Susan Wolf, in her work Meaning of Life, explains that the question as to what the meaning of life questions the purpose behind our existence in the world. She then proceeds to answer the same problem. She argues that the meaning of the life of a human being should not be considered from a subjective perspective but an objective one.
A meaningful life according to her is that which is actively engaged in successful projects of positive value. In the author’s account of what makes the experience useful, she disagrees with the view that life is meaningful if it meets the subjective criteria like making a person happy. There is much more to a purposeful life than merely being happy as a person (Wolf Pp.90).
Wolf justifies her argument with the fact that there lived quite many people who were happy as individuals, but their lives cannot be counted as important ones. For example, she cites Blob who had a great deal of happiness and contentedness but in her view led a meaningless life. To support her argument further, she gives life examples of Gandhi and Mother Teresa who both did not have particularly happy lives but objectively speaking their lives were meaningful.
This author’s work basis his arguments on the compatibilist school of thought in which the history of ethics postulates that a man with the capability to reason well has free will to act with the full knowledge of what is right and what is wrong (Friedenberg and Silverman Pp.45). She refers to her argument which is aligned with this school of thought as the asymmetry of the reason view; according to this view, the responsibility of a human being for their actions depends on their ability to reason and consequently substantiate right from wrong.
