Environmental Agency and the Objective Foundations of Meaning — Epoche C1
The dispute, and a misattribution to clear away first Whether a life spent restoring a drained wetland is more meaningful than a life spent pleasantly is the question this essay turns on, and the answer defended here is that it can be, for reasons that have little to do with how the restorer feels about it. Before that case can be made, however, one repair is needed. The compressed version of this essay presented its opponent as Shelly Kagan, attributing to Death (2012) the thesis that meaningfulness reduces to an individual's subjective experience. That attribution should not stand. Death is principally an argument about why dying is bad for the one who dies — Kagan defends the deprivation account, on which death harms a person by depriving them of the goods their continued life would have contained — and where the book turns to the value of a life it presents hedonism, the view that only pleasurable experience is good in itself, as one option to be weighed rather than as a conclusion to be adopted. The view the essay actually opposes has a clearer proponent. Richard Taylor, in the essay "The Meaning of Life" (1970), takes Sisyphus — condemned by the gods to roll a boulder up a hill for ever, watching it roll back down — as the paradigm case of a meaningless existence, and then asks what would have to change for the life to become meaningful. His answer is: nothing outside Sisyphus. Suppose the gods, in a stroke of mercy, implant in him an overwhelming craving to roll stones. The labour is unchanged, the product still nothing, and yet, Taylor says, the life is now meaningful, because meaning consists in the agent's own drives being engaged and fulfilled. That is subjectivism about meaning in its sharpest and most honest form, and it is the position the rest of this essay contests. The alternative defended here is not the opposite extreme. Susan Wolf's Meaning in Life and Why It Matters (2010) sets out the hybrid position in a phrase: meaning arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness. Both conditions are required. A person indifferent to what they are doing does not lead a meaningful life however worthwhile the activity, and a person passionately absorbed in something worthless does not either. The environmental case is a good test of this formula precisely because both halves are visible in it — the restorer must care, and the wetland must be worth restoring. Why experience alone cannot be the whole story Two arguments bear against the purely subjective account, and they are of different strengths; the difference is worth marking rather than blurring. The first is Robert Nozick's experience machine, from Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974). Imagine a device that can give you any experiences you choose, indistinguishable from the inside from the real thing: you would float in a tank, believing yourself to be writing a novel or making a friend. You may programme a lifetime. Nozick observes that most people, asked whether they would plug in, decline — and he draws three lessons: we want actually to do things and not merely to have the experience of doing them; we want to be a certain sort of person, and someone floating in a tank is nothing in particular; and we want contact with a reality not of our own making. The argument's evidential status should be stated honestly: it appeals to a widely shared reaction rather than demonstrating anything, and a determined subjectivist can simply report a willingness to plug in. What it establishes is that the burden lies with the subjectivist, since the ordinary understanding of a meaningful life is not one that experience alone satisfies. The second argument is the one the compressed version gave: if any positive internal response confers meaning, then trivial and demanding activities come out equal. Stated that way it is too quick, and the subjectivist's reply must be conceded before it is answered. Sophisticated subjectivisms do not count every passing thrill; desire-satisfaction theories restrict the desires that matter to those that are informed and stable, and Taylor's own account requires a persisting drive rather than a momentary pleasure. The objection must therefore be sharpened, and the Sisyphus case is what sharpens it. Hold the internal states fixed: let the drugged Sisyphus and the wetland restorer be equal in intensity of engagement, in stability of desire, and in reflective endorsement. No restriction statable in purely subjective terms then separates them, because there is nothing left on the subjective side to separate. If a difference remains, it lies in the object of the engagement or in the standard the activity meets. That is the turn the rest of the essay follows. What the Aristotelian framework actually claims The framework invoked to supply that missing element is Aristotle's, and it helps to say what it commits one to rather than gesture at it. Eudaimonia , the term at its centre, is badly served by "happiness", which suggests a mood; "flourishing" or "doing well" is closer, and Aristotle's own argument shows why. In the Nicomachean Ethics he asks what the characteristic work or function of a human being is, reasoning that just as the good of a flautist lies in flute-playing done well, the human good lies in the characteristic human activity done well. He concludes that the human good is activity of the soul in accordance with excellence, over a complete life (1098a16–18). Two features of that formula do the work needed here. The first is that it names an activity , not a state: eudaimonia is something one does, so it cannot be conferred by a drug or a tank. The second is that the activity is assessed against a standard — aretē , excellence, a wider notion than moral virtue, since a knife and a horse have their excellences too. Aristotle is explicit about where pleasure fits: it completes the activity, he says, in the way that bloom completes those in the prime of life (1174b31–33). Pleasure supervenes o