What does it all mean? (I)

In the opening chapter of his book, On the Meaning of Life, John Cottingham asks: "Can a radically immoral life really be meaningful?" He proposes some conditions that might rule this out: "the meaningful life for human beings is an integrated life", whereas the life of the torturer, say, is likely to be fragmented. What is more, "in order to be meaningful, life must meet the standards of some pattern tailored to our human nature, rather than being a pure function of isolated individual choice."

Forget, for a moment, whether these claims are true. What do they have to do with the meaning of life? It is a famously opaque question, but as I understand it, when we ask whether life has meaning, we are not interested in the meaningfulness of individual lives, but in human life in general. Scepticism about the meaning of life is not piecemeal: "Ned's life isn't meaningful, nor is Kate's, nor is mine. I wonder whether anyone has a meaningful life?" If human life has meaning, all human life has meaning; if not, none. Consequently, much of Cottingham's discussion strikes me as mis-directed. (I have the same complaint about other recent work on the topic.)

To repeat: the demand for meaning is obscure. How to get a grip on it? One strategy is to look at the ways in which it might be satisfied – or not.

So, what could give meaning to life? The overwhelmingly instinctive response is: God. Thus, I think it is a constraint on any adequate account of the question of life's meaning to explain why this would seem to do the job.

In much the same way, we need to make sense of the argument that life is meaningless because we are tiny specks in an endless cosmos – even if we reject that argument in the end. Much as I adore it, I cannot be satisfied with Ramsey's charming riposte:

Where I seem to differ from some of my friends is in attaching little importance to physical size. I don't feel the least humble before the vastness of the heavens. The stars may be large, but they cannot think or love; and these are qualities which impress me far more than size does. I take no credit for weighing nearly seventeen stone.

A tempting proposal is that life has meaning just in case human lives play a role in a larger functional whole. After all, the question of life's meaning is often framed as a question about the point of life, about whether it has a purpose. This would account for the relevance of God, but also for the view that life has meaning only because it is social, and the attempt to give meaning to life by putting us "in harmony with nature".

There must something in this "functional interpretation", but it does not take us very far. For one thing, it won't explain why the magnitude of the universe seems like an argument against the meaning of life. On the functional view, appeal to size is no more than a stand-in for mechanism or the rejection of purpose, as in the planetarium scene of Rebel Without a Cause. But the problem of mechanism is about freedom and agency, not about meaning: it is not the problem I have in mind.

In any case, the functional interpretation makes it hard to see why we should want life to have meaning. What is the appeal of being cogs in a divine machine? As well as explaining why God seems relevant, and why size really matters, an interpretation of our question must explain why anyone should care about the meaning of life.