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2 results

  • 1 - Why Should We Care about Meaning?

  • Clifford Williams, Trinity International University, Illinois
  • Book:
    Religion and the Meaning of Life
    Published online:
    23 March 2020
    Print publication:
    09 April 2020, pp 8-29

  • Summary

    Chapter 1 gives two answers to the question, why should we care about meaning? The first answer comes from Blaise Pascal. He was appalled at people who appear to be indifferent to the meaning of their lives because, he believes, everyone naturally cares about meaning. Given this fact, we expect that everyone will care about meaning. This expectation is muted somewhat, however, by the fact that there are a number of causes of indifference. A second answer to the question of the chapter connects caring about meaning with believing in God: we should care about meaning because God has given us desires for intrinsic goods and right pleasures and because God desires for us to satisfy these desires. This answer is compatible with duty ethics (deontological ethics), happiness ethics (hedonism), and virtue ethics. The chapter suggests that caring about meaning can be regarded as a virtue alongside traditional virtues, and it describes the features of such a virtue.

  • 8 - Primary goods, capabilities, and children

    • By Colin M. MacLeod, Associate Professor of Law and Philosophy at the University of Victoria
  • Edited by Harry Brighouse, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Ingrid Robeyns, Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam
  • Book:
    Measuring Justice
    Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    28 January 2010, pp 174-192

  • Summary

    The debate between advocates of a primary-goods focused approach to justice and advocates of a capabilities focused approach has been conducted without much explicit attention to how the perspective of children should be represented and interpreted. This chapter makes some modest progress toward remedying this neglect. As with Rawls's theory, the capabilities approach has been developed and refined in many different ways. Crucial motivation for the capabilities approach lies in the claim that the metric of primary goods is insufficiently sensitive to diversity within the human population. There is a strong tendency in capabilities theory to privilege agency considerations and there is no direct recognition of intrinsic goods of childhood. So even if focus on functionings for children is compatible with sensitivity to intrinsic goods of childhood, more work needs to be done to illuminate the precise character and significance of these goods.