As Christine
Korsgaard points out, “[c]oncepts like knowledge, beauty, and meaning, as well
as virtue and justice, all have a normative dimension, for they tell us what to
think, what to like, what to say, what to do, and what to be” (The Sources of Normativity, p.9; italics
added). When we apply these concepts to make judgments, we make normative
judgments. This is the case when the concept of meaning (or meaningfulness) is
applied to a human life. Suppose I ask the question about my life’s meaningfulness
and answer it positively, that is, I make the judgment that my life is
meaningful. Such a judgment has implications for me with respect to my thought
and action: it is not just that the judgment implies some possible things that
I can think or do; it is that it makes claims on me and I admit that it has
authority over me. In other words, I feel the normative force of the judgment
that my life is meaningful.
Why does
the judgment that my life is meaningful have normative authority over me? First
of all, such a judgment is not subjective --- it is not, as some may put it,
just a matter of one’s opinion. The judgment that my life is meaningful is
intersubjective or interpersonal. And second, the judgment has to be justified,
rational, or supported by good reasons. I am rationally compelled by the
judgment to think or act in certain ways rather than others. Putting these two
aspects together, the judgment ‘My life is meaningful’ is, as Allan Gibbard
puts it in his discussion of normative authority, “interpersonally valid” (Wise Choices, Apt Feelings, p.155).
When I
judge that my life is meaningful, not only do I have a positive evaluation of
my life, a positive answer to the question of who I am, and a good reason for
my existence, I also have a clear answer to the question of how I should live
my life --- what I should think, what I should like, what I should say, what I
should do, and what I should be. It is difficult to see how the judgment can
have normative implications for me and for others, and can significantly
constrain or direct my life, if I understand the meaningfulness of my life to
be something purely subjective, something depends solely on what I happen to
believe, feel, desire, or value. In order to have normative authority over me,
such a judgment has to be, like other normative judgments, at least in some
respect intersubjective if not objective too. The normative force of such an
evaluative judgment has to come, at least partly, from something beyond my
subjective perspective in the sense that the correctness of the judgment is not
simply up to me.
This is
why there is a significant difference between ‘My life is meaningful’ and ‘My
life is meaningful to me’. I would
not be altogether satisfied if the latter was all I could truly say as an
answer to the question about my life’s meaningfulness. There would be something
wrong with my understanding of meaningfulness if I believed that my life is
meaningful simply because it is meaning to me. In this respect judgments about
meaningfulness are like judgments about beauty: if I want to know whether I am
beautiful, the answer ‘I am beautiful to me’ is not going to be good enough to
me. Even if beauty is in the eye of the beholder, there has to be at least one
beholder other than oneself.
