Susan Wolf's Meaning In Life And Why It Matters

In this paper, I will argue that all lives are not equally meaningful. I believe this because though all lives have meaning, there are some lives that, when viewed from more than one perspective, have more meaning than others. This imbalance can be explained through the discussion of the three main “measurements” of meaningfulness such as the egoistic perspective, the reasons of love and the two endoxa as well as how happy or fulfilled people feel in regards to their lives. At the moment, the most popular way of thinking about the topic having meaning in life seems to be that meaning comes from ideas branching from egoism, reasons of love, or the two endoxa as explained in Susan Wolf’s book “Meaning in Life and Why It Matters.” The egoistic perspective is states that people act in pursuit of self-interest. To elaborate, within the egoistic perspective there is the descriptive thesis (that people seek their own goods) and the normative thesis (that people are only rational in that they seek to maximize their own welfare). This relates to the impersonal perspective, which is similar to
I acknowledge that all humans have reason in that no matter what, it’s in our nature to search for happiness and fulfillment, therefore we act out accordingly, thus giving us meaning in life. However, my paper has established that this is not enough to say that all lives are equally meaningful. It is difficult to label an exact measure onto subjective measurements that play into perspectives such as egoism and reasons of love, thus leaving the objective view on how the world has changed because of one person as the best way to determine how much meaning one has in their life. So, because subjective reasons are unquantifiable and some lives have a greater impact on the world around them, the lives have contributed more to the world have more meaning than the ones who have contributed