Value-theory & the Good Life

1. Value-theory & the Good Life Section 3 Worthwhile Life, Self-respect & Meaningful Work

2. Worthwhile life • A worthwhile life can be distinguished from a worthy or virtuous life, & also from a life of which the quality is so low as not to be worth living.

3. Worthwhile life • The possibility of lives not being worth living raises issues about voluntary euthanasia & about infanticide. • Voluntary euthanasia can be justifiable in rare but imaginable cases

4. Worthwhile life • What makes life worth living is activities, states & experiences of intrinsic value. • There is intrinsic value in the development or flourishing of essential human capacities in general.

5. Objection • Someone might say that what makes life worthwhile varies with conceptions of life, & that these conceptions are constituted by the values of one’s society. Reply • The position presented above (on the previous slides, this Section) is compatible with numerous conceptions of what makes life worthwhile (where ‘conceptions’ consist in sets of beliefs about the application of the key concepts, such as flourishing and worthwhileness).

6. Self-respect According to John Rawls, self-respect combines two ingredients: • ‘a person’s sense of his own value, his secure conviction that his conception of the good, his plan of life, is worth carrying out’. • ‘a confidence in one’s ability, so far as it is within one’s power, to fulfill one’s intentions’. He adds that without self-respect, either nothing may seem worth doing, or people lack the desire to strive even for what they regard as valuable [see note 1 (last slide, this Section)].

7. Self-respect • A slight corrective to Rawls’ view is in place. For people with no plan of life can still have self-respect, as long as they have standards about which they care, related to the central practice or practices of their life, & thus have a set of implicit priorities. • This helps explain why meaningful work normally facilitates self-respect. For people whose work is meaningful comply with their own standards of skill or judgement, & are typically aware of doing so [see note 2 (last slide, this Section)].

8. Self-respect & Meaningful Work • When people care about standards relating to their activities in this way, they necessarily want to comply with them; & so the awareness that they are achieving this will necessarily be rewarding, even if they remain dissatisfied with their achievements to some degree. • This is one reason why self-respect is argued to have intrinsic value, & confers such value on meaningful work.

9. Meaningful Work • Meaningful work is further argued to have intrinsic value because of its very nature. It has a place in worthwhile lives both because it conveys self-respect & because it embodies the development of an essential human capacity.

10. Meaningful Work • This raises issues about the desirability of full employment both in developed & developing societies.

11. References 1. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971, p. 440. 2. See further Robin Attfield, ‘Work and the Human Essence’, Journal of Applied Philosophy, 1, 1984, pp. 141-50.