On Living a More Meaningful Life

In this dissertation, I differentiate between the philosophical questions of "What is the meaning of life?" and "What is involved in coming to live a more meaningful life?"; the aim of the dissertation is to provide an answer to the latter, but not the former, question. Previous attempts to distinguish between more and less meaningful lives have appealed to the notion of objective values; my account attempts to distinguish between more and less meaningful lives by appealing, not to the notion of objective values, but rather to the extent to which individuals actualize their capacities to have deep concerns and to live in accordance with them. I argue that coming to live a more meaningful life is a matter of 1) coming to live in better accordance with what one happens to care deeply about and 2) coming to adopt a more befitting set of deep concerns [wherein to say that a set of concerns is befitting is to say that a) it is possible to adopt those deep concerns; and b) that one's doing so would increase the overall extent to which one cared deeply about things in accordance with which one had some capacity to live, and/or one's doing so would increase the overall extent to which one was able to live in accordance with what one cared deeply about.] In this dissertation I also address some of the broad practical issues which are connected to the problem of how to live more meaningfully.

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