Achievement and Meaning in Life

Abstract

AbstractAchievements play a key role in many accounts of meaning in life. What characterizes projects that are the best sources of objective worth and meaning? A natural thought is that the achievements that are the most objectively worthwhile and therefore the most significant for meaning are those that accomplish some great good, but John Stuart Mill’s crisis, recounted in his autobiography, casts doubt on this thought: imagining the completion of his life’s goals robs them of their meaningfulness to him. It has been suggested that the most meaningful projects have goals we cannot imagine completing. This chapter gives an account of the structure of the projects that can be the richest source of meaning, and explains why that is so: projects with self-propagating goals involve the pursuit of continued challenge, which activates the value-theoretic principle of recursion, yielding a rich and potentially unending source of value and meaning.