ON REDEMPTION:

THE VALUE OF PUTTING BAD THINGS TO GOOD USE

A DISSERTATION

SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY

AND THE COMMITTEE ON GRADUATE STUDIES

OF STANFORD UNIVERSITY

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENT

FOR THE DEGREE OF

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Peyton McElroy

March 2011

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/

This dissertation is online at: http://purl.stanford.edu/gq597rc8146

© 2011 by Peyton Craig McElroy. All Rights Reserved.

Re-distributed by Stanford University under license with the author.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

ii

I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequatein scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

R. Anderson, Primary Adviser

I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequatein scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

David Hills

I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequatein scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Tamar Schapiro

I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequatein scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Allen Wood

Approved for the Stanford University Committee on Graduate Studies.

Patricia J. Gumport, Vice Provost Graduate Education

This signature page was generated electronically upon submission of this dissertation in electronic format. An original signed hard copy of the signature page is on file inUniversity Archives.

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v

Abstract

This dissertation offers a theory of a practical solution to the problem of lost

meaning in a person’s life due to bad, past events. The starting-point is the following

set of claims: each of us wishes for a meaningful life but each of us, too, is vulnerable

to threats to the meaning in her life (past regrets, mistakes, misfortune and general

loss). The dissertation offers an answer to the question of whether there is anything we

can do to restore lost meaning in our lives.

I connect this phenomenon of restoring meaning to the past to two different

models of redemption: the Hebrew-Christian model and an account of the same

developed in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. I point out that the Hebrew-Christian

model (the account that gives many of us the notion of redemption with which we are

most familiar) relies on a fundamentally compensatory view of redemption (being paid

back for sufferings or paying back for one’s misdoings), which I argue is an

undesirable feature for a theory to have, since, it does not actually do the job making

the regrettable parts of our lives any less regrettable or more endorsable than they

were before, and, because of this, does not restore value to our lives overall.

Nietzsche’s creative response to the Hebrew-Christian model, on the other

hand, avoids compensation altogether. Because of this, it evades the objections

besetting the Hebrew-Christian account. I rely on work from Lanier Anderson to

interpret Nietzsche’s idea of redemption as the transformation of the role a bad past

event plays in a person’s life such that affirmation of that life is possible, yet again, for

the agent. I show, however, that Nietzsche’s account has problems stemming from its

moral implications. Therefore, I propose an alternative model of redemption, one that

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builds on Nietzsche’s account, keeping narrative transformation at the heart of

redemption, but developing new criteria for that transformation. On my account,

redemption is a matter of restoring meaningfulness to a life by transforming the

meanings of regretted events from bad to good in a thick, normative sense that counts

positively toward an agent’s well-being. My ultimate thesis will be that such a

transformation makes a life more meaningful than it would have been otherwise.

The first step in my argument is to show that events get their meanings from

the narratives in which they are situated. I draw on a variety of contemporary theorists

in the debate on what a narrative is. I argue that other accounts of narrative, though

each reasonable in its own way, have various drawbacks that ought to be avoided. I

claim that a plausible view that can avoid these problems is the position that narrative

is a set of represented events arranged around a telos. An event, then, gets its meaning

by its relationship to an organizing telos: it has positive or negative import depending

on the extent to which it advances or thwarts the aim in question. I raise the concern,

however, that this sense of “meaning” may not work for actual lives of people. I

suggest that the what is at stake in the determination of an event’s meaning for a

person’s actually life is not merely significance with respect to an agent’s aim, but also

other considerations that bear on the agent’s well-being (such as the value of the aim

to which the event contributes).

The implication for the thesis of this complicating observation is that

redemption is a matter of restoration of well-being that comes when an agent

transforms the role of an event from bad to good in a thick, normative sense. I suggest,

however, that this cannot be quite right since, we find it natural to think there is

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something more at stake in redemption—a restoration of a particular relationship

between a person and her past, or between a person and beloved pursuits in her life. I

suggest that what is at stake is the meaningfulness of a person’s past, and a person’s

life overall: the narrative transformation of redemption, I claim, satisfies criteria for

meaningfulness and because of this, can be said to restore meaningfulness to the

person’s life.

In order to show that this is true, I must investigate the value of

meaningfulness in a person’s life. This is the next step in my argument. I do this

mainly by reviewing Susan Wolf’s account of meaningfulness in her book, Meaning

In Life And Why It Matters. I argue that though Wolf’s account of the conception of

meaningfulness is compelling, it cannot quite account for the way in which teleology

functions in the realization of meaningfulness. I point out that we seem to think that

how the parts of a life fit together matters in an assessment of its overall

meaningfulness. It matters to us is that a person’s life exhibits personal growth and

development over time. I suggest inclusion of this feature of meaningfulness can

improve Wolf’s thesis.

The next step in my argument is an investigation into the kinds of attitudes that

give rise to redemptive behavior: these are regrets remorse and grief over loss that cut

deep enough to threaten the sense of meaning in our lives. I point out that while regret

is, arguably, a disvaluable attitude with painful affect and about something we cannot

change (the past), it is nonetheless valuable. I argue this point against a challenge form

Rudiger Bittner, “Is It Reasonable To Regret The Things One Did?” I show, contra

Bittner, that an agent who accepts the facts but not the import of the past, and so does

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not regret the things one did, stands to lose an important dimensions of

meaningfulness as discussed in Chapter III: the narrative of a person’s growth and

development. This conclusion generates the question, then, if we cannot jettison regret

altogether, what can we do in the face of threats to the meaning in our lives?

The final step in my argument is to answer that question by showing how an

agent can genuinely change the meaning of past events from bad to good—in a thick,

normative sense, (good for her). This narrative transformation, I argue, accomplishes a

restoration of meaningfulness since the agents’ past can now be represented as

satisfying criteria for meaningfulness articulated in Chapter III. I conclude that my

account of redemption is attractive, since it provides an agent with a practical solution

to the problem of lost meaningfulness without generating the objections found in the

alternate models (Hebrew-Christian and Nietzschean) discussed at the beginning of

this dissertation.

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Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Lanier Anderson for his insight, support and mentorship

throughout this process. Lanier’s unflagging intellectual enthusiasm and dogged

determination to examine and then solve philosophical puzzles, have had profound

effects on me. I cannot imagine doing philosophy any other way. Lanier quite literally

inspired me to pursue this project since it was his work on Nietzsche that captured my

imagination in the first place. I am, therefore, indebted to him for his philosophical

contributions and scholarship that I used to advance my own thesis. For his generosity

with his time and continued support throughout this process, I am extremely grateful.

I am also very appreciative of David Hills whose philosophical acumen

includes an uncanny ability to find subtleties, complications and nuances in what at

first might seem simple. He consistently asked tough questions of me and challenged

me on my assertions, always with the constructive project of this dissertation in mind.

Tamar Schapiro has been very helpful to this project. Her insights helped keep the

thesis relevant to conversations in ethics and moral psychology—which was important

to me. For a similar reasons I have Allen Wood to thank. His spirited challenges to

some of the Nietzschean implications in the thesis consistently helped me to avoid

making troublesome or wrong-headed claims that might have threatened the success

and appeal of the project as a whole. Finally, Agnieszka Jaworska, who was on my

committee in its early stages, gave her time and insights to this dissertation,

particularly in the area of moral psychology. My conversations with her were key to

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getting major parts of the thesis off the ground. For these reasons and so many others,

I am very grateful to each of my dissertation committee members.

Finally, I am deeply grateful to my family—my husband, my two children and

my parents. To my husband, I owe more than I can say. It was he who handed me

Allan Bloom’s translation of The Republic of Plato in our apartment in New York City

the summer of 2000 and said I ought to give it a read (even though I had never read

nor studied any philosophy before). Though at first I was utterly maddened by the

book (and once even threw it across the room in frustration), I was overcome by it, fell

in love with it and with philosophy in general. For years, my husband has fielded my

philosophical questions and ruminations, always in good humor and with his own

argumentative skill. Year after year, he has engaged me in philosophical conversation

that helped me to clarify my ideas, remind me of the reasons I began this dissertation

in the first place, and strengthen my resolve to finish the PhD. Without my husband,

Jamie, there would be no PhD, no dissertation. To my parents I also owe great thanks

since it was their support that to a large degree enabled me to write in my sixth and

seventh years—the years I completed the bulk of this project. I extend my deepest

thanks to all involved.

xi

Contents

I. Redemption: A Practical Solution to Lost Meaning in Life 1

Introduction 1

1.1 Problems in other accounts of redemption 8

1.1.1 The problem of compensation in the

Hebrew-Christian account 8

1.1.2 Friedrich Nietzsche’s account 16

1.1.2.1 Nietzsche’s solutions

to the Hebrew-Christian problems 17

1.1.2.2 Changing the ‘It was’ into the ‘Thus I willed it’ 19

1.1.2.3 Moral implications of Nietzsche’s account 25

1.2 The search for a plausible account of redemption 30

1.3 Chapter Outline 33

II. How Events In A Life Get Their Meanings 40

2.1 What is a narrative? 45

2.2 Narrative and teleology 60

2.3 A moderate view: Narrative as the representation of development

in teleology 66

2.4 Conclusion 77

III. The Value of Meaningfulness 83

3.1 The problem: What kind of value is at stake in redemption? 85

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3.2 Meaningfulness—a third kind of value 88

3.2.1 Wolf’s Fitting Fulfillment View 88

3.2.2 What’s missing: How the parts of a life

fit together for overall development 100

3.2.2.1 The importance of teleology

to the meaning in our lives 107

3.2.2.2 Narrative and the meaningful life 110

3.2.3 A possible solution:

Fitting Fulfillment along dimensions of meaning 112

3.3 Objection: Either “Who cares?” or “One-thought-too-many” 118

3.4 Conclusion: Redemption as rescued meaningfulness 124

IV. The Problem with and Importance of Regret, Grief

and Other Past-Directed Negative Attitudes 126

4.1 Bittner’s challenge: no regrets 129

4.2 Regret as a “reactive attitude” 135

4.3 Regret and the narrative self 144

4.4 Conclusion: Regret can threaten meaningfulness

but can also enhance it 157

V. Redemption: The Value of Putting Bad Things to Good Use 161

5.1 Narrative transformation: Genuine change or mere illusion? 163

5.1.1 Changing the Past 165

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5.1.2 Human will and changes in meaning 169

5.2 From bad to good: the mechanics of genuine meaning change 172

5.2.1 Untangling our muddled intuitions

by appeal to “the dimensions of import” 175

5.2.2 Changes in meaning: putting bad events to good use 179

5.3 Redemption as Restoration of Meaningfulness 190

5.4 How can we explain the lemons in the lemonade? 190

5.5 Conclusion 201

VI. Redemption of Misfortune, Error and Moral mistake:

Objections and Responses 203

6.1 Redemption of misfortune and deliberative error 204

6.1.1 Redemption of misfortune:

Bad experience becomes opportunity for growth 205

6.1.2 Redemption of deliberative error:

Mistake turns into advantage 207

6.2 Moral Conversion: The redemption of moral failure 209

6.2.1 Forgiveness and redemption:

Two distinct moral concepts? 210

6.2.2 George Wallace test case: Can dimensions of import

explain moral redemption? 222

6.2.3 Some objections and responses 231

6.2.3.1 Redemption as justification of bad behavior 231

xiv

6.2.3.2 Redemption ought to be about payback,

not narrative transformation 237

6.2.3.3 The plausibility of unintended redemption 245

6.2.3.4 Is it always good to seek redemption? 248

6.2.3.5 Are some events/actions unredeemable? 249

6.3 Conclusion 251

Bibliography 256

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1

I.

Redemption: A Practical Solution to Lost Meaning In Life

Introduction

Each one of us wishes for a meaningful life. We all want to feel that what we

do, the projects we pursue and general activities we participate in, the things we care

about and spend our time doing, matter in some larger sense—that they have value

independent of our own subjective investment in them. We also want what we do to

matter to us— we want our lives to be spent doing things we actually care about. The

meaning in our lives matters to us and we express this both about periods in our lives

(“My time spend with my grandmother those several years was very meaningful to

me.”) or even mere moments (“That was a very meaningful wedding ceremony.”) or

about our lives as wholes (“Gandhi lived a meaningful life.”).

Unfortunately, however, each of us is vulnerable to threats to the meaning in

our lives. There are losses over which we have no control that leave us grieving and

resentments we harbor that make it difficult to feel good about our lives. Sometimes

we feel alienated from our projects, losing the sense of where we are going or which

of our projects is truly worthwhile. Sometimes what are trying to do fails so

disastrously, that we doubt the value of the project as a whole or wonder if we were

right to even care about it from the start. Nearly everyone has felt the pain of remorse

or regret. Who hasn’t wished that he had acted differently in some situation? The pains

of regret can preoccupy us when we comb over the past and find that our choices and

experiences gnaw at us. Regrets, grievances and feelings of alienation—all responses

2

to perceived losses or mistakes in judgment—can threaten to diminish the

meaningfulness in our lives, or worse, render whole episodes of our lives seemingly

without meaning at all.

Is there anything we can do to rescue meaning from past, bad parts of our

lives? Initially we might find it natural to think that there is no way to rescue meaning

from past events since they are past, and what is in the past cannot be changed. In this

dissertation, however, I will argue otherwise. The thesis of this dissertation is that

there is something we can do to restore lost meaning in our lives: we can add events to

our lives going forward, that change the meaning of past events by altering the roles

that they play in our lives. I will call this practical solution to the problem of lost

meaning, “redemption” and argue that it is good for us to do, since it enables us to

welcome back our lives—even the difficult parts—as meaningful once again.

To see more vividly the kind of phenomenon I have in mind, consider an

example of an agent who is the victim of sexual assault. Imagine that because of the

unexpected and horrible event, she is vulnerable to feelings of loss and disorientation.

She is afraid to go outside her home and no longer takes for granted the confidence

required to accomplish such a simple task as shopping for groceries. The event

threatens the sense of meaning in her life, since it seems to have derailed some of the

key projects she had pursued prior to the attack.

Now imagine that the agent finds herself drawn to a support group for victims

of sexual assault—a support group provided by a local non-profit devoted to women’s

health. She attends regular meetings and begins to organize her life around support

group events. She develops friendships with group members and finds that doing so

3

provides her life with an organizing force that restores the sense of meaning the attack

seemed to have stolen away. Even more, she finds herself enthusiastic about taking a

leadership role within the support group community. She spearheads several

fundraisers and takes over as coordinator of the crisis hotline, making sure there is a

person at the desk at all times to respond to incoming calls. She begins to find great

meaning in being a positive force in the lives of other assault victims, providing for

them the support that others had given her in the weeks after the attack.

Over time, her involvement with the support and crisis center grows deeper.

When the Program Director of the nonprofit leaves her post, our agent jumps at the

chance to take over the position. Along with the board of directors, she works to

broaden the mission of the Center to include political activism, raising awareness in

the community of contributing factors to instances of sexual assault. She now finds

herself on the front lines of efforts to destigmatize victims of assault, as well as to

provide educational resources to perpetrators. Over time, she becomes a leader in her

community and highly values the experiences with the Center that put her in the

position of working alongside local corporations and municipal organizations such as

the city police, to develop projects that benefit women and other community members

at risk.

In short, the agent restores meaning in her life that had been lost in the wake of

the attack, and now regards everything about her support group activities as

meaningful and deeply important to her sense of herself. On the one hand, she regards

the sexual assault as a painful event in her life that bears negative significance in the

story of her personal development. It ended a life trajectory that was—up to that

4

point—unsullied by the hurt and pain of violence and abuse. On the other hand, the

event also bears some distinctively positive significance as an event that brought her

close to so much of what she now values, and shaped her in ways she has come to like

about herself. Her abilities to serve as a counsel to others, her profound appreciation

for her own psychological strength, as well as a far more developed sense of what

must be done in order to decrease the likelihood of attacks and abuse toward women,

are just a few of the positive legacies of this event in her life.

In this story, the agent responds to a loss of meaning in her life by undertaking

projects that change the narrative trajectory of her life, changing the salience of the

loss itself from something altogether bad to something good—making her life more

meaningful than it would have otherwise been all things considered. In this

dissertation, I am calling this kind of phenomenon redemption. I will show that though

it is not required of agents, it offers a plausible and practical solution to the problem of

lost meaning and as such, is a good thing for people to do.

The skeptic might worry that in arguing this way, I am claiming that

redemption is the only reasonable response to lost meaning in life. She might point to

a perfectly reasonable agent who chooses to respond to her losses by simply moving

on with her life as best she can without engaging in efforts to transform the meaning

of the past in the way described above. I am not however, claiming that redemption is

the only plausible response to lost meaning. To be sure, there are other ways that an

agent might respond to losses in her life, some of which better for an agent than

others. Consider the assault victim in the months after the attack. She could become

consumed by her anger and grief, allowing those responses to overwhelm her such that

5

they inhibit her functioning. In such a case we would have reason to believe that the

event had great negative import in her life, its meaning for her being far more

devastating than if she had managed to find a way to “move on” from it. Alternately,

the assault victim could deny the negative import of the event, trying to forget it as

best she could—in which case we might worry that she was in bad faith and that she

needed to reconcile herself to her past before moving on with her life.

Still further, there is another possible response: the agent in question could

reasonably accept that the attack was a loss but over time simply move on from it.

“That was then, this is now,” she might say, and do so in a way that didn’t cause in us

the worry that she was in denial of her pain. Rather, the agent in this scenario would

simply choose to move forward, adding events to her life that were meaningful in and

of themselves. Simply moving on is a perfectly reasonable response to loss and it

certainly seems better for the agent than the other two responses. Simply moving on

from loss, however, doesn’t solve the practical problem of restoring meaningfulness to

what has past. Bad, past events cannot be taken back or erased, but, nonetheless, can

diminish the meaning of the person’s life as a whole. The key question motivating this

dissertation is to what extent can an individual rescue lost meaning in their lives,

rescuing past events from utter disvalue when the past, itself, cannot be changed.

Another concern a skeptic might pose about the plausibility of the thesis is a

discomfort with the word “redemption” and the general concept of a practical solution

of the kind I have in mind. A skeptic might have several reasons for this. First, the

word “redemption” has religious connotations, theological roots that I will discuss in

the first section of this essay below. I do not think, however, the semantic history of

6

the word “redemption” ought to deter us from investigating the plausibility of the

concept, which, I argue in this dissertation, picks out a genuine human phenomenon.

Consider, too, that we now frequently speak of the concept of redemption

outside of a theological framework— though how we should understand the concept

of redemption without presuming the existence of God has not yet been explicitly

spelled out. We might say, for example, that a politician who makes a public gaffe

“redeems himself” when he later effects a key diplomatic move. We say that a

particular film is “redemptive” when the conclusion of the film leaves its audience

members with the sense that the human experience is not without hope, or that good

has prevailed over the bad in some way. Similarly, we talk about a person who

overcomes some difficult experience as having found a “redeeming” feature in her

trial: She now speaks of her suffering in some sense as a time of positive growth and

personal development such as in the case above of the assault victim.

It is the implicit claim of this dissertation that the concept of redemption would

benefit from philosophical attention. My explicit claim will be a defensible analysis of

redemption as a philosophical concept: what it is we mean when we say that a person

has “redeemed himself” and what a person must do in order to achieve redemption.1

A second reason the skeptic might cite as cause for concern is the general

worry that the phenomenon is implausible—the past cannot be change and is not a

proper object for practical deliberation. In addition, our intuitions about 1 While I think that redemption of past moral failings is a paradigmatic sense of redemption, there are other important kinds of redemption: redemption of error more generally (with no moral implication) and, more controversially, a person’s redemption of misfortune. In my dissertation, I will defend these latter kinds as genuine cases of redemption. I acknowledge that my treatment of cases like the ones above as instances of redemption requires explanation—the concept may be new to the philosophical community.

7

meaningfulness and redemption can seem muddled and murky at best. It is the burden

of this dissertation to demonstrate the plausibility of redemption, clarifying the idea,

and showing how meeting such criteria makes for a genuine increase in the value a

person’s life overall.

In Section 1.1 of the present essay, I investigate two possible accounts of

redemption and argue that each is flawed. First (Section 1.1), I argue that the Hebrew-

Christian notion has several problems, the most concerning of which is its reliance

upon the idea that redemption is a matter of payback. Though perhaps familiar to some

of us, I show that payback or compensation is not the best explanation of the

phenomenon in question. Second, (Section 1.2) I argue that Friedrich Nietzsche’s

criticisms and responses to the Hebrew-Christian notion of redemption are worth

investigating. I show how Nietzsche’s account, as interpreted by Lanier Anderson,

solves some key problems with the Hebrew-Christian model and provides an

interesting positive project: a creative account of redemption all his own. I examine

the plausibility of this account and determine that, while compelling, it is not without

problems—especially ones surrounding the moral implications of his view.

Finally, (Section 1.3) I propose that we preserve the insights from these other

two models but make provisions that enable an account to avoid the pitfalls of the

other two. The remainder of this discussion begins to develop such an account. I close

with an outline of the project.

8

1.1 Problems in other accounts of redemption

Little philosophical attention has been devoted to the idea that the past can be

rescued from disvalue. The use of redemption as a concept meant to pick out such a

phenomenon has not been the subject of analytical discussions of moral psychology to

date. The applications of the concept with which we are most familiar seem to have

evolved within the context of Jewish thought, and further developed within the

writings of the Gospel writers and later, the writings of Christian theologians and

philosophers. Below I review this traditional religious account (Section 1.1.1) and

argue that it faces several objections based on its reliance upon a compensatory

function to explain the phenomenon. Then in Section 1.1.2, I review the creative

response of Friedrich Nietzsche, whom we can arguably regard as attempting to

preserve insights from the aforementioned model while reimagining the concept of

redemption in a way that avoids the key problems associated with the Hebrew-

Christian account. I argue, however, that Nietzsche’s model, though compelling, is not

desirable on account the moral implications of the view (namely ones surrounding the

subjective nature of redemption on his account).

1.1.1 The problem of compensation in the Hebrew-Christian account

In an essay interpreting how Friedrich Nietzsche deploys the concept

throughout his work—a subject I take up briefly in paragraphs below—- Lanier

Anderson writes that redemption has a central role within Jewish thought since it

characterizes the Jewish people’s relationship to Yaweh: as their God, Yaweh

redeemed the people of Israel by bringing them out of Egyptian captivity, and then,

9

after the Babylonians destroyed the first Jewish temple, from Babylon (Exod. 6:6, Isa.

47:4).2 This idea of liberation from bondage seems to cover cases of liberation from

suffering more broadly and emancipation from sin.3

In the latter case of freedom from the bondage of sin, the liberation is from an

undesired spiritual state or state of one’s own soul, in distinction from an unwanted

physical state such as the state of being held captive. Hebrew writers used words that

would have also been commonly deployed to describe transactions such as ransoming

persons from slavery, repurchasing of taken property in addition to actions such as

“avenging or restitution for victims, and related notions of restoration.”4

Anderson notes that the development of redemption-like concepts in Hebrew

thought connected the idea of liberation to freedom from tribulation and suffering.

When Gospel writers (and later Christian theologians) appropriated these concepts

however, they seemed to favor the idea of liberation as a compensatory action having

to do with ransom price and restitution.5 The Gospel writers used language

surrounding notions of repayment to capture the religious idea that Christ paid the

price for our redemption by way of death. The Hebrew notion of redemption was

replaced with the idea that God saves the people by way of Christ. The idea was that a

person in need of redemption had fallen from a better state of being into the current

one from which he needed deliverance. Such deliverance is only accomplished by

sacrifice or ransom payment. Christ’s death is regarded as the intervening sacrifice

2 “Nietzsche on Redemption,” 227. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., 227-228.

10

that accomplishes restitution. This sacrifice amounts to a promise of a future

restoration (at Judgment Day, etc).6

The problems with a theological account of the phenomenon of redemption are

several. First, the account assumes a God, but would be better for an account to avoid

dependency of the theist position. If a notion of redemption could be developed that

avoided this commitment, then redemption could be open to more people, including

those not part of these particular faith traditions.

Second, and more to the point, is the problem that the theological account

described above is not a genuine solution to the philosophical problem of wanting to

regard one’s own life or past life experience as valuable when it currently is not. The

theological model from above addresses this problem by way of God giving the agent

an entirely new life—one restored to an original, pure state—after this one is over.

This idea has two negative ramifications. The first of these is the idea that those in

need of redemption have to wait until the end of time to receive restorative treatment.

This means that the solution to the person’s problem is not a practical one: there is

nothing he can do to rescue his own life from disvalue at this time. The second is that

God grants new life at the end of time, but not an improvement of this one being lived

now—blemishes and all. The life in need of redemption in the first place—the one

with the blemishes and regrettable features-—does not become something endorsable,

but is merely jettisoned in favor of some other, pure and unblemished life bestowed

upon a person on Judgment Day. Arguably, what the agent wants is for the present

6 Ibid., 228.

11

life, the one with the blemishes, to somehow become more valuable than it currently

is—not a replacement of this life.

Take as an example of this issue the assault victim from above. What her

behavior in the months and years after the assault suggests is that she harbors a desire

to make some sense of, make meaning out of what has already happened to her. It

seems to matter to her that what she does right now improves her life’s overall value

and, even more, improves the value of the things that were causing her life to diminish

in value in the first place. What matters to her is that her life—the one with the

blemishes—becomes something endorsable again. On the theological model, however,

a person is compensated for her suffering in this life with a pleasant after-life. This

means, however there is nothing practically-speaking she could do to make her life

better now but wait for compensation. Similarly, if a person has marred the overall

value of his life by moral indiscretions, he is, on the theological model, not in the

position to do anything himself to restore it value (God pays Godself back by way of

the death of Christ).

I do not think, however, that the solution to the problem of restoring value to

one’s own life can be fundamentally compensatory.7 Recall that in the example of the

assault victim, her activities at the Center and the eventual centrality of her purposes

there to her psychological economy, appear to bring new meaning to her earlier

misfortune. That horrible experience is no longer entirely disvaluable when the agent

finds a way to genuinely represent it as contributing in some positive way to the now

important and very valuable aims in her life of serving as counsel to others and

7 I am indebted to Lanier Anderson for this idea.

12

advancing the humanitarian projects of the Center itself. What matters to the agent is

not that her assault was then followed by something good such as a lottery win or even

a professional advancement (as if she, like a contestant on The Price Is Right, is

restored to well-being by being awarded….a new car (!)). What matters to her, as

articulated in the above sketch of her life, is that she does the work of restoring value

to her life by her own actions, and she does so in a way that connects pieces of her life

to one another in a meaningful way. Her relationship to the assault is now different,

better, because of something she did that changed role of the assault in her life.

To see the problem with compensation as the key to redemption in another

way, consider a person who, while driving his boat intoxicated, struck and

permanently harmed a person. Imagine that the agent feels genuine remorse and has a

sense that this horrible mistake has diminished the meaning in his own life, lessening

its overall value somehow. In the months following the accident, the insurance

companies haggle and finally come to a resolution. The agent’s insurance company

eventually writes out a very large sum of money to the victim. Is this redemption?

Does this set of events solve the problem for the agent, the problem of his sense of

diminished meaning in his life? I suspect that our intuitions tell us “no” –that even

though the story involves the agent (represented by the company) settling the score,

paying off debts owed to the victim, this is not redemption. Even if the sums of money

reached grand amounts over and above what was reasonable to the point of being

overly generous, we would likely still not find it natural to allow this example to count

as redemption. Further, even when we remove the idea of the insurance company and

refashion the example so that the boater is wealthy individual who writes checks for

13

large amounts to the harmed party, I do not think we will find it natural to say that

such check-writing constitutes redemption for the boater.

Many of us might not have clearly defined reasons for our intuitions on the

matter. We might observe that, though it was good, decent or what was owed, the

compensatory gesture of the individual in question was not “meaningful.” We might

find it natural to think that the insurance company is not the kind of thing that satisfies

redemption since it ought to be something the agent does himself. Even in the case

that the agent, himself, pays back the victim, we might observe that the story so

construed does not tell us enough about the agent’s psychology. We might want to

know more: to what extent was he remorseful and to what extent was the agent really

concerned about the victim?

The intuition that compensating the harmed party does not satisfy criteria for

redemption (and so does not solve the problem of lost meaning for the agent), is

demonstrated in our interest in these other considerations: the “meaningfulness” of the

gesture (something like its relationship to the original offending act), the psychology

of the agent (the extent of remorse) as well as importance of the good gesture to the

agent (does the kind gesture really matter to the agent?). The fact that we care about

these considerations points us to a need for an explanation other than compensation for

the phenomenon of redemption.

To make this point sharper still, imagine a different set of circumstances

surrounding the accident in the example above. Imagine that the agent above had no

insurance at all but in the months after the accident he felt great remorse, apologized

to the harmed party profusely, paid what he could toward the victim’s medical bills,

14

then never saw the victim again. However, the agent in question was never the same

after the accident. After that day (after the 24 hours during which he sobered up

literally and metaphorically), the agent turned his life around. He sold his boat (the

minimal proceeds from which he gave to the victim), sought counsel for his

dependency on alcohol (went daily to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings) and became,

over time, a person who would never be so reckless as to take out a boat while

intoxicated.

To the contrary, the agent devoted his time to practicing mindfulness and

became known for being careful, considerate and thoughtful. People would often seek

him out to solicit his advice in personal and professional matters. Each day he would

say how grateful he was for what he had around him, and how much he appreciated its

value—which was attested to by the way he cared for things and for people. There

were numerous times in his life after the day of the accident that he had the

opportunity to steer someone away from a dangerous situation. Sometimes this

directly involved counseling a person who was vulnerable to addiction, a problem he,

too, was burdened with prior to the accident. The agent was eventually able to regard

his life, upon reflection, as meaningful, and in particular was able to regard his moral

mistake that day (for as he turned on the motor to his boat that morning, he knew full

well that his responses were impaired) as an important turning point for him—one that

came to shape his life in a positive and meaningful way.

I intend the story I draw out above to highlight the way in which compensation

can play little or no role in a narrative we would want to call a redemption story. In the

example in the above paragraph, the agent hardly compensates the victim for the

15

suffering caused at his hands, though perhaps he gives him what is owed in terms of

the apology. Neither does the agent in question perform acts of compensation that

benefit that individual indirectly (I think it would be a stretch of the imagination to

regard those counseled by the improved agent later in life to be proxies for the victim).

The tale I have told has little to do with compensation. Nonetheless, I suspect each of

us is inclined to call it a redemption story. I argue we are likely to regard it as such

because what really matters to us is not that debts are paid off and scales returned to

“zero,” but that ugly parts of a person’s life, the ones generating the problem for an

agent in the first place, become the focus of a transforming process through which

they are rescued from some disvalue, enabling the agent to become reconciled to his

past, regarding it and his life as a whole as meaningful again.

There are countless examples like this that highlight our interest in

considerations other than compensation in our intuitions about redemption. If we get

the sense that these criteria are not in place, then the compensatory gesture is

“meaningless” and as such, does not count toward redemption, no matter how much

compensation might be paid. The above discussion suggests that the Hebrew and

Christian notions of redemption, while they were seminal in terms of establishing the

contours of the discussion about the phenomenon in general, are lacking because of

their dependency upon the concept of compensation, paying back for what one has

done or getting paid back for what one has suffered. I have argued above that

compensating for what one has done by acts meant to benefit others or receiving

benefit from others for suffering endured is not a necessary feature of redemption and

does not do the work of solving the problem of rescuing lost meaning from our lives. I

16

argue, instead, that a plausible account of redemption ought to avoid dependency on

the idea of compensation to explain what counts or does not count as redemption.

Friedrich Nietzsche provides us with just such an account. Below, I examine its merits

and anticipate some possible objections.

1.1.2 Friedrich Nietzsche’s account

Nietzsche was critical of the Hebrew and Christian notions of redemption, in

part for the reasons I have articulated above. At the same time, however, he also had a

positive project. Anderson argues that we can understand Nietzsche’s positive project

as an attempt to preserve Hebrew-Christian insights by redeploying the old religious

concepts, giving them new meanings that avoid the pitfalls of the Hebrew -Christian

model.8 In the paragraphs below, I rely on Anderson’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s

texts and his general project in order to examine the plausibility of Nietzsche’s

positive account of redemption.

Nietzsche’s brand of redemption is, as Anderson argues, “a species of self-

transformation.”9 First, I will briefly name the ways in which the account is supposed

to avoid the problems with the Hebrew-Christian model, discussed above. Then, I will

examine Nietzsche’s notion of redemption more closely to determine the extent to

which it serves as a superior alternative to the aforementioned model. Ultimately, I

conclude that while Nietzsche’s account has some compelling features and solves key

problems found in the Hebrew-Christian model, it has some morally problematic

implications. 8 “Nietzsche on Redemption,” 226. 9 Ibid., 257.

17

1.1.2.1 Nietzsche’s solutions to the Hebrew-Christian problems

First, as part of his positive project to redeploy religious conceptions with new

meanings, Nietzsche places the agent at the center of the redemption process.10 It is the

agent who does the redeeming and not a God. This feature of his account removes the

dependence upon a theistic position, and satisfies he concern that it ought to be the

agent—and not a third party—who effects redemption. Recall the intuition that the

person with the problem of lost meaning ought to do the redeeming himself. This

intuition was brought out in the example of the boater whose insurance company

compensated the harmed party for losses incurred. When someone else does the

redeeming for the agent in question, we tend to think it isn’t “meaningful.” The agent

doing the redeeming himself is the first way Nietzsche avoids the problems in the

Hebrew-Christian model.

Second, Nietzsche’s redemption is something agents can do to improve their

lives while they live them—not a matter of well-being restored after their current lives

are over.11 This feature of Nietzsche’s account maintains the relevance of the concept

to practical reason and the general effort to live good lives. Recall, from above, the

concern that being granted a new, eternal, pure life after this one is over, unhelpfully

minimizes the practical import of meaningfulness in life, since an agent who will be

given a good life only when this one is over, though she may be able to increase her

chances of being awarded a good life later if she behaves well now, is neither in a 10 Ibid., 254. 11 Ibid., 256.

18

position to improve its actual value, nor enjoy (right now) the satisfaction that comes

with a life of actual value. On Nietzsche’s account, as we will find in the examination

below, the concept of redemption matters to an agent’s practical deliberations, since it

can be a consideration in reasoning about what to do. Agents have some control over

addressing this problem of lost value right now.

The third problem Nietzsche’s account avoids is the implausibility of a view

that amounts to the replacement of a bad life with a new, altogether different one.

Recall the intuition from above that what matters to us is that lives that we have

lived— the ones with the blemishes—are rescued from bad meaning, not replaced

with something else. We want to find a way to accept the lives that we have lived as

valuable somehow, even though they contain regrettable features. Replacement of

these lives with pure, eternal ones after this one is over, does not solve the particular

problem of the felt loss in meaning over this life right here. Nietzsche’s positive

project posits a solution to this problem by transforming the meaning of the regrettable

features in a life, thereby improving them, making them more embraceable than they

were.

Finally and connected to the point above, Nietzsche’s account of redemption is

not a matter of compensation but of transformation.12 We can understand Nietzschean

redemption as a process that aims to retain the originally objectionable features of a

life but transform them such that they play important and meaningful roles in the

agent’s life. My point here will be made clear and receive more detailed motivation

below. For now, I merely suggest that the key objectionable feature of the Hebrew-

12 Ibid., 245-253.

19

Christian account—its reliance upon compensation as a model for redemption—is

removed in Nietzsche’s account and replaced with the notion of narrative

transformation. Let us now examine several of Nietzsche’s texts in an effort imagine

how his brand of redemption might work, and how it might avoid the problems

mentioned above. My examination will mainly involve discussion of several, key

texts, one from Zarathrustra and the other from the Gay Science, along with analysis

from Lanier Anderson’s work on the subject.

1.1.2.2 Changing the ‘It was’ into the ‘Thus I willed it.’

The theme of redemption was certainly something that concerned Nietzsche.

Anderson directs our attention to a chapter entitled “On Redemption” in Thus Spoke

Zarathustra. The chapter is an encounter between Zarathustra and a band of cripples

and beggars, whose spokesperson, a hunchback, asks for healing (evoking similar

scenes from the New Testament). Zarathrusta refuses to cure the band of cripples of

their ailments because he is far more concerned about “inverse cripples,” those people

“who lack everything, except one thing of which they have too much— human beings

who are nothing but a big eye or a big mouth or a big belly”—creatures who suffer

from the distorting effects of a particularly voracious desire or craving.13 Zarathrustra

thinks spiritually crippled creatures are more in need of redemption than their

physically disfigured counterparts (As in biblical texts, the physical ailments can be

understood as stand ins for spiritual, psychological malformations).14

13 Z II, “On Redemption,” 250. 14 Anderson, “Nietzsche on Redemption,” 231.

20

Zarathrustra claims: “I find man in ruins...fragments and limbs and dreadful

accidents— but no human beings.”15 He ends the speech with a prophesy that human

beings will effect for themselves a redemption in which they are able to affirm their

lives by finding a way—fashioning a way—to genuinely accept the whole of them:

… I walk among men as among the fragments of the future— that future which I envisage. And this is all my creating and striving, that I create and carry together into one what is fragment and riddle and dreadful accident. And how could I bear to be a man if man were not also a creator and guesser of riddles and redeemer of accidents! To redeem those who lived in the past and to recreate all “It was” into a “Thus I willed it!”—that alone should I call redemption! [Z II, “On Redemption,” 251]

In the Zarathrustra passage cited above, Nietzsche seems to advocate (through the

character of Zarathrustra) a redemption that pulls together into some acceptable whole

the disjointed parts of a human life—the good parts, the bad parts and everything in

between. While Zarathrustra, like the figure of Christ, promises a better future for

human beings, he does so using an unusual temporal logic, one different from the

model in which redemption is achieved by a future restoration of a person to

wholeness. On Zarathrustra’s view, redemption is achieved by way of a creative act

that changes something about our pasts.16

This feature of Nietzsche’s account of redemption can be perplexing since we

know that a person cannot change the past. It must be, then, that what changes about

our pasts is our own attitude towards them. Anderson explains it this way:

“The proposal is surprising in that it does not look forward to any removal of the injuries that engender our need for redemption. On the contrary, every piece of the ‘It was’ looks set to remain in place. Only our attitude toward them is to change. In that new future, we are meant to will the ‘It was.’”17

15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., 232-233. 17 Ibid.

21

Anderson concludes that for Nietzsche,

“the past is redeemed not by some different future that compensates us, but by a new attitude (creative willing, affirmation), directed toward the same past that gave rise to the call for redemption in the first place.”18 But what reason would an agent have to change his attitudes about a past that is

marked by regret, remorse or loss? An account of redemption that cannot explain how

an agent has good reason to change his own attitudes about a bad past falls prey to the

objection that redemption is implausible because it doesn’t really amount to a genuine

change in a life.

The answer to the above question of what reason, on Nietzsche’s view, agents

would have to change their attitudes about their regrettable pasts has to do with

realization new roles for bad events such that a negative response to them is no longer

warranted. To see this, let us examine another key text from Nietzsche on the subject

(GS 341). 19

The text articulates a doctrine Nietzsche himself once considered his most

important (EH P, 4; also III, ‘Z’, 1, 6, 8) and one that stands at the center of his

reflection on redemption: the eternal recurrence doctrine.20 Below is the doctrine’s

treatment in the Gay Science:

18 Ibid., 234. 19 My account here largely follows Anderson in “Nietzsche On Redemption and Transfiguration.” 20 There is scholarly debate regarding the meaning of the doctrine, whether it is a metaphysical position (that time is circular or some such claim) or a practical thought experiment intended to provide a way of assessing the value of a life. Anderson votes for the latter: “Nietzsche asks us to imagine that our lives will return, and our reaction is supposed to show something about how good they are…A reaction of joy is supposed to indicate that the life was good, whereas sorrow, regret, and the like show it to have been wanting.” He notes that the doctrine has in the past been read as a cosmological theory—that time is circular—but that recent arguments favor the view outlined here (“Nietzsche on Redemption and Transfiguration,” 235).

22

The greatest weight.— What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every pleasure and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence...’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon...? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you could have answered him: ‘You are a god, and I have never heard anything more divine!’. If this thought gained dominion over you it would change you, as you are, or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, ‘Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?’ would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to wish for nothing more than for this eternal confirmation and seal? [GS 341]

The demon challenges us with his invitation to consider not merely having the chance

to, as we often say, “do it all over again” but, rather, to consider being made to live

our lives—exactly as we have lived them— “innumerable times more,” and then

evaluate our lives by our own reactions.

Anderson writes that Nietzsche’s notion of recurrence involves no specified

standards by which a person is meant to evaluate her life. Rather, a person evaluates

her life by her own lights—her personal set of values and standards, which are

“implicated in her own reaction to her life’s imagined return.”21 This experiment

functions—as Anderson calls it—as a kind of coherence test that reveals just “how

consonant a person’s life is with her values.”22 But what has all this to do with

answering the question of what reasons a person has to change his attitude about his

own past? The answer to this question is in following the implications of the eternal

recurrence passage in the Gay Science, in conjunction with the Zarathrustra text

(Zarathrustra’s prophesy that we will find a way to ‘change the it was to the thus I

willed it,’). The idea is that an agent could use the eternal recurrence test to generate a

21 Ibid., 236. 22 Ibid. This is a controversial position on the Eternal Recurrence doctrine. Some theorists think that more than mere coherence has to be involved in the possibility of affirmation.

23

creative response, a vision about what to do in the future that might change the

relevance of past events, thereby justifying a different, more positive attitude about

them.

On Anderson’s interpretation, Nietzsche’s texts suggest a practical solution to

the problem of being unable to embrace one’s life: add events to your life that

transform the role of regrettable features, bringing together “fragmentary, accidental,

puzzling or regrettable” parts of your life into one endorsable whole such that you are

able to affirm it.23 Anderson’s idea is that Nietzschean redemption is a matter of

narrative transformation: By adding events to his life, the agent can tell a life story

such that regrettable events become integral (essential) parts of an affirmable whole.

In the new story, events come to have different import because of their relationships to

the whole. Anderson writes, “I thereby bring my life into greater harmony with my

values, and thus improve it in the dimension of Nietzsche’s concern.”24

Anderson’s example of how this works is found both in his 2005 essay on

Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, and also in the essay presently under discussion. He

asks us to consider the career of Jimmy Carter who was defeated—by a landslide—in

the 1980 presidential election by Ronald Reagan. Anderson writes, “Carter’s loss of

the Presidency was a sweeping repudiation of his core values and accomplishments,

and ended his ongoing projects.”25 The defeat threatened to signify the end of Carter’s

political career—a career that would end in failure. The idea is that Carter’s life was,

at that time, in need of redemption. Anderson draws out the story of how Carter

“transformed his Presidential library into the Carter Center,” and initiated a new

political project that enabled him to do the very things that mattered to him,

contributing importantly to the world in the way he valued (alleviations of poverty in

23 Ibid., 239. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 240.

24

developing countries, improvements to the well-being of people all over the world,

conflict resolutions among nations, etc.).26 Anderson concludes, “It is by now a

commonplace observation that Carter built the greatest U.S. Ex-Presidency ever.”27

What Anderson argues is that it is the very need for redemption that motivated

Carter to transform his career:

“The range of his activities has gone so far beyond the normal course of ‘elder statesman’ politics that it is hard to imagine his even conceiving the project, let alone implementing it so energetically, without the need for redemption posed by that stinging defeat.”28

The loss is, arguably, necessary to the whole narrative and because of this, can be

affirmed as an integral part of the whole. Anderson writes: In that sense, to wish for such an ex-Presidency is also to wish for the defeat, and precisely that fact allows the later successes to redeem the earlier failure. To wish away the defeat would also be to wish away Carter’s genuine achievement— viz., the invention of a whole new kind of public life (along with the many concrete accomplishments that make it up). 29

The defeat becomes “the hinge around which his whole public life turns.”30

To see that the eternal recurrence doctrine has practical application, we must

also see that affirmability of the newly conceived narrative is not enough for genuine

redemption: in the case of Carter, Carter had to put in motion plans of action,

executing projects and programs that actually changed the meaning of his life events:

“He had to make the new life story into a true story” so that the past events really

played the new roles he imagined for them, making affirmation of them justified.31

26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., 241. 31 Ibid.

25

Nietzsche’s account might then appear to solve the four problems mentioned

earlier in this essay. First, Nietzschean redemption does not rely on the theistic

position: it is the agent who does the redeeming, and not a God. This is an advantage

for Nietzsche’s account since, as noted above in the insurance company example,

many of us have the intuition that redemption ought to be something the agent does

himself (or else it is not “meaningful”). Second, Nietzsche’s redemption is a practical

solution to the problem of a felt sense of loss of value of one’s life overall. Instead of

waiting for death to receive redemptive treatment as is the case in the Hebrew-

Christian model in which a person receives a new, better life upon the end of this one,

an agent can do things now to improve his life’s overall value. Redemption is

important to us because it is practically relevant to us.

A third way in which Nietzsche’s account avoids the Hebrew-Christian

problems, is that is involves improving the very features of the life that were causing

the diminishment in a life’s value in the first place. Recall the intuition that what

seems important to us is that the lives we have lived—the ones with the regrettable

features—are made embraceable somehow. The criticism of the Hebrew-Christian

model was that a person was redeemed by the replacement of his blemished life with a

new and pure, but completely different one, radically disconnected from the one he

actually lived. Nietzschean redemption is a matter of making this life, affirmable.

Fourth, Anderson’s interpretation of Nietzschean redemption removes the

concept of compensation from the account and replaces it with transformation. This is

in its favor since, as discussed above, compensation is not a genuinely plausible way

to understand redemption. Recall that considerations other than compensation are

important to us, such as certain aspects of the agent’s psychology, as well as the nature

of the relationship between the regrettable event and the activity intended to redeem it.

Because Nietzsche avoids the notion of compensation altogether, and replaces it

26

instead with the idea of narrative transformation, his account is more plausible than

the alternative, Hebrew-Christian model. However, it is not without its own

problems—which we will review in the section below.

1.1.2.3 Moral implications of Nietzsche’s account

Though Nietzsche’s account is very compelling and appears to successfully

avoid the problems with the Judeo-Christian model, there are some concerning

objections to the account—namely, ones surrounding its moral implications.

Affirmation of life’s eternal return as an ideal may have distorting effects in moral

cases. The most concerning objection for the account, I think, is the lack of objective

values by which to judge when something gets to count as redemption and when it

does not. Recall that the eternal recurrence test, as understood by Anderson, is a

thought experiment: how consonant is your life with your own, avowed values? The

agent’s own subjective values are the principles by which he judges his life good or

bad, and the events within it good or bad. An event is regrettable on Nietzsche’s

account, and worth redeeming, when it is something that strikes the agent as bad given

the things he cares about.

The eternal recurrence doctrine suggests that as long as the agent is able to

affirm with joy the events in his life, he achieves redemption. This subjectivist feature

of Nietzschean redemption generates the objection that an account of redemption

ought now allow a despicable person to redeem himself simply by fashioning a life of

integrity—expressive of his (horrible) avowed values. A person who fails terribly at a

27

project to harm someone cannot achieve redemption by redoubling his efforts or by

finding an alternate avenue to exact his objective or express his (concerning) values.

Though we might imagine the agent in question can believe he is redeeming

himself through his actions, we might also think he is terribly mistaken in this, and

regard his activity as vengeful or tragic instead. Take as an example a fictional

gangster. Imagine that the gangster regrets that he allowed himself to be swindled out

of a large amount of money by a rival gang leader. Now imagine that he allows his

regret over this to work to his advantage: he decides to allow his rival to think he has

gotten the upper hand. Our gangster even sends over various members of his own crew

as spies, to become underlings in the rival organization. Meanwhile, our gangster lies

in wait planning a surprise attack on his opponent. Our gangster plots to take over the

rival’s corner of the market—a scheme that will likely involve extortion. When the

surprise attack is successful, the gangster experiences a felt sense of satisfaction: his

earlier mistake was redeemed since he can now regard it as the turning point to his

successful takeover.

The example above satisfies the conditions for Nietzschean redemption in the

way discussed earlier. While this might initially resemble the kind of redemption with

which many of us are familiar, I think upon further reflection that we would find it

natural to say that the gangster has not been redeemed or has not redeemed his

mistakes. This is because the concept of redemption seems to bring with it notions of

objective value—that what is being rescued in redemption is positive in an objective

way. It matters to us that redemption is about objective good, and that it is good for a

28

person to do in a thick, normative sense. Nietzsche’s account does not harmonize with

this intuition.

The second concern surrounding moral implications of Nietzsche’s account is

that the eternal recurrence doctrine along with Zarathrustra’s charge to fashion the ‘it

was’ into the ‘thus I willed it’ is possibly a morally problematic regulative ideal. This

requirement seems plausible with case examples such as Carter’s transformation from

failed politician to revered ex-President but may not be possible in other kinds of

cases—say, cases of moral failures. While the requirement of affirmation might

motivate an agent to turn a deliberative error or apparent loss into an advantage, the

requirement might be terribly disturbing in cases of moral failures. A person who

commits evil may never (should never) be able to will the eternal return of his moral

violation.

The Nietzschean apologist might explain that eternal recurrence is merely a

regulative ideal and that redemptive efforts can yield results farther or closer to this

ideal. The Carter example may come close to ideal redemption since we can imagine

that Carter could plausibly will the eternal return of his career trajectory, 1980 loss and

all. Consider as evidence of this, the following affirmable set of events. Imagine that

Carter’s eternal recurrence would involve him being repeatedly elected to the highest

office in the United States, during which time he hones diplomatic skills he would

later deploy in the best years of his public service, develop an impressive list of

contacts important to the success of the Carter Center, and generally enjoy the

challenge and honor of holding the office of President before getting bumped out of

29

office in order to begin the most important part of his career. In my mind, this sounds

ideally affirmable in the Nietzschean sense.

A person with moral failings, however, may very likely not be able to will (or,

anyway, should not be able to will in some cases) the eternal return of his moral

violations. The Nietzschean apologist could argue that this fact need not mean there is

no redemption for people with moral failings. Rather, moral failings on the Nietzshean

redemption plan simply render full-blown redemption impossible. An agent can

improve his ability to affirm his life by fashioning a role for those moral failings that

is more acceptable than it would be otherwise, but find a redemption of a lesser kind.

Take as an example the boat driver who permanently harmed a person but allowed that

bad action to inform the rest of his life, becoming a better person than he would have

otherwise become. Because of his values—he genuinely feels remorse for what he has

done—he cannot will the eternal return of his negligence on the day of the accident.

So his is not, on Nietzsche’s account, full redemption but instead, partial.

I do not think, however, that this can be quite right. Consider that many of us

may have the intuition that redemption of a moral failing is a paradigmatic case of

redemption. Perhaps owing to the Christian notion that redemption is about being

saved from the psychological prison of sin, we tend to regard issues surrounding moral

failings as exemplars of redemption and not cases that fall short of full redemption.32

32 Take as an example of this intuition a story about a gangster who turns his life around. Imagine a gangster who was convicted of his complicity in extortion and aggravated assault. Imagine that one day, during his jail time, he is gripped by the truth of what he has done and feels great remorse. After his release from jail, he has a vision of his life that involves establishing and maintaining an at-risk youth center where local kids can congregate: they can play pick-up basketball, eat a healthy meal, or find a quiet place to do schoolwork. These kids can get off the streets where idle loitering breeds vulnerability to risky behavior. He gets key neighborhood donors on board and establishes his center for at-risk youth. Our former gangster spends the rest of his life being a positive presence in the lives of at-risk

30

We tend to think of people who reconcile themselves to their past immoral behaviors

by way of moral conversion as paradigmatically redemptive. As such, I argue they

ought to receive the same status as their non-moral counterparts. Nietzsche’s

placement of eternal recurrence as the key notion of redemption, distorts moral cases.

Eternal recurrence and affirmation as ideals are too strong and are incompatible with

some of our intuitions about what is paradigmatically or ideally redemptive.

What might be important, however, in a search for a more plausible account is

consideration of the way in which the Nietzschean account is able to handle the

complexity of our intuitions on the more-or-less aspect of redemptive efforts. Perhaps

we can preserve this insight without turning to the affirmation of recurrence as a

regulative ideal.

teens. His Youth Center is a success insofar as it actually serves the local community by providing real and lasting support to kids who would otherwise turn to gang membership.

A major part of our imagined agent’s success with his Youth Center is his ability to understand the psyches of at-risk youth—an understanding that his involvement with the gang only enhanced. He now regards his earlier gang involvement as a horrible mistake but one that has shaped him in positive ways as a human being and become important to his life story, since it is an integral part of how he came to do the very good work that now he feels called to do. So, far this is compatible with the Nietzschean sense of redemption: an individual seems to transfigure his life narrative such that regrettable features are transformed, made more beautiful. Here’s the point, however: I suspect that many of us will regard this story as a genuine and paradigmatic case of redemption, while on Nietzsche’s regulative ideal of affirmation and eternal recurrence, it gets a lesser status since the agent would likely not be able to wish for the eternal return of his life, a wish that would require him to will all over again his moral failings, to say ‘yes’ to the abuses in which he was complicit. For Nietzsche, the person who is more redeemed the closer he is able to actually will the past transgression. Though I feel the pull of this idea, I am inclined to disagree. Perhaps my view is something like this: a person is more redeemed the closer he is able to represent his life as developing, engaging in, participating in, growing closer to something truly valuable.

In the case of the former gangster, we can neither think that this agent could ideally will the eternal return of his assault and extortion, nor accept that the story is not ideally redemptive. On the one hand the regulative ideal of eternal recurrence offers Nietzsche’s account the flexibility to explain our subtle intuitions about the more-or-less aspect of redemptive efforts. Perhaps some may think it ought to count as a lesser form of redemption than, say, the Carter case in which Carter might plausibly affirm every single fact about his past. On the other hand, there is something wrong with an account that relegates this case to a less-than-ideal redemption. It might be natural to think, “How much more redemptive can a story get?” when it comes to the former-gangster-turned-youth-mentor?

31

1.2 The search for a plausible account of redemption

In the discussion above, I examined two possible accounts of redemption and

found each lacking in some way. I argued that while the Hebrew-Christian model of

redemption gave us a way of talking about a particular phenomenon—that is, agents

seeking to restore meaning in their lives that was lost to past events, regrettable actions

and misfortunes—it had several, insurmountable weaknesses: (1) the agent does not

effect redemption himself and (2) the redeemed life is not an improvement of this life

but a replacement of this one for another, and (3) the problem isn’t practical since

there is nothing an agent can do to solve the problem of lost meaning in his life.

These objections are also connected to the final and largest concern with the

Hebrew-Christian account of redemption, and that is the problem of compensation

(being paid back for sufferings and being made to pay back for offenses) as the key

criterion for redemption. We then turned to Friedrich Nietzsche’s thoughts on

redemption. In his imaginative account as interpreted for us by Nietzsche scholar

Lanier Anderson, an agent transforms the narrative of his life by changing the role

some life event plays, thereby rescuing it from the negative import it originally held

for the life in question. Nietzsche’s account aims to solve the problems in the Hebrew-

Christian account. Though interesting and persuasive, however, it, too, has problems

centered especially on the subjective nature of the values appealed to in the account.

That an agent simply appeals to his own values to decide affirmation of his life,

Nietzsche’s account is vulnerable to the objection that a horrible person can affirm his

horrible life and achieve redemption on Nietzschean standards.

32

Still, on the whole, the Nietzsche account has some promising and very

attractive features. With its emphasis on the agent doing things, it provides us with a

very practical solution to the problem of lost meaning and is able to explain this

phenomenon without reference to compensation, but instead with narrative

transformation that succeeds at explaining how we can actually change something

about our past, not merely replace it with something better. I propose that we build

upon Nietzsche’s account, preserving the insights he salvaged from the Hebrew-

Christian model, but developing an account of the phenomenon that avoids the

weaknesses in his account—ones stemming from the reliance on subjective standards

for redemption

This is the work of the present dissertation. I suggest that we keep the

Nietzschean insight that narrative transformation can provide a practical solution to

the problem of lost meaning in an agent’s life due to a disvaluable past. This aspect of

Nietszche’s account helps avoid the reliance of the account on compensation (since

redemption is a matter of transformation in a person’s story, a change in the meaning

of an event from bad to good), and makes it possible for the agent to: (a) restore value

to his life during his lifetime, and (b) render the original event that needed redeeming

genuinely more acceptable given its new relationship to the agent’s valuable life story.

What I suggest, however, is that we jettison the idea that redemption is a

matter of coherence, getting an agent to live a life she can affirm according to her

own, subjective values. This is where Nietzsche and I part ways. I will argue that

redemption involves a change in meaning from bad to good in a eudaimonistic way

surrounding not merely subjective but also objective value. (The change in meaning of

33

some part of an agent’s life goes from bad for her to good for her in a thick,

eudaimonistic sense, which I discuss in chapters two and three.) My dissertation turns

on this argument since it is important to my ultimate thesis that redemption is a

practical solution to the problem of lost meaning in an agent’s life that is good for the

agent, that improves his life’s meaning overall, making it more meaningful than it

would have been otherwise, where meaningfulness has objective components.

In order to accomplish the task of arguing for this kind of an account of

redemption, I will need to argue for a particular way of understanding the meaning in

our lives and show that redemption can rescue past meaning in the eudaimonistic way

I have in mind. In the paragraphs below, I provide a chapter outline that will give an

overview of the argument.

1.3 Chapter Outline

The first step in the argument for redemption is to identify how events come to

have meaning for agents. If redemption is a matter of a change in meaning of some

event from bad to good, then we need to understand how events come to have

meaning for people in the first place. This is the subject of Chapter II, “How Events

Get Their Meanings.” Events, I will argue, come to have meaning for people by being

parts of narratives in their lives. This chapter mainly consists of examination of a

variety of plausible theories on narrative—on what makes something a narrative. Here

I rely heavily on David Velleman’s 2003 essay, “Narrative Explanations.” In the end, I

defend the claim that narrative is something like the arrangement of events around a

34

telos. I argue that this view of narrative can help us understand how events come to

have meaning, since on this view, events would get their meanings by their

contributions, positive or negative, to the narratives in which they reside. In the case of

actual lives, I argue that events can come to have meaning for people by their

contributions to the aims of the people in question. I suggest that redemption, then,

might be something like the retelling of a life narrative such that an event with

negative import for some aim comes to have positive import instead.

I finish Chapter II, however, by casting some doubt on this conclusion. I point

out that when we ask about what some event “means” for an agent, we tend to become

interested in other factors over and above addition the brute way in which the event

advances or thwarts aims. For example, we may want to know how important the

relevant aim is for the agent (how much did he care about it?) and how valuable was

the aim is in the first place. Perhaps losing data for medical research bears worse

meaning for a defeated research scientist, than losing a shell collection does for a

hobbyist, since medical research is of greater objective value than shell collecting. I

argue that our interest in considerations such as objective value of aims and subjective

investment of the agent seems to address our concerns as to how the event affects the

agent’s well-being in general (was the event good or bad for him in a thick,

eudaimonistic sense?). I suggest, then, that “meaning” of events in actual lives is not

merely a “thin” concept having to do with the event’s contribution to an aim, but a

“thick,” eudaimonistic concept having to do with the agent’s well-being. I try to

remain neutral about theories of well-being, but suggest that the concern over the

import of an event with respect to an agent’s well-being seems to include factors such

35

as the event’s contribution to an aim as well as the value of that aim and subjective

investment of agent in that aim. I conclude the chapter with the provisional claim that

if redemption is about a change in meaning of an event from bad to good in an agent’s

life, it must satisfy this thick, eudaimonisitic sense of meaning. The event in question

must come to contribute positively for an aim of some value that is important to the

agent.

In Chapter III, I turn to the subject of meaningfulness in life—what kind of a

thing it is and what its criteria are. I come to this subject matter in the following way.

First, I point out that if the provisional claim at the end of Chapter II is true, then what

is at stake in redemption would seem to be restoration of well-being by way of a

narrative transformation in the thick, eudaimonistic sense. I argue, however, that this

doesn’t seem quite right, since what seems to be at stake in redemption is not merely

restored well-being, but something more, a deeper structure matter having to do with

the agent’s relationship to her past. The end result of redemption seems to be not

merely restored well-being, but a rescue of meaningfulness of her past. Redemption

seems to rescue a bad past from disvalue by making it more meaningful to her than it

would have been otherwise.33 It must be, then, that the change in meaning required of

redemption not only restores an agent’s well-being but also, importantly, satisfies

conditions of meaningfulness—whatever those may be. I argue that this claim requires

us to investigate the concept of meaningfulness, to isolate what kind of a value it is,

and identify its criteria.

33 Consider, for example, the imagined assault victim. What is important to her about her work at the Center is not merely that her well-being is restored in the wake of the attack, but that she has a new relationship to the attack, itself: it now is meaningful to her since it is an important part of everything she now cares about, etc.

36

In Chapter III, “Meaningfulness and Narrativity of Lives,” I search for a

plausible account of meaningfulness. Here I draw heavily on the work of Susan Wolf,

particularly her recent book, “Meaning in Life And Why It Matters.” I argue that

Wolf’s “Fitting Fulfillment” view of meaningfulness—the idea that meaning is

conferred upon a life by an agent lovingly engaging with an object of some value in a

positive way— though compelling and promising, has is lacking in a key way. I argue

Wolf’s view cannot explain why we might find it natural to think that one life can be

more meaningful than another because of how its parts fit together as a whole. In

particular, I argue that her view cannot explain why we tend to think a life

demonstrating personal growth is more meaningful than one that does not (even when

both lives may meaningful on Wolf’s criteria). My main concern is that Wolf’s Fitting

Fulfillment view does not give enough centrality to over-arching teleology in the

meaningful life, which is why it does not easily explain our nuanced evaluations of the

meaning in lives overall (though I acknowledge that her earlier work on the subject of

meaningfulness does give more of a role to teleology). I conclude Chapter III by

arguing that we ought to amend Wolf’s account to reflect the importance of teleology

to the meaningful life, and say that meaningfulness is a matter of loving engagement

with and pursuit of objects of value in a way that demonstrates personal growth.

In Chapter IV, “The Problem With And Importance Of Regret,” I address a

key objection to my account of redemption: why not respond to meaning-threatening

events in our lives by accepting that they happened but denying that such past events

have any real import for our lives going forward. In this chapter, I examine how

regrettable events can threaten (though do not always) the meaningfulness in our lives,

37

but that our negative evaluative attitudes in response to them are nonetheless

reasonable and important for the value of our lives overall. They are parts of our pasts,

and can contribute to our personal growth and development—important narratological

aspects of the meaningful life, as discussed in the previous chapter.

I argue for this position mainly by arguing against Rudiger Bittner in his essay,

“Is It Reasonable to Regret Things One Did?” Bittner argues that regret and grief over

bad past events are utterly useless attitudes, and that agents would do better to simply

jettison such attitudes, and “move on” from mistakes or losses. I argue that we can

roughly understand this assertion as the position that the past has no particular claim

on individual, on how he understands himself and his own life. I argue to the contrary

that the past does have a claim on us. First, regret over the past is a reactive attitude

indicative of having cared about something in the first place. It is because of what

valuing is (having certain evaluative attitudes in relationship to an object, being afraid

when it is threatened, joyful when it flourishes, etc.), that valuing entails regret and

grief in cases where what is valued is undermined. I argue that because of its

inseparability from valuing in general, regret is not an attitude that can be reasonably

considered disvaluable. Second and more important, I argue that how we ought to

understand ourselves is not merely a function of our present attitudes, but also of our

past narrative history (the meanings of past events in our lives for our lives in general).

I argue that Bittner’s position fails to take into account the importance of a narrative of

personal development to an agent, and to the overall meaningfulness of the agent’s

life. The Bittnerian position makes the agent vulnerable to a diminishment in

meaningfulness in his life, since it amounts to a reduction of what I call “diachronic

38

integrity” necessary for a narrative understanding of our lives and, as discussed in

Chapter III, for understanding how parts of our lives fit together with one another to

express growth, one key feature of the meaningful life.

After arguing for the importance of regret as a past-directed negative attitude, I

acknowledge that such attitudes and the events that give rise to them leave us with

practical problem of how to restore meaning lost in the past due to these threats to the

meaningfulness in our lives. In Chapter V, I introduce the reader to the concept of

redemption, construed as the practical solution to the problem of lost meaning by

rendering some, bad past part of her life as meaningful to her life overall. First, I argue

for the surprising claim that agents can have a certain kind of control over the past

(control over the flexible part of the past constituted by the meanings of past events).

Second, I show how an agent can change the meaning of the past from bad to good,

understood not only in the thin sense of import with respect to a telos but in the thick,

eudaimonistic sense of Chapter III. I argue that when we can represent regrets or

losses as positive advancements in narratives with valuable aims we care about, we are

able to “redeem” the past of its earlier disvalue. We do this in the way suggested by

the Nietszchean account of narrative transformation, by adding events to our lives that

change the meanings of the original loss or regretted event. The key difference

between my account and Nietzsche’s will be that such a transformation from bad to

good must be good for the agent in a particular way that involves objective value.

I defend this idea against a variety of objections including the worry that

redemption is not genuine change, and that those who believes it is, are in denial. In

response, I use a variety of case examples that show how genuine narrative

39

transformation is achieved. Redemption, I will argue, requires a particular relationship

obtaining between offending event and new, positive aim. What I will call

“dimensions of meaning” (the different component parts of meaningfulness such as

value, success and centrality of the new aim to the agent) must be satisfied to change

the significance of an event in a person’s life narrative. My argument for redemption

turns on the idea that narrative transformation is real and brings about a positive

change in meaning in the agent’s life that makes it true of the agent that bad past

events have good meanings, and can be regarded once again as meaningful in the

eudaimonistic sense.

My burden in Chapter V is also to allay the concern of the skeptic that

redemption is merely a papering over of bad behavior. I acknowledge that on my

account of redemption, redeemed events can still be the objects of remorse, grief or

regret but that once redeemed, the pain of these negative evaluative attitudes is

mitigated by the addition of the positive role these events play in agent’s lives and

their status as meaningful is restored. Putting bad events to good use in the way I

describe suggests redemption is a good thing for the agent to do.

Finally, in Chapter VI, I test these ideas with a variety of examples. I examine

redemption of misfortune, deliberative error and moral failing, each in turn in an effort

to test the plausibility of the account and its criteria. The objections against which I

defend the account mainly surround moral implications of the view (including the

worry that the concept of redemption is not distinct from forgiveness, the concern that

there are unattractive consequentialist implications of my view, as well as the general

objection that redemption is mere excuse-making). I defend my view against these

40

concerns, arguing that in each case my account avoids the charges made against it. I

mainly do this by carefully reviewing how the criteria for narrative transformation

function so as to genuinely bring about positive change in the meaning of the past.

I conclude the dissertation by arguing that the concept of redemption needs

more philosophical attention. It bears on concerns in moral psychology, normative

ethics and value theory and, as such, would do well to undergo further scrutiny and

research from philosophers.

41

II.

How Events In A Life Get Their Meanings

The idea that we can think about the value of a life as a whole has been around

for thousands of years.34 A strain of this debate in the last twenty-five years or so has

involved the idea that the shape of a life matters, though what this might remains

somewhat vague. One way to see what the intuition might be about is to consider a

common form of resistance against an especially simple, straightforwardly hedonistic

picture: a good life consists in greater amounts of pleasurable experiences than painful

ones—regardless of the order in which they occur.

Fred Feldman captures the hedonist view this way in “Pleasure and the Good

Life: Concerning the Nature, Varieties, and Plausibility of Hedonism”:

The intrinsic value of a life is equal to the sum of the intrinsic values of the minimal episodes of intrinsic attitudinal pleasure and pain contained in the life.35 On this view, what a single experience contributes to the life overall is the intrinsic

value of that moment—that is, the amount of pleasure or pain contained within it.

Many people find this unsatisfying because they have intuitions that even if we accept

the hedonist conception of the good as pleasure, still the order in which good and bad

things succeed one another in a life matters to the person living it.

The intuition that the order of experiences matters in our evaluation of a life

overall has gained some support throughout the last century. Alasdair MacIntyre,

David Velleman and Michael Slote, among others, have all argued that the shape of a

34 C.f Plato’s Republic. 35 Feldman, Pleasure and the Good Life, 129.

42

life matters in the evaluation of its worth.36 In his 1986 book on the work of Franz

Brentano, Roderick Chisholm quotes Brentano as capturing the intuition that the shape

of a life matters:

Let us think of a process which goes from good to bad or from a great good to a lesser good; then compare it with one which goes in the opposite direction. The latter shows itself as the one to be preferred. This holds even if the sum of the goods in the one process is equal to that in the other. (Quoted in Chisholm 1986, 71) On this view, our evaluations of a life seem to follow the principle that a person’s life

is better if it represents improvement rather than depreciation. David Velleman shares

the same intuition that it is better for a person to have early struggles, ending her life

with achievement than it is for her to have early successes only to end her life with

failures:

“Consider two different lives you might live. One life begins in the depths but makes an upward trend: a childhood of deprivation, a troubled youth, struggles and setbacks in early adulthood, followed finally by success and satisfaction in middle age and a peaceful retirement. Another life begins at the heights but slides downhill: a blissful childhood and youth, precocious triumphs and rewards in early adulthood, followed by a midlife strewn with disasters that lead to misery in old age. Surely, we can imagine two such lives as containing equal sums of momentary well-being. Your retirement is as blessed in one life as your childhood is in the other; your nonage is as blighted in one life as your dotage is in the other.”37

Velleman wants to say that we will consider the improving life better than the

deteriorating life.38

Proponents of the simple hedonist view may explain this intuition by arguing

that anticipation about the future or feelings about the past can factor into the utility of

some particular moment. The improving life, then, is better overall because early 36 McIntyre (1984), Velleman (2000), Slote (1997) 37 Velleman, “Well-Being and Time,” 58. 38 Ibid.

43

struggles are concurrent with the hope of success—hope that adds hedons to the

discreet moments in question. Similarly, in a downward trajectory, the anxiety of

experiencing a series of failures after initial success decreases the value of the

successive moments. A life’s value on this view is still merely additive.

While at first this may seem like a satisfying explanation for why we think

certain life shapes are better than others, some may say that hedonists still need to

explain why it is theoretically possible for there to be lives equal in sum total utility

but different in our evaluations of them. After all, we can always imagine

corresponding adjustments in the base level hedons to balance out the hope and

anxiety hedons, but keep such adjustments small enough so that the two lives seem

similar in total hedonic value but remain evaluatively different: one life is better than

the other.

That there could be two lives identical in hedonic value but different in our

evaluations of them, suggests there is more going on that mere pleasure calculus in the

evaluation of a life overall. David Velleman, in his essay, “Well-being and Time”

(2000), suggests that the ordering of the experiences matters in an evaluation of the

good life. He thinks that a person’s well being over a lifetime is function of the

“narrative significance” of a life’s events. 39 Unfortunately, what “narrative

significance” might mean remains underdeveloped.

The conversation about what this “narrative significance” might mean and how

it might function in our evaluations of overall lives matters to the present dissertation,

since what redemption seems to be about, as suggested in the previous chapter, is a

39 Ibid., 72.

44

change in the narrative significance of some event from bad to good for an agent. It

will be important that we understand how events get meaning for a person in the first

place (since redemption is about a change in meaning from bad to good), and how this

change in meaning affects the goodness or badness of a person’s life overall. Finally,

our discussions throughout this dissertation might also help us understand why it is

that certain “life shapes” are more valuable than others even when hedonistically

identical.40 The hedonic case is just one example perhaps among others that highlights

the different considerations other than pleasure of each moment, in evaluating the

goodness of a life. It is my guess that the “overall shape” of a life is something like the

story of a person’s life or one of the main stories in a life. I suspect, for reasons which

will become clear in this chapter and the next, that when we evaluate lives as to their

goodness overall, the story of a life is but one consideration among many (In Chapter

III, it will turn out that the narrative of personal growth and development is one

component of a meaningful life).

What I will argue in the final paragraphs of this essay is that the narrative

significance of an event for a person is something like its meaning for that person: its

import with respect to a larger telos or aim of the individual in question. This will be

important to the overall thesis of this dissertation since I am arguing redemption is a

matter of a change in meaning from bad to good of an event in someone’s life. We

will need to know how an event comes have significance or meaning in the first place

40 It will turn out from discussions in Chapter III, that the narrative of our personal development is a key aspect of meaningfulness, a special value a life can have distinct from its potential benefit (hedon count) and extent of morality contained within it. On this view, one “life shape” may be better than another because it is suggestive of this kind of personal growth that counts positively toward a life’s meaningfulness.

45

in order to appreciation what a change in meaning might be and how this can be

effected. I come to this conclusion about the meaning of an event, through a series of

arguments on the nature of narrative itself. This comprises the main body of this essay.

I suggest in the conclusion that how the events in a person’s life come together

to form a whole story is important to the task of evaluating a person’s life according to

a special kind of value—meaningfulness, which is the subject of the following

chapter, and which is in part, constituted by not only an individual’s relationship to the

pursuits and aims he cares about, but also by his personal development over time.

Such personal development is expressed by narratives and takes on certain “shapes”:

successes or failures of over-arching pursuits (both physical and psychological). A

meaningful life, I will argue in the following chapter, is going to contain achievement

of pursuits of value and/or personal growth and insight developed as a result of life’s

experiences. For the present purpose, however, it will be enough to determine how

events in our lives get their meanings so that we may better understand how a change

in meaning of an event might affect the overall value of a person’s life.

The first step in this endeavor is to let us focus our attention on the question of

narrative—what it is so that we might know how events come to have significance by

it. In Section 2.1, I review some of the positions on what narrative is. While the

minimalist view that narrative is simply any representation of an event (which would

include just about any subject followed by a verb) is attractive in its simplicity, I

object that the account is overly permissive, and turn, instead, to Noël Carroll’s more

moderate account. Carroll’s idea is that narrative is a representation of events with

shared subject matter and causal relations. While initially intuitive, I follow Velleman

46

(2003), in thinking that Carroll’s view can’t be right since there are narratives that do

not have causal relations among the relevant events.

I then review Velleman’s own theory from “Narrative Explanations.” Velleman

argues that what makes a narrative is the fact that a sequence of events acquires an

ending conferred on it by way of an emotional resolution appropriately experienced by

those apprehending the narrative. While the theory is compelling, I offer reasons to

think that emotional resolution is not the critical feature necessary to narrative

construction. Instead, I argue for a teleological theory; Narrative is the representation

of development of some telos. When a sequence of events expresses the development

of someone (or something’s) purpose or aim, narrative gets off the ground.

In Section 2.2, I examine the link between narrative and teleology more fully,

investigating how event sequences can express the development of an aim from

inception to ultimate frustration or satisfaction. Finally, in section 2.3, I subject my

view to further scrutiny and argue that it is attractive since it generally preserves our

intuitions about gets to count as a story, and avoids the unintuitive results of the

minimalist account I discuss earlier. I argue that we ought to up my proposed view of

narrative and see to what extent it can help us understand the task of the opening

paragraphs: the search for an understanding of how narrative significance of a life

contributes to its overall value.

2.1 What Is A Narrative?

We use the word narrative in everyday language to pick out many, different

things: grand, literary works such as Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, short stories in books

47

and magazines, and anecdotes recounted to us in mundane conversation. Narratives

function in our lives in many different ways—from providing causal explanation (in

the way a just-so story illuminates how the leopard got his spots), to conveying

meaning (in the way a novel may get you to grapple with tough questions about the

human experience), to delivering emotional impact (in the way that a tragic opera may

leave you feeling devastated).

David Hills has suggested that Aristotle, in his work on tragedy in The Poetics,

left us a legacy of two strains of thought on the concept of narrative.41 One of these

strains treats narrative as a causal explanation of some state of affairs. This more

theoretical conception has been emphasized the philosophy of history. The other

Aristotelian strain is a discussion within aesthetics, in which narrative features as a

series of representations of events that have a distinctively emotional effect on its

audience: in this strand, the goodness or badness of a narrative depends upon the

extent to which it brings the audience to katharsis—that is, resolves an emotional

conflict.

In this essay, I will argue for a conception of narrative that perhaps is more a

version of the former strain—one that follows the theoretical line of Aristotelian

thought—but is certainly compatible with the latter. I also argue, however, that simply

regarding narratives functionally as resolutions to emotional conflict cannot be quite

right since there are narratives that do not resolve emotional conflicts. I argue, instead,

that narratives are better understood as representations of development in teleologies,

the represented pursuit of aims that often do, but do not always have emotional

41 I get this from conversation with Hills, January-March 2010.

48

resolutions. I will argue that apprehenders’ emotional resolutions with respect to a

narrative do not make the narrative a narrative but can be, instead, enjoyable payoffs

for having apprehending the relevant narrative in the first place.

***

One way to answer the question, “What is narrative?” is to take up a

minimalist approach that identifies narrative as any representation of events. One such

minimalist view is H. Porter Abbott’s in The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative.

Abbott hypothesizes that a narrative is just “a representation of an event or series of

events.”42 So, any representation of a change from A to B counts as a narrative. He

argues that while we might at first think of narratives as artful (novels, folk tales or

anecdotes we tell one another), that we actually construct them day in day out,

moment to moment: “As soon as we follow a subject with a verb, there is a good

chance we are engaged in narrative discourse.”43 When a child falls down, he tells his

mother, “I fell down” and in doing so constructs a narrative because the sentence

represents some change: the boy was running, then he fell down.

Abbott tells us that we engage in narrative discourse so effortlessly and

continuously from our early development onward that some theorists consider it—

along with language—the distinctive human trait.44 The ability to engage in narration

develops in early childhood at an age that coincides with our earliest sets of first-

personal memories. This correlation may imply that our capacity for memories about

42 Porter. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 12. 43 Ibid., 1. 44 Ibid.

49

our own selves is dependent upon capacity for narrative. Our mental record of our

lives, of who we are, begins as our capacity for narrative develops.45

The benefit of this minimalist account is that it can cover a great many

phenomena. Such an explanation of narrative can account for all the ways in which we

participate in so-called “narrative discourse” from reporting explanation of change

from A to B to full-fledged literary works. On this view narrative is a genus while

literary narrative, anecdotes, chronicles of events, reports, descriptive claims and even

arguments are species.

The drawback of the minimalist program, though, is that it threatens to become

vacuous. If any subject followed by a verb is a narrative, then even purely descriptive

claims such as, “The riverbed is dry” can be construed to represent events of a sort,

and so counts as narratives on Abbott’s view. Counting “The riverbed is dry” as a

narrative, however, is likely to run against intuitions on what narrative is since most of

us likely find it natural to regard narrative as a story, a representation involving

movement or action or development of some kind—even if it were a minimal story

about how a person changed his mind (mental action) or about a person standing at a

crosswalk, waiting, then moving to cross the street. The riverbed’s being dry is a state

of being that some may or may not find it natural to think of as an event. Even if,

however, we changed the claim to “The riverbed dried to a ratio of 2 fl. oz. of water

per cubic feet of soil,” I am inclined to think we would not find it natural to consider

this a narrative.

45 Ibid., 3.

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Perhaps we ought to find a further criterion (other than mere event

representation) that must be present in a narrative. One natural thought is that narrative

is a matter of representation of two more events that are causally related: the first

event explains the second and so on. Intuitive examples of narratives (short stories,

anecdotes, novels) tend to contain causal explanation: “First, X happened. Then X

caused Y to happen, etc.”.

In his Cambridge guide, Abbott, himself, argues that representing causal

relationships in time is the key function of narrative.46 While mechanical clocks and

early modes of time-keeping provide a grid of regular intervals within which we locate

events, narrative allows the events themselves to establish the time.47 “I fell down,”

conveys a passage of a few seconds. Depending on what details we add in the

narrative, that passage of time could expand or contract.48 What is happening, here, is

that our apprehension of experiences as intelligible events, as events that explain one

another through time, seems dependent upon our ability to engage in narration.

Abbott points out that even when we look at a static picture, it is difficult to

perceive without a narrative structure. When we look at a photograph of a partly

submerged ship—its stern sunk in deep waters—we see more than just a ship: we see a

ship wreck. The photograph implies a set of events—a rising storm, a struggle to stay

afloat and eventual disaster— that are hard to resist imagining when we look at the

picture. 49

46 Ibid. 47 See also Kant’s theory of time determination in Critique of Pure Reason. For Kant causal relations do the work of establishing time for persons. 48 Abbott, 3-5. 49 Ibid.,11.

51

This idea that causal explanation is at the heart of narrative is not new. This kind

of causal explanation was what Aristotle took pains to articulate in his development of

an account of tragedy in The Poetics. What makes a portrayal of events hang together

as a plot, or muthos, he argues, is the requirement that they follow one another “by

necessity” or “probability.”50

Discoveries and reversals of fortune “must arise form the actual structure of the

plot., so that they come about as a result of what happened before, out of necessity or

in accordance with probability.”51 What befalls a character is necessarily explained by

the prior events.

Similarly, Noël Carroll, in his 2001 essay "On the Narrative Connection,"

argues that narrative requires the connection of causal relation. He takes up Morton

White’s distinctions among three modes of represented events: annals (These

represent events temporally ordered, as in “Sally went to the store in the morning. The

house crumbled at 4 pm. Two bikes crashed—11:00 pm.), chronicles (these represent

temporally ordered events pertaining to a single subject), and narrative.52 Carroll then

argues that narrative requires the additional connection of causal relation: the final

event is explained by the prior events. Carroll points out that, in ordinary speech “we

use narratives to explain how things happened and why certain standing conditions

were important.53 This would also explain the intuition in E. M. Forster’s thought that

“The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a narrative, while “The King died”

50 Aristotle, Poetics, §10. 51 Ibid. 52 Carroll, “Narrative Connection,” 118-33. 53 Ibid., 128.

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is not yet one.54 In the former sentence, the king’s death explains why the queen died.

We are also likely to resist calling the two sentences, “The King died. The Queen

died” a narrative on the basis similar reasoning: these events seem causally unrelated.

This thesis on narrative might not be quite right, however, since there are

potential counter examples to the claim that causation is necessary to narrative.

Consider, as example, the story of King Mitys that Aristotle uses in The Poetics to talk

about how merely the illusion of causation is enough for us to apprehend as set of

events as a narrative. Causal explanation is crucial to Aristotle’s view of how plots

work to effect katharsis. Aristotle acknowledges that the causal relations among

events may be illusory—but even in that case, illusion of necessity is important for the

emotional pay-off of katharsis. In Book 9 of The Poetics Aristotle reminds us of the

story of King Mitys. Mitys of Argos, who was murdered. Mitys’ murder murderer

later got his just deserts when a statue of Mitys came loose and fell on him, and killed

him.

Aristotle observes that in this story the first event does not necessitate the

second event. Instead, the first event leaves apprehenders of the story unsettled (since

a sense of order has been upset) and the second event, though causally unrelated,

vindicates this concern by chance. The apprehenders, however, cannot help but

perceive the illusion of necessity as if there was some providential purpose to the

second event. After all, it was a statue with the likeness of the King that ended the life

of the murderer!55 Aristotle claims that that relationship between the two events is

enough to suggest necessity, though it is merely an illusion of causation. The illusion 54 Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 86. 55The Poetics, §9, 17.

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of causation is enough to get the emotional resolution (catharsis) with which Aristotle

is chiefly concerned, to get off the ground.

There is another way of interpreting this example too, which further reduces

the importance of the causal necessitation to narrative. This is the idea that it is

precisely because the justice in the Mitys case is accidental (hence, its being what we

call “poetic justice”) that enhances the apprehenders’ resolving emotional effect. We

may feel particularly satisfied by the happy accident of the statue of Mitys falling right

on top of Mitys’ own murderer! If the lack of causal relations can even enhance our

enjoyment of what we call a narrative, then it must not be causal relations that

determine what gets to count as narrative in the first place.

David Velleman thinks similarly—that causation is largely irrelevant to

narrative and that emotional resolution is the chief concern in “Narrative

Explanation,” he claims that narratives can contain causation but do not require it. He

argues that the explanatory force to which Carroll refers is just the causal information

that the narrative contains, “information that would be equally explanatory if recast in

non-narrative form.”58 For Velleman, therefore, causation is a distinct phenomenon

from narrative. It replaces the causal theory with what I will call below “the tick tock

theory”: a theory that narrative is a matter of represented events that bring us to an

ending by way of emotional resolution (with or without causal relations among

events). Paradigmatic instances of narratives—novels, short stories and told

anecdotes— all seem to share the feature of delivering some resolving emotional

58 Velleman,“Narrative Explanations,” 6.

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impact on the hearer/reader while descriptive claims, chronicles of events, doctors’

patient’s reports and lab reports have no such aims. Take as an example of the latter, a

representation of a chemical reaction in which a set of causally-related events are

represented, say, metathesis, in which two chemical compounds exchange ions or

bonds to form different compounds. I am inclined to think most of us will not regard

this as counting as a narrative. Perhaps the reason, “NaCl(aq) + AgNO3(aq) !

NaNO3(aq) + AgCl(s),” does not count as narrative is because it is a set of represented

events that does not bring us to any emotional resolution. In fact, it doesn’t pique our

emotions at all. It would seem that if we cannot accept that the sentence, “NaCl(aq) +

AgNO3(aq) ! NaNO3(aq) + AgCl(s),” is a narrative, then we are not able to accept

the minimalist view that narrative is simply representation of events or, even,

representation of causally related events.

Velleman proposes that what might distinguish narrative from phenomena such

as chronicles of events, police blotters and lab reports is the unique function of

delivery of an ending by way of emotional resolution—with or without causal

relations inhering among the represented events. He acknowledges that narrative can

use causal explanation to achieve its unique function, but that it does not have to use

causal explanation to achieve this function.

I think his theory is promising. Velleman observes that stories are structured

around endings. To support this claim, he draws on the work literary critic Frank

Kermode in his series of lectures entitled, The Sense of an Ending.” Kermode argues

that human beings seek to confer endings on what is actually an endless chain of

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events.59 He takes an example the way we fictionalize the event of a ticking clock by

saying that the clock goes “tick tock” and not merely “tick tick tick.” The “tock” is

fictional in the sense that there is no distinction between it and a “tick.” In a functional

clock, there is no break between a tock and a tick—the tocks simply keep going on

endlessly, without any change in feature or rhythm. It is we who impose the

distinction between a tick and a tock where there isn’t one.

Kermode points to work of psychologist Paul Fraisse whose experiments

demonstrate that that subjects can grasp the intervals within the fictionalized structure

but not, apparently, the intervals between the fictional tock and tick.60 Kermode

writes:

“The fact that we call the second of the two related sounds tock is evidence that we use fictions to enable the end to confer organization and form on the temporal structure… The clock's tick-tock I take to be a model of what we call a plot, an organization that humanizes time by giving it form; and the interval between tock and tick represents purely successive, disorganized time of the sort that we need to humanize.”61 Velleman thinks that Kermode’s observations point to the distinctive feature of

narrative: the conferring of an ending onto a series of represented events. The ending

need not be causal, but, on Velleman’s view, must provide emotional resolution in the

way tocks provide us organization and emotional resolution from the open-ended tick,

tick, tick.62 The phenomenology of the tick, tick, tick for human beings is maddening

and tension-inducing. (Composers, novelists and film directors know and exploit this,

of course, sometimes literally with a ticking bomb, though often far more

59 Kermode, The Sense of an Ending. 4-45. 60 Friasse, The Psychology of Time. 61 Kermode, 45. 62 “Narrative Explanations,” 17-19.

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figuratively.) What drives narrative, Velleman proposes, is a familiar emotional

cadence: the arousal and resolution of affect, a pattern that is biologically

programmed. “Hence we understand stories viscerally,” Velleman thinks, “with our

bodies.”63

Velleman supports this view with a detailed discussion of how narrative cadence

works: an initial, unstable emotion gives rise to another emotion that leads to a more

stable (if ultimately temporarily so) emotion. He cites work from Peter Brooks on

narrative. Brooks argues that the beginning of a story is a stimulus that prompts the

search for stimulus-reduction, “the itch that demands scratching,” while the middle of

a story is the postponement of stimulus- reduction by way of obstacles and misdirected

efforts, and the end is the “satisfying discharge that pacifies, if only temporarily.64

Velleman argues that there is a history to emotions—how they are initiated and

what brings them to a more stable place. Some emotions, such as fear and anger can

be elicited “out of the blue” by danger and injury, respectively whereas emotions such

as disappointment, gratification, and grief must “develop out of some antecedent

attitude that can be disappointed, gratified, or aggrieved.”65 Some emotions are ones

that motivate behavior while others are elicited by other emotions and ultimately lead

to their extinction.66

This theory is compelling and, I think, sheds some light on the problem with the

minimalist view in which chronicles and reports get to count as narratives simply

63 Ibid, 19. 64Ibid., 18. Velleman here draws from Brooks’ Reading for the Plot, Chapter 4, "Freud's Masterplot: A Model for Narrative." 65 Ibid., 22. 66 Ibid.

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because they represent events. Recall the intuition, from above, that chronicles of

events, scientific notations and news reports do not seem to count as narratives.

Chronicles of events, (“Napoleon marched X miles on day Y. He invaded Russia on

day Z.”), share subject matter and even represent a succession of causally-related

events. Still, many of us will object to calling this so-called chronicle of events a

“narrative”—particularly when we most often think of narratives as stories with ups

and downs, for the characters involved and dramatic tension, etc. Velleman’s theory

can explain why we resist calling a chronicle of events a narrative—because such a

sequence is a mere tick-tick-tick and not a tick-tock. If the sequence were a tick-tock,

we would experience an ending by way of emotional closure and not bat an eyelash

about its inclusion in the category of narrative.

Velleman’s account is vulnerable, however, to the objection that there are

genuine cases of narratives that do not have such emotional resolution. There are

narratives that are not as dry as news reports, say, but are also lacking in emotional

impact (and consequently emotional resolution). A narrative without emotional

resolution might occur because (a) the events in the narrative do not generate

distinctive emotion in apprehenders (maybe the events are not all that provocative), or

(b) because the second event does not resolve an emotion brought about by the first

event.

Take a set of represented events we are inclined to regard as a narrative that is

not emotionally provocative, say, pieces of mundane conversation. Imagine that after

being handed a glass of wine and asked, “How was your day?” a man remarks, “It was

good. I had a really nice conversation with Leslie this morning. I bumped into her at

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Starbucks. At first, I wasn’t going to approach her because I thought maybe she

wouldn’t want to engage in idle chit-chat after all that’s happened to her this past

month, but I ended up approaching her in spite of myself. I waited until she was

leaving with her coffee, then waved hello. She seemed relieved to have someone to

talk to, so I gave her a hug and we chatted for a minute. I’m glad I did. I told her we’d

call her next week.”

We may find it natural to regard this as a narrative or as an utterance that

contains a narrative. While the utterance is, in some sense, a report of the speaker’s

day, there seems to be something more than mere reporting going on, but not

particularly resembling of any emotional pattern Velleman has in mind. While the

speaker does say he wasn’t going to approach Leslie, and then does so in spite of

himself, the moment’s uncertainty does not need to be explicitly emotional. It could be

that the speaker was merely deliberating, and then came to a decision about what to

do. The story will not likely generate any emotional instability in the reader—an “itch

that needs scratching,” etc.

The other case in which a narrative does not bring us to emotional resolution is a

case in which the second event fails to resolve the emotion piqued by the first event.

Velleman takes this objection head-on in an example of Herodotus’ story of

Psammenitus, the Egyptian king. Velleman takes the story out of an essay from Walter

Benjamin, “The Storyteller.”67 In his essay, Benjamin recalls the Herodotus telling of

the story—a story in which the Egyptian King Psammenitus was captured by the

Persian king Cambyses. Herodotus tells us that Cambyses was then bent on humbling

67 In Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 89-90.

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Psammenitus by having him watch a procession in which his daughter would be

enslaved and his son, executed. Psammenitus remains emotionally reserved

throughout the procession until he recognizes one of his old servants and then

subsequently bursts into tears:

While all the Egyptians were lamenting and bewailing this spectacle, Psammenitus stood alone, mute and motionless, his eyes fixed on the ground; and when presently he saw his son, who was being taken along in the procession to be executed, he likewise remained unmoved. But when afterwards he recognized one of his servants, an old, impoverished man, in the ranks of the prisoners, he beat his fists against his head and gave all the signs of deepest mourning (Benjamin, 88-90). Benjamin goes on to say that Herodotus offers no explanations for the king’s outburst,

though readers for centuries have debated over the cause. 68 (Perhaps the king cared

not for his son but for his servant or, as Montaigne imagined, perhaps the appearance

of the servant was the last straw for the king and opened the floodgate to pent-up

tears).69

Velleman admits, “Because the tale of Psammenitus doesn't arrive at any

emotional conclusion, it doesn't qualify as a story according to my account, strictly

applied.”70 He argues, however, that all kinds of genres can use an audience’s

familiarity with narrative construct in order to have some other desired effect (say, a

poet confuses his audience by uses pieces of a narrative in his poem in order thwart an

audience’s desire for a certain emotional resolution, etc.). “In the present case,” he

writes, “the storyteller, Herodotus, is clearly inviting us, the audience, to read a story

68 Ibid. 69 Montaigne, “Of Sadness or Sorrow,” 8. 70 “Narrative Explanations,” 31.

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into the events that he has recounted.”71 Velleman thinks, then, that the text stands a

perfect example of his view: while the text as it is doesn’t arrive at emotional

conclusion and so not as of yet a narrative on Velleman’s view, it generates in

apprehenders the strong desire to find emotional closure that would complete the

narrative.

Velleman argues the example gets to be called a story even when it fails to be a

complete story on the tick-tock theory. This is because there are ways to interpret the

story that will yield emotional resolution. In searching for these ways, we encounter a

narrative that may not have a singular, definitive emotional pattern. “These events,”

Velleman writes,

“can be interpreted to yield an indefinite number of stories, as they are interpreted to describe different arcs of emotion. The invitation to take an active part in completing the story is what makes the tale of Psammenitus so stimulating. And the fact that Herodotus has left part of the storytelling to us does not prevent us from saying that he has told a story.”72 When a listener/reader identifies the emotional pattern that brings the set of events

to a close, the set of events secures its status as a narrative. The process of searching

for emotional resolution involves serially constituting different narratives—trying

each one on for size.

While this theory is compelling and, I think, points us in the right direction, I do

not think conferring an ending by way of emotional closure is the necessary feature of

narrative for which we are looking since there can be phenomena we find it natural to

regard as narratives but do not give us emotional resolution. I agree with Velleman

that Herodotus’ story of Psammenitus leaves us confused as to how we should feel 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid, 32.

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about the represented events (or what we should feel about the events). I also agree

that our confusion is like an itch that needs scratching in the tick-tock sense and

generates searches for an explanation for the king’s tears—an explanation will likely

deliver emotional resolution in apprehenders. I do not agree, however, that resulting

emotional resolution explains why the set of represented events gets to count as a

narrative. I think this is the wrong reason the set of events becomes a narrative after an

explanation of the king’s tears is added to the apprehended events. I think, instead, that

what explains why the represented events count as a narrative after the addition of an

explanation for his tears is the provision of a guiding telos for the actors involved, and

that our resulting emotional resolution is a rewarding pay-off for the construction of

the narrative. In the paragraphs, below, I will argue for this point—the claim that

narrative is a matter of represented development in teleology.

2.2. Narrative and teleology

On Velleman’s account, a narrative should deliver emotional closure. In the

example of Psammenitus, above, the text seems to resist such closure. Velleman

argues that because we do not understand why Psammenitus cries, we apprehend the

set of events without experiencing a stabilizing emotion. I agree with Velleman that

the text can be a narrative once we settle on an explanation for Psammenitus’ tears,

but I do not think that the reason the text then gets to count as a narrative is because an

ending is conferred by our experiencing emotional resolution. Instead, I think that our

settling on an explanation of Psammenitus’ tears helps organize the reported events

into a representation of the development of aims—(let’s say something like “the

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King’s aim to shame Psammenitus” or “Psammenitus’ aim to hold on to his honor”).

The payoff of this is an ending to our confusion to be sure but I do not think it is the

reason the text gets to count as a narrative. When we do not understand how an event

fits into the development of some telos, we may, depending on the case, resist calling

the whole set of representations a “narrative” until we determine how the events fit

together around a telos or the teleologies around the relevant characters.

When we serially try out explanations for Psammenitus’ tears, we serially

constitute narratives by arranging the events around different teleologies. When we do

so, we exploit our capacity for theory of mind: we “get inside the mind” of the agent

in question. Now Psammenitus’ behavior— once we settle on an explanation for it—

has particular meaning: the events mark the frustration of a particular telos. Several

possible theories have already been explored above. Perhaps seeing his now-enslaved

servant devastates Psammenitus, because it signifies the decimation of a singular

purpose to take care of his servant for whom he felt more intensity than even his

children. Alternately, the narrative could go like this: Psammenitus refuses to accept

defeat, struggling to maintain a veneer that he does not care about the King’s intent to

shame him. As each of his family members and subjects are paraded about without

dignity, his aim to maintain that veneer is challenged until at last he can take no more,

etc. In either of these cases or others like them, the event of Psammenitus’ tears can

now be said to fit into a particular set: the set of represented events that expresses the

development (and ultimate frustration of) specific aims.73

Represented development in a telos and the coming to a close of a series of

73 Simultaneous, of course, is the achievement of the conquering King’s aims to shame Psammenitus.

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events by way of emotional resolution are very often concurrent. Let me explain why.

Apprehension of an organizing teleology and the events surrounding it yields an

appreciation of the import of the events—what significance they have for the

characters or individual involved, whose aims are affected by the events. The ups and

downs of a person’s aspirations, or complicated representation of the actions of a

group of people, will have beginnings and endings according to the development,

advancement, change or frustration of the teleologies involved. Apprehenders respond

to this development in teleology in complicated ways (the examination of which goes

beyond the scope of this dissertation though the matter deserves some attention given

our present purposes). The way in which apprehenders respond to a set of represented

events can vary depending upon which characters the apprehenders identify with, but

as long as they apprehend a development in teleology, they apprehend a narrative. We

can be in different moods and respond to narratives in different ways at different

times. The set of represented events of a person slipping on banana peel could make us

laugh one night in a certain mood and then feel sad on another night when we are in a

different mood. We can be ill-informed about a story (we don’t “know the whole

story”) and laugh in response to it but then be told additional facts and realize our

laughter was inappropriate. My argument here is that we emotionally respond to

narratives that already exist on the basis of their orientation around intelligible

teleologies.

Whether or not an apprehender feels an itch that needs scratching, a tick that

needs tocking, or finds his way to an emotional resolution that confers the ending upon

the events is, I am arguing, beside the point. That we tend to respond to represented

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development of teleology emotionally by getting nervous or scared and excited, then

subsequently relieved, is a payoff we get from apprehending the narrative in the first

place. In his defense of the claim that narratives are in some sense constituted by

fictional ending our emotional closure confers upon a series of events, he points us to

Aristotle’s discussion of plot structure in the Poetics—how causal relations among

events provide the elements of story. Velleman writes that at first we might think

Aristotle’s claim is tautologous.75 He asks us to consider as an example of this

concern, the way in which Aristotle characterizes endings as events that need not be

followed by anything else:

A beginning is that which does not itself follow necessarily from something else, but after which a further event or process naturally occurs. An end, by contrast, is that which is itself naturally occurs, whether necessarily or usually, after a preceding event, but need not be followed by anything else. A middle is that which both follows a preceding event and has further consequences. [vii 1450b]

Velleman’s reply to Aristotle’s appeal to causal necessity is to remind us that events

are, in truth, an endless chain of tick-ticks and not tick-tocks:

The beginning of a story always has necessary antecedents, causally speaking, and the ending is always sufficient for further consequences. There are no beginnings or endings in the chain of causation.76 Recall that Velleman thinks what makes an ending an ending is emotional

resolution—not an event that, when depicted, need not be “followed by anything else”

(or anyway, the sense in which nothing need follow in the emotional sense).77 He

thinks these endings are fictionalized and he follows Kermode in thinking that we, by

75 Ibid., 21. 76 Ibid., 22. 77 Here I refer back to Aristotle.

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analogy, apply learned emotional patterns to the represented events—thereby creating

an ending where there isn’t really one.

I would argue differently, that learned emotional patterns—the ones Velleman

wants to say we apply by analogy to the represented events—are not fictionalized but

felt responses (complicated as they may be) to represented developments in

teleologies. We cry when we lose something we value and aim to preserve, rejoice

when we achieve something we set out to do, or when something we actively care

about flourishes, etc.78 In cases in which the narratives we respond to are entirely

fictional or about individuals other than ourselves, I suspect some kind of

identification with the represented aims, individuals is at work, though, again, this

discussion goes beyond the scope of the dissertation. All the same, however, it might

be a good time to put my concern about Velleman’s tick-tock theory in the following

way: In order for us to have an emotional resolution to conflict, we have to become

interested in the characters or circumstances in the first place. This is a process that

likely requires caring about what the individuals are doing, what effects their

behaviors will have on the individuals in the set of represented events, and how we

feel about such roles. Caring about characters in a story such that we can have

emotional responses with respect to them likely involves having beliefs about what

would be good for individual characters in the eudaimonistic sense.

Even when the set of represented events is about a rock rolling toward a cliff

face (A set of events than can cause anxiety in apprehenders and, emotional resolution

when the rock finally falls to the ground.), I think the story of the rock falling is prior 78 Cf. work on emotions such as Josef Raz (1999, 2001), Samuel Scheffler (2004) and Bennet Helm (2001).

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to apprehender’s emotional responses. Taking an interest in the rock rolling toward the

cliff face, I suspect, is connected to our capacity for theory of mind (an argument for

which I will provide below). When we imagine what it would “be like” to roll,

knowingly or unknowingly (for each of these psychological states would affect the

individual’s response to his eventual fall in different ways), toward a steep drop, we

find ourselves having emotional responses. These responses are complicated by other

features in the narrative (such as whose mind we are in at the moment), but do not

arise on their own without provocation from perceived teleological conflicts: other

people wanting things, losing things, being prevented from getting things or

personified objects doing the same, etc. (More will be said about this below). When an

individual in a story wants to fall off a cliff (he has a death wish), our emotional

response to this may be quite complicated (we may not want him to want to fall off the

cliff and so on), but my point here and in sections below, is merely that the story about

the individual and the cliff was a story prior to our felt responses.

The emotions that Velleman argues confer endings do not come out of nowhere,

but are very much generated by the apprehension of teleology, as I argue here. The

temptation to think of narrative ending as, by necessity, fictional coincides with an

under appreciation of the role intentionality plays in a sequence of events. In our

earlier discussion, we noted psychological research revealing our difficulty grasping

the interval between the tock and the tick but not between the constructed tick tock.

Recall that Kermode thinks that the tick-tock is something we do to “humanize” time,

bestowing upon it an organization that is peculiarly human. What makes apprehension

of a “tock” human-like is that it mimics our own rhythms: the serial taking up and

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satisfaction (or frustration) of, our intentions. When we apprehend a “tock,” we

imagine the clock has beginnings and endings in the way that our own movements do.

Where a God’s eye view of the world might not distinguish our movements from the

ebbs and flow of a river, we, on the inside, regard ticks and tocks to our own

movements because we take ourselves to initiate those movements with aims that end

either in fulfillment or disappointment. As first causes, we make our own beginnings

and apprehend endings when we fulfill or fail to achieve the purposes for which we

act.

I argue that narratives represent this teleological movement distinctive of human

beings and, so too, the emotional cadence Velleman argues is distinctive of narrative

representation. To see that beginnings and endings apply to human action, we can look

to work in philosophy of action. Michael Bratman has argued for an understanding of

human action as a kind of planning agency. He has argued that we should regard

intentions as conceptually basic. He thinks intentions need not be further analyzed

into, say, beliefs and desires).79 When we form intentions to do things, we initiate

series of movements to carry out our plans. Forming an intention and initiating

movements on the basis of the intention is, I think, a distinctive feature of the human

experience. We form intentions and when we do so, we instigate a process that we

hope will bring the world into conformity with our desires. We keep track of the status

of our plans of actions. We keep track of whether or not we are succeeding or failing

to secure some x, whether or not our intentions are thwarted or satisfied. Our

apprehension of how an event affects the development or frustration of our aims

79 Cf. Faces of Intention, 1991.

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generates the emotional responses of satisfaction, joy or, alternately, disappointment

and frustration, etc.

What I think we see in some sets of represented events is this kind of

intentionality. When a set of represented events appears to track the aim of someone or

something, we regard the set of represented events as a narrative. What follows from

my claim is that the emotional resolution often characteristic of narrative is

importantly tied to teleology that (depending on your position on free will) may or

may not be fictionalized. While the final event in a narrative sequence may be, as

Velleman observes, just another cause for further effects, it may also be the genuine

end of an individual’s purpose for action.

.

2.3 A moderate view: Narrative as the representation of development in teleology

So where does the above discussion put us in our search for an account of what

narrative is? I will argue below that my own account can avoid the problems in the

above-mentioned accounts, while also staying true to commonsense intuitions on the

matter. I take myself to be elaborating on the intuitions that stories are about

characters doing things—what I take to be paradigmatic cases of narratives. I think

that what these paradigm cases share is the representation of events organized around

a person aiming at something. Such a paradigm case often involves an individual (or

individuals) forming an intention of some kind, and then putting in plans of action she

hopes will bring the world into conformity with her desires, while responding to

threats and advancements in her aim. A narrative may represent development of more

than one aim, but it must at least represent one. A novel or a play or an anecdote can

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employ multiple narratives, and so, represent the development of multiple aims. When

we suspect that a set of representations might be a narrative, we apply the paradigm

case to the set of represented events by analogy. Narrative features of the core cases

will be present in instances of narratives even in the limit cases, if only in degenerate

way.

Let us look at the limit cases in order to determine to what extent my account

can avoid the charges standing against the other accounts: the worry about vacuity

and, alternately, undesired narrowness such as Carroll’s causal relations account.

On my view, any subject followed by a verb does not yet make a narrative.

Descriptive claims (“The ball is on the table” or even “I fell down”) are not narratives

because they do not represent the development of telos. While an objector might say

that the latter sentence, “I fell down,” represents the thwarted aim to stand up (or to

run as in Abbott’s case of the crying child who runs to his Mama after falling down),

the sentence, alone, cannot really be said to represent development of an aim. It is

simply too sparse to represent initiated and further threatening or advancement of a

telos. More would need to be added before we confer status of narrative on descriptive

claims such as the ones above.

Let us now look at a chronicle of events: a set of descriptive claims

documenting events between T1 and T2. Take as an example the following set of

sentences, “Napoleon attacked Austria. Then Napoleon attacked Prussia. Then

Napoleon attacked Russia…” While I think that each descriptive claim in the set

represents Napoleon’s movements, together they do not amount to the expression of

the development of an overall purpose for action. If we say, however, that he did

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things that as part of an effort to set up a unified Continental empire centered in

France, then it is a narrative precisely because we are then able to understand the set of

claims as representing the developing of this aim.

Still the objector might argue that each descriptive claim represents the

achievement of a purpose and, overall, the set is the representation of Napoleon’s aim

to dominate Central and Eastern Europe. Perhaps because we already know

Napoleon’s aims from historical documentation, we find it very tempting to say that

this set of descriptive claims expresses his aim to dominate Europe. I think that taken

as they are, however, these descriptive claims do not yet give us many clues to the

mind of Napoleon, though they do report on his movements. I think that if we think

we see the mind of Napoleon expressed in the descriptive claims above, then we have,

without awareness, supplied an aim to the set of represented events where there isn’t

one. In so doing, we construct a narrative from what was a mere report.

In order to see this more clearly imagine a reporter at a newspaper whose beat

is crime. He takes notes on what happened and interviews the people involved. His

job, as a reporter, is to write up a document that provides information on just the facts

of what happened. He is not to assume anything. Even the phrase “the man came at the

woman with a knife” imbues the text with clues about the state of mind of the man

since “came at” indicates a sense of urgency and focus that, say, “the man had a knife

which he moved toward the woman” does not. Even verbs such as “stabbed” or

“wielded” start looking to our reporter like verbs that assume too much about the

minds of the people involved in the event he tries to report on. He finds himself

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struggling not to tell a story but to simply report the facts. He finds it tempting, and

almost impossible not, to imagine the state of mind of the individuals involved.

What my comments suggest is that what makes a set of represented events a

narrative is not the events, themselves, but how the events are represented—what

organizing principle guides their arrangement. If they are arranged around and express

development of a telos, then they count as a narrative. If they do not express

development of an aim but merely report movements of an individual, then they do not

get so counted. Our sense that a represented set of events is a narrative is stronger

when we can more readily apply the paradigm case of a person aiming at something to

the represented set.

So far, my account avoids the permissiveness of Abbott’s account. My account

excludes descriptive claims, reports and chronicles of events that do not contain

representation of development in teleologies. I think this exclusion brings my account

closer to our intuitions on the matter.

What about stories about animals, non-sentient beings such as trees, and even

inanimate entities such as rocks, oceans and wind? An objector might observe that

there are plenty of events surrounding animals, rocks, trees and wind. Such entities do

not do not have purposes for their actions and yet we can serve as the subject of

narratives. Imagine, as an example, a story about a rock: how the rock, getting warmer

throughout the day, sits atop a mountain side, how it provides a resting place for a

hiker who comes to lean on it before getting up again to climb, and how it also

withstands the rain that the gathering clouds shed rain on it before nightfall, etc. If we

can tell a story about a rock, the objector might say, then we can tell narratives without

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appeal to purposes, aims or teleologies. Surely, then, the thesis developed so far is

wrong.

This objection is too hasty. What often goes on in narratives about rocks, trees

and wind is a process, though tacit, of personification—supplying a telos to inanimate

objects. Apprehenders tend to personify sequences of events involving the states of

inanimate objects and non-sentient beings. We often supply a telos to a set of

represented events about inanimate objects where there is none. Take the example of

the rock story from above. The rock “sits,” “provides” and “withstands”. The set of

events, depending upon what words we choose to describe the event, seem to give us

information about the rock’s “experience” and even, some (though arguably

impoverished) aims (perhaps it enjoys—seeks communion with—the hiker, wishes

for, revels in the soothing rain that comes after a day of “enduring” the hot sun, etc.)

Getting inside the “mind” of the rock (!) is a component of the narrative construction

of inanimate objects.

If, however, the set of represented events is truly devoid of teleology, of what

the rock would wish for, prefer, enjoy, dislike, desire or aim at, then, I argue the set of

events is merely a descriptive claim such as would be the case in a weather report or

scientific document: “The rock’s surface was 90° F at 10:00 am, 95° at 10:30 am. At

noon, a hiker sat on it and rain fell on it from the NW at 10 mph.” This represented

set of events gives us very little information about the rock’s “experiences” or mind or

general telos, etc. On my view, this is not a narrative.

In the same way that Abbott wants to say we cannot help ourselves, and

immediately construct a narrative out of a picture of a wrecked ship, I argue that we

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often supply an organizing purpose to a represented set of events where there may not

be one already. When we do this, we construct a narrative. To what extent the

descriptive claims about the rock are a narrative depends upon to what extent the

represented events express development of a telos.

My discussion suggests a critical link between narrative and theory of mind. I

am not alone in this observation and follow such theorists on narrative such as Blakey

Vermeule (2009) and Lisa Zunshine (2006), who think that our capacities to

apprehend narrative is importantly connected to our capacities to perceive other

minds. When movements have purpose— intentionality— we apprehend narratives.

Take as an example the notation for metathesis described in earlier paragraphs:

“NaCl(aq) + AgNO3(aq) ! NaNO3(aq) + AgCl(s).” I suspect we are not inclined to

call this sentence a narrative. It does not reveal a developed purpose. In this case, we

are inclined to reject this limit case as a narrative. If however the same set of events is

represented as the development of a telos (“…The drama of the hopeful reagents

begins when the aqueous salt solution permeates the barrier at the top of the

beaker…”), then we may be more likely to call this a narrative.

This is the same with respect to theoretical explanations of states of affairs. Take

as an example a theodicy in which the current state of the universe is explained by

earlier events. If we supply a designer to the universe, then we likely apprehend the set

of representations as a narrative. If, however, the representation resists apprehension

of a mind, then we are less likely to count the evidence as a narrative; A string of

events beginning with an enormous explosion of a swirling mass of gases followed by

the rapid movement of the resulting gaseous bodies away from the center of the

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explosion and the subsequent formation of swirling gasses—smaller in size to the

original, singular mass—around central axis, can be explained without reference to

mind. The movement of these bodies can be explained by appeal to certain natural

laws (gravity, electromagnetism, weak and strong nuclear forces, etc.).

When we find ourselves tempted to call this explanation of a state of affairs a

narrative though at the same time do not also postulate a designer, it may be because

we have unwittingly supplied minds to the subatomic composition of the universe,

say, theoretical entities such as quarks and leptons. Quarks and leptons “obey” the

forces named above. We may even unwittingly regard theoretical entities as initiating

movement—thereby having intentions—independent of the aforementioned forces as

if the entities would be moving in some other way had they not been sideswiped by

the forces of gravity. If, however, we truly do not apprehend purpose in the

representation then we may find ourselves apprehending an explanation of a state of

affairs and not a narrative.

The more the events are represented as development of a telos, the more we are

confident that the set is a narrative. When we take the paradigm case of an individual’s

developed aim and, by analogy, apply it to limit cases, we find that some sentences are

agreeable to the application. When I suspect that the sequence is a narrative, I imagine

that the narrative will function so as to reveal a purpose or the thwarting of a purpose.

If application of intentionality to some sequence of events pushes on the limits of our

imagination too far, then we may ultimately choose to give up trying to regard the set

of representations as a narrative. In this case I stop allowing them to operate as

tracking some aim.

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So far, then, my account avoids the permissiveness of minimalist accounts such

as Abbott’s but is flexible enough to include representations of events surrounding

inanimate objects and the like so long as those representations are relevantly

connected to representation of developed teleology. What about the stories such as

King Mitys in which causal relations do not obtain among represented events in a set?

How does my account treat these cases?

As I argue above, such sets of represented events are narratives when the events

in them express the development of a telos. In the case of King Mitys, the events

express development of a purpose to have order restored. Events in the set are

organized by a third party—not by the actors in the story (the King or the murderer).

The narrator has thrown together these two events in order that they express the

development of an aim to see that the King’s murder was avenged or that order as

restored. Apprehenders take particular delight in the fact that the features of the first

event are developed and then resolved by mere chance (the murderer of Mitys is killed

by a falling statue of Mitys!). The fact that the second event is not necessitated by the

first is not an obstacle to narrative construction. What makes this set a narrative is that

the second event develops (in this case develops and satisfies) a generated by the first

event: a search for assurance that wrongdoers do not fare well and, because of this, do

not escape punishment for their behaviors.

Finally, my account does not require, as does Velleman’s, that a narrative

confer an ending by way of emotional resolution on the part of the apprehenders.

Though emotional resolution does not exhaust the explanation of what a narrative is, it

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is very often a part of our experience of narrative and of narrative endings for the

reason that the teleological orientation of narrative tends to represent emotional

patterns and produce them in apprehenders as well. Represented emotional patterns of

the individuals internal to a narrative express agent-relative values and as such, can

give us clues to what matters to the agents in the story, what their minds are, what

aims they have and how they regard what is happening to them in the story. As I have

argued, there might be more or less information about the minds of the individuals in a

story to help us deepen our appreciation of the narrative.80

80 The appreciation that some set of events is, on my view, separate from the emotional responses of apprehenders to the set of events. Like the represented emotions of the individuals internal to the story, the real emotions expressed by apprehenders are clues to what matters to them, what desires they bring to the experience of apprehending the narrative—a topic, as I have acknowledged, that is beyond the scope of this dissertation. (Take as an example of the way in which emotional resolution of apprehenders is distinct from narrative, itself, the last scene in the 1991 film Thelma and Louise. The two friends have been fleeing from the police after Louise shot a man who tried to rape Thelma. In the final scene, they decide, in order to escape what appears to be a hopeless situation, to wrest control of their circumstances by ending their lives. They drive their car off a cliff. What makes Thelma and Louise a narrative on my view is the represented development of their aims. Apprehenders may or may not mirror the emotions expressed by the individuals internal to the story. The particular emotional responses of the apprehenders have to do with the viewers’ wishes and hopes: do they want Thelma and Louise to keep on living by turning themselves in (thereby accepting life-long prison terms), or do they, alternately, regard suicide as the only, plausible and acceptable action to satisfy a telos to live freely and authentically?

On Velleman’s view, what makes Thelma and Louise a narrative is that the set of events brings apprehenders to an emotional resolution that confers the ending upon the sequence. On my view, the sequence is already a narrative by having tracked, for apprehenders, the teleologies of the two women. Our responses, varied as they may be, are beside the point in terms of constituting narrative. In arguing this way, I do not wish to underplay the importance of emotional responses to narrative, for it may very well be that emotional resolution is the key function of narratives for human beings. My point, however, is that such an emotional payoff does not constitute the narrative itself. Some narratives will deliver high emotional impact to apprehenders, the kind of impact characteristic of novels, short stories, operas or other literary forms. Perhaps the more we get inside the mind of characters in narratives, the more likely we are to have strong emotional responses to the narratives. There may be many possible reasons why narrative leaves us cold. It may be that something about the story makes it difficult for us to engage with it in the relevant way. Perhaps aspects of the plot are too unbelievable, or so deeply troubling (morally or otherwise), that we resist emotional engagement with the narrative. Take as an example Oscar Wilde’s criticism that the works of Charles Dickens were terribly, overly sentimental. He is famously reported to have quipped to Ada Leverson, “You would need to have a heart of stone, to not laugh at the death of Little Nell.” (as quoted in Richard Ellmann’s, Oscar Wilde, 469). Perhaps when some narratives leave us cold, this is because the representations offer up less interiority to the minds of principle actors in the events than other instances of narrative. In any case, I argue that apprehension of a teleology makes the set a narrative, regardless of the level of emotional impact. More

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A skeptic might wonder if my view of a narrative is a matter of tracking

teleology, then it must end with the ultimate frustration or achievement of the telos in

question. This, the skeptic would argue, is not a good result for a theory since some

narratives do not seem to conclude this way. I argue in response that narrative need

not conclude with the satisfaction or ultimate frustration of the represented aim since

on my view all that is needed is represented development of an organizing aim. This

feature of my account can explain why we might think certain narrative-like objects

can count as narratives even when they don’t seem to have satisfying conclusions.

Perhaps the narrative seems to conclude in the middle of things, ending with the

satisfaction or frustration of a nested aim but not the larger, critical aim that organizes

the representation. This can still count as narrative on my view.

Take as an example of this a marriage comedy in which the two lovers fall in

love with one another, express their wishes to be married, overcome obstacles to their

union and eventually get married. The organizing telos is, arguably, to secure and

experience the married life—not merely to participate in a wedding ceremony. At the

same time, however, marriage comedies usually end with a mere proposal if not the

marriage ceremony itself. Neither a proposal of marriage nor a two-hour wedding

ceremony is the accomplishment of the grand aim to experience the married life—that

is, to have one’s own life entwined with another’s.

work would need to be done in this area to further iron out the relationship of apprehender emotions and apprehended narratives.

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It is a misunderstanding of my view to think that this stands as a counter-

example. A marriage comedy is a narrative on my view because it contains the

representation of development of telos (to be married) even though it does not end

with the accomplishment or frustration of that grand aim. An event sequence may

conclude with the accomplishment or frustration of an aim, nested within the larger

aim, and still get to count as narrative.

Finally, an objector might point to stories in which actors are passive: things

happen to these figures and, for this reason, cannot be said to be pursuing aims but

merely responding to forces pushing them around. These are narratives about luck and

fortune or devastating misfortune but not about agents bending the world into

conformity with their desires. Whether the narrative is about a piece of kelp being

tossed about by an ocean wave or a person experiencing great distress, we will not

want to exclude such a phenomenon from an account of narrative. I argue in response

that my account is compatible with the intuition that there are narratives with passive

figures. In stories with passive figures, the passive figures likely have some emotional

response to how the forces in question affect them. As I have argued, such responses

are clues to what matters to the individual. Even when brute forces are represented

without any teleologies functioning in their movements, the passive subjects

vulnerable to them may respond in ways that give us clues to their minds, desires, felt

needs, etc. The will to continue living, to minimize pain, to lessen damage or to stay

afloat are teleologies, if not very active ones, in the paradigmatic sense of an agent

actively pursuing some x. Misfortune is often represented as a thwarting of an agent’s

telos.

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Further, as discussed in previous sections, a set of events concerning non-

sentient beings such as waves causing kelp to bob about, we either find the set of

events resistant to personification completely, in which case we apprehend the

representation as merely descriptive claim, or the set of events is apprehended in some

teleology –though perhaps in some degenerate form. For these reasons, I argue that

sequences with passive subjects are not counter-examples to my view.

The discussion above shows that my view is neither too permissive nor to

narrow. It can be flexible enough to include representations without causal relations

among events (such as the Mitys story), representations with either great or minimal

emotional impact, and representations with ambiguous endings or even no endings at

all. At the same time, it is not altogether permissive because it excludes scientific

reports and mere descriptive claims that we may intuitively resist calling narratives.

2.4 Conclusion

When we think of narrative as a representation of development of teleology, I

think we stay close to the everyday way in which we talk about narrative. On my

account, an event sequence can fail to be a narrative when the events resist orientation

around a telos or when they do not suggest the development of a telos. In cases in

which events seem not to hang together under an organizing telos, then apprehenders

either become skeptical that the sequence is a narrative, or they fill in pieces of

information that will enable the events to orient around a telos. In cases in which a

telos is not developed, the sequence might get counted as a descriptive claim but not

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yet a narrative. My view also allows for a kind of flexibility consonant with our

intuitions: the more a sequence of events expresses the development of a telos, the

more confidant we are that the sequence is a narrative and so on.

Recall that what motivated the present discussion on the subject of narrative

was the claim that agents could solve the problem of lost meaningfulness in their lives

brought on by meaning-threatening regrets, failures or losses, by rescuing lost

meaning in their pasts through a process of narrative transformation in which they

change the meanings of past events from bad to good. In an effort to test this

possibility, I set out to investigate how events in a life get their meanings in the first

place so that we might be able to understand how the meanings of events could change

from bad to good. On the account of narrative for which I have just argued, events

could get their meanings by contributing in some way—positively, negatively—to a

guiding aim or telos.

Does this work for actual lives? Do the events in actual human lives get their

meanings in the same way? I think the answer is yes—that we can understand events

in human lives as having meaning for us when we can represent them to ourselves as

contributing positively or negatively to relevant teleologies of ours—that is the aims,

aspirations, pursuits, activities we adopt. When we regard our lives as containing

narratives (the story of how I found my job, the narrative of my pursuit of a

promotion, my aim to get my scuba-diving license, my journey through parenthood),

events come to have meaning because they bear on the multitude of things we have in

motions, aims we have set, cares we have that need protecting, etc. Perhaps we can

talk about one overall life narrative arranged around some grand aim or, more likely,

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about several key narratives that track the development of some pursuit of ours we

truly care about.

Perhaps, then, we are closer to an understanding of how redemption might

work. If redemption could be a rescue of lost meaning in the past, then perhaps it will

be some kind of retelling of the narrative such that the past events received a new

meaning—one that contributed positively instead of negatively to the aim in question.

Recall from the beginning section of this essay, David Velleman’s claim, in “Well-

being and Time” (2000) that overall well-being over a lifetime was in some way a

function of the “narrative significance” of the ordering of events. If redemption were a

matter of changing the contribution some event played in a guiding aim of an agent’s,

we could somehow replace a narrative that functioned so as to devalue the agent’s life

with one that increased its overall value.

A skeptic might raise the concern that, perhaps determining the meaning of an

event for a person is not so simple as identifying the contribution the event makes to

an individual’s aim. The skeptic might point out that when we ask what some event

“means” in an actual human life, we tend to become interested in additional

considerations over and above the contribution of the event to relevant teleologies of

the agent. Take as an example of such an additional consideration the question of how

important was the aim in question to the agent. After all, if some aim was very

important to an agent, an event that represented the thwarting of that aim will be more

deeply negative in meaning for that agent than an event that thwarted an aim the agent

didn’t care about all that much. For two people who compete in a marathon, the fact

that they both fail to finish might have different meanings since one agent cared about

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winning a great deal while the other did not so much.

Consider, too, that when we ask what some event in a person’s life “means,” we

also will likely want to know the value of the organizing aim in question. After all, if

the agent’s aim is to construct the largest ball of twine, we will likely consider her

losing her twine to a kitchen fire of less negative meaning than losing data for cancer

research would be for a scientist, even though both events are considered losses and,

to the previous point, mattered a great deal to the agents involved.

Perhaps the matter of determining the meaning of an event in someone’s life is

more complicated than merely isolating its contribution to an organizing aim. When

we ask if an event is “good” or “bad” for an agent, we seem to be asking what an

event means in a thick, normative sense—as if the answer to the question will convey

information about the agent’s well-being. This would mean that a change in meaning

of an event from bad to good in a thick, normative sense amounts to something more

than merely positive import for a person’s aim. When we search for the meaning of an

event in a human life, we evaluate the event not merely functionally as to what role it

plays with respect to a telos, but also according to other factors that will convey

information about the event’s overall effect on the value of the agent’s life. For the

present purposes, I wish to remain neutral on what well-being is, but merely claim that

the question of an event’s meaning in a person’s life concerns well-being, and

includes, but is also more than, the description of how the event affects an aim.

I call the kind of meaning discussed in this chapter the “thin” sense of meaning:

the function the event has within the context of a life narrative (to thwart or advance

an organizing telos). I call the second kind of meaning the “thick” sense of meaning:

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the effect the event has on the overall well-being of the agent, on the value of his life

overall. The thin sense of meaning is part of the thick sense since fixing the meaning

of an event in the latter sense will involve identifying the role the event plays in the

agent’s organizing aim. It will also, however, involve other considerations such as the

ones mentioned above. It will be important for the overall thesis of this dissertation

that the narrative transformation I have in mind not merely be a change in the thin

sense of meaning, but also of the thick sense mentioned above since what I am trying

to prove is that redemption increases the value of an agent’s life overall— that it is

good for the agent in the thick, eudaimonistic sense.

I will examine how an event’s meaning—in this thick sense—gets fixed for a

person, and then, how an event might change its meaning in Chapters V and VI. At the

present time, however, let us allow the conclusion of the present chapter to guide

further research into redemption, since we now can appreciate the importance of

narrative to it (since the significance of events requires apprehending an organizing

narrative). Before I examine what the thicker, normative sense of meaning might

entail, and how it might get fixed for a person, I will isolate what is at stake in

redemption from the start. This is important to my larger thesis, since the change in

meaning from bad to good I claim redemption consists in ought to also satisfy

requirements for an increase in value to a person’s past and to her life as a whole.

What, then, is the value at stake in redemption that, when a change in an event’s

meaning is achieved, increases for the life as a whole? Investigation of the questions in

an effort to find its answer is the subject of the following chapter.

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III.

The Value of Meaningfulness

As I am conceiving it in this dissertation, redemption is a process of narrative

transformation that increases the value of our lives overall. But exactly how does this

narrative transformation change us and increase the value of our lives? What kind of

value is at stake in redemption and why do we care? The answers to these questions

are the subject of the present chapter.

In the last chapter, I argued that events might get their meanings in the first place

from the contributions they make to an agent’s organizing telos. I complicated this

claim at the conclusion of the chapter by introducing the idea that in addition to this

aspect of import, there may be other considerations that bear on the determination of

an event’s meaning for a person (such as value of the agent’s aim, centrality of the aim

to the agent, etc.). These further considerations seemed to pertain to a person’s well-

being, though I indicated that I wished to remain neutral for the moment on which

theory of well-being is best. I suggested that perhaps redemption is a matter of

restoring lost meaning by a retelling of a narrative such that bad events can now play

good roles in a thick, normative sense that restores well-being.

It might follow from these observations that what an agent stands to gain in

redemption is restored well-being. I will argue, however, that redemption is not merely

a matter of restored well-being, but instead, the restoration of a different kind of

value—one that has to do with an agent’s relationships to beloved projects in his life. I

call this special kind of a value a life can have, “meaningfulness.” In order to render

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my claims plausible, I will need to identify what this special kind of value consists in,

and then demonstrate how redemption as I see it (an event’s change in meaning from

bad to good in this thick, normative sense) satisfies its criteria.

In the present chapter I examine this special kind of value—meaningfulness—a

life can have. I will argue below that meaningfulness is distinct from the value of a

life’s utility (happiness) or morality. The aim in this chapter is to untangle some of the

muddled intuitions on meaningfulness. Unfortunately, this is no simple matter because

meaningfulness is a difficult subject to tackle, and accounts of it up to this point are

vague and provisional. In Section 3.1, I defend the idea that redemption is more than

mere restoration of well-being. In Section 3.2 I review plausible accounts of

meaningfulness, mainly Susan Wolf’s account in Meaning In Life and Why It Matters.

I consider some objections to the account—mainly that its demand for objective value

is unnecessary—before determining that, overall, it is largely defensible. I raise an

additional objection, however, that the view cannot account for the way in which we

think meaningfulness has something to do with how the parts of a life fit together and

demonstrate personal development over time. I suggest that a more teleological view

of meaning can solve that problem.

In Section 3.2.2 I sketch of an account of meaningfulness that incorporates

needed teleological elements. This account saves the intuitions that the

meaningfulness in lives is enhanced (1) by the increased import life events have when

they contribute to other parts of the life, and (2) when they contribute to the

development of a person’s potential in a positive way. In Section 3.3, I defend the

plausibility of meaningfulness against the “One-thought-too-many” objection. I argue

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that this is merely an apparent objection and that meaningfulness is practically

relevant to our lives since we can have a meaningful life as a reasonable aim and make

choice in our lives accordingly.

Finally, in Section 3.4, I return to the subject of redemption and argue that we

can now see more clearly how redemption might increase the value of a life overall,

by changing the meaning of an event from bad to good. Satisfaction of the provisional

account of redemption would enable a person to represented previously regretted parts

of his life as part of larger, beloved projects important to the agent that reflect positive

growth and development for the agents. That is, redemption, at least initially, appears

to meet the demands of meaningfulness articulated in this chapter.

3.1 The problem: What kind of value is at stake in redemption?

At the end of the last chapter, I considered the thought that determining the the

meaning of an event in an actual human life might not be as simple as isolating its

import with respect to an agent’s aim. When we ask what some event “means” in an

actual human life, we tend to become interested in additional considerations over an

above the contribution of the event to relevant teleologies of the agent (value of aim,

extent of centrality of the aim to the agent, etc.). I concluded that our interest in these

other considerations suggests that there is something more than positive or negative

contribution to an aim that matters to us in determining the meaning of events in the

lives of human agents.81 I argued that that the meaning of an event must involve the a

81 The skeptic might become a bit concerned that talk about the meaning of an event in someone’s life is strange—perhaps even wrongheaded—since it asks us to focus our attention on the value of certain activities for the people participating in them and not for their own sakes. Take as an example, the value

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“thin” aspect, which is its contribution to a guiding telos, but also a thicker, normative

aspect that conveys additional information about the event’s relationship to the agent’s

well-being. This thought would suggest that what is at stake in redemption is a

restoration of a perosn’s well-being. The transformation of an event for a person from

bad to good import would, somehow, restore a person’s overall well-being. Let us test

this idea.

Recall one of the examples of redemption from Chapter I—the story about the

victim of sexual assault who became a rape crisis counselor, and head of the non-profit

organization in her community. On the view I have just presented, the redemption in

her life prevents some event from counting against her well-being. The agent, when

she represents her life to herself through this narrative, ought to feel a sense of relief

that her past is no longer disvaluable to her overall well-being, as well as a felt sense

of satisfaction that her well-being is restored— that her life can be represented as

faring well based on the new trajectory.

I do not think, however, this explanation of the value of redemption suffices. A

felt sense of relief that now her life is faring well when before it was not, or even that

the past can now be represented as having gone well, does not quite capture the

phenomenon I have in mind. Recall that after the initial grief, resentment and

disorientation, the imagined agent from above put her life back together but did so in a of medical research. This is valuable, the skeptic might argue, precisely because it benefits other people—not the research scientist performing the lab experiments! To this, I would remind the skeptic that what we are currently examining is what is at stake in the question of what an event or activity means for an agent, is the value to the agent of participating in that activity in the first place. I do not think it will turn out to be unintuitive to claim that participating in valuable activities—such as medical research—will count positively for an agent in his efforts to live a good life, or that an event’s meaning for a person involves considerations of its objective value. That medical research benefits other people is what makes is good for the agent to do.

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particular way—she put her horrible misfortune to use by allowing it to change in

meaning from altogether bad to good in some sense. Now she looks back on her attack

with complex feelings. On the one hand, it was horrible— an event she wishes never

to live over again. On the other hand, her experience is now part of larger story in

which she finds great meaning (Her life as a rape crisis counselor, her work with the

Crisis Center and her relationships with the people she has met along the way are very

dear to her).

It is hard for her to imagine her life without the bad event and now this hideous

event comes to have additional roles in other parts of her life—it now plays positive

roles as being something that brought her closer to what she has come to value. I think

the reason we do not think that the assault-victim-turned-rape-crisis-counselor is

merely relieved that now her life is going well or even pleased that her past can now

be represented as having fared well is that something more is at stake in redemption.

I suggest that what is at stake is the overall meaningfulness in the agent’s life.

Though redemption may satisfy criteria for an increase in well-being, it does so in a

unique way that results in a particular relationship between an agent and the things she

cares about. In the paragraphs below, I will often refer to these things as “beloved

objects” since these pursuits or persons or places in an agent’s life become the focus of

a person’s attention--their loving engagement, care and valuing. (I will say more

about this “loving engagement” or what a “beloved object” might me in the

paragraphs below). I argue in this chapter that redemption results in new relationships

between an agent and events in her past when bad events become part of beloved

projects in a way that meets criteria for meaningfulness. Redemption, I will argue,

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restores an agent’s felt sense of meaningfulness regarding past events, and, too, his life

as a whole.

In order to show that redemption satisfies criteria for meaningfulness, I will need

to provide an account not only of redemption, itself, but of a plausible account of what

meaningfulness is. In the paragraphs below, I examine meaningfulness to determine

what it might be. First I review Susan Wolf’s promising account—the Fitting

Fulfillment account of meaningfulness— before examining some possible objections

to her view.

3.2 Meaningfulness—A third kind of value

The desire that our lives be meaningful likely resonates with each of us. As

mentioned in Chapter I, each of us hopes that his life matters in some larger sense that

the activities we participate in, the contributions we make to various human projects,

the things we care about and spend time promoting, have value independent of our

own subjective investment in them. We also want, however, what we do to matter to

us— we want our lives to be spent doing things we actually care about. Though each

of us wishes for a meaningful life, however, it is difficult to say what such a life is and

identify what confers meaningfulness upon a life. One promising account of

meaningfulness is Susan Wolf’s.

3.2.1 Wolf’s Fitting Fulfillment View

In Meaning in Life and Why It Matters (2010), Wolf argues that when it comes

to evaluating lives as to their goodness or badness, philosophers have tended to talk

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about the extent the life in question affords happiness or, alternately, morality. Wolf

argues that there is a third category of value by which we evaluate lives which is not

reducible to happiness or to morality. This third kind of value involves considerations

like the ones mentioned above: that what we do matters in some objective sense of

being valuable or worthwhile and that our activities surround things we actually care

about.

Wolf proposes that this third category of value be called “meaningfulness” and

that it is realized by “loving objects worthy of love and engaging with them in a

positive way.”82 This is her Fitting Fulfillment view of meaningfulness: that a life or

life episode is meaningful when the liver of the life lovingly engages in a positive way

with objects worthy of such loving engagement, when, as she writes, “subjective

attraction meets objective attractiveness.”83

Her notion of loving engagement stems from another claim of Wolf’s—that

there is an often-overlooked category of reason for acting that is crucial, she thinks, to

our capacities to live meaningful lives. She thinks that current accounts tend to direct

our attention to happiness and virtue because they focus on two main kinds of

motivation: something is practically reasonable either when it benefits the agent

himself (in which case the agent who acts on this reason acts egoistically, since the

reason for which he acts is considered to be in the individual’s own self interest), or

82 Wolf, Meaning In Life, 13. 83In calling her account of this category of value—“meaningfulness”— Wolf wants to avoid charges that she is begging the question; She does not take herself to be proving what meaningfulness is by pointing to our intuitions that some activity is meaningful. Rather, she says, she is providing an account of a category of value expressed in responses to the question, “What should a good life contain?” that is not also explained by appeal to either happiness or morality. Wolf argues that she explicitly avoids concept analysis of the word “meaning” since, she thinks, it may very well be that our uses of the term refer not to one property but to many— depending on the context of the use of the term, (Wolf, 13).

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when it is objectively valuable (making it the case that the agent who acts for the sake

of the objective value of something does so selflessly as is often described in moral

deliberations).84 Wolf suggests that this description of human motivation is incomplete

since there are reasons for acting that are not reducible to either self-interest or to

selfless, God-like awareness of objective value.

Wolf calls this category “reasons of love.”85 The kinds of reasons Wolf has in

mind are ones we act on when we go visit a family member in a hospital or stay up all

night making a Halloween costume for a child.86 She suggests that such reasons of

love are ones that end up shaping our lives, guiding a good deal of our behavior and

engage us in the activities we tend to say make our lives worth living.87

If Wolf is right that something can be practically reasonable for reasons other

than those of self interest or virtue, then we might better understand the kind of value

meaningfulness might be, since meaningfulness seems to make a life valuable neither

because it yields happiness or moral goodness but because of something else. Perhaps

meaningfulness is a value that involves the pursuit or promotion of valuable objects in

a particular way—namely, for the sake of our love for them. A skeptic may argue that

Wolf’s reasons of love are, in each case, reducible to either self-interest or moral

reasons. When we go visit a family member in the hospital, either we do so for the

sake of the anticipated pleasure we get from, say, the family member smiling and

thanking us (in which case we feel gratified) or for moral reasons that come with our

special obligations to this family member. When a parent stays up late making a

84 Ibid., 1. 85 Ibid., 4-5. 86 Ibid., 4. 87 Ibid.

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costume for her child, she does so either for some pleasure she anticipates receiving

from doing so or for the sake of perceived duty or objective value of the action.

I think, however, Wolf can furnish descriptions of human motivations that resist

such a reduction. Take as such an example Wolf’s imagined parent who stays up all

night to make a costume for her child. Imagine that the parent does not consider

costume making to be a special obligation of the duty of parenting. (If it were, this

parent argues, many parents would be in direct violation as they reach for the first

costume on the rack at Target). Rather, the individual in question considers late-night

costume making optional. On the other hand, self-interest is not what makes late-night

costume making practically reasonable for the agent. The agent is not motivated by the

thought that she will receive thanks from the child or pleasure at seeing the child in the

costume. Rather, what motivates the parent in this case is the thought that making a

costume promotes the interests of her object of love (her child). Doing this work is an

optional activity that will help her child— whose well-being the parent cares about a

great deal—to flourish.

What makes late-night costume making practically reasonable for the agent in

this case is not its potential benefit to the agent nor its objective value, but its potential

to promote something the agent loves and to express that love. Late-night costume

making is a personal expression of the mother’s love for her daughter. On Wolf’s

Fitting Fulfillment view, acting on reasons of love can generate activities, projects and

engagement with the things we love that are the meaning-makers in our lives. Wolf

thinks that much of what we do is not justified by either self-interest or morality:

“I visit my friend in the hospital; I study philosophy, I bake an elaborate dessert.

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If the framework in which we conceptualize our reasons and our actions recognizes only self-interested and moral value, then we will have to fit our understanding of these choices into these categories...Given the inconvenience and the difficulties involved in these enterprises…it is far from clear that they are in my self-interest. Yet to regard them as morally valuable…is to puff them up in a way that seems both pompous and hard to sustain…”88

If she is right about this, then these reasons of love can help us explain the special

value of meaningfulness that a life can have that is neither the value of happiness nor

morality. When a life comes to have the value of meaningfulness, it is likely because

the agent has acted on reasons of love in a particular way with particular objects.

The other features (in addition to the requirement of “loving engagement”) of

her Fitting Fulfillment view are the requirements of objective value and the somewhat

vague requirement that the loving engagement be sustained ‘in a positive way.’ The

objective value requirement, which I will discus further below, is meant to capture the

importance of the fact that what we do, and the things we love, matter in a larger

sense—or at least in a sense independent of our own subjective investment in them. If

we believed that what we did was, not in fact valuable, we would begin to doubt the

that loving the object was really worthwhile, and our attachment to the object would

no longer underwrite the sense that our life was meaningful. Of course, our beliefs

about such matters can be wrong in which case we are wrong about the meaning in our

lives. My point, however, is that the concern that our the objects of our loving

engagement have objective value is a signal that such value is important to the

realization of meaningfulness. In addition, the requirement of objective value blocks,

say, a child molester from realizing meaning in his life by child molesting.89 Even

88 Ibid., 50. 89 Ibid., 60.

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though he may regard his own activities as valuable and believe that these activities

give his life meaning, he would be wrong about this. I will discuss the relationship

between meaning and morality in greater detail, below.

Finally, the thought that meaningfulness requires agents to lovingly engage with

objects of real value in a positive way leaves much open to interpretation. Perhaps this

might mean not obsessively to the exclusion of all else, such that the agent remain

open to other objects of value in his life. Perhaps, too, “in a positive way” means that

the agent ought care for the object of love in w way that does not mistake some kinds

of behaviors as positive that are in fact negative, for the object of love (as would the

case of a smothering mother whose behaviors actually inhibit the child rather than help

her flourish, etc.) This aspect of Wolf’s account might need some fleshing out.

The advantage of Wolf’s Fitting Fulfillment view is that it brings together two

disparate aspects of what we admire in good lives: the importance of subjective

investment in the life and also of objective value. She thinks, and I agree, that this

combination of requirements is important and that an account of this third category of

value ought to include both features of a good life. On the one hand, she points out, we

judge our life on the extent to which it provides us with a felt sense something like

fulfillment. Wolf acknowledges that this subjective component often surfaces in

responses to the question of what we want for our own lives: we want our lives to

afford us the felt satisfaction of their being worthwhile. On the other hand, we often

judge the value of a life overall on the extent to which it expresses the pursuit of or

participation in activities that are regarded as objectively valuable. This objective

aspect of meaningfulness tends to become particularly important when we impartially

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examine and assess the lives of others (Mother Theresa, Mahatma Ghandi, etc.),

though we evaluate our lives by it, also.90

Wolf’s view is both elegant and, potentially, explanatorily powerful. Prima

facie, it seems to explain much of our general assessments of our own lives, why they

might be lacking or why they are good, as well as of the lives of others. What we

admire in the life of Mother Theresa, Pablo Picasso, Mahatma Gandhi, J.S. Bach, Dr.

Martin Luther King, Jr., Abraham Lincoln or Anton Chekhov is that each of these

lives contains loving engagement in a positive way of an object of value worthy of

such engagement. When a life overall expresses such activity, we say that the life,

overall, was a meaningful one. Let us now examine the extent to which its key

components amount to a defensible view.

3.2.1 Some objections to Wolf’s account

One worry for Wolf’s account is that in appealing to objective value, Wolf

leaves herself open to the general concern that there might not be such a thing as

objective value—in which case, Wolf’s account would suffer due to its reliance upon

it. The skeptic could argue that Wolf’s thesis would be all the better without an appeal

to objective value or a criterion that objects need to be worthy of the love the agent

gives them. Even Wolf, though she maintains it is important to the concept of

objective value that some object is valuable whether or not anyone notices that it is,

bluntly observes that if people find an object or activity engaging, there is likely to be

90 Ibid., 15-25.

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something making it so.91

Nomy Arpaly and Jonathan Haidt each doubt that the appeal to objective value

in fact bears much weight in the Fitting Fulfillment view, in part because of the

observation Wolf, herself, makes above—that when an agent enjoys a felt sense of

fulfillment from loving engagement with something, it is likely to be something of

value. Arpaly encourages her to abandon the requirement of objective value since, she

argues, Wolf can be confident that the sole criterion of loving engagement in a

positive way will exclude meaningless activities such as, say, winding the largest ball

of string, making more handwritten copies of War and Peace or devoting one’s entire

life to taking care of a goldfish. This is because, Arpaly thinks, no human being can

truly find fulfillment from loving engagement with something utterly without value.

Arpaly writes:

“I will make the following claim about the normal adult human who receives full satisfaction in her life from keeping a goldfish: she does not exist. There is no such person.”92

While Arpaly concedes that there may very well exist at least some person who

“claims, believes, and even feels that her goldfish and only her goldfish makes her life

meaningful,” she insists that such a person is deluded in her claims that her fish is a

loving companion since such claims would fly in the face of what we know about the

brains of fish.93 Such a person would either be in denial (and well aware that he is

missing real relationships with other people that are, in fact, sources of fulfillment) or

deeply confused about what fish are actually capable of.

91 Ibid., 128. 92 Ibid., 129. 93 Ibid.

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Though I think Arpaly has a point here, I also think that appeal to objective

value, to external reasons for valuing some object, is important given that we are

fulfilled by an activity in part because we take it to be truly worthwhile, and would

begin to doubt our own fulfillment if we found that our activities were not, in fact,

valuable and worthy of our felt enjoyment of loving them. Both Haidt and Arpaly

make the observation that meaningfulness in a person’s life seems to develop and be

enhanced by networks of activities around objects of love. This is a feature of

meaningfulness that I think Wolf’s account does not easily explain (I go into further

detail on this below). Wolf acknowledges this, though, in response and makes the

controversial claim that sometimes activities might not have much value in and of

themselves but might begin to gain value when loving engagement with them involves

building that network of other, already valuable objects around it. As Wolf puts it,

vital engagement of an object/activity (riding horses, making beautiful quilts,

participating in political activism), highlights the way in which a person tends to focus

attention on an object of love, build activities around it, advance and protect it,

develop relationships as a result of it, such that “even if the object upon which the

attention was focused is initially of no particular value,” those who become engaged

with it tend to benefit from valuable networks of activities and relationships that arise

as a result of it.94 In this way, Wolf concedes that perhaps “value can emerge from

brute attraction.”95

Merely observing the fact that “value can emerge from brute attraction” is not an

objection. Rather, she thinks, such a claim simply affords us opportunity to notice the 94 Ibid., 129. 95 Ibid.

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“continuum of value” along which an object or activity can lie.96 To what extent horse

riding (sitting on top of a horse going around in circles) is valuable may shift and

change according to the role it plays in a person’s life (the relationships it fosters, the

virtues it encourages in a person, etc.), though there is fact of the matter about its value

at any moment. If horse riding turned out to not be very valuable, then even if the rider

insisted she was fulfilled by it, it would not be truly meaningful. At the same time, a

housewife who truly found housekeeping valuable and lovingly engaged with it, but

failed to find herself fulfilled by it, would have either reason to question the value of

her object of love or, alternately, the extent to which she was truly acting on reasons of

love and not on, say, a felt sense of moral obligation or appreciation of the objective

value of maintaining a peaceable home.

Wolf is concerned not to burden her subjective conception of fulfillment with

objective status. She thinks both Haidt and Arpaly imbue fulfillment with the deeper

sense of, say, meeting human agents’ psychological needs or developing their

potential in some objective sense of the capacities of human nature. Wolf would rather

burden the feature of her account that is the value of an object/activity with objectivity

than burden a person’s fulfillment with it.97 She argues that making fulfillment

something objective is problematic for two reasons: (1) that it privileges human nature

(After all, what is so good about our natural capacities when they include things like

belligerence and hate?) and (2) that it removes the importance to a concept of meaning

of personal perspective, of what a particular individual would want for his own life.98

96 Ibid. 97 Ibid., 121. 98 Ibid., 122.

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Wolf admits that the appealing to objective value might leave her account vulnerable

if it turns out that there is no such thing as objective value. However, she maintains

her thesis and argues that she ought not be held accountable to problems in other areas

of philosophy. Until philosophers in the field of metaphysics provide defeating

evidence against the plausibility of objective value, she should be free to the concept

in a weight-bearing way in her account of meaningfulness.99

Finally, a skeptic might worry about either the account’s conflicts with the moral

domain or, alternately, conflation with the moral domain. On the one hand, Wolf’s

insistence on objective value in an account of meaningfulness might threaten to

collapse the domains of morality and the meaningful life. On the other hand, a

moralist might worry that there are potential, objectionable conflicts with the moral

domain.

Wolf concedes that there may be conflicts between meaning and morality. The

requirement of objective value will likely eliminate disvaluable and immoral pursuits

from being the objects of loving engagement (as in the case, say, of the child molester

from above). Still, Wolf maintains the distinction between this value in life and the

value of morality, and therefore, she acknowledges that there will be conflicts between

the meaning in one’s life and the demands of morality. A woman who gets meaning

from her relationship with her daughter might reasonably find it difficult to decide

what to do in a situation that she believed required her to break the law to save her

daughter’s life. I think we would find it natural to think that both the demands of

morality and the demands of meaningfulness bear on her decision, and that she is

99 Ibid., 45-48.

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reasonable is acting either way. On the other hand, some conflicts between

meaningfulness and morality might be merely apparent. Take as an example a mother

deciding whether or not to lie in order to get her daughter into an elite private school.

Imagine that in some sense, the mother’s relationship to the daughter might be

strengthened by this act. Wolf points that even here, however, the value of the

mother’s relationship and the daughter’s well-being, on which the contribution to

meaning depends” might be “compromised by construing them in a way that insulates

them from morality.”100 Wolf’s idea here is that it may be likely that in this case,

meeting the demands of morality would actually enhance the meaningfulness of the

mother’s love of her daughter. After all, encouraging her daughter to live according to

moral demands by modeling it herself might be just the kind of loving engagement in

a positive way that realizes meaningfulness. If the mother models living according to

moral demands while also providing support to her daughter in her education, she

demonstrates a belief in her daughter’s abilities to accomplish valuable goals on her

own (without the cheapening effects of having cheated to get where she is). Such a

demonstration is likely just the kind of loving engagement that will help the object of

her love to flourish and to form positive, meaningful relationships to objects of value

in her own life.

Wolf maintains that though there are many factors that will close the gap

between meaning and morality (as in the case, above), a moralist’s concern cannot be

completely satisfied since there can always be conflicts between the two domains of

100 Ibid., 61.

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value (as in the case of breaking the law to save the daughter’s life).101 She thinks, and

I agree, that leaving the two domains separate captures more accurately the

phenomenon of a felt sense of meaning in one’s life. What it is we want in a

meaningful life is not expressed by wishing for a moral one. I think, instead, her view

is promising—that what we want in a meaningful life is both a subjective sense of

something like fulfillment that comes with engagement with the things we love, as

well as the assurance that what we love is truly valuable.

Provisionally, I think her account is reasonable and able to handle the objections

raised so far. I think, however, there are some key aspects of our assessments of good

lives that are not easily explained on Wolf’s account. Below I explore these aspects

and link them to the concern that Wolf’s view leaves unaddressed the feature of

narrativity in the meaningful life.

3.2.2 What’s missing: How the parts of a life fit together for overall development

Imagine the following life. Imagine an individual who announces to his friends 101 Moralists might argue that such a scenario is a straw man, since saving the daughter’s life might very well be the moral action. Imagine, however, that the daughter had been involved in a criminal activity. The police come to the door and demand to know the daughter’s whereabouts. The mother feels the emotional strain of an apparent dilemma (as has been dramatized in many films, television shows and books with similar themes): either the mother must obey the demands of morality and tell the truth about her daughter (that she is hiding from the police in the attic) or obstruct justice and lie in order to protect the object of her love. In this case, it seems as though there are two competing values in play in her decision. Now imagine that the mother believes that the meaningfulness of her relationship with her daughter is enhanced by the integrity that comes with each of the two women obeying demands of morality. Still, she may feel justified in closing the door on the police. After all, this simply buys her time to appeal to her daughter’s rationality, to give her daughter a chance to choose for herself to turn herself in, etc. I think we might find it natural to acknowledge the legitimacy of the mother’s dilemma as a genuine conflict between two values, and not immediately dismiss this case as illustrative of the mother’s irrationality or depravity. I suspect we might feel this way even in the case the mother lies to the police without any intention of trying to change her daughter’s mind. The dilemma between the meaningfulness of her love for her child (upholding, maintaining and developing her relationship with her child) and obeying the demands of morality, in my view, seem legitimately at odds here.

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and family that he is leaving his desk job in Manhattan to pursue surfing in Mexico.

He leaves the city and heads for Mexico, spending a year of his savings on surfing

lessons in Baja. There he meets interesting people, develops a new network of friends,

skills, language, even a philosophy of life (influenced by surfing culture) about which

he writes to his friends back in Manhattan. He has found great meaning in his Mexico

experience but at the year’s end, decides that surfing is not his thing. He abandons his

life in Mexico and heads to Los Angeles where he meets up with some folks who

introduce him to a self-help program meant to enhance professional and life skills. He

becomes a leader at the program and collects a salary there as a promoter of the

program. He finds meaning in this, too.

Six months later, however, he abandons this project and announces that he will

be going to business school since he now thinks making money is what he needs to be

doing. In graduate school, he meets a lot of interesting people and spends his time

studying and working hard on his internship, but decides in his second year that a

venture with a friend to start a restaurant is what is beckoning now…on it goes with

this fellow. Let’s call this fellow Flit since he flits about from thing to thing.

Now imagine another agent. Let’s call her Contented. She has a day job but

finds most of her fulfillment through her family and friends, whom she loves. She is a

beloved sister, mother and spouse and church member. She enjoys and finds meaning

in her Wednesday night Bingo games with her church community, sitting with her

husband in front of the television after the children are put to sleep or on Saturdays

with her children who love morning cartoons, as well as cooking up lasagna for her

extended family when they come over to watch Sunday football.

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Flit’s and Contented’s lives on Wolf’s account are both meaningful. Flit

lovingly engages with objects of value in a positive way—it’s just that he serially

moves through each meaningful activity one after the other without much sense of

connection among these engagements. There may be potential for his life to be

represented as having overall personal development that connects the parts of his life

together but, at this time, the agent has not taken measures to critically evaluate this

aspect of his life. At this point, his life really is a series of distinct parts, disparate and

disconnected form one another. Though Flit may insist what he is doing at any given

moment is meaningful, his friends and family may begin to doubt his integrity and

think that he is not so much forging a meaningful life but merely looking for one.

While some may find it natural to think his life is less meaningful than a

person who develops a network of family, friends, skills, learned wisdom over time in

a way that reflects overall personal growth, there are some of us who might be

uncomfortable with this claim. The skeptic might argue that Flit’s life experiences

sound wonderful and enriching and even highly desirable in their ability to stave off

boredom. Surfing culture in Mexico, LA life and daring entrepreneurship serially

experienced might be just the thing a life needs to be fun, exciting, and authentic. To

this, I would argue that even with their positive, anti-boredom effects, these fun and

exciting experiences become truly enriching only when the individual in question has

an appreciation of how they shape his overall personal development or form him in a

positive way overall. Surfing, LA culture and business school have the makings of a

narrative surrounding an organizing telos that might help to express personal

development, but the agent in the above-imagined scenario does not know or has not

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taken the care to identify what such an organizing telos might be. Such a task, I argue,

would benefit the overall meaningfulness of his life. I think that understanding how

the parts of his life fit together tends to yield personal insight and growth that, I argue,

is a key dimension of meaningfulness. As the example is construed so far, however,

Flit’s life simply does not have this feature, this dimension of meaningfulness. My

point for our present discussion is that on Wolf’s view, the friends and family who

think Flit is in a search for meaning instead of fully realizing it (and so be vulnerable

to a diminishment in his life’s overall value), would have no justification for their

concerns since Flit plausibly has “more” meaningfulness in his life, having logged

more loving engagements with objects of value in a positive way, than, say, the person

who stays in one or two jobs and develops one set of beloved activities.

Let us now consider the case of Contented. In the case of Contented’s life, the

agent in question enjoys the felt sense of fulfillment that comes with loving

engagement with objects of value (her family, friends, community) in a positive way. I

doubt many of us would find it natural to regard her life as meaningless. Her life

certainly has meaning in it by Wolf’s standards and, I suspect, according to the

intuitions of most of us. I do think, however, we would be uncomfortable with a view

that cannot explain why Contented’s life is less meaningful than, say, an individual

whose love of the very same objects of family, friends and community (with

supposedly the same value) inspires her to pursue more valuable activities than mere

television watching and snuggling on the couch (though there is nothing disvaluable

with these activities). Imagine a different person than Contented. Let us call her

Aspiring, whose love of her children inspires her to directly develop her children’s

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intellectual capacities through conversation and exposure to other objects of value

such as art, ideas, history, science or take a more active role in her community by, say,

becoming a stronger community member than is described above (Maybe she heads

up the meals program that goes to church members who are bedridden or to families in

need, etc.). These pursuits have the effect of shaping her own development as a

person. For Aspiring, the loving engagement in a positive way with her objects of love

not only affords her fulfillment (as Contented feels, too) but also growth as a human

being.

On the Fitting Fulfillment view, both Contented and Aspiring enjoy the same

objects of value (family, friends) and are lovingly engaged with them in positive ways

(neither obsessively nor mistakenly, or even immorally etc.). They must both, then, be

of equal value in terms of their meaningfulness on Wolf’s view.102 I suspect, however,

we might think Contented does not have as much meaning in her life as a person

whose love of family and friends inspires her to display various virtues herself or 102 At this point it might be helpful to explain that Wolf, at least in the book under present discussion, is in the business of judging “equal” meaningfulness. She takes herself (7-13) to be investigating what a good life consists in that is not also covered by appeal to happiness or morality. In answering the question of what a person ought “to aspire to,” she argues for her Fitting Fulfillment view—that we ought to aspire to loving objects worth of that love in a positive way (13). In both the lives of Flit and Contented, this requirement of loving objects worthy love is satisfied. It might be a little strange to talk about meaningfulness this way, but I am arguing that we can roughly claim that on Wolf’s view these lives are “equally meaningful” since they both do the job of satisfying the minimal requirements she articulates for Fitting Fulfillment that realizes meaningfulness in a life. Wolf does not anywhere suggest that she is in the business of articulating criteria for judging which lives are more meaningful than others.

I, however, am claiming that an account of meaningfulness ought to be able to do this, since this would make sense of some of our intuitions on the subject: we do tend to make assessments about the extent to which some life episode is more meaningful than another or some life is more meaningful than another. Take as an example the thought that though my wedding was meaningful because it expressed loving engagement with my beloved partner, it might have been more meaningful to me had I been a bit older and more able to appreciate the context of community—the larger structure through which a lifelong union with someone can develop. We might also acknowledge that both Eleanor Roosevelt and my friend Vicky both lived meaningful lives, but that perhaps Roosevelt’s life was supremely meaningful. Though our intuitions on this subject maybe muddled or murky, they are there nonetheless.

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develop the capacities of those she loves more fully.103

The problem Flit and Contented highlight is that Wolf’s account does not readily

explain why we tend to become interested in teleological aspects of a life in a

determination of its meaningfulness. We wonder about how the lack of development

in Flit’s life—the lack of connection among his activities in his life as a whole—

affects his life’s overall meaningfulness or how Contented’s activities—though all

connected with one another in some sense—do not seem to develop her overall as a

person, unlike Aspiring, whose love sent her to investigate developmental education,

art and so on.

If Flit were to be able to represent his life to himself and others as (legitimately)

a journey of learning, leading to a discovery of how to live, which he refined

throughout his later years, thereby rendering surfing, self-help organizing and business

pursuits under one intelligible roof, then we might be inclined to be more generous in

our evaluation of his life’s meaningfulness. If Contented were more like Aspiring,

taking on projects that involved development, learning and personal growth, we might

be inclined to regard her life as having more meaning in it.

In defense against this charge, Wolf might lean on the argument she deploys in

her responses to Haidt and Arpaly when they suggest she drop the objective value

requirement. She might point out that meaningfulness is often realized around a

103 Perhaps, a skeptic might argue, displays of virtue make a life good, independent of any supposed contribution to its meaning. On this skeptic’s view, displays of virtue and development of character would belong to a conversation about moral value and in a dispute about competing ethical theories. Still, our intuitions, here, I think need some further ironing out and deserve further philosophical attention. I argue that what is at stake in personal development is the meaningfulness of a person’s relationship to her own life—that her own sense of herself in the world, her potential, be treated with a kind of loving engagement in a positive way.

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network of activities (recall Haidt’s horse riding student who finds great meaning in

all things horse-related: her friends, her skills, set of knowledge, social activities all

stem from her love of horse riding). Wolf responds to these ideas by explaining how

objective value can account for our intuition that such networks increase the

meaningfulness in a life. She argues that the more an agent develops activities around

the object of love, the more valuable the beloved object becomes.

Wolf could argue similarly in the case of Flit and Contented. For example she

could say that the difference between Contented’s life and Aspiring’s life is that

though both Contented and Aspiring developed networks around their beloved objects,

Aspiring’s network involved other objects of love that were simply more objectively

valuable than those that Contented constructed around her objects of love. (Recall,

however, the risk in arguing this way is the controversial claim that brute attraction

can generate value—which, though Wolf disagrees, could threaten the plausibility of

Wolf’s objective value requirement altogether.)

Even with this explanation, however, I do not think Wolf successfully captures

the importance of interconnections of parts of a human life and the way in which such

parts develop into an intelligible and valued whole. When we talk about meaningful

lives I think we become interested in narrative aspects of what a good life ought to

contain such as the development of human potential. Recall in our earlier discussion

that Wolf had opposed Haidt’s and Arpaly’s instinct to require more objectivity from

fulfillment (she resisted the claim that no human being could be fulfilled by a sole

relationship to one’s goldfish) as if fulfillment is the realization of human potential

and not simply a subjective feeling generated by one’s activities. Wolf argued that

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there is nothing inherently valuable about human potential when we have the potential

for horrible things, etc.

Nonetheless, when we admire the meaning in lives of others, we tend to focus on

objective value of the things in their lives, pursuits and things beloved, as well as, I am

arguing, the development of a person over a lifetime. We want to know how the life

events come to fit together as a whole, how the different parts of a life fit together to

express the formation of a human being in a positive way. That Wolf’s Fitting

Fulfillment view does not immediately explain our intuitions about Flit and Contented

and the importance of overall development to a life’s meaningfulness may mean we

need to find a way of talking about Fitting Fulfillment in a more explicitly teleological

way.

I argue below that on a more teleological view of meaningfulness, agents find

meaning in their pursuits and activities (which certainly surround perceived value and

objects of love) and the relationships between pursuits rather than between objects of

love, per se. I examine the viability of a more teleological view of meaningfulness and

suggest that we make relevant amendments to Wolf’s view that preserve her insights

but also account for the intuition that development is important to the meaningful life.

3.2.2.1 The importance of teleology to the meaning in our lives

Many theorists think that meaning in a life has to do with goal seeking. In his

book, After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre writes that when someone complains of her life

being “meaningless”:

“she is often and perhaps characteristically complaining that the narrative of her

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life has become unintelligible to her, that it lacks any point, any movement toward a climax or a telos.”104 A fair number of theorists such as MacIntyre emphasize the point that meaning in a

life seems to refer to the presence of teleology in a life.105 On MacIntyre’s view, it

seems that a life is intelligible—meaningful—when the experiences and events within

it are apprehended by the liver of the life as parts of a larger telos. As long as an

individual understands her experiences as representing engagement with or

expressions of some larger telos, her life will likely have the property of meaning in it.

Wolf’s current view, it seems to me, is lacking in its articulation of the

importance of such teleology, the felt import of a person’s activities, to an account of

meaningfulness—though it might very well be consistent with, or even partly implied

by her current formulation. Wolf’s argument that meaningfulness requires the

subjective quality of loving engagement might very well imply pursuit of an aim.

Wolf’s earlier work on the subject of meaningfulness, I think, gave more consideration

to teleology in the determination of a life’s meaningfulness. She arrived at the current

Fitting Fulfillment view throughout years of work and a series of essays—the last one

of which is published in her 2010 book on the subject. Earlier versions of her

argument were far less cohesive but gave more attention to the teleological aspect of

meaningfulness in a life.

One such incarnation of her view that highlights teleology is in “The Meanings

of Lives.”106 In this essay, Wolf draws out our intuitions on meaningfulness of a life

104 MacIntyre , After Virtue, 202. 105 See also Markus (2003) and Thomson (2003). 106 in Perry, Bratman, Fischer, eds., Introduction to Philosophy: Classical and Contemporary Readings (2007)).

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by way of several, imagined characters that seem to lack meaning in their lives.

Wolf’s characters, Blob, Useless, the Alienated Housewife, and Failure give us insight

into what is missing from a meaningful life. Blob “spends day after day, or night after

night, in front of a television set, drinking beer and watching situation comedies.”107

This life, we think is not meaningful. It lacks depth, achievement, and activity. It

cannot be, however, that mere activity makes life meaningful. Take as evidence of this

the life of Sisyphus or David Wiggins’s example of “the pig farmer who buys more

land to grow more corn to feed more pigs to buy more land to grow more corn to feed

more pigs.”108 Activity that goes nowhere can seem useless. The lives of Useless

characters is that the activities in their lives are “pointless, useless, or empty.”109 The

activity they do has no real value.

On the other hand, a person who seems to engage in a valuable activity but is

entirely indifferent to it (does so without what she later comes to call loving

engagement) seems to fail to achieve a meaningful life also. Wolf points us to the

Alienated Housewife, who “does not identify with what she is doing” (laundry,

housework, taking care of the children). “[S]he does not embrace her roles as wife,

mother, and homemaker as expressive of who she is and wants to be.”110 Lastly, Wolf

points us to the way in which a life lessens in its meaningfulness when key projects

central to its meaning fails. Wolf asks us to imagine a scientist who, after an entire

career devoted to a research project, discovers she made an early mistake and that

107 Wolf, Meaning in Life, 6. 108 (1976). “Truth Invention and The Meaning of Life,” first published in The Proceedings of the British Academy LXII. 109 Wolf, Meaning in Life, 7. 110 Ibid.

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reaching her research/professional goal is now impossible. Even if her life is not

rendered meaningless, there is some sense in which it is rendered less meaningful than

it would have otherwise been.111

We can see what is wrong in each of Wolf’s imagined characters: Blob,

Useless, Failure, Alienated Housewife. Blob pursues no aims even if he sets them.

Failure’s aims do not get realized. Useless’ aims are not contributions to objectively

valuable ends, and Alienated Housewife has not truly adopted as her very own the

ends for which she acts. On Wolf’s earlier views on the subject, an ideally meaningful

life is one in which an agent is active rather than passive, has success with truly

valuable aims and wholeheartedly adopts her ends autonomously.

In these cases, we can see above the origins of Wolf’s later Fitting Fulfillment

view. Her later requirement that meaningfulness include loving engagement seems to

imply activity rather than passivity, and wholeheartedness rather than alienation.

Similarly, her requirement that the loving engagement fit the object (that the object

merit such love) ensures objective value, as has been discussed above. Finally, her

concern that this engagement be “in a positive way” is vague but could be taken to

mean a requirement that the engagement develop, advance, protect or honor some

objective value—an implication of success of some kind.

3.2.2.2. Narrative and the meaningful life

Annti Kauppinen, in an unpublished work, “On The Meaningfulness Of

Lives,” observed that while Wolf’s account is suggestive of the importance of overall

111 Ibid.

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narrative to a meaningful life, the role of narrative in the good life goes

underdescribed in her formulation.112 Kauppinen argues that our conception of the

good life includes talk about ideal trajectories yielding the subjective sense of

fulfillment discussed above. As Kauppinen puts in: We have the sense that in a good

life, an agent brings about a meaningful life and is not just born with one. Kauppinen

takes himself as building upon Wolf’s insight by developing from her Fitting

Fulfillment view, an account of the ideally meaningful life trajectory.

He encourages us to imagine how an ideally meaningful life might progress

over time—much in the way that a good narrative might develop. First, Kauppinen

suggests we might imagine a beginning of some kind in which an agent responds to

some set of circumstances by setting out to change the situation, to bring the world

into conformity with her desires. In a good life story, the agent adopts objectively

valuable ends. Now imagine that the activity consisting in the pursuit of those ends is

not unlike the rising action of a good story: the agent’s endeavors require her to use

special skills that test human capacities, affording her the opportunity to exhibit

virtues and hone excellences. She responds to challenges and unforeseen

circumstances, developing her skills in judgment, sociability, etc. Finally, in the last

part of an ideally good life narrative, the agent succeeds in bringing about the desired

state of affairs that is also, because it was a good end to begin with, a positive

contribution to a valuable human project.

As Kauppinen ultimately puts it, a meaningful life narrative or episode

“approximates the ideal of testing one’s essential human capacities in a successful,

112 I get this point from Kauppinen’s unpublished work.

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wholehearted pursuit of truly valuable goals with the support of others” and ideally,

builds to a “progressive shape.”113 His thesis, I think, is appealing and is meant to

serve as a model of an ideally meaningful life since real lives will be far more

complex than the imagined one in his essay.

Still, some of us might regard Kauppinen’s account of an ideal life trajectory a

bit confining. Perhaps not everyone would want such a trajectory; it can seem stifling

to approximate a script, and “life shape” may be a nebulous or even vacuous term.

Nonetheless, his overall point I take to be relevant: just as Velleman noted in “Well

Being and Time,” the narrative features of our lives play important roles in our overall

evaluations of our lives. Wolf’s view could use a bit more of this emphasis on

narrative features of the good life.

Perhaps, then, there is something in the middle: an account of the third

category of value—“meaningfulness”—by which we judge lives that is not so abstract

as to leave us with merely the bare minimum requirement for realization of it (and

therefore be silent on the issue of, say, a life’s development over time and less than

obvious in how it can account for the subtlety of our assessments), but not overly

specific so as to hem us into a script.

Below, I provide a sketch of such an account that I argue is an improvement to

Wolf’s Fitting Fulfillment view but retains most of her insights.

3.2.3 A possible solution: Fitting Fulfillment along dimensions of meaning

113 Kauppinen, pg, 2.

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First, I suggest we keep the general idea of Wolf’s Fitting Fulfillment thesis

that meaningfulness is realized by something like loving engagement with objects of

value in a positive way. I argue, however, that we adopt a more explicitly teleological

way of talking about meaning by articulating the view in the following way: that

meaningfulness is realized by loving engagement with and pursuit of objects of value

in a positive way. Second, I propose that we account for the myriad of subtleties in our

intuitions about what is more or less meaningful by appealing to the several moving

parts of the above view: a life can be more or less meaningful depending upon the

degree to which each of the different dimensions involved (loving engagement,

objective value of activities, and positive development of them) is realized.

Let us call these distinct moving parts of the Fitting Fulfillment view—loving

engagement, value of activity and positive development—“dimensions of

meaningfulness.” I think that a life or life episode can be more or less meaningful

depending upon the degree of subjective investment (loving engagement), extent of

overall value of the activity or telos in question, as well as the success attained in its

pursuit. I also think, however, that these dimensions of meaning or meaningfulness

can interact with one another in intricate ways and, I concede, have complicating

threshold effects. For example, if a telos is utterly disvaluable, success will count for

little and may even count against the meaningfulness of some life episode. To see the

plausibility of this, imagine the fictional life of Sisyphus. His aim (impressed upon

him by unjust Gods) of pushing a rock up on a hill is not valuable from the start so

that even one successful push uphill does not count towards meaning. Alternately,

when the value of the pursuit is high enough, it can be meaningful even if it is

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continuously frustrating. Imagine, say, setting up a school in Rwanda against many

odds. Perhaps that pursuit is valuable enough such that mere participation in the

activity without actual success is meaningful.

Take another example of the complex interaction of the dimensions of value of

the aim and success with the aim. Consider the claim that the differences in the

meaningfulness of Mother Theresa’s life and Martin Luther King Jr.’s life are

negligible. They are both highly meaningful lives even though Mother Theresa lived a

long life while King was assassinated in the middle of his pursuits. Both persons

pursued highly valuable goals with much success that afforded them opportunities to

exhibit personal development, virtues even.114 But a skeptic might argue that Martin

Luther King Jr.’s life would have to be counted as less meaningful on the view I am

proposing—the one with individuated dimensions of meaningfulness—than, say,

Mother Theresa, since his pursuits were cut short by assassination while hers were not.

Such a skeptic might argue that such a result is not intuitive and can be better handled

on the Fitting Fulfillment view as originally articulated.

I do not think, however, that my more teleological articulation of Fitting

Fulfillment view yields an unintuitive result. It might be very well the case that we

find it natural to say King’s life would have been more meaningful had he lived longer

to make more progress in the Civil Rights movement (though we could not be sure of 114 A skeptic might argue that Mother Theresa, like Flit or even Sisyphus, moved about from population to population never able to successfully eradicate hunger or poverty, rendering her life meaningless on my proposed teleological view. Such a skeptic might think that her life is more easily described as meaningful on Wolf’s view since Mother Theresa lovingly engaged with objects of value in a positive way. However, I doubt that Mother Theresa’s explicit aim was the eradication of hunger or poverty. Her ability to devote her life to service likely involved the view that there will always be poverty, and that her role was to offer relief. More likely, she, along with her organization, made a mission of going to where they were needed, and providing relief in these places. This, it seems to me, she accomplished.

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this, of course). The role of success of an aim in determining the meaningfulness in

life is merely one consideration among several. Imagine a fellow, Schmartin, who led

a life very similar to Martin Luther King Jr. Schmartin led the 1955 bus boycott and

founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957, but died from a bout

of pneumonia in 1958. There was no march on Washington and no Peace Prize, no “I

Have a Dream” speech. Surely, Schmartin’s life was meaningful, but I think we may

find it natural to regard his work as merely beginning and, because of this, not as

meaningful, as say the real King’s accomplishments.

In claiming that achievement plays some role in our assessments of the

meaningfulness of life episodes, I do not wish to elevate the importance of success

inappropriately. The fact that King’s life was cut short while Mother Theresa’s life

was not bears little in the overall assessment of meaningfulness in part because the

value of the pursuits is largely equally as valuable and, frankly, their success with

them roughly comparable. Consider, too, that that while alleviating poverty is a very

important and valuable goal it is one that can be taken up by almost any of us. In

contrast, advancing the interests of black people in this country, helping to emancipate

them from racism and encouraging the reconciliation between white and black people

in the US are highly valuable goals that may require a unique individual to be able to

do effectively. King was that person and, despite his life being cut short, was able to

fill the role necessary for the kind of change those goals required.

In addition to these dimensions of meaning (subjective investment, value of the

activity and success of the activity), I think there is yet another aspect of the

meaningful life that needs more articulation than it receives on the Fitting Fulfillment

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View. This is the contribution the pursuit makes to other parts of the agent’s life: it

matters to us how parts of our lives relate to one another. Recall that Haidt got Wolf

to agree that people find meaning in a nexus of relationships around which they

organize their lives. Haidt’s example is of a student in one of his classes whose love of

horse riding came to shape much of the rest of her life: she found friends through

riding, developed a particular body of knowledge she found meaningful through

riding, honed key skills of which she became proud through riding, etc.115 These

connections can work across time to increase the meaningfulness of a life. Imagine

that my love of fishing (that I already had developed) becomes all the more

meaningful when I am able to introduce it to a friend I already have. We now go

fishing together and write one another frequently about our fishing stories, etc. When

my earlier work at my first job turns out to come in handy at another job of mine years

later, I am pleased; I now find that the earlier episode in my life—my first job—

becomes all the more meaningful since I can recognize it has positively contributed to

some other project I take to be valuable. When a pleasant vacation I am taking

becomes the place I meet my lifelong partner, I delight in the deepened significance

this vacation will take in my larger life narrative. Now this moment in my love plays a

key role—a distinctively positive one—in the development of one of the most

important pursuits in my life: my marriage.116

115 Wolf, Meaning in Life, 95. 116 This will be important when it comes to redemption. Imagine that a pink slip that turns up on my desk at work one morning initially deviates me, but then turns out to actually advance some other valuable project I care about. Imagine, say, say that my losing my job gave me enough time to write the novel I always wanted to write, etc. I then feel a complex set of emotions since while I am disappointed at losing my job, I am also able to recognize the deepened significance of the moment. A bad turn of events has now afforded me the opportunity to promote some other activity of high value with which I have become lovingly engaged, etc.

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My point here is that we find fulfillment in the way in which parts of our lives

fit together as wholes, under the unifying force of teleolgies. Such a dimension can

have complicated effects as well. Too many teleolgies running at once threatens the

possibility for any one, single teleology to be of any importance to the agent—which

is, itself, a dimension of meaningfulness. In contrast, an agent’s life can be too unified

when there is only one aim through which all other activities gain their import. Take

as an example of this Ahab from Melville’s Moby Dick, in an all-consuming search for

revenge against a whale who took his leg. His unified pursuit certainly counts a great

deal toward realizing meaningfulness in his life. After all, he passionately pursues an

object of some value. At the same time, however, we find it natural to negatively

regard Ahab as unhealthily obsessive in his pursuit. This would seem to fulfill a good

deal of the dimensions of meaningfulness and is, then, meaning-making.

There are features of his engagement, however, that count against

meaningfulness in the way Wolf, and now I, too, have been discussing. The kind of

engagement Ahab exhibits is suspect. Ahab does not lovingly engaged “in a positive

way” with an object of value when his aim is to destroy his supposed object of love—

the whale that so grips him and becomes his sole focus. Further, and more to the point,

his attention on the whale is “obsessive” and so is not “in a positive way”. Perhaps

what makes Ahab’s engagement with the whale not “in a positive way” is that his

engagement is based on a misunderstanding that the object actually merits the extent

of loving engagement he gives it. The aim takes primary place in his psychology to the

exclusion of all else, and because of this is incorrectly engaged with. Ahab’s pursuits

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allow him to exhibit some growth and development (indeed some virtues such as skills

as a sailor and whaler), but leave him completely impoverished in other key, positive

and valuable human capacities. I think we find it natural to allow this to count against

our assessment of overall meaningfulness in his life much in the same way we might

regard a scientist who pursues a research project to the exclusion of developing other

aspects of his personal life (even when his research goal is highly valuable).

I argue that these dimensions of meaningfulness (degree of achievement,

subjective investment and value of activity, as well as extent of personal development)

along with a more explicitly teleological way of articulating the Fitting Fulfillment

view can improve upon Wolf’s account. Evaluating the extent of meaningfulness

beyond mere realization of it requires parsing out the different dimensions of

meaningfulness included in a teleological formulation of Fitting Fulfillment. I have

fleshed out Wolf’s discussion of value of an object to include the extent of

development an activity affords a person. An activity that ends up developing a

person’s capacities in a positive way is more valuable and hence, more meaningful

than one that does not enable a person’s development.

Finally, one of the dimensions of meaningfulness ought to be the extent to

which life events and experiences are capable of being represented as making positive

contributions to a person’s overall personal development. It matters to us how our

activities relate to one another and contribute to other valuable parts of our lives, and

how these come together, more or less, under guiding teleologies that enable us to

appreciate our lives as wholes. It matters to us that our lives afford us positive

development as human beings—learned skill, wisdom, or excellence of some kind.

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These amendments to the Fitting Fulfillment view can help us explain the our

complex and nuanced set of intuitions about what a good life ought to contain—a

domain that is, as Wolf showed us, not reducible to either morality or utility.

3.3 Objection: Either “Who cares?” or “One-thought-too-many”

Now that we have in mind a more developed understanding of meaningfulness,

the kind of value it is and its criteria, it is important to defend the plausibility of

meaningfulness against a final objection. The objection can be framed as a dilemma:

Either this third category of value is merely descriptive of a life and so is not practical

(in which case, the skeptic objects, “Why would anyone care about it?”), or else it is

practical and so can be pursued (in which case, the skeptic argues, it has distorting

effects since a friend, lover or artist is no friend, lover or artist if he pursues friendship,

love or art for the sake of the meaningfulness in his own life and not for the sake of the

valued friend, lover or the art).

I argue that this objection is merely apparent, that this third category of value by

which we evaluate lives is action-guiding but not in a distorting way. Consider the first

horn of the dilemma that this third category of value distinct from happiness or

morality is of no practical importance. That we ought to admire Mother Theresa’s life

for having this value or that I ought to judge my own life for its lack of this value,

argues the objector, has not been shown to provide me with any guidance for acting.

Of what relevance, she may ask, is this description of how we judge lives to my efforts

to lead a good life?

The answer to the skeptic’s objection lies in an appreciation of the special kind

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of reason a person generally acts on when satisfying criteria for meaningfulness—

reasons of love. Recall that reasons of love are acted on for the sake of the beloved

object. This fact ensures that meaningfulness will likely be achieved by pursuit of

beloved objects for their own sakes.

Still, meaningfulness is action-guiding insofar as we can consider more clearly,

more intentionally, what kinds of objects/activities we should be pursuing (namely

ones we suspect have objective value and ones that tend to fulfill us), and in what way

we ought to pursue them (lovingly, out of reasons of love and in a positive way).

Threats to meaningfulness come with signals that something is wrong. Either we

become aware that what we are doing was not as valuable as we thought given the

signal that is our remorse or regret, or that we were acting on the wrong reasons

(perhaps out of obligation or self-interest instead of out of love) and so alienated from

our beloved objects. Though there are many ways the meaning in our lives can be

threatened (we can become alienated from our pursuits, choose bad aims, suffer

failures, etc.), I argue that when we act on these reasons of love and continue to be

vigilant about the potential signals we get regarding the warrant of our loving

engagement, we can have some control over the meaningfulness in our lives. We can

reflect on the degree to which something is truly fulfilling us or reflect on ways we

ought to develop our current projects in order to sustain loving engagement or effect

personal growth. When we live examined lives, we increase the chances of living

meaningful ones.

But to turn to the second horn of the dilemma, even if we could show ways in

which this third kind of value could be action-guiding, there is the concern that it

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would then fail to be an accurate description of human psychology. Arpaly puts the

worry this way: acting for the sake of meaningfulness seems to be “one thought too

many.”117 She argues that acting for the sake of meaningfulness does not constitute

loving engagement (but might, in fact, inhibit it), since such engagement requires

loving the object for its own reasons: “People who act, say, for the love of art, do not

act for the sake of a meaningful life but rather for the sake of art.”118 If a life’s

meaningfulness is valuable to agents at all, it must be practical but if it is practical,

then how does it play a role in our practical deliberations without having this sort of

distorting effect?

This one-thought-too-many objection is also merely apparent. The key to

dismissing it comes from understanding how nested aims work in human psychology.

Imagine that I have an aim to get a college degree. Because of this I sign up for, and

aim at passing, Introduction to Philosophy. The fact that I signed up for Philosophy

101 and aim to pass it because I want a college degree does mean I cannot also love

the class for its own sake. After all, I chose it (over calculus) because I found

objective value in its, I found it lovable. That I signed up for the class as part of my

larger aim to graduate from college, does not mean I cannot also love the class in a

way that honors it for its own, intrinsic value—independent of its instrumental value

of making meaning for me, contributing to my aim of a college degree. This nesting

of sorts allows one aim to have multiple objects—the class is lovable, and is the object

of my attention, as is the larger project of graduating from college.

Let us take another example. Imagine that I decided early on that marriage (or 117 Ibid., 90. 118 Ibid.

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more to the point, a lifelong union with someone) was something I wanted in my

life—largely because I suspected this project might be the bearer of great meaning for

me. To go throughout life with someone, to possibly raise children together, to grow

old together—it seemed like the kind of a project that was a winner as far as

meaningfulness was concerned. I suspected that in order to sustain this activity

throughout my life, I would need to be selective about the partner I chose. This person

would need to have certain attributes and get along with me in various ways.

When I was in college I met someone—I fell for someone—-who fit the bill. We

got married. Now when I tiptoe out of our bedroom in the morning, closing the door

quietly behind me so that the noise of the children won’t wake him up, I am surely

acting on reasons of love. I am not thinking that doing so will make my life more

meaningful. I am lovingly engaged in the project of marriage because I find my

partner lovable. Nonetheless, as Kant reminds us, inclinations come and go. I choose

to stay partnered up not because love is always the occurring emotion dominating my

present consciousness—for it is not. I choose to stay partnered up for many reasons:

love of my partner, self-interest, moral ones (having to do with the promises I made),

but also ones surrounding the hope that doing so is providing my life with meaning.

The search for meaningfulness has provided larger, over-arching reasons and a wider

teleology through which my nested aims have developed.119

119 A skeptic might say to this, “Wow. You were very deliberate—more than I—about relationships when you were in college. I just fell in love, and getting married seemed like the thing to do, and now I have all the feelings you do about my life, but I never set out to create it under the heading of “meaningful life.” The skeptic might argue that this, again, points to the worry that meaningfulness is not action-guiding and is really just a description we attribute to lives: either they have meaningfulness or they do not. To this, I argue, “Sure, that’s fine to satisfy meaning without intending to so. Meaningfulness doesn’t have to be action-guiding. But I argue that it can be action-guiding without at

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I do not think there is anything wrong in saying that I am married for the reason

that it is meaningful to do so, or inaccurate in describing human psychology this way.

It might be easier for us to imagine a person deliberating on what she should do to

make her life more meaningful when the considerations are abstract (such as “develop

a professional career that is both valuable and engaging” or “search for a lifelong

partner”) rather than specific (such as “submit this paper to a journal” or “buy a

birthday gift for my husband today”). This is because when the “big questions” or

over-arching teleologies that are making meaning for her in her life seem “settled” for

her, then her deliberation focuses primarily, more naturally, on the smaller, nested

aims within those larger teleologies. When asked why she performed the latter two

activities, an agent would most likely say, respectively, “because I really want to get

something published” and, “because I love him and I want to make him feel great

today.” Still, as MacIntyre insists in his essay on the subject in After Virtue, these

activities simply cannot be understood without their context in the larger teleologies

and narratives of a life. If we continued to ask “why?” to the agent’s responses we

would surely end in final answers that have to do with life’s meaningfulness.

I suspect that deliberation on what to do to increase or establish meaning in our

lives happens most directly at times when we recognize the meaning in our lives has

been threatened: when we lose our jobs, separate from our life partners, experience the

deaths of loved ones, make horrible errors that put our aims at risk, etc. When the

meaning in our lives is threatened, we might find that our practical deliberations

include explicit references to meaningfulness as a good in our lives. At these times, we the same time being alienating or distorting in its effects.” Further, self-reflection is, perhaps, an important component of a good life.

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might find ourselves saying rather bluntly, “What can I do to make sense of this

situation?” or “There must be something I can do that would make this situation

tolerable, something I could understand or in which I could find meaning.” When one

meaningful project ends but another has not been established, we can feel that rising

sense of disorientation—say, when we graduate from college. Perhaps, then, we

might have thoughts such as, “I’ve just graduated from college but I have no idea what

to do. I feel lost as if I’ve just been dumped onto the world’s stage without the benefit

of rehearsal. What career could possibly be meaningful for me to pursue?” It is

questions such as these that motivate the following chapter, Chapter IV on regret, grief

and other negative, past-directed attitudes that can threaten the meaningfulness in our

lives. Before we move on to this subject, I will briefly review Chapter III.

3.4 Conclusion: Redemption as rescued meaningfulness

Recall from the first section in this essay the problem of identifying what was at

stake in redemption—the narrative transformation of a change in meaning in a bad,

past event to a good event in the context of some alternate narrative. I raise the

concern that the thick sense of meaning we become interested in when we want to

know about what some event means for a person, pointed in the direction of

redemption being about restoration of well-being. Recall that I called this claim into

doubt. In the case example of the assault-victim-turned-crisis counselor, I argued that

it was not merely relief that now her life was faring well or that now her past could be

represented as having fared well, but rather something deeper, something different. I

argued that what the imagined agent felt was a deepened sense of meaning in her

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life—a sense that now a past misfortune in her life was part of a larger, valuable

enterprise surrounding a nexus of important activities of her: her role as counselor, her

friendships, her positive discoveries about herself, as well as her developed

professional skill and body of knowledge.

In subsequent chapters, I will argue that the story of redemption is a story about

recovering meaningfulness in life that was lost to various threats such as misfortune,

regrets and other losses. Since redemption is a phenomenon concerning the recovery

of meaningfulness in a person’s life, we needed an account of meaningfulness capable

of offering criteria for a life’s being meaningfulness, so that we can examine to what

extent the narrative transformation involved in redemption satisfies these criteria. In

this chapter, I have addressed the former project of identifying, at least roughly, a

sketch of meaningfulness and its criteria: that it is a matter of loving engagement with

and pursuit of objects of value in a positive way that expresses personal growth. In

Chapters V and VI, I will develop an account of redemption itself, so that we can

begin to see to what extent redemption satisfies the demands of meaningfulness in a

person’s life as articulated in this chapter. Before then, however, I will examine a key

phenomenon that can be the focus of redemptive behavior in agents—the negative

evaluative attitude of regret or remorse or, more generally, perceived loss.

No life is ideally meaningful. Most lives contain moral blemishes and events

with low intrinsic value: moral failings and event sequences of low value that threaten

the overall value achieved in the life. Still, each of us wishes to have a life of high

value—one rich in meaningfulness. Because of this, I will argue, we often respond to

the onset of a bad experience or regretted action by searching for ways to transform

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the role that some offending event plays in our lives overall. We say that we “learned

from a mistake” when we want to apprehend the positive upshot of some failure. We

say, “what does not kill us makes us stronger” when we suffer but want our suffering

to not be in vain. We want our efforts and experiences to be worth our while—worth

the effort of living them and, moreover, meaningful in a good way.

Before I examine how this redemptive activity works, I will examine the

evaluative attitudes that can generate redemptive activity. The characteristic attitudes

of which redemption is a function are remorse and regret—attitudes that some may say

are irrational since they appear to be in part a function of impossible wishes—wishes

to change the past. In the chapter that follows, I examine the problem of the rationality

of regret and argue that though it can in certain cases give the agent a practical

problem of lost meaning that, I later argue, redemption can solve.

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IV.

The Problem With and Importance Of

Regret, Grief, and Other Past-Directed, Negative Attitudes

In the last chapter we found that meaningfulness is a special kind of value a

life can have that it is distinct from either happiness or morality, and that it is realized

by loving engagement with and pursuit of objects of value in a way that enhances the

development of an individual in a positive way. Each of us wishes for a life such as

this. Unfortunately, however, as has been noted in earlier parts of this dissertation,

each of us is vulnerable to threats to the meaning in his life. There are losses over

which we have no control—deaths of loved ones, natural disasters, misfortunes that

can threaten everything we’ve worked for or everything we’ve loved. Alternately,

there are mistakes that we have made that generate such persistent regret that they

cause us to doubt the value of our pursuits and the positive direction of our lives in

general. We can experience a series of events or execute a series of actions, then come

to regard that series of events as having led us down a wrong path, as less than

valuable—perhaps even worthless or disvaluable. We can worry that some path we’ve

been on has made us develop in not-so-positive ways—ways we no longer endorse or

worry have become unacceptable. Alienating regrets, grievances and feelings of

remorse (ones that pose threats to the meaning in our lives) are the kinds of negative

evaluative attitudes about our pasts relevant to this dissertation.

Not every regret, loss or moral infraction threatens the meaning in our lives. It

is when such attitudes (and the events that gave rise to them) endanger the key aspects

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of meaningfulness discussed in the last chapter that they become relevant to the search

for a practical solution to lost meaning in life. When losses jeopardize our loving

engagement in our pursuits or get us to question the value of an object of love or even

positive direction of our personal development, an agent can find himself concerned

about the meaning in his life. When we experience such loss to the meaning in our

lives, we are left with practical problems, since our lives no longer satisfy the criteria

for the meaningful lives we so desire.

Recall from Chapter I the motivating question of whether or not we can

reasonably expect to find a practical solution to this problem. When our lives are

diminished in meaning because of past events, we lose value that seemingly cannot be

rescued since what is past cannot be changed. There is nothing we can do to go back

and fix the problem or erase it away. Recall that there are a variety of ways a person

can respond to bad past events. A person can become so consumed by what has

happened that we think continued grieving or regret is not in a person’s interest. A

person can outright deny the facts of the past, exerting control over his life by refusing

to let what has happened generate pain. It might be natural to think that this response

is not in the person’s interest either, since it, too, does nothing to change the past and

causes in us the concern that the individual’s denial is unsustainable, that painful

feelings will ultimately assert themselves. Also, living according to false beliefs does

not seem like living well. In contrast, a person can accept the loss and move on from it

as best as possible—a choice that does nothing to change the past, but at least seems to

be better for the person than these other two responses.

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The present chapter is an examination of yet another possible response to lost

meaning in one’s life. Perhaps we can accept the facts of the matter as they are (and so

not exhibit outright denial of the past) but deny that they have any real import for us

one way or another, or pose any threat to the meaning in our lives. It would seem that

if we successfully demonstrated that the past does not have the power to threaten

meaningfulness in our lives, then we would be able to avoid the practical problem that

motivates this dissertation, since we would render the problem merely apparent. It is

the burden of this chapter to examine this possibility, and, ultimately, to locate the

missteps in the argument for this solution to the problem of lost meaningfulness.

In Section 4.1 I examine the puzzle that regret and other negative past-directed

attitudes can pose for moral psychology. In particular, I note the complexity of such

attitudes: (1) on the one hand, they can be beneficial sources of information for agents

about what it is the agents themselves value, and (2) on other hand, they can function

as disvaluable attitudes that are painful, and unhelpfully past-directed. In Section 4.2,

in an effort to isolate what might be valuable about such attitudes (if anything), I

examine the extreme position that regret is of no value at all. I do this mainly by

arguing against this view as presented in an essay from Rüdiger Bittner (1992) “Is it

reasonable to regret the things one did?” In Section 4.3, I analyze the concept of what

it is to value in order to support the conclusion that regret has positive value as an

attitude important to having valued something in the first place. Such valuing is a key

component in the realization of meaningfulness, as we discovered in Chapter III.

Then, I argue that Bittner can’t be right about the irrationality and utter disvalue of

attitudes like regret, raising a wider concern more to the heart of the problem with the

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Bittnerian view: his no-regrets position fails to take seriously the role that the past

plays in our efforts to live meaningful lives.

Sections 4.3 and 4.4 develop this argument through an examination of the role

the past plays in our efforts to live meaningful lives. Relying on the conception of

meaningfulness from Chapter III, I argue that how the parts of a life fit together as a

whole to express a developed narrative of overall personal growth is a key contributor

to the meaningfulness in one’s life. But Bittner’s position entails that the past is of no

particular relevance on our identities as agents, and that such a position makes an

agent vulnerable to a diminished narrative identity—an important dimension of

meaningfulness. I thus conclude that Bittner’s no-regrets position solves the problem

of bad events that threaten the meaning in our lives, but at the cost of diminishing the

meaning in our lives in another sense, since it tends to undermine any overall narrative

of our personal development—a key element in realization of a meaningful life

overall. This result sets up my discussion of redemption as the problem of lost

meaning—which is the subject of chapters that follow.

4.1 Bittner’s challenge: no regrets

“Repentance is not a virtue, i.e. it does not arise from reason. Rather, he who repents what he did is twice miserable, i.e. impotent.” (Spinoza, Ethica, pt. IV, prop. 54).

Regret, grief and other past-directed con-attitudes surface as concepts worthy

of philosophical attention in their relation to problems in moral psychology and moral

philosophy. When it comes to living a good life, we want to know what kinds of

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responses to value-relevant states of affairs are justified and, further, advisable for an

agent to have. Still, the philosophical issues in this domain do not always get the

attention they deserve. While it is commonplace to talk about what an agent ought to

do, it is, in some philosophical circles, still rather mysterious to talk about what an

agent ought to feel or what attitudes she ought to have. As Elizabeth Anscombe

lamented in her essay “Modern Moral Philosophy,” more work needs to be done in

philosophy in order to talk responsibly about moral motivation, say, or a philosophy of

psychology more generally.120

Beyond this importance of moral psychological attitudes in general, past-

directed con-attitudes such as grief or regret pose interesting, special problems of their

own. On the one hand, such attitudes bear an obvious negative valence: they are

attitudes connected with the evaluative judgment that something has gone wrong, and

most often accompanied by the wish that things had gone otherwise.121 As such these

attitudes are painful feelings that we would rather not have, whether they concern our

past actions, or other events to which we are importantly related. On the other hand, it

is a natural intuition that evaluative attitudes have an important role to play as

reasonable responses to perceived losses of value. In this respect, such attitudes seem

to bear a positive valence: they can serve as expressions of what an agent considers

herself to value and, because of this, are somehow related to her self-governance.

My aim in this chapter is to argue that con-attitudes about our pasts (e.g.,

regret, grief, or remorse) are reasonable and valuable to the agent. At first blush, this

120 Elizabeth Anscombe. “Modern Moral Philosophy.” 121 See for example, regret as construed in Monika Betzler’s, “Sources of Practical Conflicts and Reasons for Regret,” 198.

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might seem like an incontestable position. Bernard Williams, for example, thinks it

would be a kind of “insanity” for an agent never to experience the sentiment of

regret.122 Many of us have the intuition that an agent without any regret at all is

deficient in some way. But Rüdiger Bittner challenges this intuition in his essay, “Is it

Reasonable to Regret the Things One Did?”.123 He argues that there is nothing

advisable about regret as an attitude, that in fact, it is never warranted, and even

irrational, since its cognitive content consists in a wish to change the unchangeable.

Bittner claims that regret is merely a superfluous pain without which agents would be

better off. Further, he thinks that the integrity of an agent’s self-conception is not

harmed by the exclusion of regret as an attitude. Instead, he argues that part of what it

is for an agent to demonstrate integrity is for that agent to determine which actions he

identifies with, and which he abandons as no longer expressive of him. Thus, it is the

job of the agent to abandon both the negative, past-directed attitude and also in some

way, the event or action toward which the attitude was originally directed. Such

abandonment is something like the removal of the event from a narrative conception

of oneself or one’s life or, even, the denial that a narrative conception of oneself is a

part of a good life at all. On this view, an agent constructs her self-conception by

picking and choosing which events she regards as representative of her development

as a person.

Bittner casts the question of his paper as follows: “Given that we did

something bad, is it reasonable for us to regret that we did it?”124 He intends to use the

122 Williams, “Moral Luck,” 29. 123 Bittner, “Is It Reasonable,” 274. 124 Ibid., 262.

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word, “reasonable,” in the everyday sense of being a “good idea” or

“recommendable.”125 While Bittner takes himself to be arguing against regret, he later

broadens his thesis to include the idea that past-directed con-attitudes in general—

attitudes such as grief—are, by themselves, neither worthy of admiration nor

warranted. It is apparent by the end of the essay that he means to be making the wider

claim that there is nothing recommendable about any past-directed, self-directed con-

attitude.

The crucial point to understand, then, is why, on Bittner’s view, we should

judge an evaluative attitude like regret to be unreasonable in the first place. Bittner’s

evidence of its unreasonableness seems to be two-fold: first, that it is disvaluable as a

pain (and thus adds its own negative weight over and above the diminishment in well-

being that we must confront from having something bad happen), and second, that the

attitude is solicited by and directed toward a past event about which the agent can do

nothing. In fact, Bittner thinks attitudes like regret and grief only stand to “cloud”

practical deliberation.126 The argument against the value of regret as a moral

psychological attitude then goes something like this: “Regret is a painful feeling

accompanying the acknowledgment that something has gone wrong and involves

something like a wish that things had been otherwise. Since something has already

gone wrong, it is past and cannot be changed. It is irrational to wish that things in the

past should be otherwise. Therefore, it is irrational to regret the things that have

passed. Since what we feel is, in an important sense, under our control, it is also, by

125 Ibid. 126 Ibid.

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virtue of the above set of premises, irrational to feel the pain of a past-directed attitude

such as regret or grief.”

Bittner’s argument turns on the idea that the past has no real claim on us—or

rather, that a person’s identity as an agent need not be dictated to him by his past

actions or prior commitments. Bittner is motivated to argue this way in response to

Bernard Williams, who claimed in “Moral Luck” that a person who does not regret

some unfortunate action stands to lose his “identity and character” as an agent.127

Bittner challenges us by asking what relevance the past really has in constituting a

person’s character and “identity as an agent.” Bittner imagines an agent could say of a

regretted action: “True, I did that, I even did it intentionally. But I am no more in it.

You cannot find me there. That is history. It does not cast a shadow over what I do

now.”128

Bittner’s view seems to be that agency is forward-looking and, because of this,

we are under no obligation to appeal to the past to understand ourselves as agents. I do

not think Bittner is arguing that we excuse agents from being held accountable for

their past. Rather, he is simply saying that we are not required to regard our past

actions as constitutive of who we are as agents in the present. Bittner suggests that in

an important sense our agency is expressed precisely through our choices to shed or

retain various past actions from the concept of our identity. This, as Spinoza

complains, regret, grief, and the like are merely unnecessary second pains: “We do

127 Williams, 29. 128 Bittner, 271.

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grieve about separations but there is nothing recommendable or praiseworthy in

grieving. If you can do without it, do not think you rather ought to grieve.”129

Bittner’s argument that an agent ought not to grieve relies on his claim that, in

an important sense “what you feel is up to you.”130 He acknowledges that at first we

may object that this is like asking whether a headache is reasonable. He insists,

however, that he is not talking about the idea that a person, should he regard some

feeling as unreasonable, could, in that moment, annihilate it. Rather, he argues, a

feeling judged to be unreasonable “slowly recedes and eventually dies out” just

because it makes no sense to us, given the person we have become.131 While Bittner

acknowledges that sometimes feelings can be stubborn—persisting even against our

better judgment—at other times, he points out, they do respond to an agent’s insight.

An agent who tells himself he ought not feel x about y, may find he reaches “a more

sensible way of feeling and so, in the end, perhaps a more sensible way to act.”132

There is something wrong with how Bittner thinks of evaluative attitudes such

as regret, but something right, too. On the one hand, it is natural to think that agents

ought not romanticize negative attitudes such as regret, allowing them to get in the

way of future deliberation by wallowing in them. We tend to think agents ought to

eventually “let it go” or “move on.” We may worry that when an agent does not

eventually “get over” his regret or grief, there is something suspect at play (such as an

ulterior motive to gain sympathy). We also tend to worry that continuous and

unending grieving is not in an agent’s best interest since it can affect the agent’s

129 Ibid., 273. 130 Ibid., 262. 131 Ibid., 263-264. 132 Ibid, 264.

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ability to make good choices going forward and inhibit their pursuit of new valuable

projects going on into the future.

On the other hand, we may recoil at the thought of a world in which agents

respond to loss with the cool rationality that Bittner thinks is exemplary for practical

deliberation, and which does in fact seems appropriate for deliberation, about, say,

whether to put the snow tires on before winter sets in.133 What, exactly, is wrong with

Bittner’s picture of agency that gives rise to our general unease with the picture he has

in mind? Below, I examine several possible problems with the Bittnerian view.

4.2 Regret as a “reactive attitude”

Bittner’s no-regrets argument leaves open several possible responses. First, we

might adopt a rationalist view that regret is something like “a reason unacted upon still

calling out for action.” On this view, the good reason the agent should have acted upon

in an instance of deliberation still presses upon the agent’s practical rationality,

continuously asserting itself since has so far remained unacted upon. Regret is the

phenomenon of perceiving the reason that should have been acted on. An alternate

response rests on the more general concern that Bittner thinks purely instrumentally

about evaluative attitudes, and that this is wrong because such attitudes are part of

valuing, itself, and cannot be separated from the activity of a valuing agent. More will

be said about this below but for the present, let us say that this position takes it as

evident that what it is to value something is to exhibit certain attitudes in response to

it: to be frightened when it is threatened, grieve when it is lost and rejoice when it

133 Ibid., 272.

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flourishes. This position regards regret and grief and the like as, what I will call

negative or con-attitudes, as “reactive attitudes,” combinations of affect and cognitive

state that are responses to perceived threats to an object of value.

The Rationalist Response

An advantage of the rationalist reply is that it directly debunks the Bittnerian

notion that regret is irrational. This view explains regret in terms of practical

rationality: I regret when I perceive that in my practical deliberation, I either failed to

consider the right reason—the one I should have acted upon—or else I considered it,

but failed to act on it.

The problem with this view, however, is that the agent can regret all kinds of

things—not merely her own poor deliberations. A burglar can experience regret when

he chooses not to steal the car when the opportunity presented itself. He can spend

hours kicking himself for not acting on his impulse (he thinks this would have been a

reasonable solution to his cash-flow problem). In another kind of case, an agent can

regret even when he acts on good reasons and, therefore, has deliberated well.

Consider for example, a case of rationally resolved conflict when an agent deliberates

between two incommensurable values or acts on a good reason to do x but must, as a

result, forsake something else, y, that was also valuable. Imagine that after her choice

to do x, she then regrets the fact that she had to forsake y. In that case, she regrets that

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she had to make this choice even though she deliberated perfectly well, and would

make the same decision again if presented with a forced choice.

Some theorists will want to say that regret in such cases is irrational. Monika

Betzler, in her essay, “Sources of Practical Conflicts and Reasons for Regret” thinks

differently, however. She argues that regret in cases of rationally resolved conflict is

warranted whenever an agent’s good deliberation results in a decision which also

involves forsaking acting upon reasons that have been generated by identity-forming

commitments such as the development of long-term relationships or projects.134 In

these kinds of cases, an agent’s regret is warranted (even when there was no wrong

reason acted upon) because she finds herself unable to act on reasons to value things

that have become important to her, important parts of her identity.

Betzler’s example of this is a person who began to pursue a career in

philosophy, entered into a graduate program, developed a dissertation thesis but then

chose, on good reasons, to pursue a more financially stable business career instead.

Her new project makes it impossible to act on reasons to read more philosophy,

schedule meetings with graduate advisors, and hone her philosophy writing skills. The

valuable project of becoming a philosopher generated reasons to value all kinds of

activities that she is no longer able to pursue. Those reasons to interact with graduate

advisors and pursue writing improvement are still good reasons stemming from

identity-forming commitments around which the agent has organized her time. They

continue to assert themselves in her practical deliberation but cannot be acted upon

because of her new, equally valuable choice to become a financial analyst. (At the root

134 Betzler, “Sources of Practical Conflict,” 198.

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of the agent’s deliberation regarding her career choice were incommensurable values

of financial stability and intellectual satisfaction). The agent is warranted in feeling

regret in her choice to pursue a business career, since the good reasons to value

philosophy-related activities continue to go unacted upon for some time thereafter.

On Betzler’s view, regret in theses cases (rationally resolved conflict over

identity-forming commitments) is supposed to be distinct from, say, regretting the

choice of chocolate ice cream because the agent must forsake vanilla as a result.

Identity-forming commitments (such as career choice), already underway in the life of

the agent, have generated valuings (reading philosophy, developing dissertation ideas,

meeting with professors) that the agent has good reasons to continue to act on but can

no longer act on. In Betzler’s account, the reasons to act on these valuings serve as

explanations of the rationality of regret in some cases of rationally resolved conflict.

Betzler’s view is not too different from the broader claim that regret is a

reactive attitude, since the regret in the above-mentioned view is a response to what

the agent actually values. The strictly rationalist formulation of regret, however, is

wanting since it cannot explain cases in which an agent might reasonably regret events

that were not the product of the agent’s own deliberation. This is the kind of case that

interested Bernard Williams in his 1981 essay on moral luck. In the essay, Williams

asks us to imagine a lorry driver who runs into a child who darts out into the street.135

The driver did not choose to hurt the child—that is, he did not deliberate on whether to

drive into the child, review considerations, reasons for and against, etc. Instead, he

was driving along, perhaps a little too quickly to make a fast stop, and by being at the

135 Williams, 28.

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wrong place at the wrong time, his driving down the street turned out to end the

child’s life. In an important sense, he was the cause of the child’s death—in our

imagined scenario, she dies from the trauma of having been hit by the truck he was

driving.

We may find it reasonable that the driver in this imagined scenario would feel

regret, perhaps even remorse.136 Surely the driver feels morally implicated, if not

altogether morally responsible, that he has killed someone. We would, perhaps, find it

concerning had the driver not expressed an attitude of regret or remorse. A strict

rationalist may find it difficult to explain the intuition that regret in this case is

warranted: there is no reason that went unacted upon, that should have gone acted

upon. The driver did not make a deliberative error, leaving some reason unacted upon

still calling out, pressing upon his practical rationality. Indeed, he didn’t deliberate at

all in the course of events that led to the death of the child. He was simply a link in a

causal chain that ended in the child’s death. Our sense, however, that the driver is

warranted in his regret demands explanation. The alternate view mentioned above—

that regret is a reactive attitude, expressive of what we value—may provide us with an

explanation for this phenomenon and so, furnish a stronger response to Bittner’s no-

regrets challenge. Below, I investigate this alternate view.

Regret As A Reactive Attitude

136 Remorse will involve the awareness that one had committed a moral violation or, as in the present case, the thought that there was something the agent could have done and perhaps ought to have done to avoid hitting and killing the child.

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I think a more promising conception of regret is the broader claim mentioned

at the top of this section: regret is not so much a matter of a reason unacted upon that

calls out for action, but a particular response to perceived loss of value that involves

the awareness that the agent is in some sense responsible for, or causally related to, the

loss. This view of regret begins from the view that it is a necessary condition of

valuing is to express certain attitudes around the object of value. That is, it is part of

what valuing consists in, to exhibit fear, for example, when the object of value is

threatened, joy when it flourishes, and grief when it is lost to us.137 On this view,

regret is something like a “reactive attitude”—a response to the perception that

something has gone wrong with an object of value in a way that the agent recognizes

he is partly (or wholly) responsible for.138

The lorry driver in Williams’ example takes himself to be a person committed

to avoiding hitting other people, and this self-conception generates the distinctive

sentiment involved in regret. His regret reveals the presence of a general commitment

to refrain from causing harm to others. He is now painfully aware that he has been

involved in a harm-causing chain of events, the result of which is the death of a child,

something he took himself to be committed to generally avoiding. This seems to be the

best explanation for why we might think that it is reasonable for Williams’ lorry driver

137 Compare work done on this topic by J. Raz ((1999, 2001); S. Scheffler (2004); B. Helm (2001). 138 I borrow the term “reactive attitude” from P. F. Strawson who argues, in his essay “Freedom and Resentment” (Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays (1974) and reprinted in 2008 by Routledge.) that resentment is a reasonable, “reactive attitude” because it is one that follows from having taken another agent to be a member of the moral community, a person of free will, in the first place. . Resentment, argues, Strawson, is a moral emotion, a response to having taken someone to be a moral agent in the first place. Such “reactive” emotions, argues Strawson, are important components of moral relationships. In a roughly analogous way, I am arguing that regret is a reasonable, “reactive attitude” because it follows from perceiving that something an agent values has been threatened in a way that the agent recognizes he in some way caused or for which he was in some way responsible.

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to regret having hit the child, even though his doing so was not a product of

deliberation. If we regard regret as inseparable from valuing more generally, then even

in instances of unintended, harm-causing chains, regret is a reasonable attitude.

Further, if regret is an essential part of the phenomenon of valuing something, then we

must find value in regret as an attitude—that is, of course, if we take valuing to be part

and parcel with a good life.

It should also be clear from the examples of Chapter III that valuing is

certainly a key feature in the meaningful life. Loving engagement with an object of

value is another way to talk about valuing that object—protecting it, developing it,

enjoying it, etc. We found that the meaning in one’s life is dependent upon this kind of

relationship between human beings and objects of love—ones we take to be valuable

and actively seek to develop and sustain. For this reason, we can find fault with

Bittner’s view assumption that a valuing agent is radically separable from his reactive

attitudes of satisfaction, disappointment, joy and grief with respect to the objects of

value. Bittner does not appreciate that regret is inseparable from valuing and because

of this, fails to acknowledge that regret has value all its own as an attitude that follows

from having valued something in a way key to leading a meaningful life as discussed

in the Chapter III.

Further, this position that reactive attitudes such as regret and grief are

expressive of what an agent values, and thus reasonable as well as valuable to a good

life, is distinct from an additional value that regret can have: its instrumental value to

practical deliberation. Regret can be a valuable source of information for the agent. It

can help the agent formulate second-order attitudes (Does the agent want to value the

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object of value expressed in his regret?) and elucidate what he actually values. In

addition to being a reactive emotion, in part constitutive of what it is to value, past-

looking regret can be instrumentally valuable to forward-looking agency.

Jon Elster in his essay, “Ulysses and the Sirens,” explores this idea.139 He

observes that agents often use anticipated regret to compensate for imperfect

rationality in efforts to achieve their goals or satisfy their higher-order desires. In the

example referred to by his essay’s title, Ulysses asks his shipmates to bind him to the

mast of his ship as it passes by the alluring sirens because, all things considered, he

does not desire to allow himself to give in to (what will be) his overwhelming

immediate desire to follow the sirens’ call upon hearing it. Ulysses knows that he

would regret choosing to act on his desire to follow their voices because he would be

lured to his death, thus making impossible his central desire to go home. So, he binds

himself in advance of his temptation. Now he can listen to their luring call without

acting on the desire to follow it and in so doing, achieves more central desire—which

is to go home.

Arguments, then, can be made for the instrumental value of both the past-

directedness of regret and its painful affect. Imperfectly rational valuing agents can

use pain and past-directed thinking toward the valuable goal of self-management by

learning about what is actually valuable to them and by putting these insights to good

use, so that what the agents actually value guides their behavior.

The observations that (1) a meaningful life requires valuing, (2) regret is

inseparable from the phenomenon of valuing, and (2) that it can be instrumentally

139 Elster, Ulysses Unbound, (2000).

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valuable as well, point us to the flaws in Bittner’s position. I do not think this set of

observations, however, amounts to a decisive objection for Bittner’s view. It is

possible that Bittner could concede that valuing is an important dimension of the

meaningful life and agree to the thesis that regret is an inevitable result of having

valued something in the first place, but simply insist that regret and grief are

imperfectly rational responses to the setbacks on life. Therefore, we should engage in

emotional self-management aiming to bring it about that these past-directed con-

attitudes fade as quickly as they arise in us, therefore minimizing their painful,

deliberation-clouding effects. Regret and even grief are nothing special, play no role in

the life of a perfectly rational agent, and play no genuine role in the meaningful life

other than being an unfortunate, inevitable attitude that ought to be trained out of

someone as soon as possible.

To see the force of this Bittnerian response to my objections, recall that Bittner

does not advocate that an agent should annihilate a feeling as it arises. He argues

instead that feelings are “up to us” in the sense that they are responsive to reason: an

agent ought to allow regret to recede after he regards it as unreasonable, particularly in

light of the person he has become.140 What Bittner objects to is clinging to regret

when the agent would do better by “moving on,” distancing himself from the bad past

event and, in so doing, establishing a conceptual distinction between himself and the

agent who made the mistake in the past. Bittner imagines an agent can say of past, bad

action, “You cannot find me there,” because the agent no longer identifies with the

agent who made the mistake.

140 Bittner, 262.

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Perhaps we might concede for the moment that merely clinging to regret will

neither help an agent overcome his compromised state of having done something

wrong nor make it true that he has a different character or identity than the agent who

made the mistake. Even when we concede these points, however, we still might not be

comfortable with Bittner’s overall project of proving the irrationality and general

disvalue of regret and grief—the position that leads him to claim “You cannot find me

there.”

The strongest objection to Bittner’s account, then, does not lie in a mere

concept analysis of valuing, nor in valuing’s relationship to meaningfulness. The

deeper objection appeals to the concern that this agent is in bad faith with respect to

his past— that he fails to appreciate the role the past plays in a person’s self-

conception and, ultimately, in the practice of living a good life, one that is meaningful

in the way articulated in the last chapter.

In order to argue for this, I will need to show that Bittner’s position commits

an agent to this kind of denial—denial about the meaning of the past, of how the past

has import for a person’s larger aims and narratives in his life. Then, I will show how

this position makes an agent vulnerable to the meaning in his life, to a diminishment in

his life’s overall value.

4.3. Regret and the narrative self

Recall Bittner’s imagined response to a bad, past event: “Yes. I did that. But

that is history. You cannot find me there. It does not cast a shadow over me now.”

The key idea embedded in this response is that the past is of no particular relevance,

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that it has no claim on the agent or import for the agent’s life now. The problem with

such a position is that it is not true. The past does have import for agents, as I will

argue below. I will claim that an agent who denies the import of the past is in bad

faith, and as such compromises the value of his life overall, both by living according

to false beliefs and, more to the point of this dissertation, standing to lose a narrative

sense of himself—a crucial dimension to the realization of meaningfulness in one’s

life as discussed in Chapter III. Jettisoning a regretted past from one’s understanding

of one’s life may appear to solve the practical problem of a bad event threatening the

meaning in our lives, but it simply moves the problem elsewhere: an agent who does

not regard his past as contributing to his identity over time, thus to the overall value of

his life now, has a diminished sense of narrative in his life and as such, compromises

the meaningfulness in his life, since the narrative of one’s personal development, how

the parts of a life fit together to express growth, is a key component of meaningfulness

as discussed in the previous chapter . Below, I motivate this claim more fully.

What kind of import does the past have?

Recall from Chapter III Flit and Contented, two imagined agents whose lives

realize Wolfian meaningfulness but do not reflect overall personal development, an

observation that, I argued, gives us reason to regard their lives as less meaningful than

they would otherwise be. Flit moves from one (arguably) meaningful experience to

another in succession, without having a sense of how these experiences fit together

into a whole. His surfing days in Mexico, self-help seminar job, business school and

entrepreneurial adventure do not express to the agent himself a sense of personal

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development (learning, skill-building, becoming a better person in some way). His life

experiences surely have the makings of a narrative around an organizing telos but the

agent has not undertaken (or perhaps has tried and failed) the task of self-

understanding required to arrange his life events in such a way that their representation

reflects personal growth. Instead, he just moves from adventure to adventure like a

piece of kelp in open surf. The parts of his life remain isolated from one another,

separated by time. (Perhaps even the thought that he has developed over time as an

adventurer, always seeking to remain open to new things, to follow the path that is less

traveled, to test the limits of the human experiences might lead him in the direction of

developing this part of his meaningful life. That he has developed valuable skills an

adventurer would need to be true of him, however. For a narrative of personal

development to count toward the meaningfulness of his life, it needs to be true of the

agent in question.)

Contented meets Wolf’s criteria for meaningfulness in a different way. She

lovingly engages with objects of value in (arguably) positive ways. Her problem,

however, is a lack of substantive progress in personal development within this one,

extended meaningful experience. She fittingly finds fulfillment in her children, bingo

games and Saturday TV but does not seem to do anything with her experiences such

that she can be said to develop in positive ways, acquire valuable skills, grow better in

some way, etc. Recall that we examples such as Flit and Contented point to an

additional dimension of meaningfulness that goes underdeveloped in Wolf’s account.

This is the dimension of narrativity in a person’s life—how parts of the agent’s life fit

together into a narrative whole that expresses personal development and growth. An

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ideally meaningful life is capable of being thus represented, and all lives can be

evaluated according to this feature. A diminished sense of narrative development will

count against the degree of meaningfulness in the life.

We now have the material for a response to Bittner. After all, the past matters

to the overall value of an agent’s life in an important sense. There is therefore a

serious cost to Bittner’s position that the past does not have import and casts no

shadow—good or bad—on the agent’s life now—namely, a diminished sense of

narrativtity in an agent’s life. An agent who denies that past events have meanings for

his overall life does not regard the past sequence of events as making an important

contribution to his identity as an agent. While the agent may acknowledge that his past

self performed the regretted action in question, Bittner thinks that because his present

attitudes are differently constituted and express a distinct agential identity, the past

events belonging to the prior identity and do not contribute any negative import to the

new identity. But for an agent to represent himself across time in the way narrativity

demands, he must be willing to include past events and accept that these events make

contributions to the formation of his identity, character and development as a person

over time. The position that such an identity is not a function of the events in the past

threatens to diminish the agent’s capacity to represent his life in the narrative way that

is crucial to meaningfulness.

To see the force of this objection against Bittner, let us examine more carefully

what it might mean for events in an agent’s past to play no role (or merely optional

role as may be the case in the Bittnerian sense) in the formation of his identity over

time. Below, I first clarify the relationship between agential identity and what I call,

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“diachronic integrity,” the quality of having series of events in the agent’s life explain

one another so the can represent his life to himself in a narrative way. Then, I show by

appeal to a case of extremely diminished diachronic integrity—a person with full

amnesia—that lacking diachronic integrity makes it impossible for an agent to

understand himself, know what matters to him and why, to have sense of the meaning

in his life.

Agency and Diachronic Integrity

There are two extreme positions on either end of the spectrum regarding the

extent to which the past has a claim on our identities as agents. On one end of the

spectrum is the position that the past has absolutely no claim on an agent. Though this

may not be Bittner’s view, there are times at which he appears to be endorsing

something like it. In saying about some past action “You cannot find me there,” or

claiming that a disowned action casts no shadow over the agent, Bittner suggests that

the past makes no claim on the process of constructing a self-conception.

On the other extreme is a view that the sequence of events of which we were a

part constitutes, and thereby determines, our identities as agents. Lanier Anderson

attributes something like this view to Friedrich Nietzsche, who in various places in his

writing implies that a person’s identity is constituted by all of the facts about him.141

A person’s identity is essentially constituted by the set of discrete actions and

experiences of the agent. Anderson calls this view “inverse superessentialism”— that

141 In “Nietzsche on Strength and Achieving Individuality.”

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a person’s identity is equal to the bundle of facts about him.142 On this view, who the

agent is just is the bundle of every single fact about him.

Adopting the view that we are entirely determined by past event sequences

comes at the price of a flexibility to change who we (essentially) are. Recall that the

past is a set of event sequences that have already happened and cannot un-happen. If

who I am is entirely exhausted by the facts of what happened in the past, then my

agential identity is rigidly fixed up until the present moment. No amount of wishing

that I were differently constituted would do anything to change the fact of the matter

that I am identical to the set of events (and the accompanying facts generated by those

events) that have happened so far.

Alternately, when we adopt the more Bittnerian view, we gain a flexibility to

become quickly who we want to be by adopting new attitudes. In doing so, however,

we potentially forsake a special kind of integrity. The integrity at stake is similar to

but distinct from the kind threatened by akrasia—the phenomenon of an agent

performing an action without his own, full endorsement (an action not representative

of the agent’s avowed beliefs). Work in this area of philosophy involves pinning down

criteria for successful self-governance in single instances of deliberation.143 While

akratic action puts pressure on an agent’s ability to understand himself at a particular

142 This is the idea that every property of a thing is equally essential, precisely because things do not have essences that make them what they are. When things do not have distinct essences, they do not preserve their identities across counterfactual situations. Rather, every single property of that thing becomes necessary to being the thing that it is. In the case of personal identity, a person is who she is because of all of the facts about her (this is the “superessentialism” aspect of the view). Anderson calls the position “inverse superessentialism” in contrast to the superessentialist Leibinizian position that there is an essential aspect to things and persons such that an essence contains or implies all of the properties of that thing or person (from Anderson’s “Nietzsche on Strength and Achieving Individuality”). 143 See work on self-governance from Michael Bratman (1999), Harry Frankfurt (1989).

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moment, regretted action in general (whether it was fully endorsed at the moment of

deliberation or not) can put pressure on an agent’s understanding of himself as a

person across time. This is because regretted actions or regrettable event sequences in

a person’s life suggest that things have not gone in the way that the agent can now

accept as expressive of who he is. Thus, they threaten to conflict with a person’s desire

to regard himself as leading, over time, a life in concert with avowed values and in

service of sustained goals.

The view that the past has no particular claim on our identities as agents

enables an agent to resolve the resulting conflict, but at the cost of a kind of radical

excision. The agent, as it were, simply removes the offending event or sequence of

events from his understanding of himself as an agent. The cost of this resolution is a

serious one because it involves a diminishment in diachronic identity, or in the

conceptual continuity of a person’s understanding of himself over time. When agents

are able to alter self-conceptions simply by asserting that they are no longer identified

with some of their own past actions or even entire event sequences, the narrative of

themselves as an agent across time can become discontinuous. When I view my prior

self who committed some action as distinct from my present self, I alienated myself

from my prior self, and thereby stand to lose a continuity of myself as an agent

through time, a person with a continuous set of values, aspiration or goals.

But of what importance is diachronic integrity? I will argue that diachronic

integrity is importantly linked to meaning-making in an agent’s life since such

integrity makes possible a narrative organization a person’s life. This sort of narrative

development, expressing positive growth in an individual, contributes to the meaning

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in an agent’s life. I will argue below that the more diachronic integrity the agent

achieves, the more opportunities there are for the events in her life to contribute to its

meaningfulness. The weaker an individual’s diachronic integrity, the fewer

opportunities there are for events to contribute to larger, orienting goals of the agent.

Meaningfulness and Diachronic Integrity

In order to better understand the relationship between an agent’s diachronic

integrity (the conceptual continuity of his agential identity) and meaningfulness in his

life, let us take an extreme case of diminished diachronic integrity: a case of full

amnesia. Recall Jason Bourne, the special ops agent at the center of a series of films

inspired by Robert Ludlum’s thriller, The Bourne Identity. In the first film, The

Bourne Identity, a fishing crew finds the unconscious Jason Bourne face-up in open

seas. They revive him and keep him aboard their ship until they reach land. Jason has

amnesia and no idea about who he is except for several clues that include gunshot

wounds in his back, an electronic device embedded in his hip that records a numbered

Swiss bank account, and a remarkable ability to deploy martial arts skills when it

seems necessary. The ensuing film, and the other two films as well, amount to a quest

for self-understanding: Jason Bourne tries to piece together the story of who he is

(who he was and how he became who he is in the present).

What can we say about the diachronic integrity of Jason Bourne’s self-

conception as an agent? First, it is worth nothing that Bourne’s radical memory loss

clearly does not prevent from being an agent at all. On the contrary, the character is

very much an agent operating in the world. He still has present attitudes and quickly

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(despite his amnesia) adopts plans of action based on intentions generated from

immediate desires such as drives to live, eat, escape danger, etc. His problem,

therefore, is not a lack of agency. His problem is that he does not know who he is and

so does not know what to do beyond satisfy immediate desires. He does not know how

to be a who he (uniquely) is. He has no memories of his past and because of this no

sense of who he is, what matters to him and why, where he came from, what events

have led him to the present moment, etc. His utter lack of information about who he is

presents him with a problem: he does not know what to do. He does not know how to

carve up his time, what activities to pursue (what he should be doing given who he has

been). The only thing he can think to do is to hunt down evidence of who he is to

solve the above-mentioned problem. This is the story of the three Bourne films.

An agent with full amnesia has an extreme diminishment in diachronic

integrity. Such an agent cannot appeal to a set of past event sequences of which he was

a part to inform his self-conception, because he has no memories from which to

construct such an identity. Let us call the set of past event sequences an agent takes as

representing his past a “narrative self.” A narrative self is not simply a set of discrete

events. It is a set of event sequences that track the development of a person’s aims

over time: what aims and aspiration a person has had, what successes and failures he

has encountered, what experiences contributed to developing conceptions of goods

around which he organized, and continues to organize, his life. An amnesiac such as

Jason Bourne has a badly ruptured narrative self, since it does not extend back beyond

the relatively recent past. The agent feels the lack of prior story as a disorienting lack.

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An agent without a narrative self may know his present desires (hunger, felt

need to escape), but because he has no past to provide data on what kinds of pursuits

he adopted or objects of value he lovingly engaged with, he likely has no knowledge

of what (other than food and safety) matters to him, nor what he should do to bring the

world into conformity with any long-term goals (since he doesn’t know what these

are). Aims and pursuits such as building a community, maintaining a friendship,

developing a career, learning to play the guitar, the search for experience of the

beautiful, etc., all require development and maintenance of a narrative self in order to

keep track of how the relevant far-ranging goals are faring or even to establish what

mattered to this particular agent in the first place.

Here’s the larger point: The development of these organizing teleologies is an

agent’s narrative self and is a key feature of living a good life: a felt sense of meaning.

With a weakened narrative self, an agent stands to lose a felt sense of meaning in her

life since she lacks a self-conception that represents to herself a pattern of loving

engagement with objects of value and tracks personal development that would

contribute to the meaningfulness of her life.

When events do not also represent developments in the agent’s avowed

aspirations or values, the event stands to have little meaning for the agent. Because

events and experiences tend to gain import within the context of narratives, as we

learned from Chapters II and III, a life without much narrativity is one without much

meaning. As we encountered in Chapter III, breakdown in meaning occurs for us when

we lose track of why we are pursuing what we are pursuing, or we find that what we

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are pursuing is unachievable or disvaluable in some way. Jason Bourne’s problem is a

breakdown in narrative self and a loss of orienting meaning in his life.

That Jason Bourne has no narrative self at the onset of his amnesia does not

disable his practical reasoning, but it certainly informs it. In the course of the three

films, he organizes his time by developing a quest to search for his identity. His new

quest to reconstruct his narrative identity puts in place an organizing telos that,

regardless of his success with his aim of discovering his identity, provides him with a

new, organizing meaning to his life. (The desire to have meaning in his life gets

meaning off the ground.) In the case of extreme loss of diachronic integrity, an agent

loses out on meaning, and must start from scratch in order to find it. Over time, a new

set of event sequences will provide an amnesiac with a narrative self to inform his

present self-conceptions, and on it goes. In the case of an amnesiac, an agent has no

memories of the past that could function as a narrative self, tracking development in

telos.

Let us now return to our discussion of what an agent stands to lose or gain in

asserting that the past does not have a claim on the agent, that the facts of what

happened do not have meaning for the agent’s overall identity. Bittner’s agent, of

course, is not an amnesiac. The agent Bittner has in mind has access to past

memories—it’s just that he does not regard the past event sequences of which he was a

part as making any particular claim on him. This kind of agent picks and chooses

which events in his past have meaning for him and which do not. In the agent who

says of his own past action, “It does not cast a shadow over me now…you cannot find

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me there,” the agent disowns the regrettable event sequence because he no longer feels

that it represents him.

In one sense, this abandonment could be said to form a new narrative

identity—one with the regrettable events omitted. In this sense, the new narrative has a

certain kind of integrity—just not the one we discussed above. The new identity

forged by abandoning particular, regretted actions contains no conflicting attitudes: the

agent is able to endorse all of his constituting attitudes for the very reason that the

regretted choices (and bad experiences not representative of the agent) have been

excised from the agent’s self-conception. The abandoned events have no meaning

relative to the aspirations of the present agent—they make no contribution to the

narrative of the new agent since they do not have any import—bad or good—for the

new, present self so constituted.

But this does not seem quite right. In the case of regret, the agent’s disavowal

expressed in his regret informs the future practical deliberation of the new narrative

self. Indeed, it is the import of the bad event that we can say makes the new agent who

he is today. It is because the agent became aware of a mistake that he is able to be the

kind of person he is now.

Consider, as an example of this, the character of Jason Bourne as he begins to

put together the pieces of his true identity. He discovers mid-way through the first film

that he is/was an assassin. When he learns this of himself, he is deeply troubled. (We

know this because, among other behavioral clues, he expresses his remorse to his new

girlfriend, Maria, played in the film by Franke Potente.) Bourne’s project of

discovering his identity is deepened by this new awareness: he now feels compelled to

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reconcile himself to his past by resisting the role he apparently played as assassin (take

as an example his later choice to refrain from shooting a trained killer who comes after

him), and confronting who or what transformed him into the Frankenstein’s monster

he now worries that he is.

On the one hand, the new narrative of Jason Bourne includes forward-looking

activity, not the least of which is his setting up a life with his new girlfriend on a

remote island. On the other hand, he is compelled to return to his past, given his desire

to understand who he is (even on the remote island, he spends hours mining his

memories for clues to his past). His new living situation on the island is entirely

oriented around avoiding the past—hiding from his past and the trained killers who are

now after him.

To say of Jason Bourne that his disavowed past has no meaning for his present

identity amounts to a denial of the prominent role the past plays in his present

deliberations. The past has meaning for Jason insofar as even his disavowals of it

inform his present deliberations. His new pursuits of self-discovery and reconciliation

are meaningfully connected to his past self—that is, these pursuits stand in direct

opposition to his former activities. Everything Bourne elects to pursue is chosen in

light of his understanding of his life as a former assassin. His efforts to reject the life

of the assassin are direct responses to his felt regret. There is a larger narrative here of

personal growth and development that can only be explained in light of his past as an

assassin.

My winder point here is that the claim of Bittner’s agent (“I am no longer in

that”) can seem like bad faith. To be no longer in some past action would amount to

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sharing no conceptual connection whatsoever with the past action. I think we will find

it natural, however, to regard pro-and con-attitudes about the past as importantly

informing our present deliberations. Our attitudes about the past stand as reasons in

our deliberation in favor of x or in defense of y. It is because I regret getting a

speeding ticket that I now drive the speed limit on the highway. To say that I am no

longer “in that” past behavior of speeding is to deny that my having gone too fast had

negative import for the development of my goals but now functions importantly in my

present deliberation of how to behave.

The agent who abandons his past, who does not allow past events to play

meaningful roles in who he is now stands to lose diachronic integrity and, as a result

of this, a diminishment in the meaningful connections in his life. Though Bittner’s

agent gains a kind of flexibility in becoming who he wants to be (simply by the

adopting new attitudes), he stands to lose meaningfulness: that attribute of a good life

that comes from having events in one’s own contribute to valuable goals.

Regret has a positive function, then—even for Bittner’s agent who wishes to

abandon his past. It is expressive of what we value and because of this, provides us

with the opportunity to enjoy a felt sense of the meaning in our lives. With regret

comes the clarification of what matters to us and why. Regret signals that something

of import to us has been compromised. Feeling the import of the events and

experiences in our lives is part of living a meaningful life. Without regret, we cut

ourselves off from this and also from the opportunity to learn more about ourselves,

and enhance our capacities to represent our own personal development over time.

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While Bittner may rightly object to wallowing in regret, he fails to take seriously the

positive role regret plays in agents’ lives and because of this, his argument for tossing

out the attitude altogether misses the mark. Without regret (a feeling that comes along

with having valued something in the first place), we cannot even make changes in our

lives according to what we really value, since important indicators of value would be

missing from our lives altogether.

4.4 Conclusion: Regret can threaten meaningfulness but can also enhance it

As we found in the previous chapter, meaningfulness is special kind of value

that lives can have. It is better for an agent to have a meaningful life, all other things

being equal. When bad events in our pasts threaten the meaningfulness in our lives, we

are left with a practical problem that can seem intractable. Recall the variety of

responses an agent can have to meaning-threatening regret or loss. Allowing a bad

event to overwhelm him or being overcome by grief and regret threatens his ability to

live a meaningful life and so provides him with no solution. Outright denial—

forgetting bad events by erasing them from our memories—is in bad faith and as such

is not a good solution. Simply moving on and accepting the loss as a diminishment in

the value of one’s life overall is a reasonable response, but does not solve the problem

of restoring lost meaning in the past.

Finally, we now can see that Bittner’s suggestion that we should acknowledge

the facts of what happened but deny that they have any import for the value of our

lives overall is no a solution either. That more simply renders the agents vulnerable to

yet another kind of diminishment in meaning: they lose the narrative development of

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their lives, appreciation of their agency over time, their personal growth. A diminished

narrative self threatens a person’s sense of the meaning in his life, what matters to him

and why, and how his engagement with objects of value has enabled him to develop in

positive ways.

Bittner might still object to this conclusion by arguing that his agent does have

a robust narrative self and even acknowledges the role that bad events have played in

her development—it’s just that his agent doesn’t cry over the spilled milk. In

particular, Bittner might argue that his position is that crying over spilled milk is

irrational “particularly in light of” what an agent has become.144 To this, I simply

reassert the thesis that in order for an agent to understand what he has become in any

meaningful way, he needs to be able to represent to himself the narrative that has

made him who he is. This requires confronting, not jettisoning, the bad events in his

life. In order to maintain diachronic identity, nurture a narrative self, he needs to allow

the past to cast its shadows—whatever they may be—and then make the most of what

story appears.

Avoiding the potential threat regret poses for meaningfulness by denying the

import of the past can be said to have its price. In an agent who frequently exercises

the capacity to remove the bad meaning of event sequences from his narrative self-

conception, the set of event sequences that do represent the agent’s self-conception

will be impoverished of integrity and so, too, of meaning. Perhaps this is the kind of

agent who moves from thing to thing without making efforts to establish consistent

commitments across time (that was then, this is me now). The trade-off of resolving

144 Bittner, 262.

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the conflict of regret by denying its meaning to the larger narrative of a person’s life is

a diminishment in the meaning-establishing connections among events in a person’s

life overall.

Examining the matter of the extent to which the past makes a claim on our

agential identities through the lens of regret generates several interesting implications

for moral psychology. Regret puts pressure on an agent’s self-conception since it is an

attitude characterized by disapproval of her own actions. An agent can resolve this

conflict by disowning the event and excising it from his self-conception altogether. In

this case, he gains a new self, devoid of regrettable blemishes, but he now stands to

lose (more or less depending on the case) diachronic integrity, narrativity, and thereby

a degree of meaningfulness in his life, since the connections between his life events

and the narrative they comprise are severed.

Alternately, an agent can acknowledge the meaning of past events to his

present identity, in which case he retains diachronic integrity but accepts that identity

contains key blemishes: his regrettable, past behaviors bear negative import for him

since they represent bad turns of events in his life narrative. They bear a meaning, but

not the kind of meaning—the positive kind—that is ultimately desired.

Perhaps Bittner was right about this, then: while we might think it problematic

if an agent takes up a policy of always training herself out of a regrettable feeling as

soon as it happens, we should not think ill of an agent who forsakes diachronic

integrity in favor of having an identity she can endorse. “Why expect her to happily

return to the scene of the crime?” we might say. She should just “let it go” since doing

anything less, while it might encourage “meaningful” connections between the past

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actions of which she was a part and her present self, will also bring on pains regarding

things she cannot change. Of what use is a meaningful life consisting in events that

bear on larger projects when the meaning is bad?

In the next two chapters, I will chart a path toward a satisfactory answer to this

question, a path that runs though how regrettable events can function positively in a

life that is, overall, a meaningful one. Regrettable events and events surrounding loss

in general can, I think, play good roles in larger agent narratives and function

positively in an agent’s narrative development. What the project of the ensuing

chapters assumes is that there must be ways to manage the past, to control the meaning

of the past, so that bad meaning doesn’t hamper an agent’s ability to forge a

(positively) meaningful life out of his narrative history.

So, let us return to the scene of the crime and examine the structure of bad, past

events in an effort to investigate the plausibility of the claim that regrettable events

can play good roles in the overall narrative of an agent’s life.

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V.

Redemption: The Value of Putting Bad Things to Good Use

Let us now consider a plausible answer to the question motivating this

dissertation: “Is there anything an agent can do to restore lost meaningfulness due to

past, regrettable events and, thereby, increase the value of his life, overall?” In the last

chapter, we saw that the response to diminished meaning in life of acknowledging the

facts of what happened in the past but denying that they have any import for our lives

overall only moves the problem elsewhere, since such a denial diminishes the capacity

for an agent to represent his life’s narrative of personal growth—a key dimension to

the meaningful life. “Moving on” from regrettable events (accepting their negative

import, while trying to add meaningful experiences on into the future) is reasonable

but does nothing to change their meaning in the past. Outright denial of the facts of

what happened does not rescue lost meaningfulness, and neither does allowing losses

to overwhelm us by grieving or regretting endlessly. None of these responses is the

plausible solution to the problem of diminished meaningfulness in a life.

It is the burden of the present chapter to lay out a plausible, practical response

to the problem of lost meaningfulness. Throughout this dissertation I have been calling

this proposed solution, “redemption.” In the first step in my argument for its

plausibility, Section 5.1, I argue that an agent can change his past in a specific, limited

sense—he can change the meaning of some part of his past by placing it in the context

of a new life narrative. I anticipate the objection that this sort of change is not

genuine—that there is nothing about redemption that makes the past loss any better

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than it might have been otherwise. I argue in response that redemption is genuine

change, since it requires that the added events involved in the person’s new life

narrative warrant a change in significance of the original loss from bad to good in the

context of a life narrative of the agent’s. My discussion in this section draws on the

results of Chapter II—that narrative is a set of represented events arranged around a

telos. When an agent adds events to his life such that a loss can be represented as a

positive development in a central narrative within the person’s life, the agent achieves

redemption and, in so doing, rescues some amount of meaningfulness diminished by

the occurrence of the original loss.

In Section 5.2, I argue that the meaning of a life event gets fixed for a person

not only by the extent of success that event represents with respect to a telos (as in the

thin sense of meaning in Chapter II) but also by an additional set of features (I call

these “dimensions of import”) that draws on our findings about meaningfulness in

Chapter III. These additional dimensions of the import of a life event for a person are,

first, the value of the aim, and second, the extent of its centrality to the person’s

psychological economy (including the subjective investment of the agent in the

organizing aim).

I argue that altogether these three aspects (contribution to an agent’s aim, value

of that aim, and, its role in the agent’ psychology) interact in complicated ways; they

can work together or come apart, since each individually contributes to the event’s

overall import. Nonetheless, I argue that when we are careful to parse out the

contribution each dimension makes, we find that the original thesis is defensible: an

event can change from bad to good meaning in the context of a certain narrative, and

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in so doing mitigate the amount of lost meaning (in the thick sense discussed in

Chapter III) in a person’s life—where meaningfulness is determined by the extent to

which a life is able to demonstrate loving pursuit of objects of value.

Finally, I show how these dimensions of import can change. That change,

when it is a matter of change from bad to good import for a person in a valuable

narrative the agent cares about, is redemption. I anticipate the objection that our

intuitions on the subject of redemption are hopelessly muddled and argue that we can

untangle them by way of appeal to these same dimensions of import. I then show that

achieving redemption is good for a person since its effect is the restoration of

meaningfulness; Satisfying conditions of narrative transformation from bad to good

changes the relationship of a person to her past—it makes it possible for the agent to

represent her past as being meaningful, the pursuit of a beloved object of value in a

way that demonstrates positive personal growth.

5.1 Narrative transformation: genuine change or mere illusion?

Recall the assault victim-turned-crisis-counselor from Chapter I. Recall that

through her involvement with the Crisis Center and the umbrella non-profit devoted to

women’s health, she transformed the meaning of the assault in her life. Her increasing

participation in the crisis center gave her an opportunity to lovingly engage with

pursuit of valuable aims that are meaningfully related to this assault. She developed

friendships with the support group members, became active in the group and even

ended up taking on the role of Director of the non-profit. The assault led to her

personal growth and development as a human being. As pointed out in Chapter I, our

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agent is bound to have complicated feelings regarding the assault since on the one

hand it was a painful event in her life that bears important negative significance in the

story of her development, but on the other hand, in light of her subsequent activities,

it also bears some distinctively positive significance as an event that brought her close

to so much of what she now values, and shaped her in ways she has come to like about

herself.

A skeptic might be dubious, however, about the extent to which this process is

a matter of genuine change in the past— a key aspect of redemption as I characterize it

above. Sure, the skeptic might concede, the new activities in her life sound terrific—

meaningful even—but the claim that new activities do anything to change the past,

making it any different than it actually was, seems spurious. We know that agents

cannot change the facts of what happened. This point was crucial to the objections I

raised against Bittner in the last chapter. Unlike authors of fictional narratives, we

cannot use an eraser to wipe away the past or edit out things we do not like or pencil in

some event that did not actually happen. We do not have full authorial control over

our lives in this way. We cannot make something a certain way simply by willing or

wishing that it was so. If it depends on any such idea, the skeptic might say, then

redemption as rescue of lost meaningfulness in the past, is simply not a plausible

concept. The key to disarming this objection is in understanding how the addition of

further events in a storyline can change something very real about past events in the

story: their significance.

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5.1.1 Changing the past

How much control do we have over our past? At first glance, this question may

seem strange, ridiculous even. After all, we know that we cannot change the past.

What is past is recalcitrant to change since the past is a sequence of events that have

already happened and cannot un-happen. Events in the past are fixed in time and

because of this, are not responsive to our wills in the same way that the future is.

Let us consider, for a moment, the relationship we have to the future. Because

human agents are not Divine Will, we cannot simply will into being a state of affairs

simply by our having thought of it. What we will, and the coming into being of what

we will, are separated by time. Bringing the world into conformity with our desires

requires setting ends, taking up plans of actions, and, often, revision after revision of

such plans. When our plans are thwarted, we sometimes respond by adopting different

means to desired ends. Other times, however, our plans are thwarted in such a way

that we forsake our ends, start over and begin again.

These observations reveal a particular relationship human agents have with

respect to the future. There is a great flexibility to the future because we can bring the

future world into conformity with our current desires by adopting aims and executing

plans of action to achieve them. In this sense, we seem to have extraordinary authorial

control over our lives. Yet we know that we do not have complete authorial control

since we cannot simply make something true by willing it so. Rather, we have a

limited control. We are very much limited by the stiffness of the resisting world. There

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are other wills and other phenomena that stand against us in our efforts to control what

happens to us. There is both flexibility and rigidity to our relationship with the future.

Is the past any different? As stated above, the past consists of a sequence of

events that has already happened and, because of this, stands stiffly against human

will. We know that we cannot change the facts of what happened. Insisting that things

happened differently than they did is simple denial of the fact of the matter. Mere

wishing that things happened differently does nothing to change the facts of what

happened. Neither, it would seem, do any acts of will. There seems to be an

asymmetry between the past and the future since we cannot will into the past

something that did not happen, nor will away something in the past that did happen.

Human will seems utterly powerless in the face of the past.

These observations suggest a fundamental difference between our relationship

to the past and the one we have with the future. The past is rigidly fixed, while the

future is more pliable. That the past is entirely rigid, however, may not be quite right.

To see the possibility that the past might have some flexibility, consider a Chinese

fable about a lucky farmer. The fable highlights a particular kind of flexibility to the

past. Specifically, the fable highlights the way past events seems to fluctuate in value

relative to their place in a larger event sequence. Over time, an event in the past can

change in value, depending on its relationship to other events.

The fable begins with a farmer losing all of his horses. His neighbors say, “Oh,

that’s bad luck.” The farmer says, “Maybe.” The next day, his horses return to

pasture along with two other horses. His neighbors say, “That’s good luck!” The

farmer says, “Maybe.” Unfortunately, the two new horses turn out to be wild. When

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the farmer’s son tries to ride one, he is thrown to the ground and breaks his leg. The

neighbors say, “Bad luck,” but the farmer says, “Maybe.” Because of his broken leg,

the farmer’s son is spared from being drafted, against his will, into war. The neighbors

smile and say “Lucky!” but the farmer says, “Maybe”…and so on.

The fable focuses our attention on the way a life event can be good or bad

depending on its place in an event sequence. We are meant to initially regard the

farmer’s son breaking his leg as a bad turn of events. When the same event assumes its

place in the event sequence ending in the son’s being excused from the war draft,

however, we regard it differently. Now we think the event has positive value because

it is crucial to the son’s being spared the horrors of war—or worse, untimely death.

In this story the facts of what happened do not change, but our evaluations of

them do. This kind of evaluative change of the past is not the kind of perceptual

change that happens when the accuracy of our memory falters or when we outright

deny the truth of what happened. In cases of memory failure or outright denial, our

change in the representation of the past falsifies the facts of what happened, but

nothing about the past genuinely changes. Changing our evaluations about past events

need not be not falsifying, however. Here the change in our representation of the past

can be legitimately responsive to actual changes in the event sequence structure.

When evaluative changes in past events are responsive to actual change in the

structure of an event sequence, what changes is not what happens in the event

sequence, but what role some event plays the larger sequence. This is the case with the

son’s breaking his leg in the Chinese fable above. First, its role is to bring to an end—

at least temporarily so— the son’s horse riding and enjoyment of freedom that comes

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with having two able legs. Later, the event’s role is to spare the son from experiencing

the horrors of war. I am going to call this change in the role of an event a change in

“meaning”. When a past event comes to play a new role in an event sequence, the past

event has a new meaning. The facts of what happened in the past do not change, but

the meaning of what happened in the past can. As the Chinese fable suggests, the past

is both rigid and flexible: while the facts of what happened provide the stiffness to the

past, the meaning of events offers up flexibility.145

In the fable of the Chinese farmer, the meaning of events change independent

of human will. It is by bad fortune that the wild horses throw the son to the ground and

good fortune that the same event is timed so as to spare the son from going to war.

However, when we wonder, “How much control do we have over the past?” we are

not merely asking about the role of luck in changing the past, but also about how

responsive the past is to human will. We want to know to what extent our wills can

change anything about the past. I have suggested that what is flexible about the past is

its meaning. This leads us to the thought that in determining how much control we

145 We already capture this feature of the past in common conversation. When someone achieves a goal despite experiencing a setback, we say that the person “overcame” the adversity, as if he refused to allow a fact of the matter to have the impact it initially threatened. What really went on was something like this: At first, the event played the role of ending some particular aim of the agent’s, but later played either a genuinely insignificant role in the sequence leading up to achievement of the agent’s aim, or, as is sometimes the case, played the role of actually furthering the agent’s goal when the event’s effect was to galvanize the agent’s determination to achieve some x, or differently, played the role of teaching the agent that some other end was actually more important than the one he had previously pursued. Take another example from commonplace conversation. When we make a mistake, we often end up talking about the error as if it was valuable: making a mess of things was instrumentally valuable to us since we gained important insight from having fouled things up. Similarly, when something bad happens, we may say to ourselves, “Well, maybe something good will come of this.” When we say this, we do not anticipate denying that the event ever happened or willing to forget the bad event. Rather, we are imagining that there might be a time at which we will look back on the event—at that time in the past—as something not altogether bad but different in meaning from the meaning it had at one time. This is the kind of very real change at the center of redemption.

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have over the past, we will be identifying the extent to which human will can bring

about changes in meaning of the past.

In the section below, I examine the plausibility of the claim that human beings

can, of their own wills, change the meanings of past events.

5.1.2 Human will and changes in meaning

One way to change the meaning of events in a narrative is to change the

narrative that we are in, thus making it potentially more meaningful—in the Wolfian

sense discussed in Chapter III—than it otherwise would have been, all other things

being equal.

In this vein, consider as an of this the example from Chapter I of former

President Jimmy Carter who dramatically lost to Ronald Reagan in the 1980

presidential election, but came back to launch a successful and highly valuable ex-

Presidency as a diplomat and founder of the Carter Center. As discussed in the first

chapter, the defeat threatened to signify the end of his political career—a career that

would end in failure.146 Carter transformed his Presidential library into the Carter

Center and initiated a new political project that enabled him to extend, develop and

continue to do the things that mattered to him. It is “by now a commonplace

observation that Carter built the greatest U.S. Ex-Presidency ever.”147 Carter altered

the narrative that the defeat was in, transforming its meaning from career-ending event

to the re-launching of the best part of his career.

146 Anderson, “Nietzsche On Redemption,” 240. 147 Ibid.

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The example of Carter, then addresses the question of how much and what

kind of control we have over the past. The answer is, “some.” We have some control

over the past. Human wills can change the past in so far as we can change the shape of

our lives by altering the roles events play in their lives. We can use our wills to bring

about intentional plans of action, thereby adding events to the event sequence that

constitutes our life, and, in so doing, changing the place of some past event within an

overall sequence altering its meaning.

But of what relevance is the matter of the extent of our control over the past?

The importance of our control over the past only surfaces when we have the desire to

change it. Wishes that things had been otherwise, desires to change what has passed,

come up for us at very particular times. It is only when we make mistakes, experience

setbacks, or endure losses that we are interested in the question of the extent of control

over the past at all. Thus, as suggested at the end of Chapter IV, the value of our

control over the past becomes important in the wake of past-directed con-attitudes

such as regret, remorse or grief that threaten the meaningfulness in our lives. My

argument for redemption as a practical solution to the problem of lost meaning must

show that past-directed, con-attitudes such as regret and remorse can give rise to our

exploitation of control over the flexible aspect of the past, and provide an outlet for

our desires to change the roles that these events play in our overall life narratives.

Moreover, I need to show that such efforts do, in fact, change the roles these events

play from bad to good in the context of key narratives in our lives, and that such a

transformation satisfies criteria for meaningfulness. The first step in the argument is to

show that the meaning of an event for a person’s actual life is determined the

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contribution an event makes to some aim (something like the thin sense of meaning

discussed in Chapter II), as well as value and degree of centrality for the agent of the

aim in question. The second step is to argue that added events in a person’s life can

change the meaning of the event when the event comes to positively contribute to a

new aim of some value important to the agent. I will argue in the essay that an event

such a change in meaning for a person in the thick, eudaimonistic sense has the effect

of rendering that event meaningful because the event can now be represented as part

of loving engagement with and pursuit of a beloved object in a positive way that

expresses personal growth. It is in this sense that we can talk about redemption as

restoring meaningfulness and rescuing meaningfulness lost in the past due to

regrettable events.

A skeptic may worry that our intuitions on the matter of what constitutes

genuine redemption are not principled and that it is not at all clear what would satisfy

the criteria for a successful change in meaning. For example, consider an agent who

recklessly gambles away $10,000. This agent experiences the pain of regret. Imagine

that this agent’s father passes away, bequeathing him $10,000. The agent pays off his

debts and finds that his regret melts away. This upturned narrative trajectory of good

following bad strongly resembles redemption in the way I have presented it, yet

involves no real change to the past. This is evidence, says the skeptic, against the

claim that redemption is a plausible rescue of meaningfulness, making what has

happened in the past better than it might have been otherwise. In this counter example,

the scales are balanced, debts paid off and sufferings compensated for by future

events, yet there is no genuine change to what happened—the agent’s gambling is still

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as lousy a choice as ever and bears negative import. There is no real redemption, the

objector concludes. Those who represent their lives this way are deluded.

Though the gambler example follows the general narrative trajectory of good

following bad, the two events have nothing to do with another. The second event (the

father’s bequest) does not change the meaning of the first event (the gambling). In that

example the second event still plays the role of loss, while the second event signifies

gain. Unlike the Chinese farmer example, in which a broken leg changes in import

with respect to a new aim, or the Carter example in which the 1980 defeat becomes an

important opportunity and turning point, the gambling loss does not become good now

that the father bequeathed the gambler money. Redemption is not realized by mere

upturn brought about either by good fortune or human will. Instead I will argue that

redemption is brought about by added events that alter the significance of the original,

offending event. It will be important, then, to identify criteria that must be present in

all cases of redemption and show how these can sort out our intuitions on the matter.

Below, I examine the criteria for a genuine change in meaning of a life event, then

show how this can help us untangle our seemingly confused intuitions.

5.2 From bad to good: the mechanics of genuine meaning change

My aim in the above discussion was to show that my view of redemption has

the resources to defend against the objection that such a narrative transformation

effects no genuine change in the offending past or to the value of a life overall.

Narrative transformation of the kind I have in mind is a genuine in the significance of

events, traceable to their change in place in a larger narrative. Such a transformation is

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good for a person since in changing an event’s meaning from bad to good in the thick,

normative sense, it has the effect of mitigating the regret over the event and situating

the event meaningfully in the agent’s life.

As a first pass, I will say that redemption is the phenomenon of an agent

exploiting control over her past by adding event sequences that change the meaning of

a past event from bad to good in the context of some alternate narrative. Redemptive

efforts tend to be responses to regret, grief, remorse and feelings of meaninglessness

about past events that, when successful, mitigate (or in some cases altogether resolve)

the pains of regret, grief, remorse or meaninglessness. Successful redemptive efforts

reconcile an agent with his own past by enabling her to represent events in the past as

part of a larger development in a new, valuable telos taken up by the agent. The

transformed narrative is a one the agent can now endorse overall since the events

within it contribute positively to an aim the agent pursues.

We can now roughly characterize redemption in the following way. An event

thwarts a valuable telos causing the agent the pain of regret or grief, then serves as a

catalyst for her to add events to a larger event sequence that changes the significance

of the event when it can be said to contribute positively to a pursuit of some value.

Often this contribution is that the bad event enables an agent to (a) develop better

means to an end, or (b) take up and realize to some degree a new, valuable end or (c)

elucidate the value of some good heretofore unappreciated by the agent. This narrative

structure is often represented as an agent rescuing value from some bad event, making

meaning out of the meaningless or making good meaning out of the bad, learning from

mistakes, gaining key insight, becoming a “better” person in some way as a result of

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the event, even as the event initially compromised her well-being (and, in moral cases,

the well-being of others) in some other way. The moral psychological upshot of

redemption is two-fold: (1) the agent is reconciled to her past where reconciliation is

an acceptance that the past is not altogether disvaluable but, rather, has value as a

meaningful part of her endorsable life narrative and (2) the pains of regret, remorse or

grief are reduced, or in some cases, altogether eliminated.

Because the original event that was the source of the regret is now importantly

situated in a positively developing pursuit of value beloved by the agent and

expressive of personal growth, it satisfies the criteria for meaningfulness. Therefore,

the end result of redemption is the restoration of meaningfulness to some part of an

agent’s past. Redemption increases the value of the agent’s life overall by recovering

lost meaning. Redemption is a welcoming back of a person’s past to her own

(narrative) self. Her life narrative is now acceptable as more meaningful than it would

have otherwise been, all other things being equal.

Though the skeptic I imagined above might now concede the point that

redemption amounts to a genuine change in meaning of a past event, she still might be

uneasy with the account for a variety of reasons. The skeptic might be worried that our

intuitions on what counts as a genuine changes in meaning, (and hence, what counts as

redemption) are hopelessly muddled. I have been arguing that one way to change the

narrative of our lives is to change the narrative that we are in, but an objector might be

concerned that there are no clear principles that determine when such a change has

been effected.

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In Section 5.2.1, I show that we can use the conclusions from Chapters II and

III to get clearer on the principles of a change in significance from bad to good of

events in a person’s life. First, I argue that when it comes to human lives, the thin

sense of meaning as described in Chapter II on narrative—the import of some event to

a narrative—does not adequately accommodate our intuitions on the meaning of

events in a human life. As has now been mentioned in several places, I argue that this

is because when we ask about the meaning of a life event for an individual we want to

know more than just the thin sense of meaning in Chapter II—we also want to

understand the import of the event in a thick, normative eudemonistic sense—as in an

event being good for an agent. Because of this, the meaning of an event in a human

life gets fixed not only by the extent of advancement of an aim it represents but by

other features as well, ones that pertain to an agent’s well-being. I call these other

features, “dimensions of meaning,” and examine them in detail. I concede that these

dimensions of meaning (or sometimes I might refer to them as “dimensions of

import”) interact in some complicated ways but argue that they ultimately function so

as to fix the significance of an event for a person. In Section 5.2.2, I ward off the

objection that such an account is needlessly complicated by arguing that these

complex dimensions of import can be of use in untangling our apparently muddled

intuitions on the matter of meaning and redemptive transformations.

5.2.1 Untangling our muddled intuitions by appeal to “the dimensions of import”

In the paragraphs below, I examine the mechanics of how exactly the import of

an event changes from bad to good such that it effects redemption, in the hopes that

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doing so can untangle what the skeptic might worry are hopelessly muddled intuitions

on these matters. First, let us get clear on what principles determine a life event’s

meaning in the first place, then identify what would make it the case that its meaning

has changed from bad to good in the context of some narrative.

We already know, from Chapter II on narrative and the paragraphs above, that

an event in a narrative gets its import from its relationship to the organizing telos of

the narrative. The import of an event arises from the way the event advances or

thwarts the telos at the center of the narrative. Drawing on these conclusions, we

might be initially tempted to say that the criterion for redemption is met when the

agent’s life is able to genuinely represent a loss as a gain with respect to some telos of

the agent’s. I do not think, however, that determining success criteria for redemption is

that simple. Consider the worry that meaning in the thin sense described in Chapter

II—the import of some event as it relates to a telos—does not quite capture the way

we talk about the significance of events in actual human lives. When we ask what

“meaning” some event has for a person’s life, we tend to imbue the question—to a

greater or lesser extent—with the normative sense of meaning discussed in beginning

part of Chapter III. Consider, for example, some way in which agents may be wrong

about the meaning of events in their lives. When a criminal is successful at his crime,

he may be able to represent to himself his success as having positive import since it

advances his larger aim of making a living jacking cars. Outside evaluators, however,

might describe the meaning of the successful crime differently since they can point to

the very real concern that succeeding at crime tends to be disvaluable in the

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eudaimonistic sense. It may be natural for us to think that advancements in disvaluable

aims are actually failures in living well.

There seem to be factors other than degree of success the event represents,

then, in determining an event’s meaning for a person. So far, I have identified in prior

chapters, three of these features, these “dimensions of import”: (1) the degree of

advancement or failure an event represents, (2) the value of the organizing aim, itself,

and (3) the extent to which the aim plays a central role in an agent’s psychological

economy (this is something like the extent of subjective investment). I concede that

these dimensions of meaning interact in complicated ways. Take as examples of these

complicated interactions the following possibilities: an event can represent grand

failure of a high-value aim about which the agent cares a great deal (in which case the

event bears considerable negative import for the person) or only minimal success at an

aim of high value with which the agent is only minimally invested (in which case the

event is positive but certainly not as positive as it might be if the agent cared about the

aim) or any other combination of these dimensions. Our intuitions may reveal that

these dimensions can have complicating effects in the function of determining import

for an event in someone’s life. For example, it may be the case that highly valuable

aims tend to be difficult to achieve. Developing a sustainable source of energy may

arguably be more valuable than, say, coordinating a local community trash pick-up

day, though the latter aim might have a higher probability for success. The agent who

succeeds at developing the community trash-pick-up-day may plausibly enjoy more

meaning in her life than the agent who strives for development of a renewable sources

of energy, but fails (on account of its sheer difficulty). The final value of an event’s

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import is on a spectrum of more or less positive import with respect to a person’s

narrative.

I argue that these complicating dimensions of import do not count against my

account but rather count in its favor, since it is a feature of my theory that can explain

our complex intuitions on the matter of what events in a human life “mean” for the

person living them. Consider, for example, our judgment that the very same aim—say,

graduating from college—can “mean” something different in different scenarios. We

might, for instance, imagine one agent who is the first in his family to attend college

and works a job alongside of school in order to stay in college, another agent who

cares only minimally about college (since she really just wants to begin working and

collect a paycheck), and yet another agent, while invested very much in college, has

been gunning all along for graduate school, so that college is not an end but yet

another step to more education. The same event of college graduation “means”

something different in the lives of these agents—it has a different valence from very

positive to not so positive in each of their lives.

My analysis of meaning in terms of the different dimensions of important can

explain these variations. First, notice that the subjective investments are distinct in

each case. Two of the agents have high degrees of subjective investment that count

positively toward the meaning of college graduation. But second, the degree of

success represented by college graduation, and cuts across the dimension of subjective

investment. For the would-be graduate student, college graduation is a success to be

sure, but its value is largely instrumental for her. Therefore even though it contributes

importantly to her aim of a graduate degree, it is not as meaningful for her as

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completing college is for the students whose educational aims end with college

graduation (the event satisfies the aim itself!). Each of the dimensions of import noted

above (extent of success or failure expressed by the event, the objective value of the

aim to which the event contributes either positively or negatively, as well as subjective

investment) contributes value to an overall import of college graduation in the lives of

these imagined persons.

I mean my discussion above to demonstrate the way in which the dimensions

of import, though admittedly complex in the way they interact, provide my account the

flexibility to explain our very subtle intuitions on the matter of meaning of events in

people’s lives. Now that we have identified which factors contribute to a life event’s

meaning, we can determine how its meaning might change from bad to good for a

person.

5.2.2 Changes in meaning: putting bad events to good use

In order for an event to change from bad to good significance for a person (in

the thick, normative sense), it will need to take on the features of an event with good

meaning: it will need to become capable of being represented as a substantial

contribution to an aim of value that plays a central role in the agent’s psychology. As

discussed in the first sections of this essay, human beings can control this

transformation by adding events to their life narratives that enable the past activity to

contribute positively to alternate aims of value. This is the beginning of the practical

solution redemption offers to the problem of lost meaningfulness in life. As a general

rule, the more valuable the newly adopted aim, the more success the agent has with the

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aim, the more central the aim is to the agent’s psychological economy, and the more

the original event can contribute to the new aim, then the more he stands to change the

significance of the event from bad to good. These contributing dimensions of meaning

do not always work together, however. As mentioned above, they can come apart. The

dimensions of import can work together or orthogonally—in which case they work

against one another in their function of determining the new import.

Take the Carter ex-Presidency as one example of just such a complication.

Take the dimension of success of the new aim to which the loss must contribute in

order to effect a change in its meaning. In pursuing the very difficult aim of turning

the Presidential Library into a highly successful and productive humanitarian aid

organization, Carter took a great risk—such an ambitious, high value aim has a wider

margin for failure. If the Carter Center was successful, Carter stood to gain a genuine

change in meaning from bad to good of his original 1980 loss since, as discussed, it

would then come to mark the re-launching of his career.

If, however, given the difficulty of pulling off such a project as the Carter

Center, Carter had failed, then he would have not only failed to salvage any positive

meaning from the original 1980 loss (the loss would remain a defeat marking the end

of Carter’s political career), but also added life events that would have given him more

reasons to regret. Imagine that Carter’s vision of the Center had remained a mere

aspiration due to forces outside of his control (say, he lost the original funding he had

secured), then the 1980 defeat would not have even had the chance to change in

meaning since the event would still represent career-ending failure and not

contribution to career re-launching. The point is this: if the 1980 event does not

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actually play the role of re-launching Carter’s career, then it harbors the same negative

import as career-ending defeat. The added events in the new narrative need to

represent success with the newly chosen aim or the original, problematic event does

not change in meaning for the agent—it just continues to represent a bad turn of

events.

The same is true when it comes to the other dimensions of import—centrality

of the new aim to the agent and the value of the new aim. When the unfortunate event

does not actually come to have the features of an event with good meaning (positive

contribution to an aim of value, central to an agent), then the event does not transform

in meaning, and the set of events all together does not get to count as redemption.

Take an example of a person who set out to change the meaning of a loss by being

successful at an aim of middling value and of moderate importance to the agent. Let us

imagine that Carter had set out to transform the meaning of his 1980 defeat by

allowing it to contribute positively to the accomplishment of the aim of cleaning out

his garage—a project our imagined Carter had often wished he’d had the time to do

during his four years as President. The 1980 defeat, in our imagined scenario,

contributes positively to this aim because it is on account of the defeat that Carter

finds himself out of a job and, consequently, in a position to spend time on projects

he’d always wanted to do but hadn’t had the time to do before. He cleans out the

garage one Saturday afternoon all the while pleased by the thought that at least the

1980 defeat did not go to total waste. After all, now he has a lovely, clean and orderly

garage to enjoy. In the narrative of Carter’s aim to clean out his garage, the 1980

defeat now takes on a positive role.

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Though a clean garage is perhaps some very minimal consolation for the pain

and threat of the defeat, it is so minimal that it is hard to regard it as having actually

changed the significance of the 1980 defeat for Carter’s life. In order to have changed

the significance of the defeat (as the development and success of the Carter Center

arguably did), Carter needed to pursue an aim pf far greater value in response to the

1980 defeat. Moreover, it is important that the aim in question be one that is central to

Carter’s own psychology (one, like the Center, that expressed his core values). Mere

garage cleaning is not a plausible candidate for such centrality despite its being

something pleasant to Carter and not disvaluable.

This brings me to a final point about how transformation of meaning works

along these dimensions of import. Often our mixed intuitions on what gets to count as

redemption can be explained when we recognize that some set of events plays the role

of compensation and not genuine meaning change for an agent. Imagine that Carter

suddenly won the lottery after his 1980 defeat. We might find it natural to regard the

lottery win as serendipitous since the pain of loss might be soothed by the lottery win,

which restores some of Carter’s well-being for the present moment.148 This story,

however, of win after loss is not a redemption story since the lottery win has not

changed the significance of the defeat in any way. The 1980 defeat would still

represent the end of Carter’s public service which was an organizing force in his life.

There is no substantive connection between the 1980 defeat and the lottery win—one

148 In fact, Carter’s business suffered losses during the years of his Presidency—losses which he had to face upon his return from Washington. In our imagined scenario, a lottery win might have alleviated the pains of this financial losses, though still, as I will argue fail to redeem his 1980 defeat.

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event simply happens to follow the other. The lottery win effects some compensation,

not transformation in meaning.

The thought that redemption ought to require “substantive connections”

between the loss and the subsequent valuable events responsible for redemption,

highlights another important dimension of import: it matters how much the bad event

contributes to the new aim. When an agent can identify what contribution the bad

event is actually playing in advancing the new, good aim, then the process of

transformation can get underway. This process of isolating the contribution of a bad

event to new aim is often a matter of identifying some shared content between the bad

event and the new aim. To see this, consider the aim of garage cleaning and its

relationship to Carter’s 1980 political defeat. In my imaginary Carter example, one of

the consequences of the 1980 defeat is that it gave Carter the opportunity to clean out

his garage. But this is the full extent of the connection between the two events. By

contrast Carter’s actual project of developing a humanitarian aid organization made

direct use of the skills he built as President of the United States. Thus, the actual

project shares substantive content with the bad event, which in this case amounts to

the end of his job as President of the United States. In the argument I’ve developed so

far, this shared content works together with the other dimensions (the centrality of the

aim of the Carter Center for Carter and the high value of that aim) to effect a change in

meaning of the 1980 defeat from unfortunate end to Carter’s political career to re-

launching of the that career with a highly valuable project about which Carter cared

deeply and with which he went on to have much success.

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The importance of what kind of contribution a bad event is making to a new

aim can help us understand our mixed intuitions in subtle cases—ones that might

initially appear to stand as counter examples to my view but actually turn out not to be

genuine cases of redemption. Consider, for example, the story of Michael Milken, the

white-collar criminal convicted in 1989 of 98 counts of racketeering and fraud. He

was sentenced to a prison term, then released after two years. Milken is well known

for his philanthropic activities both before and after his conviction. He is co-founder

of the Milken Family Foundation, chairman of the Milken Institute and founder of

medical philanthropies funding research into cancer and other life-threatening

diseases, and he donates to charities targeting improvement in education. In a

November 2004 cover article, Fortune magazine called him "The Man Who Changed

Medicine" for his positive influence on medical research.149 Even when we have

evidence that after his prison term Milken pursued new aims high in value (his various

philanthropic projects) and was successful at these aims, many of us will still be

uncomfortable with calling this redemption of his junk bonds scam from the 1980’s—

even though his trajectory seems to resemble everything I have been saying about

redemption.

The key to explaining our mixed intuitions in the Milken case and our

suspicion that this is not genuine redemption is an assessment of just how much the

original event changed in its meaning. If we find that the meaning of the fraud

conviction has not changed all that much for Milken, then, despite the amount of mea

culpas and do-gooder activities that follow his prison term, the conviction itself will

149 Cora, "The Man Who Changed Medicine" in Fortune magazine, (November 29, 2004).

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not plausibly count as redeemed. Let us, then, examine the contribution of the fraud

conviction to Milken’s supposedly redeeming aims after prison, as well as evaluate the

extent of centrality and value of those aims in order to determine the extent of a

change in meaning of his earlier mistakes.

First, let us stipulate that the philanthropic activity Milken adopts after prison

is without a doubt valuable. Milken was able to handpick humanitarian projects,

choosing to spend money on the highly valuable aims of improvements in medicine

and education. There is nothing wrong with these aims—they are terrific. This would

count positively toward a change in meaning of the earlier pursuits to amass wealth

while evading various corporate laws and fair trading rules.

Second, consider the dimension of extent of centrality the agent gives to the

new aim. In 2007, Forbes magazine ranked Milken as the 458th richest person in the

world with an estimated net worth of around $2.1 billion. That Milken held onto so

much of the wealth he amassed during his junk bond scheming might give us reason to

be skeptical that his values have changed all that much from his junk bond days. We

might doubt the centrality of his new philanthropic aim if protecting his personal

wealth has been competing for centrality with the new philanthropic aims that are

supposed to change the meaning of the earlier aims to amass wealth by whatever

means. If an agent does not give a central role to the new, redeeming aim, then we

may begin to doubt that the agent found the original regret-inducing loss all that

meaning-threatening in the first place.

Finally, and perhaps most important to this discussion, is the consideration of

the extent of contribution those earlier mistakes make to the new aim. What kind of a

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connection is there between these two events—the junk bond scheming and Milken’s

philanthropy? Is the philanthropy in any way a response to the junk bond scheming

and if so, how? What kind of shared content exists between the two events and how

does this change the meaning of them both? Let us imagine different answers to these

questions such that we can explain possibly muddled intuitions in the case of the

“real” Milken.

In one story, Milken’s philanthropic activity after his prison term is an

expression of learned wisdom that comes out of his regret and remorse over his junk

bond scheming. Perhaps in this scenario, he experiences remorse, then something like

the wisdom that what matters more than amassing wealth (and doing so at the expense

of justice and decency) is having positive relationships with other people, and that the

latter must not be sacrificed for the former. Perhaps his philanthropic activity also

suggests the learned awareness that it was the centrality of the pursuit of money in his

former life that made him vulnerable to his regretted behavior in the first place. In

such a story, we would likely need to see a rejection from Milken of his earlier

activities (in the form of, say, remorse, expressed regret, public apology, personal

address to harmed parties in distinction from financial compensation mandated by a

court of law) in addition to new behavior that expresses a pursuit of an aim of value

that stands in some meaningful relation to the fraud conviction. In order for the

philanthropic activity to count as redemptive, it must certainly be capable of being

represented as something new, something positive and important to him that was an

expression of his remorse over his junk bond scheming. If these criteria are met, then

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this would satisfy redemption on my account: a genuine change in meaning of the

fraudulent activity from bad to good in the thick normative sense.

In another story, the philanthropy is merely what Milken’s financial advisers,

accountants and publicists advise. The philanthropic activity offers a nice tax write-off

that also carries the secondary advantage of diffusing the negative attention Milken

suffered as a result of his conviction. It is not something that actually takes a central

role in Milken’s psychology. In this scenario, imagined Milken may not genuinely

regret the fraudulent activity that gave rise to his conviction (a fair number of theorists

suggest there was nothing unlawful about his activities.).150 Instead, he merely

believes he was unfortunate enough to have been caught, and got the book thrown at

him (and his firm) for fudging things in a way that is of questionable illegality

anyway. In this case, Milken might merely give audience to various organizations

throughout his year, make decisions about where and how much money to allocate to

each organization, and have his assistant write the checks. Though the philanthropy is

by itself valuable, the subjective investment in it from imagined Milken is low in this

case, and the shared content between it and the bad meaning of junk bond scheming is

not obvious.

Perhaps there is a story in the middle, closer to the story of the “real” Milken.

Perhaps Milken’s philanthropic activity is a matter of alleviating the pains of regret by

compensating proxies for the harmed parties: the non-profit organizations that are the

happy beneficiaries of Milken’s sense of regret. Imagine that after genuine regret

Milken wonders what he can do to make up for his mistakes. He decides that 150 C.f. Daniel Fischel (1995). Payback: Conspiracy to Destroy Michael Milken and His Financial Revolution.

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philanthropy is the way to go and makes a reasoned judgment about how much money

to allocate to such an endeavor. He wants very much to balance the scales and pay

back for having caused harm to investors in his junk bond days. As mandated by the

courts, he makes good on that aim, paying back various amounts of monies to

different individuals and organizations. Upon his release from prison he consults a

financial analyst to help him make good judgments of where and how to spend a

certain amount of his income to worthy organizations serving a variety of needs.

In this scenario, the philanthropy is, as ever, valuable. Imagined Milken’s

subjective investment is greater in this story than in the previous scenario, though

perhaps not as great as in the first example in which we imagined he made it his

central aim to live differently on account of his new, learned wisdom. Lastly, the

contribution the fraud convictions are making to the philanthropic aims are more

clearly defined than in the example immediately above. On the other hand, the

relationship between the conviction and philanthropy is one of payback and not of

development of insight or forward-looking teleology. This payback does nothing to

genuinely change the role the convictions play in Milken’s life, since they do not serve

to advance new insight but merely signify compensation for what was done. Recall

that in the first example, Milken’s fraud convictions provided imagined Milken with

new insight, allowing the meaning-threatening events of his misbehavior, conviction

and prison term to play positive roles in new aims important to the imagined Milken.

In this scenario, however, imagined Milken hopes that his misbehavior, conviction and

prison term are not going to play new, positive and defining roles in his life, so much

as be erased by the compensatory measures of paying back what he thinks he might

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owe. In this way the philanthropic endeavors do not have the transformative meaning

characteristic of what I am calling redemption, but rather merely amount to a gesture

to bring the scales back to zero. This does not count as redemption on my account

drawn so far.

What is the story of the real Milken? It is difficult to tell. Recall that Milken

had a track record for philanthropy prior to his fraud convictions.151 He engaged in

philanthropic activity even alongside the wheeling and dealing of the high-yield

market and 1980’s buyouts, prior to his conviction. The philanthropic activity after his

prison release, then, is ambiguous as to its meaning, and its relationship to the fraud

convictions. Perhaps it represents a new direction in his life; or perhaps it represents

merely a return to the status quo ante for him—an effort to “get back to normal.” It is,

therefore, difficult to assess the sense in which his earlier misdoings make genuine

contributions to these later do-gooder enterprises. I would argue that redemption

remains uncertain for the “real” Milken, since it is difficult to say to what extent

Milken was interested in such a rescue in the first place, or to what extent his activities

following his prison term can be represented as coming out of insight developed from

his earlier misdoings. My account this helps to understand why we are likely to have

mixed intuitions on the matter.152

151 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Milken, as pulled from the internet January 18, 2011. 152 In order to make this point clearer still, imagine a scenario in which the shared content of regrettable event and new aim is far greater and the relationship between the two, more clearly defined. Imagine that Milken had, in regretting his fraudulent activities, become clear in his own mind of what is ethical. He became curious about how to uphold moral obligations while at the same time protect and advance the bottom line in a business. Imagine that while in prison, he consulted business ethicists, top thinkers in the areas of corporate management, and other corporate executives who were devoted to improving this area of humanity. Imagine that upon his release, he gathered these people under an umbrella think-tank organization devoted to cutting edge research on business ethics. The organization formed a research branch that culled important data on business practices in this country and used the information

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I mean this discussion to demonstrate that our intuitions on what does and does

not get to count as redemption can be explained by appeal not to payback but to the

development of a particular relationship between an agent’s bad past and his new

pursuits. I have argued that if the loss does not make any contribution of substance to a

new aim of value (say, by sharing content with that aim)—one that matters to an agent

and with which the agent comes to have some success—then the original event does

not transform in significance and so is not redeemed. I have argued, by examining

different case examples, that this thesis so far drawn, yields intuitive results.

5.3 Redemption as Restoration of Meaningfulness

When an agent adds events to his life that transform the meaning of the

original, unfortunate event, in the thick, eudaimonistic sense, the agent comes to have

a new relationship to that event. It is no longer something that threatens the meaning

in the agent’s life but instead is a part of a meaningful narrative in the agent’s life. The

unfortunate event now is a part of loving engagement with a pursuit of value, beloved

to the agent, that expresses personal growth—the conditions of meaningfulness. As an

important part of this meaningful aspect of the agent’s life, the original event is no

longer meaning-threaten and because of this, the agent can welcome it back into his

understanding of himself. This is the key claim of the dissertation—that the narrative

to develop educational programs for executives at leading corporations in this country, and improved incentive structures for corporate governance. His new (imagined) enterprise successful, important to the agent and valuable and comes out of insight gained from regret over an event with bad meaning. I think we find it natural to feel more confident in calling this redemption.

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transformation of redemption is a plausible practical solution to the problem of lost

meaning, the problem posed at the beginning of this dissertation.

5.4 How can we explain the lemons in the lemonade?

It might be natural at this point in the discussion to want to know to what

extent my account can explain how redemption does not amount to papering over that

which is terrible, wiping away of accountability for bad actions. After all, something

like a murder will always be a bad thing, despite whatever positive contributions it

might make to an agent’s various aims. If the new good role replaces the bad role an

event originally played, then this account of redemption is flawed, since such a

replacement would amount to erasing away the past or papering over bad things. A

good account of redemption, then, ought to be able to explain how something can be

redeemed and yet still be fitting of remorse or even grief.

It is true that something like a non-continuous function operates in my account

of redemption, since the dimensions of import work together to effect a change in the

role an event plays, and when that role changes from bad to good for an agent in the

thick, normative sense discussed, we can say that redemptive transformation has been

achieved. For the assault victim mentioned in previous chapters and at the beginning

of this one, the assault plays a good role in the narrative of her personal development

as a whole, and in the meaningfulness of her professional life as well. This good

meaning the assault plays in her life can be greater or lesser than the meaning of other

events in her life but, as I have so far argued, the dimensions of import come together

to deliver one function along a spectrum of positive import. At the point of the event’s

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coming to have good meaning in the thick sense of being good for the agent

eudaimonistically (demonstrating positive contribution to a pursuit of an object of

value the agent cares about and with which she has some degree of success),

redemption has occurred.

The key to dismantling the skeptic’s concern here is in appreciating the way in

which multiple narratives function in the life of an agent. An agent’s life might be

capable of being represented by a variety of narratives: the narrative of her pursuit of a

career, of her life as a parent, of her ambition to become a poet, or her relationship

with her family, with her mother, with her father and so on. An event may be at the

intersection of a variety of narratives, and so may bear positively or negatively to each

of these narratives, all at once. For the assault victim, the assault has bad meaning as

an event that was painful, meaning-threatening and frightening but, in the end, it

played a good role in her personal and professional development. At the same time,

however, it need not lose its status as having bad meaning in a narrative that ended

what was—up to that point—a life lived without such violence and fear. My account

involves the idea that events in our lives can change in their meanings, play different

roles in our lives, but still be fitting objects for regret or remorse. Sometimes the

lemons are still in the lemonade we make from them.

Let us first examine a case in which an event’s negative import arguably

completely disappears. In this case, the agent’s felt regret may indeed completely

vanish. In the Carter example, for example, the negative import of the 1980 loss is

plausibly changed completely, perhaps because the defeat becomes a gain in the very

same narrative, “the pursuit of an excellent political career.” This may mean for

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Carter that the 1980 loss no longer bears any bad meaning at all—or its negative is so

miniscule as to be insignificant. In this case, there is no room for regret after

successful redemption. Consider in support of this possibility that the one term as

president followed by the beginning of a terrific career as a diplomat, was the best

thing that could have happened to Carter. Because he was able to use unique features

of his experience as President (his gained political cache and learned negotiation

skills) toward the advancement of the best part of his career (his role as diplomat),

developing humanitarian projects that truly mattered to him, he would likely have no

reason to regard either his activity as President or the 1980 defeat as a mere wasted

time and loss. Instead, he regards that time as incredibly valuable since it provided

him with skills necessary for successful implementation of the most important part of

his public life. It is a win-win situation. He might legitimately regard his new narrative

as the best of all possible worlds.153

Sometimes, however, even when an agent accomplishes redemption—the

narrative transformation described above as allowing a bad event to positively

contribute to a new good aim of high value, etc— negative import from the event

lingers on. As an example of this sort, imagine a case in which my father dies of

cancer. The event of his death results in a reconciliation between my brother and me

after years of estrangement. This rescue of meaning is certainly good in the

eudaimonistic sense and satisfies the criteria for redemption as I have described it

above. I would never say, however, that I am glad my father died of cancer or that my

153 This is the idea with the Carter example, particularly in the context of Anderson’s essay on Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence doctrine (2005). Anderson means the example to show how an agent could effect narrative transformation that meets the demands of the doctrine—rejoicing in the thought of eternal recurrence, thereby being able to affirm all that has happened to one’s own self.

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father’s death was a good thing, as if it is a best of all possible worlds. How can my

account explain this?

My account can explain this by pointing to the way in which the event takes

on different import in the context of different narratives—there is still the narrative in

which the death of my father was horrible import (that is, the narrative of my

relationship with my father which involves the love and care of him). The loss to my

brother and me of our father may even still bearer greater negative import, all things

considered, than the positive import of our reconciliation in the redeeming narrative.

But here’s the important point: in the narrative of my search for a relationship with

my brother, this event has come to have positive import. An event, as mentioned

earlier, can be at the intersection of a variety of narratives in a person’s life.

Appreciating this can help us explain the ways in which successful redemption does

not always mean an event loses bad significance altogether, since the event may still

play a negative role in some narrative. That lingering import may be minimal or great

or reside in a narrative with a central aim (such as in the case of the death of my

father) or an aim that doesn’t play a key role in my psychological economy. I think

this feature of my account is an advantage. It gives the account the flexibility to

accommodate such examples as these.

In the best of all possible worlds, we would have our father alive and be

reconciled to one another (particularly and poignantly because we know he would

have liked to see us reconciled). This is not, however, the best of all possible worlds. It

is better-than-it-might-have-been, all other things being equal. We rendered the event

of his death not pointless or meaningless. His dying gave us reasons to let go of

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grievances, forswear anger and forgive one another of various offenses. We now

regard the event of his death as meaningful for us not in a merely negative way but

also, importantly, in positive way with respect to the narrative of a search to be close

to one another. Because of this change in the import of our father’s his death, we may

say that his death has been “redeemed” by our having reconciled with one another.

In cases such as these, the loss still plays its earlier, negative role but its

negative effects are mitigated by its alternate, positive role in another narrative with

the positive features articulated in the paragraphs above. This is the case of an event

transforming from bad to good in another narrative altogether. It has the effect of the

life overall being rescued of meaning such that the life is better-than-it-might-have-

been, all other things being equal. In such a case, the agent has still redeemed the

event since its positive import meets the requirements of the agent but the agent is also

reasonable in lingering regret or grief, etc.

The sense in which there are still lemons in the lemonade we make from bad

experiences or regrettable events is captured in Rabbi Harold Kushner’s famous book,

When Bad Things Happen to Good People. In the Introduction, he tells the reader that

his son died of a terrible disease (progeria, “rapid aging”) at a young age.154 He

acknowledges that his son’s death made him a better rabbi, but, at the same time, we

can imagine that he would not will that his son die:

“I am a more sensitive person, a more effective pastor, a more sympathetic counselor because of [my son’s] life and death than I ever would have been without it. And I would give up all those gains in a second if I could have my son back. If I could choose, I would forgo all the spiritual growth and depth which has come my way because of our experiences…but I cannot choose.”155 154 Kushner, Bad Things, 4. 155 Ibid., 147.

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Instead he’d rather be a mediocre rabbi with a healthy, happy son, etc.156 All things

considered, however, we can imagine that Rabbi Kushner would regard his son’s

death as having been made more meaningful (and less utterly pointless) than it would

have been, since it genuinely plays some positive role with respect to his calling as a

rabbi, and other aspects of his personal growth and development.

This lingering on of a degree of negative import is also likely in case of

redemption of moral failings, particularly those of a particular kind: ones large in

scope. In these cases of grave moral failings, negative import always lingers on even

when the event plays a positive role in a valuable aim the agent cares about, i.e., even

when the event undergoes narrative transformation. What I want to argue, however, is

that this need not be seen as something special about moral failings or mysterious. (I

will argue for this point more carefully in the following chapter). What is at stake in

dismissing this concern is the objection that my account wrongly lumps together the

disparate cases we’ve discussed so far—deliberative error, misfortune and moral

mistake. I am arguing that in each case, the same criteria apply—the very same

requirements for transformation in meaning must be obtained in all three kinds of

cases in order for redemption to be achieved. In addition, I am arguing that when this

set of requirements is satisfied and the meaning of an event transformed, the result in

each case is a restoration of meaningfulness to the agent’s past. If I cannot show that

the same criteria apply for all the cases, I should not be in the business of claiming that

these cases belong under the same concept. Alternately, if there were a problem with

fitting moral cases into the criteria established so far by the account, I might appeal to 156 Ibid.

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a special set of constraints distinctive of moral cases. I take it that such a solution

would count against my account (perhaps only minimally so, since inelegance is not a

decisive objection against a theory). But the result would count more against my

theory the more an ad hoc the special criteria for moral cases were. Fortunately,

however, I think the answer is easier than this: there is no problem, since the objection

is merely apparent. All three cases share the same criteria for redemption with no

special constraints for any one kind of case.

Recall, from above, the way in which human beings have control over the

flexible part of the past—the meaning—but not the rigid part of the past—the facts of

what happened. This is true with cases of misfortune as well as moral mistake. Carter

cannot deny that he actually lost to Reagan in 1980. But we have said that this fact of

the matter—that he was defeated in 1980—is no longer a suitable object for regret

since he changed the event’s role so completely.

It would be false, however, to say that the redemption change in Carter’s life

makes it the case that on the day of the defeat, Carter was wrong to feel regret. We

know, from Chapter IV, that regret has a place in our moral psychological lives as a

reactive attitude generating by having cared about something in the first place.

Resentment, anger, grief, regret, remorse are important to us in this sense and help us

maintain diachronic integrity that is an important part of meaningful life across a

lifetime. Carter’s aim was to get reelected. That psychological fact of the past cannot

change. The logical attitude in response to the defeat was disappointment, loss—even

grief given the scope of the import of the defeat in the weeks after the loss. Defeats

always merit some amount of grief when the agent has cared deeply about succeeding

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at the aim in the first place, just as moral mistake ought always to generate remorse in

the agent who becomes aware of the facts about his actions—that they are violations

of duty, or others’ rights, etc.

A redemptive change cannot change the fact that the 1980 defeat was a defeat

for Carter nor, importantly, that defeats in general merit grief, or that this one in

particular merited grief on that day. What is important for Carter’s story is that the

development of the Carter Center and Carter’s diplomatic role begins to render the

negative import of the defeat so minimal as to be insignificant. At some point in the

development of the Center and Carter’s professional life as an ex-President diplomat,

the defeat changes valence altogether from bad to good for Carter. This is because the

narrative of Carter’s professional career did not end with the defeat but continued on,

the defeat being the turning point to the best part of Carter’s career. This kind of

replacement of one meaning for another, a complete transformation happens when the

event plays no other role but good. In this case, there is no other narrative in which the

event features badly.157 This is the best of all possible worlds.

I think we feel similarly about agents who are the victims of moral violations.

A victim of a moral violation can, over time, change the role that her experience as

victim plays in her life such that it need not be the continued cause for anger or

resentment. The agent can grant forgiveness to the individual (which involves

157 Imagine that the defeat had been the reason for an eventual break-up of Carter’s marriage but that it still played the role of good turning point in Carter’s important and fulfilling life as an ex-President diplomat. In this case, there might be bad meaning lingering on from the defeat because it played a negative role in our imagined Carter’s narrative of his marriage (though even the negative meaning of this role could be the object of redemption, too. For example, imagine that fictional Carter has patched things up with fictional Rosalyn as best he could, then met someone else in his life who supported him in a particular way through the success of the Carter Center, giving Carter reason to regard the bad meaning of the defeat for his personal life as being redeemed as well, and so on…)

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forswearing of anger) or allow the event to play some other important role in her life

that warrants responses to the event other than anger (as is the case of the sexual

assault victim as depicted in the beginning of this chapter). I suspect we think this is a

sign of health for an agent to find ways of letting go of resentment (though,

admittedly, we tend to think there are right and wrong ways of letting go and can

worry that an agent who sheds anger too soon is in denial of the very real negative

import some event has for her life at that time).

Letting go of resentment, however, need not remove the fact of the matter that

moral violations in general are cause for resentment or that this particular instance of

victimization, on that day and in the weeks afterward, warranted resentment. An agent

letting go of resentment over time simply might mean that the import of the moral

violation for her life has changed.

Finally, I argue that a moral failing need not function any differently in our

evaluations than does misfortune. Its logic plays out in the same way. Just as the 1980

election will always be a defeat but whose role in Carter’s life ends up largely

insignificant, moral violations can operate quite similarly even when they never lose

their fixed status as moral violations. Simply put, they play large or small roles in a

person’s life given the facts of the particular cases. A childhood lie of little scope or a

white lie told to protect someone’s feelings is appropriate cause for regret—but how

much regret and for how long? An adult agent who harbors great remorse for a

childhood lie gives us reason to think either that they misunderstand the import of the

event (which is minimal) or that there is something else about the case we do not

know (that the lie was larger in scope than we understand) or that there were

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obligations generated by the moral mistake (such as apologies to harmed agents) that

the agent failed to meet in addition to performance of the lie (in which case the agent

may still find regret is gnawing even to this day).158

My argument is that moral violations, just as in mere misfortune, involve

unchangeable facts of the matter that cannot be wiped away, just as misfortunes do. A

victim cannot change the fact that her free will was violated or the psychological fact

that at the time of the violation and in the months afterward, she experienced waves of

grief and/or resentment. The fact that her experience now plays a good role in a

valuable aim (as is the case in the case of the assault-victim-turned-counselor) does

not mean that sexual assault in general is not an appropriate object for anger, or that

she was wrong to feel so regarding her own assault in particular. To the contrary, as

discussed, such attitudes are appropriate and, ultimately, valuable.

In the same way, an agent who makes a moral mistake cannot change the fact

that his action was an abuse of a person’s free will or that such an action warrants

remorse. These are merely the facts of the matter, and are the rigid parts of the past. I

158 Take as an example of this spectrum of import of moral violations, and our responses to them, the fact that I stole something from my friend’s dollhouse when I was about eight (I really did!). This fact, when I remember it about my own self, still gnaws at me. I feel the sting of regret (in part because I don’t think I ever apologized to her, though I honestly don’t remember. I did, however, return without her knowing, the tiny item to the dollhouse a few weeks after I took it). My moral mistake still gnaws at me, though only in mild way, and only when I bring it to my attention at will (as is the case writing this essay). Were I to stay away until 4:00 am fretting about this, we might worry that I did not fully appreciated the import of my moral mistake (which, I think is fair to say, is rather little). Perhaps I should write ny friend a brief apology, but we think, in general, this mistake largely is insignificant. This moral blemish is not a horrible error for me eudaimonistically speaking. By contrast, infidelity, abuse (physical, psychological) and other moral violations such as lying and cheating within the adult landscape will generate greater depths of remorse and do so for longer periods of time. When these moral violations become the objects of redemption, their negative scope will likely never disappear completely since their import for various narratives will be great in negativity. Murders will cause larger negative impact eudaimonistically on a life than white lies about how a friend looks in an evening gown, and so on. I do not think my observations here run counter to our moral intuitions.

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argue, however, that an agent who allows his remorse over his moral violation to

contribute in a positive way toward a good aim will change the import of the moral

violation in his life. How much negative import remains from his violation depends

upon the scope of his original offense and the other dimensions of import discussed in

this essay.

When a moral mistake is great enough in scope and great in negative import

for a person’s life, then I suspect lemons will likely be present in the lemonade for the

entirety of that person’s lives even when they can redeem this moral mistake according

to the requirements set forth above. When the scope is small enough of a moral

violation, however, then I think narrative transformations can render the violation’s

import negligible just in the way it can for misfortune.

Again, I think what I say here is consonant with our intuitions—that certain

moral failings, while they never shed their status as moral failures, have very little

import and then when an agent wrongs his hands over one of these kinds of events, we

begin to wonder if there is something wrong with the agent, not with our system of

ethics.

5.5 Conclusion

I have argued above that when an agent’s representation of a loss as a gain in a

new narrative of value that is important to the agent, the agent can rescue lost meaning

in her life. I call this narrative transformation, redemption. I have argued that this

transformation signifies genuine change in a thick, eudaimonistic sense to the flexible

part of the past—the meaning—and that this change can be brought about by allowing

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the regrettable event to contribute positively to a new, valuable aim important to the

agent. In this thick sense of improved meaning for the agent, we can also see the

beginnings of restored meaningfulness. Now that the agent can represent the bad, past

event as contributing in a key way to a good, valuable aim central to him, he can find

fulfillment that his past is meaningful, since it can be regarded as contributing to

loving engagement with a beloved object (the relevant good aim in question) in a

positive way that reflects personal growth and development over time. The narrative

transformation of redemption appears to meet the demands of meaningfulness

exhibited in Chapter III.

An objector might observe that my account so far drawn has moral

implications that require further attention, however. Is there any meaningful

distinction between forgiveness and redemption of moral failing? Does my account of

redemption suggest that the regrettable event no longer warrants remorse? Can my

account of redemption as narrative transformation explain uses of the concept that

seem to imply a compensatory structure, without appealing to compensation? These

kinds of questions motivate the following, and final, chapter.

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VI.

Redemption of Misfortune, Error and Moral Mistake:

Objections and Responses

When regrettable events, losses or moral failures give agents reasons to feel

alienated from their lives or to doubt the value of their activities, I have argued that

agents have at their disposal a practical solution to this problem. They can elect to

redeem these meaning-threatening losses in the way discussed in the last chapter. They

can transform the meaning of events in their lives along the dimensions of import

discussed articulated above. In the present chapter, I test my thesis for its plausibility

first by examining different case examples that surround what I regard as three classes

of redemption (redemption of misfortune, deliberative error and moral mistake), then

by defending it against a variety of objections—mainly ones that concern moral

implications of my view.

I will argue that regardless of the class type of the event, the morphological

features of redemption are the same: a regretted event or loss comes to represent

positive import in the context of a life narrative with a valuable aim that matters to the

agent. As I have argued in the last chapter, this narrative transformation has the result

of rescuing meaning in the agent’s life since now the past event can be regarded as an

important part of a meaningful life episode. In Section 6.1, I investigate the

plausibility of redemption of misfortune and also of non-moral, deliberative error.

First, I address the objection that misfortune doesn’t belong in an account of

redemption, since the concept only concerns only moral mistakes. Next, I briefly

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examine redemption of deliberative error. In Section 6.2, I investigate the more

complicated matter of redemption of moral failings. First in 6.2.1, I argue for a

distinction between forgiveness and redemption. Next, in 6.2.2, I show how moral

failings can be redeemed on the same principles I’ve developed thus far. In 6.2.3 I

address a series of additional objections such as concerns surrounding the

consequentialist aspects of my view. Finally, in 6.2.4, I conclude that the account of

redemption as a practical solution to the problem of meaningfulness so far developed

is plausible and holds up under scrutiny. I argue that my account of redemption can

explain why we regard redemptive behavior as good for agents to do (by appealing to

the fact that successful redemption meets the demands of meaningfulness), and is

compatible with our moral intuitions as well. Finally, I suggest several possible areas

for further research related to the concept.

6.1 Redemption of misfortune and deliberative error

Skeptics might find it difficult to agree to my claim that redemption concerns

misfortune—losses over which we have no control. Such skeptics might object that

my account is unintuitive since it involves agents redeeming things that were not of

their own doing. If redemption is going to be a plausible philosophical concept at all,

the skeptic might argue, it ought to concern only activities meant to overturn the

negative import of moral mistakes. Below, I refute this claim.

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6.1.1 Redemption of misfortune: bad experience becomes opportunity for growth

The objection that my account wrongly lumps together misfortune with

redemption of moral failure is, I think, a mistake of privileging certain influences on

the concept of redemption—particularly as it pertains to guilt over sin. Such an

emphasis does not give the Hebrew origin of the concept (release from the bonds of

physical suffering and slavery—events represented in Hebrew writings as things the

people of Israel did not bring upon themselves but merely suffered) its due. In

addition, I think that after some further reflection, we will find our wider

contemporary use of the concept of redemption, covers cases of misfortune as well as

cases of deliberative error. Take as an example the everyday way in which we talk

about an agent who finds a “redeeming aspect” of some suffering by rising above it

and overcoming it somehow. I argue that making good meaning out of the bad or

finding some meaning in a disorienting or alienating experience can surround not just

moral or deliberative mistake, but also brute misfortune—something over which the

agent in question had no control and did not cause herself.

An example of redemption of misfortune is the example in the previous chapter

of my father’s death, which gave my brother and me reason to reconcile. We

redeemed the unfortunate event of his death by allowing it to serve the good purpose

of our reconciliation. The imagined sexual- assault victim discussed at the beginning

of this dissertation serves as another example of redemption of misfortune. Consider

the ways in which she can respond to her assault. She can try to forget it, acting as if it

did not happen or did not have any negative import for her. She can allow the event to

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haunt her, making it the case that it destroys her functionality and prevents her from

developing as a person. She can even try a reasonable aim of putting the event behind

her as best she can. Alternately, however, she can rescue meaning from that event in

the way I’ve discussed. Recall from the example that she now regards the assault and

the surrounding activities as meaningful parts of her life trajectory.

Her newly shaped life narrative does not remove the fact that she was the

victim of a moral violation or that resentment and grief are appropriate responses to

this experience. Nor does it make the attack any less something she suffered, and had

no role in as an agent. Nevertheless, she has changed something genuine by adding

events to her life narrative that alter the role the assault plays in her life—a role that

mitigates her grief and gives her reasons to regard her life as more meaningful than it

would have otherwise been. Her redemptive activity may not altogether remove the

negative import of her sexual assault since it still plays the role of being a bad

experience that is cause for grief, but the badness of the event’s meaning is greatly

mitigated when the event becomes a positive turning point for her in her new

aspiration to be of service to others. Moreover, that activity at least restores a sense of

agency to her life, if not her role in the attack itself.159 The same morphological

features of meaning change are present in examples such as these, as well as in

examples of redemption of moral failings, which we will discuss in Section 6.2.

159 Redemption of misfortune can also surround acts of nature: tsunamis wiping out entire towns, a hurricane destroying a city, an earthquake leveling a country in a matter of seconds, etc. When a community transforms the import of these terrible events by allowing these events to bring about the strengthening of bonds between community members (when at first the events seemed to sever such bonds) or the exposure of unjust practices in a ruling government or the repairing of relations between various countries, etc., then these events in the community members’ lives have been rescued of meaning.

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6.1.2 Redemption of deliberative error: mistake turns into advantage

Cases of redemption of deliberative error cases in which an agent makes a

deliberative mistake but finds some way to put features of this error to good use,

thereby transforming the mistake into a learning experience or advancement of another

aim. Take as an example of this kind of redemption a person who wants to become an

artist. She attends drawing and painting classes and works hard to improve her

painting skills. Unfortunately, she misjudges the extent of her talent. After several

failed submissions to shows around town, and unsuccessful attempts to generate

excitement over her work by way of her own publicity, she gives up, accepting defeat.

This agent stops painting and her art supplies gather dust on her garage shelf.

After some reflection on the matter, however, on why it was that she failed as a

painter, she determines that canvas and acrylics do not provide the best pathway to

realize her artistic aims. Instead, she comes to the insight that her artistic ideas are

larger in scope: perhaps sculpture or even video and large-sized installations are the

better means to her aim. With this insight, she goes on to produce pieces of art that

garner a broad range of responses from her audiences. Most importantly, the agent is

able to affirm a narrative that results in her having the positive impact on her

community she was originally imagining. She now views her failed attempt at painting

as an important lesson to her of how best to apply her creativity. Instead of regretting

her failure and viewing it as a waste of time, she now views that time as key

experimentation important to her development as an artist.

Redemption of deliberative error is often represented as a time of learning,

growth, insight and an overcoming of obstacles, etc. When an agent commits some

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large error of substantial import to him—say he squanders his entire savings due to

poor judgment—he will need to develop a high value aim central to his psychological

economy, and have great success with it in order to redeem the failure. Moreover, as

we saw in the case of Milken, his new successes will need to stand in some

meaningful connection to the original failure if the later success is to count as

redemption.

The Carter example, from the previous chapter, is also arguably, a case of

redemption of deliberative error (perhaps there were some things Carter could have

done differently in his first four years or during the campaign to persuade voters

differently). By contrast, we might conclude that there was little Carter could have

done to change the outcome of the election (say, because we think large scale

economic trends controlled by Paul Volcker’s actions at the Federal Reserve swamped

other factors in causing the outcome.)160 Either way, however, the requirements of

redemption would be the same. Carter redeemed his 1980 loss to Reagan because he

managed to render it a positive turning point in his political career.

Below, I raise the objection that cases of redemption of moral failings seem to

come with special constraints, and that I have so far offered no principle sufficient to

motivate these constraints. I will argue, however, that my account has the resources to

explain what warrants these seemingly “special” constraints. I ague that there is

nothing special about moral cases of redemption, since the same morphological

features and no others, the same relationships between an agent and beloved activities,

must obtain for successful redemption.

160 I get this point from Lanier Anderson.

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6.2 Moral conversion: the redemption of moral failure

A skeptic might notice that there seem to be special constraints on redemption

of moral failings that need explanation. Consider as an example of such a constraint

the intuition that an agent is only redeemed from his moral failings when his moral

mistake ends up being the jumping-off point to a morally better life, toward a morally

relevant aim that benefits others and expresses moral insight. It is unlikely that we

would find ourselves saying that an agent could be redeemed from his earlier moral

failures by taking up the valuable aim of learning to play the violin because, though

violin playing is valuable, it is not obvious how this aim is relevant to the moral

failure, and for this reason, does not get to count as redemption. The skeptic might

observe that a plausible account of redemption ought to be able to explain what

warrants this constraint and object that my account does not provide the resources to

adequately explain this. Further, the skeptic might object, it is implausible to lump

redemption of moral failings together with redemption of misfortune and deliberative

error under one concept, since it is obvious that these phenomena are distinct, with

different success criteria, etc. That I do lump them all together, the skeptic might

argue, counts against my account.

In the paragraphs below, I will address the larger objection that my account

falsely lumps redemption of moral failings in together with the other two kinds

discussed above: misfortune and general deliberative error. Two other, related

objections are also discussed in the paragraphs below: (1) the worry that there is

something special about redeeming moral failings, since in these cases there seems to

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be a requirement, not demanded in non-moral cases, that an agent must compensate a

certain amount for his errors with benefits to others, that he must “do enough” to

deserve redemption, and (2) that redemption of moral failings fails to be indistinct

from the philosophical concept of forgiveness, and so does not merit its own category.

First, in 6.2.1, I will address the latter of these two problems: that redemption

can seem indistinct from forgiveness. I argue that redemption and forgiveness can

describe similar behaviors but that these two concepts can come apart—particularly in

cases where redemption is achieved without forgiveness (though I acknowledge that

redemption of moral failings will require seeking forgiveness even if forgiveness is

not, ultimately, achieved). I also argue below that a person is motivated to redeem

something in his past not by a moral motive but by a motive to restore

meaningfulness. Next, in 6.2.2, I test my ideas on redemption or moral failures against

a case example of George Wallace, the politician famous for his stand at the

schoolhouse door during the beginnings of the civil rights movement in the United

States. I argue that my account can explain why we might find it natural to be

conflicted about this case, about why it comes close to being a redemption story but,

ultimately, fails. In 6.2.3, I test my account further against a variety of objections,

namely ones surrounding the moral implications of my view.

6.2.1 Forgiveness and redemption: two distinct moral concepts?

In 1963, then Governor of Alabama George Wallace Jr. stood in the

schoolhouse door of the University of Alabama, in defiance of the court order to

desegregate, facing off against federal marshals and the National Guard. Less than

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twenty years later, however, he apologized to civil rights leaders. In 1979, Wallace

said of his stand in the schoolhouse door: "I was wrong. Those days are over and they

ought to be over.”161 During his final term as governor (1983–1987), Wallace

appointed a record number (at that time) of African Americans to government

positions.162

After initially being considered a moderate with respect to racial issues in his

early political career, Wallace then turned to hard-lined segregationist views after

losing the 1958 Alabama gubernatorial Democratic primary to John Patterson, who

was backed by the Klu Klux Klan.163 Running on a segregationist platform, Wallace

won the 1962 Alabama gubernatorial election by a landslide. At the end of his first

inauguration speech as Governor, he had shouted, “Segregation now! Segregation

tomorrow! Segregation forever!” (He later reported that he hadn’t read the end of the

speech his speechwriter made for him, and that he immediately regretted speaking

those words.164 Wallace made four unsuccessful attempts to run for President and in

1972 was shot in an assassination attempt that left him in a wheelchair for the rest of

his life. In the late seventies, he reported having a religious conversion and, as

explained above, made public apologies to civil rights leaders.

What we make of George Wallace’s behavior seems to depend upon what

emphasis we give various features of his narrative. His remorse, followed by

demonstrated change of heart and appointments of African Americans to government

161 Edwards, Government in America, 80. 162 Foner, Garraty, Reader's Companion to American History, 1127. 163 McCabe, Stekler, Fayer, George Wallace: Settin’ the Woods on Fire. [Documentary], 2000. 164 See Maggie Reichers, “From Racism to Redemption: The Path of George Wallace” in Humanities, Vol. 21. Number 2 (March/April 2000).

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positions, might look to us like forgiveness seeking. He seemed to be pursuing reentry

into the moral community. On another interpretation, it might be natural to talk about

redemption in this case. We could say that Wallace sought redemption after having

remorse over his earlier actions by altering the role those actions played in the context

of his political life, transforming moral disaster into a teaching moment that led to an

enlightened political career in which he protected the rights of and advanced the

interests of African Americans he had previously abused.

How we understand Wallace’s behavior seems to depend upon which concept

(redemption, forgiveness, atonement) we apply. It must be that these concepts can

explain the same behavior. But are they distinct concepts? I will argue that they are.

One way to understand the differences among these concepts is by understanding the

distinct motives that give rise to them. I will show that these behaviors can arise from

distinct motives that, if we are careful to separate, can help us explain the distinction

in the concepts being discussed.

In seeking forgiveness, an agent responds to the pains of remorse with a moral

motive, a desire to repair his relationships with the moral community, to be publicly

acknowledged as a free agent capable of choosing to behave in accordance with the

demands of morality. This is important to note, for it will turn out that an agent can

respond to remorse with a motive to redeem himself—which I below characterize as a

motive to recover lost meaning (in the thick, eudaimonistic sense) in his life. I will

argue below that such a motive to redeem comes out of an appreciation of lost

objective value, that the moral mistake marks a diminishment of very real value, moral

in kind, and can give rise to a nested aim to receive forgiveness for moral misdoing.

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Nonetheless, I will maintain that the original motive to redeem can be kept separate

from the moral motive to reenter the moral community.

Most theorists argue that this repair with the moral community is a process

requiring the forgiveness seeker to demonstrate a change of heart—a change revealed

through observable behaviors.165 He may also be required to formulate an apology and

ask for forgiveness—which may or may not be granted by the harmed party. The end

result of forgiveness is something like the restored relationship between an offender

and the moral community.

While forgiveness is reconciliation between an agent and the moral

community, redemption is reconciliation between an agent and his past. As mentioned

above, a redemption seeker responds to the pains of remorse with a motive to rescue

meaning lost in his life due to his moral mistake. A skeptic might consider this motive

“selfish” or “self-indulgent” in the sense of being inconsiderate of others’ needs and

overly interested in one’s own, and so argue it cannot be part of an account of

redemption that concerns moral failings.

This skeptical response, however, is too quick. The seeker of redemption is

well aware that his failures are moral violations: appreciation of this does the work of

generating the original remorse in him. Recall from Chapter III, that meaningfulness

in life requires an appreciation of objective value. The seeker of redemption

appreciates that having morally failed, he is worse off than before he made these moral

mistakes—he is worse off in the eudaimonistic sense, since his immoral actions

165 See the work of Charles Griswold, (2008) Forgiveness. I wish to remain neutral on which account of forgiveness is best but instead appeal to general intuitions on the matter.

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amount to threats to meaning in his life—the development, protection and promotion

of valuable objects worthy of loving engagement in his life.

As we found in Chapter IV, regret puts pressure on an agent’s narrative self-

conception because the regrettable event in the past is something the present agent

cannot accept: it represents an action expressive of different values than the one the

agent currently avows. What results is a kind of internal conflict realized by a desire to

endorse her life story as something meaningful, but blocked in this endeavor by

unacceptable actions or disvaluable experiences that alienate her from her life. Recall,

too, from Chapters IV and the paragraph above, that remorse over mistakes can be

meaning-threatening since they can cause in the agent the realization that what the

agent was pursuing of not value, not worth pursuing—both critical elements for

conferring meaning in a life. The seeker of redemption of a moral failing has a desire

to plan actions that will recover some meaning lost in the wake of those actions by

placing them in the context of a meaningful life narrative. As it seems to me, honest

possession of such a motive requires full-fledged appreciation of the moral landscape,

of moral demands and objective value, and so cannot be charged with being a nasty or

selfish motive ill-suited for an account of redemption of moral failure.

Recall from Chapter IV that one way to mitigate this internal conflict, the

sudden awareness that the meaning in one’s life has been threatened by a past loss or

bad event, is to abandon the past as something without significance, not bearing any

positive or negative import with respect to the current agent’s narrative. But by

abandoning parts of his past, the agent stands to lose a felt sense of meaning

surrounding the past event sequences in question—a felt sense we find it natural to

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think contributes to an agent’s well-being over-all.166 An alternate way to resolve the

conflict of having regrets is management of the past by way of narrative

transformation—what I call redemption.

After successful redemptive efforts, the negative import of the bad, past events

is mitigated by their new roles in the development of valuable aims, restoring lost

meaning to the individual’s life as a whole, rendering the life more meaningful than it

would have otherwise been. The bad events change in import from representing a

person’s low point to representing a turning point: the narrative shift that occurs when

a person who is headed in a bad direction turns a corner. Now something horrible

comes to represent the beginning of something good. The end result of this narrative

transformation of redemption of moral failing is a changed relationship of an agent

with his past: what did threaten the meaning in his life is now capable of being

represented as meaningful—a part of loving engagement with an aim of value that

expresses personal growth. Such a rescue of lost meaning in a past part of one’s life

increases the meaningfulness of an agent’s life overall.

The above discussion suggests the same behavior of demonstrating learned

moral wisdom can be brought about by two very different motives: the search for

forgiveness and the pursuit of redemption. While redemption involves a motive to

rescue lost meaning in a life so that he can be reconciled with his own life, forgiveness

involves a moral motive of reconciling oneself to the moral community by requesting,

and then receiving (after fulfilling particular success criteria), access to that moral

community.

166 This we saw in Chapter III.

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I concede, then, that it is possible that the same event can be an instance of

both concepts, but I argue that these concepts are distinct, have different success

criteria and can be realized by way of different motives. To further sharpen the point

that these concepts are distinct, let us now consider cases in which the two concepts

come apart.

Imagine first an agent motivated by the moral motive to seek forgiveness. Let’s

say he’s a criminal character who steals cars for a living—which he does as part of a

street gang to which be belongs. Imagine that he is caught and convicted of several

counts of grand theft auto. In prison, he experiences remorse over his activities. He has

a desire to reenter the moral community and acts on that motive, writing letters to the

families whose cars he stole and to the people whose lives his crimes and gang-related

activities negatively affected. He has not yet received letters back one way or another

as to the plausibility of being granted forgiveness.

Now imagine that subsequent to his release from prison, he continues his

demonstration of a change of heart by cleaning up his act and getting a lawful job at a

car fix-it shop. In addition to this, he actually takes extra pains to counsel young men

away from street life and toward productive behaviors that keep them in school. In

fact, he is inspired in conversation with a few community members to found a center

for youth—a center that will keep kids off the streets, give them a place to do

homework in a quiet setting or play a game of pick-up basketball. (This should start to

look familiar since I used something like this example in Chapter I, footnote 24.) Now

to a large extent, he organizes his life around the center and its maintenance. Even

more, he now plays an important, positive role in the lives of young men to whom he

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is able to give counsel, a skill very much informed by the very unique aspects of his

past, that he has been—like them—on the street, involved in criminal activity and

served time in prison. Still, he has not received letters back as to forgiveness for his

earlier offenses. At the same time, his earlier offenses have begun to change in

meaning for the agent since those offenses now play positive roles in his new, valuable

activities he cares about.

In the way I describe the scenario above, the agent was not motivated by a

desire to redeem but by a desire to be forgiven of his offenses. Even if he is not

forgiven, however, it will still be true of him that he achieved redemption because in

his efforts to seek forgiveness, he unwittingly transformed the role his past played in

his life from utter moral failure to beginning of moral renewal.

An alternate scenario is possible in which an agent responds to the pains of

remorse with a desire to seek redemption of his moral failing but develops, within his

project of finding redemption, a second nested aim to seek forgiveness. Take our

former criminal from above. Imagine that in prison, the criminal experiences remorse,

only this time instead of a motive to seek forgiveness, he first expresses a desire to

restore lost meaning in his life that his moral failures have caused. He has thoughts

such as, “I cannot let my horrible actions dominate my life in this way. I’ve got to find

a way to piece together something that I can live with, a life that make sense to me,

that I can find acceptable. I’ve got to do something that rescues the meaning from my

terrible acts.” Now imagine that he considers carefully what such a rescue will entail.

He recognizes immediately that in order to put back together a life he can endorse as

good, as meaningful, he will need to reconcile himself with the moral community and

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begin putting to good use his moral failings in a way that is compatible with his new

insights. He must demonstrate moral reform. His appreciation of these requirements

leads him to begin the steps to forgiveness, which, again, he considers carefully.

The agent knows such a rescue will require him to reconcile himself to his bad

past behavior. He will be in the position of finding a way to prevent his earlier

misdoings from going to utter waste. These concerns lead him to the thought that in

order to render them something other than mere failures, he will need to apply what he

has learned in his remorse toward good use—he will need to use them in a positive,

meaningful way. He realizes that such a restoration of meaning would be utterly

impossible without his full reentry into the moral community, since he can only put

his past to good use by being a productive member of the moral community. He must

seek forgiveness for his offenses. He must therefore demonstrate a change of heart and

show to all that his earlier failings and their consequences have finally illuminated the

moral landscape for him, and that he is no longer indifferent to the demands of

morality.

In the way I characterize the case in the above paragraph, the agent develops

the nested aim of forgiveness within the context of restoring meaning to his life. Here

is the key point: the process of narrative transformation of a moral failing can come

about with or without the granting of forgiveness, though forgiveness can be a part of

redemption and can generate activity that accomplishes redemption (even without the

agent’s intentions). Redemption of moral failing does not require a third, harmed party

to foreswear anger or publicly welcome back the offender, as forgiveness does.

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One interesting feature of redemption, then, is that its criteria can be met even

when forgiveness was impossible from the start. I have been arguing that what matters

for redemption is that the bad past event change in meaning from bad to good in the

context of a valuable life narrative, and that this is reason enough for an agent to

welcome his past back, since the past is now more meaningful than it would have

otherwise been, given the loss. In situations in which an agent who has committed a

moral violation cannot secure forgiveness because the persons he has harmed are dead,

or are inaccessible, or do not wish to have contact with their aggressor, or the

identities of whom are unknown to the agent, redemption is still possible for the agent

even when forgiveness may not be.

The discussion above suggests that there is room for both forgiveness and

redemption in a description of our moral psychology. The two concepts can come

apart or operate together. The demands of each phenomenon are distinct and the end

results are different as well. The skeptic, however, might not be satisfied. She might

concede that even if these distinctions in forgiveness and redemption are plausibly

drawn so far and that forgiveness is not a requirement of redemption, the tougher

question is this: to what extent does redemption of moral failings require forgiveness-

seeking?

I argue that redemption of moral failings does require some efforts to seek

forgiveness. The reason for this is that the meaning-threatening remorse the agent

feels, which generates the pull toward redemptive behavior in the first place implies an

understanding that the bad action was wrong, and such an insight is going to put

pressure on the agent to live in a way that is in concord with his newly avowed beliefs

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about the demands of morality. Any new redemptive aim is going to need to conform

to his new beliefs—that his earlier behaviors were wrong—in order for the remorse,

itself, to have been genuinely meaning-threatening in the first place. (If an agent

doesn’t truly regret an action, then it isn’t something that can generate redemption).

Living according to the belief that some such action was wrong will require an agent

to respond to the moral obligations generated by his infraction—such as apology, the

first step in forgiveness, etc.

Further, in order to satisfy the criteria of redemption, the agent will need to

allow his moral infraction to substantially contribute to a new, good aim that will,

again, be in concord with new moral insights that gave rise to the remorse in the first

place. Any aim taken up, then, will need to use the moral insights gleaned from the

moral infraction. This is the process of demonstrating a change in heart, a new

direction turned after the moral infraction. These are all important steps in forgiveness

seeking. Thus, any redemption seeker will need to seek forgiveness as part of a larger

effort to restore meaning in his life. This need not sully the moral aim of forgiveness.

What isolates the moral motive of forgiveness from the motive to redeem is the

genuine remorse an agent feels. Let me explain. Imagine the gangster, above, who

suddenly feels remorse for the abuses he has committed. He is horribly aware of his

wrongdoing and, too, of the way in which this affects the value of his life overall. It is

difficult for him to imagine continuing on, living with this new knowledge of what he

has done. He struggles with his conscience for days after his new insight. He tries on

denial but his guilt consumes him and he finds he cannot continue in this way. What is

he to do?

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Imagine that the individual formulates an explicit intention to redeem his past

action. He has, as described above, thoughts such as, “I cannot let my horrible actions

dominate my life in this way. I’ve got to find a way to not only become a member of

the moral community again (This is forgiveness), but also to piece together something

that I can live with, a life that make sense to me, that I find acceptable. I’ve got to do

something that rescues the meaning from my terrible acts (This is redemption).” Now

imagine that he considers carefully what such a rescue will entail. Again, he

recognizes immediately that in order to put back together a life he can endorse as

good, as meaningful, he will need to reconcile himself not merely with the moral

community, but also to his past by putting it to good use in a way that is compatible

with his moral reform. He will need to gain access again to the moral community, then

piece together a life that is both moral but, more to the point of this dissertation, puts

his remorse over his moral abuses toward a valuable aim into the future. His

appreciation of these requirements leads him to begin the steps to forgiveness, which,

again, he considers carefully. Forgiveness requires apology (this is no problem for him

since he is genuinely remorseful) and a demonstration of change of heart (this is no

problem for him, too, since this is what he must do to redeem himself anyway). And

on he goes.

A skeptic might continue to worry that the agent’s motive to forgive is infected

by the motive to redeem or that in having the motive to redeem, the agent cannot also

have the motive to forgive. I do not think that this worry is genuinely troubling. When

the agent is truly remorseful, a plan to piece his life back together that requires

responding to his remorse with forgiveness-seeking will still mean that his apology

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needs to be genuine and his change of heart actual. When the redeeming agent

becomes aware that he must act on his remorse by seeking forgiveness, he will be put

to the full demands of genuine apology (the agent must truly be sorry, etc.).

The key point, however, is that such efforts need not result in forgiveness in

order for an agent to rescue meaning from his past, bad behavior. Further, if

forgiveness is out of the question from the start because the harmed parties are

unknown to the agent, do not wish to have contact with the agent or have died, the

redemption-seeking agent can, in good conscience, move on with his redemption plan

since what is required of him is a change of heart demonstrated in a new valuable aim

that is in concord with his new, moral insights. As long as he is responding to the

obligations generated by his earlier bad behavior and doing what is morally called for,

he can still achieve redemption, even when things like apology are not possible

because of, say, any of the practical problems listed above.

6.2.2 George Wallace test case: Can dimensions of import explain moral redemption?

Now that we understand how redemption of moral failure and forgiveness are

distinct normative concepts, let us now focus on redemption of moral failure and test

its plausibility against the criteria developed in Chapter V. In order to do this, let us

return to George Wallace. Though we have acknowledged, above, that his behaviors

could most certainly have been described as forgiveness seeking, has he achieved

redemption, as the author of the article cited in note 164 was willing to claim?

Successful redemption of these misdoings will depend upon the extent to

which Wallace is able to change this significance along the dimensions of import

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articulated in Chapter V. Let us check our intuitions on this example against the

redemption account I’ve developed so far in order to determine to what extent my

account yields plausible results.

First, let us acknowledge the very real negative import Wallace’s

segregationist views and consequent behavior had on the general public and with

respect to his own political career and his wider quest to lead a good life, both in the

moral sense and also in the eudaimonistic sense discussed in Chapter III. In the wake

of the civil rights movement, such segregationist views grew increasingly unpopular.

In regard to the related narrative of Wallace’s own aims to be a good person—a

person whose role in society was to be a civil servant—his segregationist views and

activities bear very negative import as well. In terms of the present account of

redemption, the scope of the negative import of his segregationist activities on his life

was large and would require extended development in the various dimensions of

import in order to accomplish a change in meaning of the event from bad to good in a

positive aim Wallace cared a good deal about.

In a 1998 PBS NewsHour spot on George Wallace after his death in September

of that year, Jim Lehrer and NewsHour correspondent Kwame Holman were joined by

journalist Haynes Johnson (who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1966 for his coverage of the

civil rights crisis in Selma, Alabama) to discuss Wallace’s life. Together they talked

about Wallace, his career, his recanting of his segregationist views, and the extent to

which he was able to overcome the legacy of those earlier views. When Holman and

Lehrer asked Johnson if he thought Wallace’s conversion was “real,” Johnson replied,

yes, and explained,

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“Because of the tragedy… of George Wallace, he grew up in a segregated society. He started out as a moderate. He would have been a Franklin Roosevelt progressive, but he was trapped by the politics of race. And when he lost the first time, he said he would never be out - use the "n" word again - and then he became sort of a little populist demagogue. I think, though, he understood the black people and they understood him. And later on [his conversion] was absolutely real.”167

Lehrer remarked that he had always been surprised that southern African Americans

would later come to support Wallace in the voting booths. To this sentiment Johnson

added,

“…[T]here is a sort of crazy bond that goes on between people who have been living together, grew up, and kind of understand each other. You can say, I don't like what you stood for, but you may be - there may be some redemption, and we all come out of the same territory.”

Johnson’s use of the word redemption here suggested Johnson believed that some kind

of reconciliation was possible. From the context, it seems that Johnson meant a

reconciliation with the African American people from whomWallace had alienated

himself by harming them with his morally repugnant views. Such reconciliation could

count toward efforts to seek forgiveness (either instigated by solely the moral motive

or as part of a larger motive to redeem) and might have counted toward positive

meaning in the eudaimonistic sense that concerns this dissertation.

The question, though, remains as to whether such a reconciliation was

complete, whether his earlier misdoings changed in meaning from bad to good as part

of a positive project to protect and take care of worthy objects of love (African

American people and their concerns). I will argue below that this reconciliation is not

167 The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer, September 14, 1998. Transcript: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/remember/july-dec98/wallace_9-14.html, pulled from the internet, January, 16, 2011.

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complete—that the new aim did not become something Wallace deeply cared about or

had a good deal of success with, and so it ultimately fails to count as redemption on

my account. Johnson seemed to think, however, that this reconciliation might have

been possible for Wallace in part because Wallace’s personal narrative of growing up

poor in the south during the Depression was comprehensible to southern black voters.

Wallace “spoke for the little guy, the grievances of the worker” that later politicians,

Nixon and Reagan, claimed.168

Finally, Lehrer pressed Johnson again on the sincerity of Wallace’s

conversion, to which Johnson answered, “I don't know how to read someone's soul,

Jim…I would like to think that it was absolutely real. The pain he suffered, where he

came from, the fact that he understood poverty…”169 Johnson went on to tell an

anecdote of seeing Wallace at the 1976 Democratic Convention. Johnson was

overcome with a sense of pity for Wallace, then wheelchair bound on account of the

damage he incurred from the 1972 assassination:

“[Wallace] was brought there in a wheelchair. And I was standing on the platform right next to where the speakers come up, and they were bringing him up, and they had the wheelchair, they had to lift him up, and I saw those legs going like this - flopping back and forth - and the pain on his face, and I thought, oh, my God, you poor S.O.B. …I'm not defending George Wallace's racism. I don't want to make a mistake here. But in human terms he suffered enormous pain, and I think there was something.”170

The NewsHour interview concluded with Lehrer and Johnson surmising that, had

Wallace not gotten “caught up with” racial politics, he could have “led the South.”171

168 Ibid. 169 Ibid. 170 Ibid. 171 Ibid. Of course, the South, was not going to be “led” there, which is why voting Southern democrats changed Wallace and not he other way around. I get this point from Lanier Anderson.

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He could have helped guide the South in a more progressive, moderate way. Johnson

mused that if only Wallace could have “channeled those sorts of energies [expressed

by earlier segregationist activities] into doing good for people, I think he might have

been a more effective public figure.”172

What do we make of Wallace: do we think he achieved redemption with

respect to his earlier behavior? I think the answer we may find it natural to say is,

“no,” that though he may have tried to effect some kind of narrative transformation for

himself, he did not achieve it. While we may have this intuition, it may not be easy to

articulate why the example fails to count as redemption. We may have the sense that

something more or different is needed for the example to qualify as redemption.

Perhaps Wallace would have needed to do more to advance the interests of black

citizens, to make that aim more of a priority. Perhaps he could have set up foundations

with missions to advance the interests of back people, or develop a civil rights

platform on which to run for governor and then, President, or tour the country using

his public cache to educate voters on what was wrong with his earlier views, showing

them how they could help set up society so as to protect the rights of this minority

instead of violate them, etc.

These thoughts that Wallace would have needed to do something more and

different, in order to change the role of the stand at the schoolhouse door, may at first

confuse since the example bears family resemblance to many of the other examples

discussed above. Wallace’s case may come close to redemption but something seems

to be missing. I think we can explain our intuitions here by appealing to the resources

172 Ibid.

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developed in my account so far. The key question is to what extent Wallace’s earlier

misdoings, given the added events in his life narrative, ever come to represent

anything other than mere exploitation of racist attitudes for political gain.

The key question that ought to be addressed to determine whether or not the

Wallace case is redemption is whether or not is Wallace was able to change the

import—in the thick, normative sense discussed earlier—of his racial slurs and

platforms from bad to good in a larger life narrative. Recall that an event can change

from bad to good import by providing substantial contribution to a valuable aim that

the agent cares about deeply, with which he lovingly engages. In the life of Wallace, it

is difficult to see how exactly his earlier misdoings ever come to make any substantial

contribution to a highly valuable aim Wallace genuinely cares about. While we know

that Wallace apologized to civil rights leaders and gained reentry into the moral

community, there do not seem to be many other events added to his narrative that

would make it true of the past events that they are substantial contributors to valuable

aims important to Wallace.

I concede that Wallace’s second run as governor, taken up after a long hiatus,

is intriguing since he won largely by appealing to black voters. Haynes Johnson

though that reconciliation with African American voters is some kind of broader

reconciliation: a “come-back” story of a person who had hung himself on his own

racist noose but managed to untangle it and find warm welcome with black people in

this country. But the successful run for governor fails to count as genuine redemption

no matter whether Wallace’s reconciliation with the black people of Alabama is

genuine or false. Consider the possibility that the reconciliation is not a real

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welcoming back because Wallace has no real change it heart: he is still exploiting

some political view (this time a non-segregationist one) for political gain. In this case,

his stand at the schoolhouse door remains the same in its significance and is no real

cause for regret in Wallace—since he continues to endorse the aim of exploiting

various views for political gain. So, there is no redemption when the reconciliation

with the black community is not genuine.

When we examine the possibility that the reconciliation with the black

community is genuine, we are met with a variety of possibilities. Recall Johnson’s

observations, that Wallace’s past (growing up poor and in the South during the early

twentieth century) was something with which black voters could identify and in this,

there is some rescue for Wallace. In this case, however, Wallace seems to be

exploiting his connection to Southern African Americans to gain sympathy, and is

more suggestive of explanation and provision of excuse, than of narrative

transformation. In that case, while Wallace’s personal narrative may explain his stand

at the schoolhouse door, the event stays the same in its meaning within the larger

context of Wallace’s life: it is still an event bearing deeply negative import for

Wallace’s life as a whole.173

But even if the reconciliation with black voters was genuine (and so involves

demonstration of change in heart and not mere provision of excuse), there is still the

possibility that the import of the original event will not actually change in meaning for

the agent. In order for Wallace to achieve redemption on my account, the latter events

173 Also, Johnson’s thought that there was something to pity in the wheelchair-bound Wallace suggests a narrative of retribution, as if Wallace paid for his sins by losing his ability to walk. This is not redemption on my account.

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would need to make the stand at the schoolhouse door and other nefarious activities

capable of being represented as substantial contributions to aims of high value

important to Wallace. The problem for Wallace is that the earlier moral misdoing does

not actually contribute all that much to an aim of high value that Wallace cares about.

Recall that one dimension of import is the extent of contribution an event

makes to an aim. The original event was represented as advancement of a racist

agenda and bears very deep negative import for Wallace. It is very bad in the thick,

eudaimonistic sense. In order to be redeemed it has to be a contribution to some good

in the thick sense. The schoolhouse door episode did eventually come to generate

apparent remorse in Wallace and cause him to apologize, after which he appointed a

record number of black people to office. That is surely something, but the question

remains as to whether or not we can we say that Wallace took up valuable enough

aims and cared enough about them to yield a change in import of the original event.

Perhaps we ought to characterize Wallace’s new aim as something like, “to

make it a policy to benefit, advance and protect the rights of African Americans,” (as,

say, is plausibly expressed by appointment of African Americans to government

positions). If we agree that this can represent the aim of his later years, then I think we

must also agree that the success of that grand aim was middling at best: his career as a

civil servant did not bring about great benefit to African Americans of any particular

mention. It certainly did not result in any wholesale transformation of the political and

social position of black people in Alabama. What he achieved, and more, what he

attempted, would be more fairly described as some modest improvement around the

edges.

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Perhaps we might describe Wallace’s redemptive, organizing aim as something

like, “to make policies unsullied by racial discrimination and to, when possible and

appropriate, make efforts to advance the interests of black Americans.” This aim is

modest and something with which Wallace’s later career could plausibly be said to

express success. However, even this modest aim does not seem to play a central role in

Wallace’s psychological economy. Though Wallace publicly apologized to civil rights

leaders and oversaw a record number of appointments of African Americans to

Alabama government positions, there is not much else about his activities that

suggests the aforementioned aim was central to him. Wallace did not lead further

developments in the civil rights movement, or use his political power to establish a

relevant organization or spend his time, notoriety and money to advance the interests

of black people in this country. After all, as Mr. Johnson explained in the interview

mentioned above, his interests were (as typical of southern Democrats at the time)

surrounding the well-being of the worker, the little guy. The politics of race—some

think—were really a distortion of his original, and possibly more central, concern.

The extent to which Wallace uses his remorse over the schoolhouse door to

contribute to something good does not seem commensurable with the harm brought

about by the initial action. The insight that Wallace could use his role as a civil servant

not to oppress, but to free black persons, plays some kind of a role in the good aim of

making policy free from racial discrimination, but its use in other parts of his life or its

use beyond a number of appointments seems unclear. In short, the stand at the

schoolhouse door and other of Wallace’s notorious offenses, still seem to play deeply

negative roles in Wallace’s story. Though Wallace might have been justified in some

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felt satisfaction that the negative import of those earlier moral failings was mitigated

by later penance or personal improvement, he did not succeed at effecting a real

change in import of that event from bad to good in the eudaimonistic sense. Perhaps

his new life narrative may be better than it might have been otherwise and, therefore

made worthwhile his redemptive efforts, but his new life narrative is not yet redeemed

on my view. I suggest that, upon reflection, we will find that this result is consonant

with our intuitions on the matter.

6.2.3 Some objections and responses

My account of redemption of moral failings generates several important

objections. Here I will consider: (1) concerns regarding the consequentialist aspects of

the view (6.2.3.1), and (2) worries arising from the fact that my account does not place

compensation at the heart of redemption—a feature that has traditionally been an

important component in accounts of redemption (6.2.3.2). Then, I address a few

lingering concerns: “The plausibility of unintended redemption” (6.2.3.3), “Is it

always good to seek redemption?” (6.2.3.4), and “Are some events/actions

unredeemable?” (6.2.3.5).

6.2.3.1 Redemption as justification of bad behavior

One objection to my view is the global concern that in any case of redemption

of moral failing my account illegitimately excuses bad behavior. This is the worry that

if the bad event comes to have positive import for the agent in some way, then the

lemons stand to disappear in the lemonade, and an event originally fitting for remorse

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can transform in value from bad to good and no longer be bad or immoral or

disvaluable. If this is right, then my account of redemption seems to excuse horrible

acts.

The point to be made in response to this objection is as follows. I have argued

elsewhere that redemption is a matter of changing the meaning of some event in an

agent’s life—a transformation that has the effect of rescuing meaning (in the thick

sense) in an agent’s past. Redemption is in an agent’s best interest because it rescues

some amount of meaning in life—and meaning in our lives matters to us. When an

agent redeems some bad experience or activity, he does not change rigid facts about

what happened (the fact that the event is, say, a moral violation) but rather changes the

role that violation plays in a larger life narrative. The moral failing may stay an object

fitting of remorse. In some cases of moral failure, there is nothing the agent can do to

wipe away the fact that he committed a moral violation—this is the rigid part of the

past. A past moral violation will always be a moral violation in the same way that the

sexual assault victim must always acknowledge that she was made to do things against

her will or that Carter must accept that he was voted out of office.

However, just as in the other non-moral cases, the agent with a moral failure

can shape the role a moral failing will play in his life story and in the life stories of

others intersecting with his. Redemption does not expunge moral failings from an

agent’s record but rather demands that the agent put her failures—once committed—to

a good end. Recall that while Carter may no longer regard the 1980 defeat as a loss for

him in the thick, eudaimonistic sense of meaning, he cannot deny the fact that he was

run out of office that year. Similarly, an agent with a moral failing cannot deny that

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the action was a moral violation. He can, however, allow that failure to contribute to

his life in a positive way, in the eudaimonistic sense, when he fashions a way for it to

go to some good use.

Will the agent allow that moral failing to perpetuate further bad actions so that

it comes to represent the beginning of a journey into destructive behavior? Will he

allow it to gnaw at him as some stand-alone event—one that he regrets and that does

not fit within his self-conception as a good person? Or will he instead choose to

engage in redemptive activity, in which case he imagines a future for himself where he

looks back on his moral failings neither as entirely anomalous to his life, nor as

something negatively dominating it, but as an important lesson, a turning point in a

progressively successful quest for moral insight?

If the agent chooses to respond to his moral failing in the latter way and is

successful at redemption, then he still has reason for remorse regarding his moral

violation (indeed that is built into the lesson that it carries for him), but at the same

time is warranted in the felt sense that his life narrative tracks a successful quest for

moral insight, and because of this, expresses loving engagement with things of value.

His life has meaning. The hope of redemption is, therefore, the hope that the agent will

be able to accept what he made of his past and can find meaning in it. This may mean

accepting that a moral violation that is still the object of remorse is also a turning point

for good, or that a defeat that was at the time painful was turned into a re-launching

pad for a wonderful career, or that a particular suffering that was scarring and

threatened to curdle one’s relationship to the world, was eventually turned into a time

of learning and development.

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It might be natural to worry still that even on this view of redemption as

narrative transformation, I can justify my terrible actions when they turn out to cause

good effects. Imagine an agent tortures a person in order to extract information that, as

it turns out, “saves” one hundred people. She expresses regret at “having to torture”

the individual but takes the gamble that such a moral violation will be “worth it”

because the cost of torturing will be less than the cost of letting one hundred people

die. At the time of her cost/benefit analysis, she concludes that her current bad action

will be “redeemed” when the lives of the one hundred are saved.

Superficially, all the criteria for redemption on my account are satisfied in this

case: a regretted event (the torture) bearing negative import successfully advances a

highly valuable aim (the saving of one hundred lives). There may be theorists who will

want to count this as redemption. After all, we might find it natural to say something

like “well, at least she saved 100 people,” as if her saving them meant that the torture

victim’s suffering did not “go to waste.”

There is something wrong with this example, however. The problem is that the

regret in the agent is not the cause of the so-called “redemptive” behavior. The

behavior—saving 100 people—in this case is the choice the agent made in the first

place, the choice the agent still stands by and would do again and does not regret, all

things considered. Indeed, the agent is simply making the all things considered

judgment to accept the moral cost of torture. Saving 100 people is not, for the agent, a

response to perceived threat to an agent’s meaning in her life. Rather, the agent

decides that an action, though unpleasant, is a means to an end that matters to her

more than the worry that the action is morally wrong.

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In this imagined scenario, the agent deliberates and chooses to torture based on

a utility calculus. When she regrets “having to torture,” she does not regret her action

all told, but instead regrets that the circumstances called upon her to do something she

would rather not do. She does not regret her decision because she thinks it was wrong.

She regrets that making what she considers the right decision, involved something

unpleasant. Saving the 100 people, then, cannot be regarded as a response to regret

that threatened the meaningfulness of her life.

Let us now imagine a different scenario altogether. Imagine an agent who

chooses to torture and saves 100 people, but comes to regret her decision. She finds

herself terribly conflicted, worried that her hands are bloodied by her action, but

unsure as to how to continue on given her discomfort with a past that now haunts her.

Her remorse expresses the concern that the saved 100 people did not make torture the

right choice. Her regret is of the kind that threatens the meaning in her life. Her having

tortured puts her sense of herself, the validity of her aims, in jeopardy. She is struck

with the thought that the story of her life has somehow gone in a bad direction and that

she has done things she can no longer endorse. She feels alienated from her decisions

and wishes she could go back and do things differently. Though she cannot change the

rigid facts of the past, she can change the meaning of the torture from a terrible

mistake to something else: a terrible mistake that forced her to confront the kind of

person she had become and to imagine, instead, who she wanted to be.

Now imagine that the agent sought forgiveness for her offenses from the

victim and the family of the victim. Imagine that after her profound conversion, the

agent begins a lifelong journey into the methods and practices of non-violent conflict

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resolution. She masters skills in peaceful negotiation and puts them to work in her

daily life. She becomes a strong advocate for non-violent negotiation and comes to

find great meaning in advising others in its merits. She works very hard to lobby for

installation of non-violent negotiation coursework in federal agencies such as the CIA,

as well as municipal organizations such as police forces. Along with an organization

aimed at raising awareness of the practical benefits of peaceful conflict resolution, she

fights very hard to have instructors teach classes in its methods at local high schools.

She looks back on her past with complicated emotions since her past actions are still

fitting for remorse (and, fittingly, she is still remorseful of them). At the same time,

she has come to find it meaningful that these horrible acts she committed at least

forced her to confront terrible truths about herself and humanity, and what she learned

from her encounter with moral violation brought her closer to everything she cares

about today.

In the former case of the torturer who does not regret all things considered, but

merely the sad fact that she had to play a particular role, the regret in the agent is not

expressive of a perceived threat to the meaning in the life of the agent, and so is not

genuine redemption. In contrast to this is the latter imagined agent whose remorse

over her activities is expressive of a perceived threat to the meaning in her life. This

perceived threat is followed by activity that transforms the meaning of the torture from

mere moral disaster in a downward trajectory to a disaster that meaningfully forced the

agent to confront the ugliness of what she had become, giving her reasons to change

her life for the better.

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On my view, the case of the torture is not genuine redemption and so, removes

the skeptic’s objection that my account allows for the above case. I concede that some

might be tempted to say that the agent in this torture case “redeems” her ugly act or

“redeems herself” by her saving act of the 100, but I argue that such a temptation is a

gloss on the concept. The torturer in this case likely feels relief that her gamble turned

out okay—that her saving the 100 people ended up making torture the right choice.

Such relief, however, is not identical to the satisfaction that comes with having

rescued meaning from a past that, by the agent’s own lights, threatened the

meaningfulness in her life.

6.2.3.2 Redemption ought to be about payback, not narrative transformation

Another objection to my view is that some might find it natural to think that

redemption ought to be about payback and compensation and not narrative

transformation. Particularly in cases of moral failures, it is important to the concept of

redemption that an agent ought to “make up for what he has done,” say, by providing

benefits to the harmed party that are somehow proportionate to the harm done. In

cases of misfortune, too, the skeptic might say, we expect redemption to involve

someone who has suffered receiving benefits in proportion to the crimes committed

against him. On this compensatory view of the concept, redemption is achieved when

the bill is paid and when the agent has “done enough” to compensate for his failing or

received enough benefit to make up for his loss. I will argue that such a view is not a

plausible account of the phenomenon I have in mind. Payback of this kind does not

actually change the meaning of a past event and so, cannot really be said to be

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meaningful in the way that matters to the dissertation. On a compensatory view of

redemption, redemption is not a matter of fashioning an endorsable life story, but of

getting out of a debt.

In order to see why this wouldn’t be meaningful in the way I have been

arguing, consider that what matters in the cases of redemption we have been

discussing is that a past event changes in meaning from bad to good in the context of

some valuable narrative. The end result of this narrative transformation is the

restoration of lost meaningfulness in a person’s life. Recall the assault victim-turned-

crisis-counselor. I argued in Chapter I that matters to the agent is not that the assault

was followed by something good for her, such as a lottery win or even a professional

advancement. What matters to her is that her own misfortunes are transformed in

meaning from something bad to something meaningful to her life and something

importantly contributing to very positive parts of her now meaningful life.

Recall from Chapter I, too, the case of the boater who permanently harms

someone. Recall that we did not think the insurance company’s writing a large check

sufficed for redemption. I provided a counterexample for the compensatory view of

redemption in which the boater expressed remorse and following an apology, never

saw the victim again but instead, changed his life entirely for good in response to his

remorse. In the example, the boater changes his life in meaning-altering ways, making

it so that the boating accident is now an incredibly meaningful part of this man’s

trajectory, since it was this incident, he feels, that helped him turn his life around for

the better. I argued in that chapter that we would find this story redemptive.

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The fact that compensating the harmed party does not satisfy criteria for

redemption (and so does not solve the problem of lost meaning for the agent), and that

not compensating the harmed party with any benefits is consistent with redemption,

should be enough reason to dismiss the worry.

Still, the skeptic might argue that while redemption may not be achieved by

merely writing a check “big enough” to cover losses incurred, there is still some sense

in which enough good has to compensate for the bad. The way to alleviate the

skeptic’s concern here, I think, is to review the mechanics of meaning change I argued

for in the previous chapter. In order for an event to change in meaning from bad to

good in the agent’s life in a thick, eudaimonistic way, the event needs to make a

substantial contribution to a new, good aim important to the agent. This ensures that

the relationship of the bad, past event will be meaningfully connected to some good

pursuit of the agent’s.

Though he may congratulate himself for having changed the meaning of his

murder from a downward spiral to a turning point for good in his life, he would be

wrong in saying so. Walking a person across the street does not change the meaning of

the murder—though it may be in the right direction. The dimension of meaningfulness

that is the importance of the telos—in this case, the pursuit of moral reform—to the

agent has not yet been demonstrated. There has, as of yet, been only one minor effort

in this direction. Further, the success of the aim has yet to be determined. If the agent

can later tell a story about how the remorse over the offense led to a lengthy and

highly successful journey into moral rectitude, then perhaps the transformation of

meaning is plausible and redemption within reach. It also is not altogether clear what

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remorse over a murder has to do with walking an elderly person across the street—not

yet at least. If such an action were part of a larger effort to live according to moral

demands, then he might slowly be able to recover some of the lost meaning in his

great offense.

Finally, let us look at the agent’s remorse in this imagined scenaio. If an agent

is genuinely remorseful, this is because he recognizes that he failed to meet the

demands of morality. Because of this, it will not be possible for him to restore

meaning from this event in a way that preserves the integrity of the moral insight that

remorse signifies without meeting the new moral demands placed on him by virtue of

his moral failure. If his failing has generated various obligations such as apology and

return of particular benefits, etc. to the harmed party, then by all means, the agent will

need to perform these activities as part of the demonstration of his new interest in

observing moral norms. In the case of the remorseful murderer who assists a person

across the street, the story as of yet does not involve forgiveness-seeking, etc. that will

ultimately be required of him in order to redeem his moral failure.

That the meaning change is, in part, a function of the extent to which the

original offense contributes positively to the new aim, can possibly explain the

skeptic’s lingering sense that something compensatory is going on. There is a reversal

going on—the condition that the meaning of some event go from bad to good—but

such this reversal is not accomplished by compensation. The requirement for this

reversal of meaning is that offensive parts of an agent’s past must be meaningfully

connected to good projects in his life. To see that this is true consider again, the case

of Michael Milken from above. Recall that Milken’s case did not quite make it as an

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example of redemption. I argued that this was because the centrality of the aim to live

fairly, taking an active role in redistributing benefits more evenly and avoiding

exploiting others, did not seem clear, and the contribution the original fraud was

making to his philanthropy was not clear. The reason that Milken’s is not a case of

redemption is not about compensation or that Milken hasn’t “done enough”—for he

has certainly done a lot to contribute financially to very good, valuable institutions.

We think Milken’s case is not redemption if we believe that his heart doesn’t seem in

it and the connections between his fraud and philanthropy aren’t “meaningful”

enough.

For the same reason, we might find it natural to think that a person cannot

simply redeem a moral mistake by doing something good that seems entirely unrelated

to the moral mistake. Imagine a person who, in the wake of his remorse over his abuse

of his own children, sets out to redeem himself by taking up the aim of becoming a

virtuoso violinist. This agent may never achieve the redemption he seeks because it is

not at all clear how his remorse over his abuse contributes substantially to violin

playing. The connection is not meaningful. In order for the abuser-turned-violinist to

achieve redemption, he would have to demonstrate that his remorse over his moral

failures substantially contributed to violin-playing, thereby contributing to the change

in the meaning of the abuse altogether. On my account, an agent does not achieve

redemption simply by having his regret followed by an upward trajectory of success

with a valuable aim. The contribution of the bad event to the aim needs to be explicit

and, so far as I can tell, there is no explicit contribution of remorse over abuse to

excellence in the violin.

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The same concerns regarding the importance of a meaningful link between

regretted event and redeeming action, I think, guides our conflicted intuitions in the

well known example of the fictional Gauguin from Bernard Williams’ essay, “Moral

Luck.”174 Williams illustrates the role of luck in our evaluations of the worth of

actions through the fictional example of Gauguin, who he imagines is a painter who

abandons his family in order to pursue his art. William’s thesis is that our evaluation

of the goodness or badness of his abandoning his family depends upon the extent to

which he succeeds as a painter. If Gauguin succeeds as a painter and leaves us with

beautiful art, we are less likely to condemn his action, but if he is wrong about his own

talents, or he is the victim of misfortune (say, he loses his right hand to a tragic

mishap, etc.), then we are more likely to condemn his action. How things fare for

Gauguin, argues Williams, affects our evaluation of the worth of the abandonment of

his family.

The example superficially looks like a case of redemption: an agent rescues

meaning from his abandonment of his family by finding success at the valuable pursuit

of painting. The negative import of the bad event of his abandonment of his family

seems rescued of its disvalue by his success at painting. This example, however, is

only superficially a case of redemption on my account. To see that this is true,

consider the way in which the case is similar to the torture case, from above. Recall

that in the torture case, the agent does not regard her having tortured as a threat to the

meaning in her life. She does not regret, all things considered, her having tortured.

Rather, she regrets that she had to torture in order to achieve something that mattered

174 Williams, “Moral Luck,” 22.

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more to her—the saving of 100 people. Her regret is not a threat to the meaning in her

life, but is a side effect of her decision that she still regards as the right choice. The

saving of the 100 people, for her, confirms that the choice was the right one of the

two: to torture or not to torture. There is no practical problem of lost meaningfulness

to be rescued for this agent.

The same goes for Bernard Williams’ fictional Gauguin. In Williams’

imagined example, Gauguin does not regret, all told, his choice to leave his family. He

regards abandoning his family as the right choice, and his regret over having to do it

does not threaten the meaning in his life, leaving him with a practical problem of lost

meaningfulness in his life. Painting and family are both meaning-making activities in a

life. His choice to abandon his bourgeois lifestyle that hemmed in his artistic vision is

a means to the end of the project that mattered more to him: becoming a painter. In

this case, family and painting are both valuable meaning-making projects. Fictional

Gauguin takes a risk and chooses one over the other. In doing so, he encounters a

conflict between meaning and the demands of moral obligations, electing to forsake

the former for the latter.

The key issue is, however, that painting does not redeem his moral failures

since there is no perceived threat to meaning for Williams’ Gauguin in the first place.

Leaving his family is precisely the choice fictional Gauguin means to make and still

stands by. This is not a case of a disoriented individual, alienated from his pursuits or

feeling hopeless over regretted activities or deep losses. This is the story of an

individual who risked one kind of meaning for another. To Williams’ point, of course,

had Gauguin failed in his pursuit of painting (in either case of reasons having to do

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with bad luck or errors under his control), Gauguin might have plausibly been in a

meaning-threatening situation, which would have provided him with the practical

problem of lost meaningfulness. That would be a different story. Had Gauguin

expressed the kind of regret that threatened meaning—in either case of his having

succeeded at or failed at painting—we could begin to talk about his redemption. Had

Gauguin suddenly been gripped by the thought that abandoning his family made no

sense, that doing so alienated him from his sense of himself as a moral person who

cares about the people in his life, etc., or had he become aware of the problems his

own actions had caused, a new story about redemption might develop.

Finally, the above cases might cause the skeptic to question to what extent my

account of redemption does or does not allow for the redemption of moral failings by

pursuits having no immediate relevance to the moral failure—say ones like producing

pieces of art or developing intellectual ideas. In each case, it would be important to

determine the dimension of meaningfulness that is the contribution the moral failure is

making to the new, good aim, as well as what kind of remorse is expressed in the

agent. If the agent truly regrets her moral infraction and finds it meaning-threatening

to her life, then efforts to repair the meaning in her life will need to demonstrate

distinctively moral insight (such as forgiveness-seeking) since, after all, it is the regret

over the infractions that is causing the threat to the meaning in her life. An intellectual

idea developed or piece of art produced that expresses an agent’s moral reform (in

addition to demonstrable behavior change) will simply be reinforcing the moral

renewal that has already begun in the agent. The possibility that development of

intellectual ideas or pieces of art could stand alone without forgiveness-seeking or

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other demonstrations of moral rectitude seems unlikely. It would be difficult to see

how the remorse is actually contributing to the new, good aim. We would, too, be

doubtful that the agent’s remorse was genuine (and meaning-threatening) if the agent

did not, in response to the remorse, demonstrate his understanding of his moral

obligations through forgiveness-seeking and general moral reform.

________

In the discussion above, I intend to draw out the importance to redemption of

meaningful connections between the offending event and the agent. I argue that the

event ought to contribute positively to an aim of some value that matters to the agent. I

argue that the key feature to redemption is transformation in meaning and not

payback, by giving the skeptic reason to doubt its centrality through counter examples

that reveal we are willing to count stories that lack efforts to compensate as

redemptive when the criteria I’ve articulated above are met. I intend the discussion to

dismantle skeptical concerns that redemption ought to be about payback. Instead, I

argue, as stated, for the importance of the particular relationships now articulated

between offending event and new, positive aim to redemption.

6.2.3.3 The plausibility of unintended redemption

Can redemption be achieved without its being intended? If so, a skeptic might

argue that this possibility might threaten the plausibility of redemption being a

practical solution to the problem of lost meaning, since redemption can be achieved

with or without its being intentional or featuring in practical deliberation. After all, the

concept no longer seems to matter if it can be achieved in spite of what we do!

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I do think redemption can be achieved without its being intended, but I do not

think this fact is an objection to the claim that redemption is a practical solution. Let

us first examine the plausibility of redemption after the fact, and then determine to

what extent this stands as an object to my account. Consider the example of the

assault-victim-turned-crisis-counselor. In the weeks after the attack, she is disoriented

and alienated from her life in general. She feels a sense of deep loss and hopelessness.

I have described the way in which she restores meaning to her life through her

activities at the crisis center but, more to the point of this dissertation, she rescues

meaning lost to the past by transforming the meaning of that past event in her life from

something utterly horrible to something that became a turning point for her toward the

meaning in her life now. This process might have occurred very intentionally for her.

Imagine, for example, that she is aware of her felt sense of meaninglessness and

recognizes that one way to solve her problem is to find the meaning in what has

happened to her. She may have thoughts such as, “I cannot let this dominate my life,”

or “I have to find some way to make sense of this loss,” or “What can I do to make

good use of this in my life?” These thoughts might lead her to pay attention to what

new relationships at the center are giving her a good feeling or perhaps to specifically

seek out a new set of knowledge and skills that her assault can teach her (such as what

women can do to reduce possibility of an attack or, differently, what kinds of

psychological clarity a crisis can bring to a life). These are beginnings of mining a bad

event for possible good use and might lead to the positive behaviors described in the

original example from Chapter I.

The same behaviors, however, might have evolved without their being the

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results of deliberation about how to redeem meaning from the past. The agent could

have found herself taking on more responsibilities at the center and only discover later

that she had made meaning from the event and because of this, was able to render her

past more meaningful than it might have been otherwise. In this case of redemption

after-the-fact, an agent may realize only later that some bad event, unbeknownst to her

at the time of its transformation, ended up playing a good role in her life. An agent

might only come to realize in retrospect that there are structural features in place in her

life that suggest a redeemed past, bad event.

I do not think this latter situation threatens the plausibility of my account as a

distinctively practical solution to the problem of lost meaning. That some agents do

not intend redemption does not make it the case that it is not possible through practical

deliberation. Redemption is one way of increasing meaning in our lives by restoring it

in the wake of regrets and losses. Though redemption is possible without explicitly

featuring in an agent’s practical deliberation, it is also possible by an agent’s

intentionally willing to achieve it. That the latter is true of the concept maintains its

plausibility as a concept that matters to us in our searches to live good lives. Perhaps

an agent might never know about her own life that it meets the success criteria for

redemption. In such a case, we say that successful redemption is true of her life story

even when she did not enjoy a felt sense of meaning as a result of it. Perhaps this kind

of redemption unbeknownst to the agent could even be secured posthumously when

good aims of the agent are fully realized and the other success criteria are met. In any

case, these possibilities do not threaten the plausibility that redemption is a practical

solution for lost meaningfulness.

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6.2.3.4 Is it always good to seek redemption?

It might be natural to think that because redemption, on my view, is a concept

with a continuous aspect (a person can redeem a bad event to a greater extent by

developing increasing amounts of positive import for an event), then it is always good

for an agent to do. After all, it seems that a person stands to gain increased meaning in

his life through redemptive efforts, regardless of success or failure, at transforming the

meaning of the event from bad to good.

It would be wrong, however, to assume this. Because they might not meet with

success, redemptive efforts are risky and have the possibility of yielding no increase in

positive import for an agent’s life or, worse, increasing its negative import.

Redemptive efforts can go wrong in many different ways, some beyond the agent’s

control. An agent can be wrong about the meaning of an original event, as well as the

value of the aim intended to redeem the original loss. Such failures can make it so that

the agent can form ill-conceived plans about what is called for, and how to secure

redemption. An agent can be duped as to the value of an aim. Perhaps she takes up a

terrible end, thinking wrongly it is a good one. Instead of achieving redemption, she

destroys herself or others in the process in a narrative of revenge or self-destruction.

Her efforts, in that case, accomplish a transformation of narrative, but not in a good

way: The agent uses a bad event toward ill use since what played the role of a singular

loss now becomes the turning point in a downward spiral of more loss.

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Similarly, an agent could be mistaken about the meaning of an original event

and because of this, form false beliefs about what to do. Perhaps the event did not bear

the negative import she thought it did. In this case the agent betrays her own

demonstrations of insight: her redemptive efforts reflect her lack of understanding of

things instead of standing as an expression of learned moral wisdom. An agent may

give such considerable weight to sunk costs that she fails to draw accurate practical

proscriptions from the event. As a result, her redemptive activity reflects her lack of

appreciation of the meanings of things. She pursues for far too long an aim of far less

value than she realizes. Still differently, an agent could simply meet up with bad luck

in her search for redemption. The list of possible ways things can go wrong goes on.

In any of these cases, an agent could be back where she started, having spent

time on a project that goes nowhere or, worse, in one that increases negative import in

her life. We may find it natural in these cases to think the agent would have done

better to leave well enough alone, to just “let it go” rather than to pursue redemption

(hindsight being 20/20). Still, my argument in this dissertation is that the agent has

good reason to, upon weighing the risks, try to rescue meaning from a bad event since,

as we discussed in Chapter III, meaning is a unique kind of value a life can have and is

worth pursuing.

6.2.3.5 Are some events/actions unredeemable?

So far, my account of redemption is compatible with the claim that there is

nothing intrinsic to an action or an event that makes it unredeemable. As long as the

event in question is capable of being represented as substantially contributing in a

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positive way to an aim of value relative to the original offense, then the agent will be

able to redeem the event. However, an event might be unredeemable on my account

when an agent does not having enough time or resources to pull off this

transformation. Contingent aspects of the human experience make certain events

unredeemable. Take as an example, the average human lifespan can appear to

determine the possibility for redemption. Even if Hitler were to have been gripped by

remorse for what he had done, it is unlikely that the losses incurred at his hands could

have been redeemed by any amount of narrative reconstruction throughout the rest of

his life (that is, if he had lived a long one). It is difficult to imagine the circumstances

under which redemptive efforts could change his devastating and expansive program

of evil into an event that represented a transforming turn-around that met the demands

of the overall threshold of positive import.

Talk about redeeming horrendous evils may give rise to concern addressed

above regarding agent self-deception and excuse making. As I argue above, I do not

think my account encourages excuse making, though I do see the force of the worry.

Recall that on my account, a moral violation does not change in its intrinsic value

when it is redeemed. The life narrative in question—the turn of the events after the

moral violation and the overall trajectory—is what regains lost meaning for the overall

story. A moral offender can increase his life’s meaning by changing the direction of

his life narrative when he allows a moral failing to play the role of provision of

insight, of illuminating the moral landscape in which he lives. In this, there is no

excuse making, so long as the agent’s efforts satisfy the criteria I have laid out above.

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The thought that no event is unredeemable must then apply to cases of

misfortune as well. A family who loses a child to suicide, say, will never rejoice in the

death of their beloved. Nonetheless, my argument is that family members can, and

would do well to, restore meaning in their lives by allowing their child’s death to

contribute to something good: to strengthen connections to other family members, to

help others understand one another better, etc. Some persons who seek redemption of

loss of a loved one set up foundations in their beloved’s honor, while others simply

allow the bad event to give rise to new, good changes in their lives, etc. In any case,

redemption of a bad event must meet the specified success criteria articulated above.

An agent cannot restore meaningfulness to her life simply by “forgetting” the bad

event or by insisting that it had good meaning when there is overwhelming otherwise.

Rather, she must examine the badness of the event fully in order to pluck the good

possibilities from its ruins.

6.3 Conclusion

In the paragraphs and chapters above, I outlined a positive account of the

concept of redemption, what its criteria are and why it matters to us. In doing so, I

have assumed the concept deserves philosophical attention. Our everyday use of the

concept of redemption suggests its importance to us in our efforts to live good lives,

but as of yet there is very little development in the way of a philosophical account of

it.

I have argued throughout this dissertation that redemption is a practical

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solution to the problem of lost meaningfulness in our lives—a problem generated by

meaning-threatening events in our lives such as deep regrets, moral failures or

misfortunes. I have argued that we can restore meaning to our pasts through a process

of narrative transformation, in which we take up activities that put to good use the bad,

past event, thereby effecting a rescue of lost meaning and mitigating or altogether

eliminating the original regret, remorse or felt sense of meaninglessness. I argued that

objects of redemption tend to be either deliberative errors or unfortunate experiences

or moral failures that threaten central projects or beloved objects of ours. I claimed

that successful redemption of these events involves transforming the narrative in

which these bad events are situated, fashioning new roles for the bad events, such that

they bear positive import to some degree and become important parts of meaningful

narratives for us.

I outlined criteria for redemption in the chapters above that involve satisfying a

variety of conditions that would change the import of the bad, past event. These

conditions are that the agent must adopt an aim of value that the bad, event past

substantially advances in some way and that is of central importance to the agent. I

conceded that these criteria—dimensions of meaning, as I referred to them above—

have complicated threshold effects. I acknowledged that more work would need to be

done to further articulate how the dimensions work together to determine the meaning

of the agent. I claimed that when an agent satisfies the criteria of a change in meaning

of an event in her life from bad to good in a thick, eudaimonistic way, she is able to

fashion a new, good role for a bad, past event in her life within the context of a new

life narrative. This is the narrative transformation of redemption. I further argued that

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this narrative transformation of redemption meets the demands of meaningfulness,

which is, we know from our discussion in Chapter III, something like the loving

engagement with and pursuit of an object of value in a positive way. When an agent

redeems something of her past, she is able to represent that event as playing a positive

role in the development of some object of value with which she is lovingly engaged.

My account has several advantages. First, it can explain why the concept of

redemption continues to function in our everyday conversation; it matters to us

because meaningfulness in our lives matters to us. Second, it can explain our

evaluative responses to a wide variety of phenomena, including moral reform after

moral failings, overcoming setbacks or misfortunes, and the transformation of

misfortune or error into growth, development and opportunity. The same structural

features—the success criteria in my account—can be used to explain each of these

disparate cases.

Throughout the chapters, I raised critical objections against my account but

provided reasons to think such objections were, in the end, dismissible. Recall for

example the concern that redemption ought to have payback and compensation as its

central feature—not narrative transformation. I defused this objection by providing

several counter examples we find it natural to think are redemptive but do not contain

compensatory activity. Another example is the worry that my account encourages

papering over horrible truths. I removed this concern by appealing to the criteria I

have developed for redemption. I argued that this objection is not a concern, because it

was the flexible part of the past—the meaning of the past—that redemption affected,

not the facts of what happened, and that changing the past in this way requires genuine

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development in aims of real value.

Finally, another asset of my account is its avoidance of the problems that

plague both the Hebrew-Christian model of redemption, as well as Nietzsche’s

creative response to the aforementioned model. Recall from Chapter I, the concern

that the Hebrew-Christian view seemed tied to compensation—a feature we now have

determined ill-suited to the task of rescuing meaningfulness in the past. Recall, too,

the concern that Nietzsche’s account comes with some undesirable moral implications

that stem from the subjective nature of the criteria of affirmation and the doctrine of

eternal return. I argue that my account improves upon the Nietzschean model by

preserving its insights, particularly the central place of narrative transformation in

redemption, while also avoiding the moral problems that accompany such a subjective

account of redemption. On my account, both subjective (the centrality of the aim in

the agent’s psychological economy—how much the agent cares about the account),

along with the objective value of the aim, contribute to the transformation process. I

argue that my account yields intuitive results and covers the kinds of cases we tend to

regard as successfully redemptive. My account suggests that we can make the most of

our lives even if we can’t change the facts of what happened. We can come to endorse

our pasts, our life narratives, through the meaning-making process of narrative

transformation that is redemption.

In the last two chapters I have anticipated some objections—ones that largely

surrounded moral implications of my view. I have argued that my view of redemption

is compatible with the claim that an immoral action remains the appropriate object for

remorse (since the agent cannot change the fact of the matter, that he committed an

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immoral action, just as in the example of Carter, who could not change the fact of his

1980 defeat), but suggests that an agent can change the meaning of those moral

infractions in the context of larger life narratives (just as Carter changed the role of the

defeat from career ender to re-launching his career). What is at stake in redemption is

not the undoing of something bad, but the changing of a role some event plays in a

person’s life narrative. I suggested that this view is compatible with our moral

intuitions, while also providing us a mechanism to explain a wide variety of cases to

which we apply the concept of redemption.

The account I provide here in this dissertation is merely a sketch. There are

many unanswered questions. Perhaps more work would need to be done to determine

how the concept functions in our conversations about art (We say, for example, that a

particular piece of art or film was “redemptive” but we do not necessarily refer to a

transformation in narrative in the way I describe in this dissertation). We might also

want to know to what extent entire groups of people who have suffered or, themselves,

committed horrible crimes can be said, all together, to effect redemption. Take as an

example Rwandans in the wake of the violence and bloodshed between different tribes

and ruling governments. Can the Rwandans as a whole community effect redemption

for themselves as a group in the way I have articulated above that would restore

meaningfulness to the lives of individuals but, too, to an entire nation of people? Can

certain periods of human history be redeemed of their disvalue along the dimensions

of import I develop above? Finally, it might be that having a tendency to redeem past

events is a virtue—an activity that avoids the extremes denying the past and,

alternately, wallowing in it—but such a claim would require more attention than was

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appropriate for the scope of this dissertation. These are a few examples of further areas

for research that this dissertation points to and that I, for one, look forward to

investigating.

260

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