Pub Date : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.1017/S1358246121000321
F. Kamm
Abstract In this paper, I consider the idea of meaning in life as I believe it has arisen in some discussions of ageing and death. I critically examine and compare the views of Atul Gawande and Ezekiel Emanuel, connecting their views to the idea of meaning in life. I further consider the relation of meaning in life to both the dignity of the person and the reasonableness of continuing or not continuing to live. In considering these issues, I evaluate and draw on Bernard Williams’ distinction between categorical and conditional desires, Susan Wolf's work on meaning in life, and Jeremy Waldron's views on dignity in old age.
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Pub Date : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.1017/S1358246121000217
Sven Nyholm
Abstract The absence of meaningfulness in life is meaninglessness. But what is the polar opposite of meaningfulness? In recent and ongoing work together with Stephen Campbell and Marcello di Paola respectively, I have explored what we dub ‘anti-meaning’: the negative counterpart of positive meaning in life. Here, I relate this idea of ‘anti-meaningful’ actions, activities, and projects to the topic of death, and in particular the deaths or suffering of those who will live after our own deaths. Connecting this idea of anti-meaning and what happens after our own deaths to recent work by Samuel Scheffler on what he calls ‘the collective afterlife’ and his four reasons to care about future generations, I argue that if we today make choices or have lifestyles that later lead to unnecessarily early deaths and otherwise avoidable suffering of people who will live after we have died, this robs our current choices and lifestyles of some of their meaning, perhaps even making them the opposite of meaningful in the long run.
生活中没有意义就是没有意义。但是意义的对立面是什么呢?在最近和正在进行的与Stephen Campbell和Marcello di Paola的合作中，我分别探索了我们称之为“反意义”的东西:生活中积极意义的消极对应。在这里，我将这种“反意义”的行为、活动和项目的概念与死亡的主题联系起来，特别是那些在我们死后活着的人的死亡或痛苦。将反意义的观点和我们死后会发生的事情与塞缪尔·舍弗勒最近关于他所谓的“集体来世”的研究以及他关心后代的四个理由联系起来，我认为，如果我们今天做出的选择或生活方式，后来会导致不必要的过早死亡，或者在我们死后会活下来的人遭受本来可以避免的痛苦，这就剥夺了我们当前选择和生活方式的一些意义，也许从长远来看，它们甚至会变得毫无意义。
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Pub Date : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.1017/s1358246121000278
M. Hauskeller
Abstract Famously, Bernard Williams has argued that although death is an evil if it occurs when we still have something to live for, we have no good reason to desire that our lives be radically extended because any such life would at some point reach a stage when we become indifferent to the world and ourselves. This is supposed to be so bad for us that it would be better if we died before that happens. Most critics have rejected Williams’ arguments on the grounds that it is far from certain that we will run out of things to live for, and I don't contest these objections. Instead, I am trying to show that they do not affect the persuasiveness of Williams’ argument, which in my reading does not rely on the claim that we will inevitably run out of things to live for, but on the far less contentious claim that it is not unthinkable we will do so and the largely ignored claim that if that happens, we will have died too late.
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Pub Date : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.1017/S1358246121000308
M. Cholbi
Abstract The deaths of those on whom our practical identities rely generate a sense of disorientation or alienation from the world seemingly at odds with life being meaningful. In the terms put forth in Cheshire Calhoun's recent account of meaningfulness in life, because their existence serves as a metaphysical presupposition of our practical identities, their deaths threaten to upend a background frame of agency against which much of our choice and deliberation takes place. Here I argue for a dual role for grief in addressing this threat to life's meaningfulness. Inasmuch as grief's object is the loss of our relationship with the deceased as it was prior to their death, grief serves to alert us to the threat to our practical identities that their deaths pose to us and motivates us to defuse this threat by revising our practical identities to reflect the modification in our relationship necessitated by their deaths. Simultaneously, the emotional complexity and richness of grief episodes provides an abundance of normative evidence regarding our relationship with the deceased and our practical identities, evidence that can enable us to re-establish our practical identities and thereby recover a sense of our lives as meaningful.
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Pub Date : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.1017/S1358246121000369
H. Carel
Abstract This paper offers a nexus of terms – mortality, limits, contingency and vulnerability – painting a picture of human life as marked by limitation and finitude. I suggest that limitations of possibility, capacity, and resource are deep features of human life, but not only restrict it. Limits are also the conditions of possibility for human life and as such have productive, normative, and creative powers that not only delimit life but also scaffold growth and transformation within it. The paper takes a less known interpretation of the term ‘ephēmeros', to mean ‘of the day', rather than ‘short-lived' and suggests that as ephemeral, human life is contingent and mutable, subject to events beyond our control. However, virtue can still be exercised – indeed, can be exuberantly displayed – when we respond to contingent events marked by adversity.
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Pub Date : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.1017/s1358246121000333
F. Svenaeus
Abstract One way to examine the enigmatic meaningfulness of human life is to ask under which conditions persons ask in earnest for assistance to die, either through euthanasia or physician assisted suicide. The counterpart of intolerable suffering must consist in some form of, however minimal, flourishing that makes people want to go on with their lives, disregarding other reasons to reject assisted dying that have more to do with religious prohibitions. To learn more about why persons want to hasten death during the last days, weeks or months of their lives, what kinds of suffering they fear and what they hold to be the main reasons to carry on or not carry on living, the paper offers some examples from a book written by the physician Uwe-Christian Arnold. He has helped hundreds of persons in Germany to die with the aid of sedative drugs the last 25 years, despite the professional societies and codes in Germany that prohibit such actions. The paper discusses various examples from Arnold's book and makes use of them to better understand not only why people sometimes want to die but what made their lives meaningful before they reached this final decision.
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Pub Date : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.1017/S1358246121000205
M. Hauskeller
Due to the Covid pandemic, the Royal Institute of Philosophy Annual Conference 2020 had to be postponed and was eventually held online in July 2021. The conference, on which this volume is based, was meant to explore the connection between death and meaning (in life). What motivated me to host a conference on that particular theme was initially my interest in the philosophical debate on human enhancement and the possibility and desirability (or undesirability) of radical life extension. Naturally, that debate is complex and touches on many different aspects of the human condition. However, there is one claim in particular that captured my attention because the question it raised struck me as being of fundamental importance for the entire discussion. It is the claim, occasionally made by transhumanists and other proponents of radical life extension, that death undercuts meaning, in the sense that as long as our lives will have to end someday, our lives cannot possibly be meaningful (More, 1990). Even religion with its promise of a life after death, it is alleged, can only ever achieve the illusion of meaning, but never the real thing. This is mainly because true meaningfulness cannot be derived from being part of somebody else’s (in this case God’s) plan, which supposedly has the inevitable effect of stifling a sense of our own personal value. Yet it is claimed that without such a sense of personal value our (individual) lives must lack true meaning, for what gives our lives (true) meaning is ‘the continuation of the process of improvement and transformation of ourselves into ever higher forms’ (More, 1990, p. 10). Since this process is understood as open-ended, it is clear that death, by bringing it to an end, destroys not only the meaning that any individual life can have up to the point of its termination, but the very possibility of meaning. If our lives can only have meaning if we can pursue ‘our own expansion and progress without end’ (More, 1990, p. 12), then life can only be meaningful if it never ends. That connection to meaning may well play a part in why death is often perceived and described as the greatest evil. It is the greatest of evils not merely because it sets an end to
由于新冠肺炎疫情，英国皇家哲学研究所2020年年会不得不推迟，最终于2021年7月在网上举行。这本书的基础是这次会议，旨在探讨死亡与(生命中的)意义之间的联系。促使我举办这个特别主题会议的原因，最初是我对人类增强以及激进延长寿命的可能性和可取性(或不可取性)的哲学辩论感兴趣。当然，这场辩论是复杂的，涉及人类状况的许多不同方面。然而，有一种说法特别引起了我的注意，因为它提出的问题对整个讨论具有根本性的重要性。超人类主义者和其他激进延长生命的支持者偶尔会说，死亡削弱了生命的意义，因为只要我们的生命总有一天会结束，我们的生命就不可能有意义(More, 1990)。据称，即使是承诺死后生命的宗教，也只能实现意义的幻觉，而永远无法实现真正的意义。这主要是因为真正的意义不能从成为别人(在这种情况下是上帝)计划的一部分中获得，这被认为会不可避免地扼杀我们自己的个人价值感。然而，有人声称，如果没有这种个人价值感，我们(个体)的生活必然缺乏真正的意义，因为赋予我们生活(真正)意义的是“不断改进和将我们自己转化为更高形式的过程”(More, 1990, p. 10)。由于这一过程被理解为开放式的，很明显，死亡结束了这一过程，不仅摧毁了任何个体生命在其结束时所能拥有的意义，而且摧毁了意义的可能性。如果我们的生命只有在追求“无止境的自我扩展和进步”时才有意义(More, 1990, p. 12)，那么生命只有在永不结束时才有意义。这种与意义的联系很可能在一定程度上解释了为什么死亡经常被认为是最大的邪恶。它是最大的罪恶不仅仅因为它终结
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Pub Date : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.1017/S1358246121000242
J. Taylor
Abstract Many people attempt to give meaning to their lives by pursuing projects that they believe will bear fruit after they have died. Knowing that their death will preclude them from protecting or promoting such projects people who draw meaning from them will often attempt to secure their continuance by securing promises from others to serve as their caretakers after they die. But those who rely on such are faced with a problem: None of the four major accounts that have been developed to explain directed promissory obligation (the Authority View, the Trust View, the Assurance View, and the Reliance View) support the view that we are obligated to keep our promises to persons who are now dead. But I will provide hope for those who wish to use such promises to protect the meaning with which they have endowed their lives. I will argue that while we cannot wrong a person who is now dead by breaking a promise made to her during her life, we could wrong the living by so doing. We thus (might) have reason to keep the promises that we made to those who are now dead.
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Pub Date : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.1017/S1358246121000199
H. Carel
Havi Carel is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bristol. She recently completed a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award, the Life of Breath. She was awarded the Health Humanities’ Inspiration Award 2018 for this work. Her third monograph, Phenomenology of Illness, was published by Oxford University Press in 2016. She was selected as a ‘Best of Bristol’ lecturer in 2016. Havi is the author of Illness (2008, 2013, 2018), shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize, and of Life and Death in Freud and Heidegger (2006). She is the co-editor of Health, Illness and Disease (2012), New Takes in Film-Philosophy (2010), and of What Philosophy Is (2004).
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Pub Date : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.1017/S1358246121000266
D. Hill
Abstract In my 2002 piece ‘The Meaning of Life’ I argued that Life, meaning the sum of the lives of all living things, had a meaning if and only if it had been purposefully brought about by a designer or creator. Michael Hauskeller has recently criticized this argument, responding that this sense of ‘meaning’ is not the one in view when we are discussing ‘the meaning of life’. In this piece I respond to Hauskeller's argument, and, while I stand by my 2002 argument in terms of one meaning of ‘meaning’, I admit that it does not apply to the different question of what makes a life meaningful. I assert that glorifying God is the activity that contributes the most meaningfulness to a life, though I deny that this is the only activity that can contribute meaningfulness to a life. This makes me, in terms due to Thaddeus Metz, a moderate supernaturalist rather than an extreme supernaturalist. Despite this distinction, Metz has argued in this volume that moderate supernaturalism is vulnerable to the same objection as in his view defeats extreme supernaturalism, and I close by responding to this argument.
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