Content area
Full Text
J Value Inquiry (2011) 45:309317
DOI 10.1007/s10790-011-9293-x
Iddo Landau
Published online: 26 October 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
1 Introduction
Does a life need to pass a certain threshold of moral level in order to be meaningful? Could highly immoral people, such as Hitler or Stalin, have meaningful lives? To focus on the relation between immorality and the meaning of life, we may bracket other considerations that complicate the evaluation of the meaningfulness of lives. For example, in the case of Hitler, we may disregard his failure to realize his ends, assume that he took his own life to be meaningful, and ignore that he did not behave immorally all his life. We may then ask if the radical immorality of his life undermines its meaningfulness.
Advocates of subjectivist theories of the meaning of life imply that highly immoral lives could be meaningful. Advocates of subjectivist theories do not rely on objective criteria, but take the endorsement of certain beliefs, feelings, or sensations about a persons life to be a sufcient condition for leading a meaningful life. Richard Taylor, for example, argues that if Sisyphus had a keen and unappeasable desire to be doing just what he found himself doing, then . it would have a meaning for him.1 But this also suggests that if Hitler had a keen and unappeasable desire to be doing just what he found himself doing his life, too, was meaningful. This is also the case for other subjectivist theories of the meaning of life. Since on subjectivist theories a persons belief that his life is meaningful is a sufcient condition for leading a meaningful life, advocates of such theories allow that radically immoral lives could be meaningful.
1 Richard Taylor, The Meaning of Life, in Richard Taylor, Good and Evil (New York: Macmillan, 1970), p. 265.
Iddo Landau (&)
Department of Philosophy, Haifa University, Haifa 31905, Israel e-mail: [email protected]
Immorality and the Meaning of Life
123
310 Iddo Landau
Advocates of some other theories present both subjective and objective conditions for meaningfulness, but since the objective conditions they present do not have to do with morality, they too allow that highly immoral lives would be considered meaningful. A. J. Ayer, for example, posits subjectively the degree to...