Geographies of Meaningful Living

Cheshire Calhoun

Abstract

Because it is significantly unclear what ‘meaningful’ does or should pick out when applied to a life, any account of meaningful living will be constructive and not merely clarificatory. Where in our conceptual geography is ‘meaningful’ best located? What conceptual work do we want the concept to do? What I call agent-independent and agent-independent-plus conceptions of meaningfulness locate ‘meaningful’ within the conceptual geography of agent-independent evaluative standards and assign ‘meaningful’ the work of commending lives. I argue that the not wholly welcome implications of these more dominant approaches to meaningfulness make it plausible to locate ‘meaningful’ on an alternative conceptual geography —that of agents as end-setters and of agent-dependent value assessments— and to assign it the work of picking out lives whose time-expenditures are intelligible to the agent. I respond to the challenge confronting any subjectivist conception of meaningfulness that it is overly permissive.