Aaron Smuts on the Good Cause Account of the Meaning of Life

According to Aaron Smuts[1], the “correct (!) view of the meaning of life” (537) is that life is meaningful to the extent that the one who lives it “promotes the good” (536). They don’t need to do it intentionally or even be aware of it. Nor does it matter whether their existence actually makes a difference (in the sense that, if they had not existed, some of the good occasioned by them would not have occurred). The only thing that matters for meaning in life is “that one is causally responsible for the good”. A life can be more or less meaningful. The more good one is responsible for, knowingly or unknowingly, intentionally or inadvertently, the more meaningful one’s life is. If you are responsible for bad things, then those bad things reduce the meaningfulness of your life. If you are responsible for more evil than good, then your life is less than meaningful: it has negative or anti-meaning. Smuts calls this the “good cause account of the meaning of life”.

The good cause account of the meaning of life, or “GCA”, stipulates that subjective fulfilment of any kind is simply irrelevant for the meaningfulness of one’s life. It is possible to be mistaken about whether or not one’s own life is meaningful. My life can be very meaningful even if I feel consistently miserable and believe that my life is in fact utterly meaningless. My life can also be completely devoid of meaning (and even have negative meaning, i.e. be worse than just meaningless) even if I am fulfilled and think and feel that my life is very meaningful indeed. In both cases I may just be wrong about the actual meaningfulness of my life. There is nothing subjective about the meaning of life. Meaninglessness and its absence are objective features of my life. Smuts thus flatly rejects both the subjectivist account of the meaning of life defended by the early Richard Taylor (who argues that the life of a happy Sisyphus would be meaningful), and the mixed account defended by Susan Wolf (who argues that subjective attraction and objective attractiveness must come together for a life to be meaningful).

According to Smuts, there are various ways in which a life can be good. Subjective fulfilment is one, meaningfulness is another. A “happy life devoted to trivial amusements” (538) is not a meaningful life. Most people desire more than just to be happy. Smuts cites Achilles who decides to fight against the Trojans despite knowing that this would kill him because he did not want his name to be forgotten. “He chose a short meaningful life over a long life high in individual welfare.” (540) Nozick’s experience machine also demonstrates not only that a meaningful life is more important to most of us than subjective well-being, but also that meaningfulness goes beyond and is in fact independent of subjective well-being. A life in the experience machine, even if totally wonderful, would obviously be meaningless because whatever you did while connected to the machine would have no real-life consequences. If you cured cancer in the machine, you wouldn’t really have cured cancer. Nobody would be any better off because of your imagined actions and achievements: “no good would result from a machine cure.” (543) A subjectivist account of the meaning of life is also absurd because it would not allow us to normatively distinguish between subjectively equally fulfilling lives, such as the life of a cancer researcher and the life of someone who is “devoted to consuming vast quantities of excrement.” (544) Clearly, Smuts suggests, the life of the cancer researcher is more meaningful than that of a “grinning excrement eater”. If the excrement eater thinks otherwise, he is wrong, just as George Bailey in Frank Capra’s film It’s a Wonderful Life (which Smuts uses as the key witness for the correctness of his account) was wrong to think that his life was meaningless. It wasn’t, because he did a lot of good without realizing it. In the end George does of course realize exactly that and thereby discovers that his life has in fact been meaningful all along, but even if he had not made that discovery (and instead committed suicide as he had planned), his life would still have been meaningful. That is why a mixed account of meaning (such as Wolf’s fitting fulfilment view) is just as wrong as a pure subjectivist account. They are both refuted by the fact that George Bailey was mistaken about the value of his life, which shows that we can be mistaken about it, and therefore that subjective fulfilment is not a reliable indicator of meaningfulness.

A life’s meaningfulness, for Smuts, is the same as that life’s significance. When we are dissatisfied with our lives we are dissatisfied because of its (apparent) insignificance. Its insignificance does not consist in our dissatisfaction with it. To say that a life is insignificant means that it does not produce anything of value. It is, in other words, not good for anyone or anything. It does not matter whether what I do is intrinsically or only instrumentally valuable (i.e., whether it is good in itself or good for other things), the one is as good as the other. Smuts borrows an example from Viktor Frankl to illustrate his point: “imagine an ape that is punctured repeatedly in order to manufacture a life saving serum. The ape cannot hope to understand the significance of its life. There is nothing we can say to make it understand. But its life is indeed meaningful. Hundreds of people are saved as a result.” (551)

Curiously, Smuts wants to see the question whether life is meaningful distinguished from the question whether life is worth living. For him, a life can be meaningful, but at the same time not worth living (for instance because it lacks subjective fulfilment). “Meaning is important, but it is not all that matters.” (552) That unfortunate ape’s life is meaningful, but (most likely) not worth living.

A meaningful life is a life that causes more good than evil. On this view, even somebody who wants to do evil, but is not very good at it, so that due to their incompetence they actually do a lot of good, lives a meaningful life (although perhaps not as meaningful as that of someone who does the same amount of good intentionally, because the moral value of his actions adds to the total amount of goodness produced). Conversely, if somebody has the best intentions, but fails and causes harm, their life is meaningless.

Smuts is aware that his good cause account of meaning in life requires a strong meta-ethical commitment to value realism, but he does not see that as a problem because the alternative would be nihilism (which Smuts understands as the claim that there is nothing that is objectively valuable), and nihilism is simply too absurd to merit a refutation. In his view, it can safely be ignored because there is “no compelling reason to take nihilism seriously.” (559)

Commentary:

It seems to me that we have very good reason to take nihilism seriously and very little reason to take Smuts’s objectivist account of meaning seriously. For one thing, I find it difficult to understand what it means to say that an outcome is “objectively valuable”, or “objectively good”, unless it means a) that it really is good for something or b) that it benefits others in the sense that, somewhere along the line, it is subjectively good for them. The first option is unlikely to be intended here because it lacks a moral dimension. Hitler’s promotion of gas chambers in Nazi Germany was certainly good for something, in that it made it easier to exterminate a great number of people. The gas chambers were good for this, objectively. I am pretty confident that Smuts would not want us to think that Hitler promoted the good, so that we can probably safely exclude a purely instrumental understanding of objective goodness from consideration. The only other option, however, leads us back to subjective fulfilment. It is difficult to see how an action can be objectively good (in a moral sense) that makes nobody’s life (subjectively) any better, ever. Objective good, then, if it means anything, needs to be anchored in subjective good. Curing cancer would then be ‘objectively’ good because doing so increases (other) people’s subjective well-being. It is good because it is good for someone. But here is the problem: if I can do something objectively good by making you happy, then it is hard to see why my being happy is not objectively good too. And if my life becomes meaningful by my doing something that makes you happy, why then should it not become meaningful by my doing something that makes me happy?

For Smuts, who wants meaning to be understood as significance and nothing else, ‘good’ translates to ‘useful’. The good cause account of the meaning of life is a utilitarian account. My life is meaningful if it is useful. Obviously it can be useful in many different ways. The question is why we should identify a life’s meaningfulness with its utility. It seems to me that Smuts is clearly begging the question here. He does not show that meaningful means useful; he simply decrees it. However, this is not how we usually understand the term meaningfulness when we raise the question whether or not a life is meaningful. I can live a very ‘useful’ life and be fully aware of it, and still be plagued by the worry that none of it ‘means’ anything, that ultimately it does not matter, that there is no point. This suggests that we don’t think of meaning purely in terms of usefulness. When I ask whether my life has any meaning, then I am not, or at least not necessarily, asking whether it is useful. It is, however, very unlikely that I will ever ask that question when I am happy with my life, when I am fulfilled. You may ask that question about my happy life, but I will not ask it. If I am really happy with my life, I don’t question its meaning, which strongly suggests that there is, despite what Smuts claims, a connection between subjective well-being and meaningfulness.

Also, even though we can conceptually distinguish between happiness and meaningfulness, in practice we would be hard pressed to find a realistic example of the distinction. There is a reason why we have to resort to extreme examples like the grinning excrement eater to make it appear convincing that there is a difference between someone who is happy or otherwise “subjectively fulfilled” and someone whose life is meaningful. The “grinning excrement eater” is of course repulsive and creepy, especially if we imagine him happy and fulfilled. It is easy to reject such a life as meaningless despite its stipulated happiness. But in real life we are very unlikely to encounter someone who is actually fulfilled by that. Eating shit is not the kind of thing that is apt to fulfil creatures such as us. (It is also rather unhealthy.) That may well be the reason (that and the repulsive nature of the activity described) why we are so reluctant to see such a life as meaningful. A dung beetle on the other hand whose life is indeed “devoted to consuming vast quantities of excrement” may very well have a meaningful (dung beetle) life. Human beings, however, are different from dung beetles. They are unlikely to be fulfilled by the same things. It would also be very unusual for a human to be fulfilled by binge-watching daytime television, which is another stock example often used in support of the anti-fulfilment view of meaning. Yes, such a life strikes us as meaningless, but do we really think, as the example assumes, that somebody who wastes his life away watching some crap on TV all day long can be truly happy and have a sense of deep fulfilment? The happy binge watcher is just as unrealistic as the happy excrement eater. But what about somebody who finds fulfilment in watching the leaves change their colour in autumn and the snow fall in winter? What about somebody who collects smells or sounds (or stamps)? They do not seem to be doing anything useful, but can we confidently say that their life is meaningless? Smuts assures us that we can for the simple reason that meaningfulness is usefulness, but is it?

What Smuts is really telling us is not what makes a life meaningful. Instead, he is trying to convince us to adopt utility as our guiding principle when we consider how to live our lives. He is telling us that what our lives should be and what we in fact want our lives to be is not happy, but useful. This is also why Smuts severs the traditional semantic link between a meaningful life and a life worth living. It is unconvincing to declare that subjective well-being has no bearing on the question whether a life is worth living. By distinguishing the meaningful life from a life worth living, Smuts tries to make his objectivist interpretation of meaning more palatable. I don’t think it works, though. One of the prime examples Smuts uses to illustrate his view of what constitutes an objectively meaningful life (which is not necessarily a life worth living) is Frankl’s ape, tortured in the name of science and progress.[2] Under the circumstances, this ape’s life may actually be the more meaningful the less worth living it is. After all, the less we are concerned with his well-being, the more we can learn from him that might eventually benefit humanity. His is a miserable, but very useful and hence meaningful life. Ironically, Smuts takes credit for providing an account of meaning in life that does not exclude animals from the possibility of living meaningful lives. His account is proudly anti-speciesist. Except it isn’t, not really, not where it counts. Another example he uses is the collie Lassie (of 1950s television fame), who, according to Smuts, had a very meaningful life even if, being an animal, she must have lacked the kind of subjective fulfilment that only persons are capable of (558). I suppose that is because she did a lot of good, always ready to come to the rescue of various hapless humans. At least Lassie did not have to suffer to be of use to us. Of course, this implies that animals that are of no use to us cannot possibly live a meaningful life. Their existence is meaningless. So it seems that by enlisting their services, we do them a huge favour (even if their lives become less worth living as a result). We make their lives count. Seriously? I don’t buy it.

Finally (for now), Smuts’s case studies do not really support his account. Achilles is said to have chosen a meaningful life by joining the battle against the Trojans, but it is difficult to see what good resulted from that decision. Slaughtering lots of innocent people and razing a thriving city to the ground does not strike me as a particularly valuable outcome. Achilles was concerned about his reputation as a great warrior, not as a good person. Perhaps in order for his life to be meaningful in his own eyes he needed to make sure that he would be remembered as a great warrior, but this is very different from what Smuts tells us meaning is all about. So either Achilles’s life was not meaningful after all, or Smuts got it wrong (or both).

Then there is George Bailey, the main protagonist in Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life and Smuts’s key piece of evidence. According to Smuts, George’s life is meaningful, even if he is not aware of it, because he has done a lot of good (like for instance saving his little brother Harry’s life when they were both kids, or as a teenager saving his employer from a fatal error that would have ruined his life). George, however, sees his life as “a failure”. He had so many plans, seeing the world and going to College, which he couldn’t do because his father died, then joining the war and becoming a hero like Harry, which he couldn’t do because he was deaf on one ear (from when he saved Harry), and finally making his dead father’s building and loan association work, which he couldn’t do because of his uncle Billy’s negligence and the evil banker Potter’s malevolence. By showing him how things would be if he had not existed (namely much worse than they are now), the angel Clarence convinces him that George’s life has not been a failure at all. Yet although Smuts is right that George’s realization that he has actually done a lot of good contributes to his revised assessment of his life’s worth, I don’t think this is all there is to it. Rather, what George realizes is that his life has been good in many ways all along, despite his disappointments and the frustrations of some of his ambitions. He realizes that much of what he thought was important in life isn’t really important at all. What is important is community and friendship, being there for others, but also letting others be there for you, caring and being cared for. “No man is a failure who has friends”, the angel Clarence reminds George. It is the film’s central message. George has learned to appreciate life, and what is more, his life, as a shared gift. It is indeed a meaningful life, but it is not meaningful because of what he has done, or not merely because of what he has done. He used to be unhappy with his achievements and role in life. He had imagined it to be different, wanted it to be different. Now he knows that what he has got is in fact a wonderful life, and it is meaningful not because of this life’s positive utility, but for one thing because of all the good that surrounds him and that he partakes in, and for another because he is now, finally, fully aware of it.

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[1] “The Good Cause Account of the Meaning of Life”, The Southern Journal of Philosophy 51/4 (2013): 536-562.

[2] William James voiced a similar idea in “Is Life Worth Living?”: “Consider a poor dog whom they are vivisecting in a laboratory. He lies strapped on a board and shrieking at his executioners, and to his own dark consciousness is literally in a sort of hell. He cannot see a single redeeming ray in the whole business; and yet all these diabolical-seeming events are usually controlled by human intentions with which, if his poor benighted mind could only be made to catch a glimpse of them, all that is heroic in him would religiously acquiesce. Healing truth, relief to future sufferings of beast and man are to be bought by them. It is genuinely a process of redemption. Lying on his back on the board there he is performing a function incalculably higher than any prosperous canine life admits of; and yet, of the whole performance, this function is the one portion that must remain absolutely beyond his ken.”

Anti-Meaning

It is widely thought (though hardly uncontested) that a life (and certain activities in life) can not only be happy or unhappy (as well as more or less happy or unhappy), but also meaningful or meaningless (or perhaps more or less meaningful). People do not always agree what exactly it is that makes some lives more ‘meaningful’ than others, but it is certainly not unusual at all for us to express how well or badly we think a life is going in terms of its supposed meaningfulness or lack thereof. We seem to understand what people are saying when they complain about a lack of meaning in their lives, and we readily accept that living a ‘meaningless’ life is anything but desirable. Meaninglessness is supposed to be bad, something that we have good reason to avoid if we can.

But perhaps lives can be even worse than just meaningless. In a recent paper (“Anti-Meaning and Why It Matters”, Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1/4 (2015): 694-711), Stephen M. Campbell and Sven Nyholm have argued that lives can not only be meaningful or meaningless, but also “anti-meaningful”. If a meaningless life is bad, then an anti-meaningful life is even worse. According to Campbell and Nyholm we need to recognize the existence of anti-meaning to make sense of the fact that some lives appear to be less meaningful than others although they contain the same number of meaningful activities, as well as the fact that some lives appear to be not meaningful at all despite clearly containing some meaningful activities. If we think for instance that to what extent our lives are meaningful depends on the extent to which we contribute to what is (objectively) good (which is one popular theory of meaning in life), then we would probably want to say that somebody who does good and no evil leads a more meaningful life than somebody who does the same amount of good, but also some evil. However, in order to accommodate this intuition we need to assume that the bad things we do, do not only not contribute to the meaningfulness of our life, but actually detract from it. In other words, what we gain in meaning by doing what is good, we lose in meaning by doing what is bad, so that the more good and the less bad we do, the more meaningful our lives are, and if we actually do more bad than good, then our lives are not merely meaningless (or not meaningful): they are anti-meaningful.

The same argument can be made within the context of other theories of meaning. If you, for instance, think that meaning is determined not by our contribution to the good, but by subjective life-satisfaction, then a life that contains a lot of satisfying experiences and no dissatisfying (i.e., positively unpleasant or painful) ones would still appear more meaningful than one that contains the same amount of satisfaction, but also, in addition, a lot of dissatisfaction. And if you think that meaning is determined by the extent to which you achieve your central goals in life, then a life in which you achieve all your goals would still appear more meaningful than a life in which you achieve the same number of goals, but also fail to achieve some others. No matter which theory of meaning you favour, anti-meaning is needed to explain how the overall meaning in a life can be diminished (rather than simply not enhanced) by some activities or experiences.

Campbell and Nyholm maintain that because it helps us account for the above intuitions, the concept of anti-meaning is of quite some theoretical significance. But the main reason they would like to see the existence of anti-meaning acknowledged is practical in nature. They argue that anti-meaning would give us a good, additional reason to stop engaging in certain practices that are actually harmful to others (for instance consumptive practices that contribute to the gradual destruction of the environment, or our meat consumption, which contributes to widespread animal suffering). It helps us to be more concerned about “the harms and burdens that we collectively impose on present and future individuals through our economic and individual lifestyle choices”, namely when we realize that by making those choices we “are actually harming ourselves by generating anti-meaning in our own lives”.

Should we, therefore, accept the authors’ suggestion that lives can be anti-meaningful and that certain actions and practices in life can generate anti-meaning? Although this is certainly an interesting idea, I am not convinced that it is, all things considered, all that useful, neither for theoretical nor for practical purposes. For one thing, it is hard to believe that anyone would abstain from, say, eating meat or driving around in their car, or generally from causing harm to others in some way, not because they think it is bad to inflict harm on other people or animals, but because “doing so generates anti-meaning” in their lives. Apologies to the authors, but this expectation or hope strikes me as preposterous. If people cannot get motivated to change their ways by considering the harm they cause, they will most certainly not be motivated to do so in order to avoid something as obscure and intangible as “anti-meaning”. (Imagine a savvy democrat trying to convince a Trump supporter before the presidential election that he had better not vote for Trump: “I know you couldn’t care less about Trump’s racism, sexism, egocentrism, and all too obvious lack of self-control and moral integrity, despite the fact that all of this clearly has the potential of unleashing a lot of evils on the world. I know you will vote for him anyway. But have you considered that doing so will actually increase anti-meaning in your life?”)

Neither am I convinced that there is a theoretical need to acknowledge the existence of anti-meaning. It is difficult enough to defend a concept of meaningfulness, but at least we have a widely used word for it, which indicates that there is something there, some aspect of our life, some aspect of our experience, that we try to get conceptual hold of by calling it ‘meaning’. We may find it difficult to pinpoint exactly what we mean when we call a life or an action meaningful or meaningless, but we can be pretty sure that there is some quality that the one has and the other lacks and that, for some reason, we think is important to take into account. But, as Campbell and Nyholm point out, the word “anti-meaningful” is a new word, which previously did not exist, nor was or is there any other word that would convey what the word “anti-meaning” is meant to convey. We feel the need to describe certain states of affairs as meaningful and others as meaningless, but it appears that before Campbell and Nyholm nobody has ever felt the need to express anti-meaning. Yet if there is something like anti-meaning, why do we not have a word for it?

Campbell and Nyholm try to make the idea palatable by claiming that the case is analogous to those of good and evil, benefit and harm, and well-being and (more controversially) ill-being. Evil, they point out, is not merely the absence of good, but something in its own right, something positive. Similarly, harming somebody is different from merely not benefiting them. Finally, we can be well, not well, and unwell (or ill). In all those cases we have three different states, not two, a positive one, a negative one, and a neutral one. So why do we suppose that there are only two states of meaning, namely meaningful and meaningless? If meaninglessness is the absence of meaning, then we should expect that there is also the opposite of meaning, a negative to the mere neutral state of meaninglessness and the positive one of meaningfulness.

However, not for all conditions we have three different states. Yes, perhaps unhappiness is not merely the absence of unhappiness. We know that suffering and pain are more than just the absence of pleasure. But evil can plausibly be understood as the absence of good, and a total absence of well-being may plausibly be seen as the worst state you can possibly be in. We normally don’t make any difference between being unwell and being not well. And even if in all those cases there really were a positive, a neutral, and a negative state, it would not follow that the case of meaning was analogous. A glass can be either full or empty, or even half-full or quarter-full, but it cannot be anti-full. A room can be light or dark, or more or less light or dark, but it cannot be anti-light. Perhaps meaningfulness is very much like fullness or lightness, and not at all like pleasure or happiness. Then the assumption that “where there is meaning, there is the possibility of anti-meaning” would simply be false.

It is also not clear to me that it makes sense to say of a life, as Campbell and Nyholm frequently do, that it is “somewhat meaningful” or “very meaningful”. It does not sound right to me, which would suggest that meaning is not really something of which a life (or an activity) can have more or less. My life would then be either meaningful or not, but not more or less meaningful. By introducing the notion of “anti-meaning”, Campbell and Nyholm make the question of meaning a matter of mathematical calculation. If you want to know whether your life is (overall) meaningful, you just have to add up all instances or bits of meaning that you have accumulated in your life, then subtract all the bits of anti-meaning that you have also accumulated, and if the balance is in the black, then your life is meaningful, and if it is in the red, then it is anti-meaningful. Should you find that it is anti-meaningful, then all you would have to do is perform a sufficient amount of meaningful activities (like spending a couple of hours every day for the next two weeks on saving the world or curing cancer) until you are in the black. Some lives might be so balanced that those who live them permanently switch from having a meaningful life (just about) to having an anti-meaningful life (just about) and back again, forever fluctuating between meaning and anti-meaning. We could then also expect lives to be very rarely meaningless, because in order to be meaningless there would have to be exactly the same amount of meaning and anti-meaning in it, so that meaning and anti-meaning cancel each other out, which is rather unlikely. It seems to me, then, that whatever we have in mind when we talk about meaning in our lives (and perhaps more importantly its absence), it is surely more complex than this rather mechanistic view of meaning and anti-meaning would suggest.

We may indeed want to say that somebody who does more good than bad in their life, or somebody who experiences mostly satisfaction and success, leads a better life than somebody who does more bad than good, or somebody who experiences mostly dissatisfaction and failure. But the reason for this may not be that their life is, on the whole, more meaningful. Perhaps it just lacks consistency or coherence, or perhaps dissatisfaction and frustrated life plans count as bad, even though they do not make your life any less meaningful. The whole scenario assumes that we can actually make our lives more meaningful by consistently seeking out meaningful activities and avoiding those that are anti-meaningful or meaningless. If you devote every hour of your day to making the world a better place, whereas I spend only 50% of your day on making the world a better place, using the rest of my time for meaningless activities such as walking the dog, doing the dishes, or watching a romantic comedy with my wife, then your life would apparently be much more meaningful than mine (twice as meaningful, to be exact), at least on the contributing-to-objective-good theory of meaning. Or if (in accordance with the aim-achievement theory of meaning) I only get to achieve half of my central goals in life and you achieve all of them, then your life is so much more meaningful than mine (again, twice as meaningful). What, then, do we make of people who, like the members of the German resistance group White Rose, fight bravely against an oppressive regime and pay for it with their lives? Clearly they did not achieve their goals, but were their lives therefore less meaningful than if they had succeeded? Are we really prepared to say that their lives were in fact even worse than just meaningless, namely “anti-meaningful”, as the discussion in this paper suggests? Sometimes it is better to try and to fail than not to try at all. Perhaps that is why (according to Camus) we need to imagine Sisyphus as happy (precisely because his life, despite the apparent pointlessness of how he spends it, achieves meaning by his refusal to accept that it is best for the rock to remain at the bottom of the hill).