmic significance....intead of a
significance very limited in time and space" (Swinburne 2016,
154; see also Quinn 2000; Cottingham 2016, 131). Another rationale is
that by fulfilling God's purpose, we would meaningfully please
God, a perfect person, as well as be remembered favorably by God
forever (Cottingham 2016, 135; Williams 2020, 21-22, 29, 101,
108). Still another argument is that only with God could the deepest
desires of human nature be satisfied (e.g., Goetz 2012; Seachris 2013,
20; Cottingham 2016, 127, 136), even if more surface desires could be
satisfied without God.



In reply to such rationales for a moderate supernaturalism, there has
been the suggestion that it is precisely by virtue of being alone in
the universe that our lives would be particularly significant;
otherwise, God's greatness would overshadow us (Kahane 2014).
There has also been the response that, with the opportunity for
greater meaning from God would also come that for greater
anti-meaning, so that it is not clear that a world with God would
offer a net gain in respect of meaning (Metz 2019, 34-35). For
example, if pleasing God would greatly enhance meaning in our lives,
then presumably displeasing God would greatly reduce it and to a
comparable degree. In addition, there are arguments for extreme
naturalism (or its "anti-theist" cousin) mentioned below
(sub-section 3.3).


### 2.2. Soul-centered Views



Notice that none of the above arguments for supernaturalism appeals to
the prospect of eternal life (at least not explicitly). Arguments that
do make such an appeal are soul-centered, holding that meaning in life
mainly comes from having an immortal, spiritual substance that is
contiguous with one's body when it is alive and that will
forever outlive its death. Some think of the afterlife in terms of
one's soul entering a transcendent, spiritual realm (Heaven),
while others conceive of one's soul getting reincarnated into
another body on Earth. According to the extreme version, if one has a
soul but fails to put it in the right state (or if one lacks a soul
altogether), then one's life is meaningless.



There are three prominent arguments for an extreme soul-based
perspective. One argument, made famous by Leo Tolstoy, is the
suggestion that for life to be meaningful something must be worth
doing, that something is worth doing only if it will make a permanent
difference to the world, and that making a permanent
difference requires being immortal (see also Hanfling 1987,
22-24; Morris 1992, 26; Craig 1994). Critics most often appeal
to counterexamples, suggesting for instance that it is surely worth
your time and effort to help prevent people from suffering, even if
you and they are mortal. Indeed, some have gone on the offensive and
argued that helping people is worth the sacrifice only if and because
they are mortal, for otherwise they could invariably be compensated in
an afterlife (e.g., Wielenberg 2005, 91-94). Another recent and
interesting criticism is that the major motivations for the claim that
nothing matters now if one day it will end are incoherent (Greene
2021).



A second argument for the view that life would be meaningless without
a soul is that it is necessary for justice to be done, which, in turn,
is necessary for a meaningful life. Life seems nonsensical when the
wicked flourish and the righteous suffer, at least supposing there is
no other world in which these injustices will be rectified, whether by
God or a Karmic force. Something like this argument can be found in
Ecclesiastes, and it continues to be defended (e.g., Davis 1987; Craig
1994). However, even granting that an afterlife is required for
perfectly just outcomes, it is far from obvious that an
*eternal* afterlife is necessary for them, and, then, there is
the suggestion that some lives, such as Mandela's, have been
meaningful precisely in virtue of encountering injustice and fighting
it.



A third argument for thinking that having a soul is essential for any
meaning is that it is required to have the sort of free will without
which our lives would be meaningless. Immanuel Kant is known for
having maintained that if we were merely physical beings, subjected to
the laws of nature like everything else in the material world, then we
could not act for moral reasons and hence would be unimportant. More
recently, one theologian has eloquently put the point in religious
terms: "The moral spirit finds the meaning of life in choice. It
finds it in that which proceeds from man and remains with him as his
inner essence rather than in the accidents of circumstances turns of
external fortune....(W)henever a human being rubs the lamp of his
moral conscience, a Spirit does appear. This Spirit is God....It is in
the 'Thou must' of God and man's 'I can'
that the divine image of God in human life is contained"
(Swenson 1949/2000, 27-28). Notice that, even if moral norms did
not spring from God's commands, the logic of the argument
entails that one's life could be meaningful, so long as one had
the inherent ability to make the morally correct choice in any
situation. That, in turn, arguably requires something non-physical
about one's self, so as to be able to overcome whichever
physical laws and forces one might confront. The standard objection to
this reasoning is to advance a compatibilism about having a determined
physical nature and being able to act for moral reasons (e.g., Arpaly
2006; Fischer 2009, 145-77). It is also worth wondering whether,
if one had to have a spiritual essence in order to make free choices,
it would have to be one that never perished.



Like God-centered theorists, many soul-centered theorists these days
advance a moderate view, accepting that some meaning in life would be
possible without immortality, but arguing that a much greater meaning
would be possible with it. Granting that Einstein, Mandela, and
Picasso had somewhat meaningful lives despite not having survived the
deaths of their bodies (as per, e.g., Trisel 2004; Wolf 2015,
89-140; Landau 2017), there remains a powerful thought: more is
better. If a finite life with the good, the true, and the beautiful
has meaning in it to some degree, then surely it would have all the
more meaning if it exhibited such higher values--including
a relationship with God--for an eternity (Cottingham 2016,
132-35; Mawson 2016, 2019, 52-53; Williams 2020,
112-34; cf. Benatar 2017, 35-63). One objection to this
reasoning is that the infinity of meaning that would be possible with
a soul would be "too big," rendering it difficult for the
moderate supernaturalist to make sense of the intution that a finite
life such as Einstein's can indeed count as meaningful by
comparison (Metz 2019, 30-31; cf. Mawson 2019, 53-54).
More common, though, is the objection that an eternal life would
include anti-meaning of various kinds, such as boredom and repetition,
discussed below in the context of extreme naturalism (sub-section
3.3).


## 3. Naturalism



Recall that naturalism is the view that a physical life is central to
life's meaning, that even if there is no spiritual realm, a
substantially meaningful life is possible. Like supernaturalism,
contemporary naturalism admits of two distinguishable variants,
moderate and extreme (Metz 2019). The moderate version is that, while
a genuinely meaningful life could be had in a purely physical universe
as known well by science, a somewhat more meaningful life would be
possible if a spiritual realm also existed. God or a soul could
enhance meaning in life, although they would not be major
contributors. The extreme version of naturalism is the view that it
would be better in respect of life's meaning if there were no
spiritual realm. From this perspective, God or a soul would be
anti-matter, i.e., would detract from the meaning available to us,
making a purely physical world (even if not this particular one)
preferable.



Cross-cutting the moderate/extreme distinction is that between
subjectivism and objectivism, which are theoretical accounts of the
nature of meaningfulness insofar as it is physical. They differ in
terms of the extent to which the human mind constitutes meaning and
whether there are conditions of meaning that are invariant among human
beings. Subjectivists believe that there are no invariant standards of
meaning because meaning is relative to the subject, i.e., depends on
an individual's pro-attitudes such as her particular desires or
ends, which are not shared by everyone. Roughly, something is
meaningful for a person if she strongly wants it or intends to seek it
out and she gets it. Objectivists maintain, in contrast, that there
are some invariant standards for meaning because meaning is at least
partly mind-independent, i.e., obtains not merely in virtue of being
the object of anyone's mental states. Here, something is
meaningful (partially) because of its intrinsic nature, in the sense
of being independent of whether it is wanted or intended; meaning is
instead (to some extent) the sort of thing that merits these
reactions.



There is logical space for an orthogonal view, according to which
there are invariant standards of meaningfulness constituted by what
all human beings would converge on from a certain standpoint. However,
it has not been much of a player in the field (Darwall 1983,
164-66).


### 3.1. Subjectivism



According to this version of naturalism, meaning in life varies from
person to person, depending on each one's variable
pro-attitudes. Common instances are views that one's life is
more meaningful, the more one gets what one happens to want strongly,
achieves one's highly ranked goals, or does what one believes to
be really important (Trisel 2002; Hooker 2008). One influential
subjectivist has recently maintained that the relevant mental state is
caring or loving, so that life is meaningful just to the extent that
one cares about or loves something (Frankfurt 1988, 80-94,
2004). Another recent proposal is that meaningfulness consists of
"an active engagement and affirmation that vivifies the person
who has freely created or accepted and now promotes and nurtures the
projects of her highest concern" (Belliotti 2019, 183).



Subjectivism was dominant in the middle of the twentieth century, when
positivism, noncognitivism, existentialism, and Humeanism were
influential (Ayer 1947; Hare 1957; Barnes 1967; Taylor 1970; Williams
1976). However, in the last quarter of the twentieth century,
inference to the best explanation and reflective equilibrium became
accepted forms of normative argumentation and were frequently used to
defend claims about the existence and nature of objective value (or of
"external reasons," ones obtaining independently of
one's extant attitudes). As a result, subjectivism about meaning
lost its dominance. Those who continue to hold subjectivism often
remain suspicious of attempts to justify beliefs about objective value
(e.g., Trisel 2002, 73, 79, 2004, 378-79; Frankfurt 2004,
47-48, 55-57; Wong 2008, 138-39; Evers 2017, 32, 36;
Svensson 2017, 54). Theorists are moved to accept subjectivism
typically because the alternatives are unpalatable; they are
reasonably sure that meaning in life obtains for some people, but do
not see how it could be grounded on something independent of the mind,
whether it be the natural or the supernatural (or the non-natural). In
contrast to these possibilities, it appears straightforward to account
for what is meaningful in terms of what people find meaningful or what
people want out of their lives. Wide-ranging meta-ethical debates in
epistemology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language are
necessary to address this rationale for subjectivism.



There is a cluster of other, more circumscribed arguments for
subjectivism, according to which this theory best explains certain
intuitive features of meaning in life. For one, subjectivism seems
plausible since it is reasonable to think that a meaningful life is an
authentic one (Frankfurt 1988, 80-94). If a person's life
is significant insofar as she is true to herself or her deepest
nature, then we have some reason to believe that meaning simply is a
function of those matters for which the person cares. For another, it
is uncontroversial that often meaning comes from losing oneself, i.e.,
in becoming absorbed in an activity or experience, as opposed to being
bored by it or finding it frustrating (Frankfurt 1988, 80-94;
Belliotti 2019, 162-70). Work that concentrates the mind and
relationships that are engrossing seem central to meaning and to be so
because of the subjective elements involved. For a third, meaning is
often taken to be something that makes life worth continuing for a
specific person, i.e., that gives her a reason to get out of bed in
the morning, which subjectivism is thought to account for best
(Williams 1976; Svensson 2017; Calhoun 2018).



Critics maintain that these arguments are vulnerable to a common
objection: they neglect the role of objective value (or an external
reason) in realizing oneself, losing oneself, and having a reason to
live (Taylor 1989, 1992; Wolf 2010, 2015, 89-140). One is not
really being true to oneself, losing oneself in a meaningful way, or
having a genuine reason to live insofar as one, say, successfully
maintains 3,732 hairs on one's head (Taylor 1992, 36),
cultivates one's prowess at long-distance spitting (Wolf 2010,
104), collects a big ball of string (Wolf 2010, 104), or, well, eats
one's own excrement (Wielenberg 2005, 22). The counterexamples
suggest that subjective conditions are insufficient to ground meaning
in life; there seem to be certain actions, relationships, and states
that are objectively valuable (but see Evers 2017, 30-32) and
toward which one's pro-attitudes ought to be oriented, if
meaning is to accrue.



So say objectivists, but subjectivists feel the pull of the point and
usually seek to avoid the counterexamples, lest they have to bite the
bullet by accepting the meaningfulness of maintaining 3,732 hairs on
one's head and all the rest (for some who do, see Svensson 2017,
54-55; Belliotti 2019, 181-83). One important strategy is
to suggest that subjectivists can avoid the counterexamples by
appealing to the right sort of pro-attitude. Instead of whatever an
individual happens to want, perhaps the relevant mental state is an
emotional-perceptual one of seeing-as (Alexis 2011; cf. Hosseini 2015,
47-66), a "categorical" desire, that is, an
intrinsic desire constitutive of one's identity that one takes
to make life worth continuing (Svensson 2017), or a judgment that one
has a good reason to value something highly for its own sake (Calhoun
2018). Even here, though, objectivists will argue that it might
"appear that whatever the will chooses to treat as a good reason
to engage itself is, for the will, a good reason. But the will
itself....craves objective reasons; and often it could not go forward
unless it thought it had them" (Wiggins 1988, 136). And without
any appeal to objectivity, it is perhaps likely that counterexamples
would resurface.



Another subjectivist strategy by which to deal with the
counterexamples is the attempt to ground meaningfulness, not on the
pro-attitudes of an individual valuer, but on those of a group
(Darwall 1983, 164-66; Brogaard and Smith 2005; Wong 2008). Does
such an intersubjective move avoid (more of) the counterexamples? If
so, does it do so more plausibly than an objective theory?


### 3.2. Objectivism



Objective naturalists believe that meaning in life is constituted at
least in part by something physical beyond merely the fact that it is
the object of a pro-attitude. Obtaining the object of some emotion,
desire, or judgment is not sufficient for meaningfulness, on this
view. Instead, there are certain conditions of the material world that
could confer meaning on anyone's life, not merely because they
are viewed as meaningful, wanted for their own sake, or believed to be
choiceworthy, but instead (at least partially) because they are
inherently worthwhile or valuable in themselves.



Morality (the good), enquiry (the true), and creativity (the
beautiful) are widely held instances of activities that confer meaning
on life, while trimming toenails and eating snow--along
with the counterexamples to subjectivism above--are not.
Objectivism is widely thought to be a powerful general explanation of
these particular judgments: the former are meaningful not merely
because some agent (whether it is an individual, her society, or even
God) cares about them or judges them to be worth doing, while the
latter simply lack significance and cannot obtain it even if some
agent does care about them or judge them to be worth doing. From an
objective perspective, it is possible for an individual to care about
the wrong thing or to be mistaken that something is worthwhile, and
not merely because of something she cares about all the more or judges
to be still more choiceworthy. Of course, meta-ethical debates about
the existence and nature of value are again relevant to appraising
this rationale.



Some objectivists think that being the object of a person's
mental states plays no constitutive role in making that person's
life meaningful, although they of course contend that it often plays
an instrumental role--liking a certain activity, after
all, is likely to motivate one to do it. Relatively few objectivists
are "pure" in that way, although consequentialists do
stand out as clear instances (e.g., Singer 1995; Smuts 2018,
75-99). Most objectivists instead try to account for the above
intuitions driving subjectivism by holding that a life is more
meaningful, not merely because of objective factors, but also in part
because of propositional attitudes such as cognition, conation, and
emotion. Particularly influential has been Susan Wolf's hybrid
view, captured by this pithy slogan: "Meaning arises when
subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness" (Wolf
2015, 112; see also Kekes 1986, 2000; Wiggins 1988; Raz 2001,
10-40; Mintoff 2008; Wolf 2010, 2016; Fischer 2019, 9-23;
Belshaw 2021, 160-81). This theory implies that no meaning
accrues to one's life if one believes in, is satisfied by, or
cares about a project that is not truly worthwhile, or if one takes up
a truly worthwhile project but fails to judge it important, be
satisfied by it, or care about it. A related approach is that, while
subjective attraction is not necessary for meaning, it could enhance
it (e.g., Audi 2005, 344; Metz 2013, 183-84, 196-98,
220-25). For instance, a stereotypical Mother Teresa who is
bored by and alienated from her substantial charity work might have a
somewhat significant existence because of it, even if she would have
an even more significant existence if she felt pride in it or
identified with it.



There have been several attempts to capture theoretically what all
objectively attractive, inherently worthwhile, or finally valuable
conditions have in common insofar as they bear on meaning in a
person's life. Over the past few decades, one encounters the
proposals that objectively meaningful conditions are just those that
involve: positively connecting with organic unity beyond oneself
(Nozick 1981, 594-619); being creative (Taylor 1987; Matheson
2018); living an emotional life (Solomon 1993; cf. Williams 2020,
56-78); promoting good consequences, such as improving the
quality of life of oneself and others (Singer 1995; Audi 2005; Smuts
2018, 75-99); exercising or fostering rational nature in
exceptional ways (Smith 1997, 179-221; Gewirth 1998,
177-82; Metz 2013, 222-36); progressing toward ends that
can never be fully realized because one's knowledge of them
changes as one approaches them (Levy 2005); realizing goals that are
transcendent for being long-lasting in duration and broad in scope
(Mintoff 2008); living virtuously (May 2015, 61-138; McPherson
2020); and loving what is worth loving (Wolf 2016). There is as yet no
convergence in the field on one, or even a small cluster, of these
accounts.



One feature of a large majority of the above naturalist theories is
that they are aggregative or additive, objectionably treating a life
as a mere "container" of bits of life that are meaningful
considered in isolation from other bits (Brannmark 2003, 330). It
has become increasingly common for philosophers of life's
meaning, especially objectivists, to hold that life as a whole, or at
least long stretches of it, can substantially affect its
meaningfulness beyond the amount of meaning (if any) in its parts.



For instance, a life that has lots of beneficence and otherwise
intuitively meaning-conferring conditions but that is also extremely
repetitive (a la the movie *Groundhog Day*) is less than
maximally meaningful (Taylor 1987; Blumenfeld 2009). Furthermore, a
life that not only avoids repetition but also ends with a substantial
amount of meaningful (or otherwise desirable) parts seems to have more
meaning overall than one that has the same amount of meaningful
(desirable) parts but ends with few or none of them (Kamm 2013,
18-22; Dorsey 2015). Still more, a life in which its meaningless
(or otherwise undesirable parts) cause its meaningful (desirable)
parts to come about through a process of personal growth seems
meaningful in virtue of this redemptive pattern, "good
life-story," or narrative self-expression (Taylor 1989,
48-51; Wong 2008; Fischer 2009, 145-77; Kauppinen 2012;
May 2015, 61-138; Velleman 2015, 141-73). These three
cases suggest that meaning can inhere in life as a whole, that is, in
the relationships between its parts, and not merely in the parts
considered in isolation. However, some would maintain that it is,
strictly speaking, the story that is or could be told of a life that
matters, not so much the life-story *qua* relations between
events themselves (de Bres 2018).



There are pure or extreme versions of holism present in the
literature, according to which the only possible bearer of meaning in
life is a person's life as a whole, and not any isolated
activities, relationships, or states (Taylor 1989, 48-51;
Tabensky 2003; Levinson 2004). A salient argument for this position is
that judgments of the meaningfulness of a part of someone's life
are merely provisional, open to revision upon considering how they fit
into a wider perspective. So, for example, it would initially appear
that taking an ax away from a madman and thereby protecting innocent
parties confers some meaning on one's life, but one might well
revise that judgment upon learning that the intention behind it was
merely to steal an ax, not to save lives, or that the madman then took
out a machine gun, causing much more harm than his ax would have. It
is worth considering how far this sort of case is generalizable, and,
if it can be to a substantial extent, whether that provides strong
evidence that only life as a whole can exhibit meaningfulness.



Perhaps most objectivists would, at least upon reflection, accept that
both the parts of a life and the whole-life relationships among the
parts can exhibit meaning. Supposing there are two bearers of meaning
in a life, important questions arise. One is whether a certain
narrative can be meaningful even if its parts are not, while a second
is whether the meaningfulness of a part increases if it is an aspect
of a meaningful whole (on which see Brannmark 2003), and a third
is whether there is anything revealing to say about how to make
tradeoffs between the parts and whole in cases where one must choose
between them (Blumenfeld 2009 appears to assign lexical priority to
the whole).


### 3.3. Rejecting God and a Soul



Naturalists until recently had been largely concerned to show that
meaning in life is possible without God or a soul; they have not spent
much time considering how such spiritual conditions might enhance
meaning, but have, in moderate fashion, tended to leave that
possibility open (an exception is Hooker 2008). Lately, however, an
extreme form of naturalism has arisen, according to which our lives
would probably, if not unavoidably, have less meaning in a world with
God or a soul than in one without. Although such an approach was
voiced early on by Baier (1957), it is really in the past decade or so
that this "anti-theist" position has become widely and
intricately discussed.



One rationale, mentioned above as an objection to the view that
God's purpose constitutes meaning in life, has also been
deployed to argue that the existence of God as such would necessarily
reduce meaning, that is, would consist of anti-matter. It is the idea
that master/servant and parent/child analogies so prominent in the
monotheist religious traditions reveal something about our status in a
world where there is a qualitatively higher being who has created us
with certain ends in mind: our independence or dignity as adult
persons would be violated (e.g., Baier 1957/2000, 118-20; Kahane
2011, 681-85; Lougheed 2020, 121-41). One interesting
objection to this reasoning has been to accept that God's
existence is necessarily incompatible with the sort of meaning that
would come (roughly stated) from being one's own boss, but to
argue that God would also make greater sorts of meaning available,
offering a net gain to us (Mawson 2016, 110-58).



Another salient argument for thinking that God would detract from
meaning in life appeals to the value of privacy (Kahane 2011,
681-85; Lougheed 2020, 55-110). God's omniscience
would unavoidably make it impossible for us to control another
person's access to the most intimate details about ourselves,
which, for some, amounts to a less meaningful life than one with such
control. Beyond questioning the value of our privacy in relation to
God, one thought-provoking criticism has been to suggest that, if a
lack of privacy really would substantially reduce meaning in our
lives, then God, *qua* morally perfect person, would simply
avoid knowing everything about us (Tooley 2018). Lacking complete
knowledge of our mental states would be compatible with describing God
as "omniscient," so the criticism goes, insofar as that is
plausibly understood as having as much knowledge as is morally
permissible.



Turn, now, to major arguments for thinking that having a soul would
reduce life's meaning, so that if one wants a maximally
meaningful life, one should prefer a purely physical world, or at
least one in which people are mortal. First and foremost, there has
been the argument that an immortal life could not avoid becoming
boring (Williams 1973), rendering life pointless according to many
subjective and objective theories. The literature on this topic has
become enormous, with the central reply being that immortality need
not get boring (for more recent discussions, see Fischer 2009,
79-101, 2019, 117-42; Mawson 2019, 51-52; Williams
2020, 30-41, 123-29; Belshaw 2021, 182-97). However,
it might also be worth questioning whether boredom is sufficient for
meaninglessness. Suppose, for instance, that one volunteers to be
bored so that many others will not be bored; perhaps this would be a
meaningful sacrifice to make. Being bored for an eternity would not be
blissful or even satisfying, to be sure, but if it served the function
of preventing others from being bored for an eternity, would it be
meaningful (at least to some degree)? If, as is commonly held,
sacrificing one's life could be meaningful, why not also
sacrificing one's liveliness?



Another reason given to reject eternal life is that it would become
repetitive, which would substantially drain it of meaning (Scarre
2007, 54-55; May 2009, 46-47, 64-65, 71; Smuts 2011,
142-44; cf. Blumenfeld 2009). If, as it appears, there are only
a finite number of actions one could perform, relationships one could
have, and states one could be in during an eternity, one would have to
end up doing the same things again. Even though one's activities
might be more valuable than rolling a stone up a hill forever a
la Sisyphus, the prospect of doing them over and over again forever is
disheartening for many. To be sure, one might not remember having done
them before and hence could avoid boredom, but for some philosophers
that would make it all the worse, akin to having dementia and
forgetting that one has told the same stories. Others, however, still
find meaning in such a life (e.g., Belshaw 2021, 197, 205n41).



A third meaning-based argument against immortality invokes
considerations of narrative. If the pattern of one's life as a
whole substantially matters, and if a proper pattern would include a
beginning, a middle, and an end, it appears that a life that never
ends would lack the relevant narrative structure. "Because it
would drag on endlessly, it would, sooner or later, just be a string
of events lacking all form....With immortality, the novel never
ends....How meaningful can such a novel be?" (May 2009, 68, 72;
see also Scarre 2007, 58-60). Notice that this objection is
distinct from considerations of boredom and repetition (which concern
*novelty*); even if one were stimulated and active, and even if
one found a way not to repeat one's life in the course of
eternity, an immortal life would appear to lack shape. In reply, some
reject the idea that a meaningful life must be akin to a novel, and
intead opt for narrativity in the form of something like a string of
short stories that build on each other (Fischer 2009, 145-77,
2019, 101-16). Others, though, have sought to show that eternity
could still be novel-like, deeming the sort of ending that matters to
be a function of what the content is and how it relates to the content
that came before (e.g., Seachris 2011; Williams 2020,
112-19).



There have been additional objections to immortality as undercutting
meaningfulness, but they are prima facie less powerful than the
previous three in that, if sound, they arguably show that an eternal
life would have a cost, but probably not one that would utterly
occlude the prospect of meaning in it. For example, there have been
the suggestions that eternal lives would lack a sense of preciousness
and urgency (Nussbaum 1989, 339; Kass 2002, 266-67), could not
exemplify virtues such as courageously risking one's life for
others (Kass 2002, 267-68; Wielenberg 2005, 91-94), and
could not obtain meaning from sustaining or saving others' lives
(Nussbaum 1989, 338; Wielenberg 2005, 91-94). Note that at least
the first two rationales turn substantially on the belief in
immortality, not quite immortality itself: if one were immortal but
forgot that one is or did not know that at all, then one could
appreciate life and obtain much of the virtue of courage (and,
conversely, if one were not immortal, but thought that one is, then,
by the logic of these arguments, one would fail to appreciate limits
and be unable to exemplify courage).


## 4. Nihilism



The previous two sections addressed theoretical accounts of what would
confer meaning on a human person's life. Although these theories
do not imply that some people's lives are in fact meaningful,
that has been the presumption of a very large majority of those who
have advanced them. Much of the procedure has been to suppose that
many lives have had meaning in them and then to consider in virtue of
what they have or otherwise could. However, there are nihilist (or
pessimist) perspectives that question this supposition. According to
nihilism (pessimism), what would make a life meaningful in principle
cannot obtain for any of us.



One straightforward rationale for nihilism is the combination of
extreme supernaturalism about what makes life meaningful and atheism
about whether a spiritual realm exists. If you believe that God or a
soul is necessary for meaning in life, and if you believe that neither
is real, then you are committed to nihilism, to the denial that life
can have any meaning. Athough this rationale for nihilism was
prominent in the modern era (and was more or less Camus'
position), it has been on the wane in analytic philosophical circles,
as extreme supernaturalism has been eclipsed by the moderate
variety.



The most common rationales for nihilism these days do not appeal to
supernaturalism, or at least not explicitly. One cluster of ideas
appeals to what meta-ethicists call "error theory," the
view that evaluative claims (in this case about meaning in life, or
about morality *qua* necessary for meaning) characteristically
posit objectively real or universally justified values, but that such
values do not exist. According to one version, value judgments often
analytically include a claim to objectivity but there is no reason to
think that objective values exist, as they "would be entities or
qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from
anything else in the universe" (Mackie 1977/1990, 38). According
to a second version, life would be meaningless if there were no set of
moral standards that could be fully justified to all rational
enquirers, but it so happens that such standards cannot exist for
persons who can always reasonably question a given claim (Murphy 1982,
12-17). According to a third, we hold certain beliefs about the
objectivity and universality of morality and related values such as
meaning because they were evolutionarily advantageous to our
ancestors, not because they are true. Humans have been "deceived
by their genes into thinking that there is a distinterested, objective
morality binding upon them, which all should obey" (Ruse and
Wilson 1986, 179; cf. Street 2015). One must draw on the intricate
work in meta-ethics that has been underway for the past several
decades in order to appraise these arguments.



In contrast to error-theoretic arguments for nihilism, there are
rationales for it accepting that objective values exist but denying
that our lives can ever exhibit or promote them so as to obtain
meaning. One version of this approach maintains that, for our lives to
matter, we must be in a position to add objective value to the world,
which we are not since the objective value of the world is already
infinite (Smith 2003). The key premises for this view are that every
bit of space-time (or at least the stars in the physical universe)
have some positive value, that these values can be added up, and that
space is infinite. If the physical world at present contains an
infinite degree of value, nothing we do can make a difference in terms
of meaning, for infinity plus any amount of value remains infinity.
One way to question this argument, beyond doubting the value of
space-time or stars, is to suggest that, even if one cannot add to the
value of the universe, meaning plausibly comes from being the
*source* of certain values.



A second rationale for nihilism that accepts the existence of
objective value is David Benatar's (2006, 18-59)
intriguing "asymmetry argument" for anti-natalism, the
view that it is immoral to bring new people into existence because
doing so would always be on balance bad for them. For Benatar, the
bads of existing (e.g., pains) are real disadvantages relative to not
existing, while the goods of existing (pleasures) are not real
advantages relative to not existing, since there is in the latter
state no one to be deprived of them. If indeed the state of not
existing is no worse than that of experiencing the benefits of
existence, then, since existing invariably brings harm in its wake, it
follows that existing is always worse compared to not existing.
Although this argument is illustrated with experiential goods and
bads, it seems generalizable to non-experiential ones, including
meaning in life and anti-matter. The literature on this argument has
become large (for a recent collection, see Hauskeller and Hallich
2022).



Benatar (2006, 60-92, 2017, 35-63) has advanced an
additional argument for nihilism, one that appeals to Thomas
Nagel's (1986, 208-32) widely discussed analysis of the
extremely external standpoint that human persons can take on their
lives. There exists, to use Henry Sidgwick's influential phrase,
the "point of view of the universe," that is, the
standpoint that considers a human being's life in relation to
all times and all places. When one takes up this most external
standpoint and views one's puny impact on the world, little of
one's life appears to matter. What one does in a certain society
on Earth over 75 years or so just does not amount to much, when
considering the billions of temporal years and billions of light-years
that make up space-time. Although this reasoning grants limited kinds
of meaning to human beings, from a personal, social, or human
perspective, Benatar both denies that the greatest sort of
meaning--a cosmic one--is available to them
and contends that this makes their lives bad, hence the
"nihilist" tag. Some have objected that our lives could in
fact have a cosmic significance, say, if they played a role in
God's plan (Quinn 2000, 65-66; Swinburne 2016, 154), were
the sole ones with a dignity in the universe (Kahane 2014), or engaged
in valuable activities that could be appreciated by anyone anywhere
anytime (Wolf 2016, 261-62). Others naturally maintain that
cosmic significance is irrelevant to appraising a human life, with
some denying that it would be a genuine source of meaning (Landau
2017, 93-99), and others accepting that it would be but
maintaining that the absence of this good would not count as a bad or
merit regret (discussed in Benatar 2017, 56-62; Williams 2020,
108-11).



Finally, a distinguishable source of nihilism concerns the
ontological, as distinct from axiological, preconditions for meaning
in life. Perhaps most radically, there are those who deny that we have
selves. Do we indeed lack selves, and, if we do, is a meaningful life
impossible for us (see essays in Caruso and Flanagan 2018; Le Bihan
2019)? Somewhat less radically, there are those who grant that we have
selves, but deny that they are in charge in the relevant way. That is,
some have argued that we lack self-governance or free will of the sort
that is essential for meaning in life, at least if determinism is true
(Pisciotta 2013; essays in Caruso and Flanagan 2018). Non-quantum
events, including human decisions, appear to be necessited by a prior
state of the world, such that none could have been otherwise, and many
of our decisions are a product of unconscious neurological mechanisms
(while quantum events are of course utterly beyond our control). If
none of our conscious choices could have been avoided and all were
ultimately necessited by something external to them, perhaps they are
insufficient to merit pride or admiration or to constitute narrative
authorship of a life. In reply, some maintain that a compatibilism
between determinism and moral responsibility applies with comparable
force to meaning in life (e.g., Arpaly 2006; Fischer 2009,
145-77), while others contend that incompatibilism is true of
moral responsibility but not of meaning (Pereboom 2014).