Meaning and medicine: An underexplored bioethical value

The gap would be traversed if it were the case that, say, the word ‘moral’ by definition meant the most weighty considerations for or against an action. However, contemporary philosophers have demonstrated that this is not what the word ‘moral’ means. If talk of ‘right’ and even ‘morally required’ by definition connoted the most important reasons, then it would be logically contradictory to pose the question of whether one ought to do what is right or morally required. However, even if one in fact ought to do what is right or required, it is not incoherent to wonder whether one should. An ‘amoralist’, one who asks whether one should live a moral life, is intelligible and is not speaking nonsense. See Brink (1989, pp. 46–50, 59, 84).

Consider that, according to GoogleScholar, this book has been cited about 30,000 times at the time of writing this article.

Some might accept that there is a category of meaning but deny that it is something that makes a life more desirable. For the purposes of this article, advancing that position is welcome—doing so is consistent with the basic point that bioethicists and the like need to engage in systematic debate about the nature and worth of meaning.

The following point is cribbed from Metz (2015, pp. 120–121).

See related debate about whether genetically modifying non-human organisms would also undercut meaning in, eg, van den Belt (2009).

For discussion of some of the complex relationships between meaning and morality, see Kipke and Rüther (2019).

For overviews of recent English-speaking philosophical literature on life’s meaning, see Metz (2021); Seachris (2021). For the most comprehensive anthologies of such literature, see Seachris (2013b); Klemke and Cahn (2018).