Making meaning
Keywords: Philosophy.

What can we do to make our lives more personally meaningful? In this dissertation, I develop an answer to this question by drawing on underexplored aspects of the relationships between meaning, caring, and shared agency. In particular, I draw on the phenomenon in which we cultivate caring through our participation in socially constituted practices (such as friendship, philosophy, or art-making), relying, as we do, on the support and guidance of others regarding what to care about, and how. This phenomenon is underexplored in at least two respects that receive considerable attention here. First, the relationship between caring and acting is standardly thought by philosophers of action to be one in which caring structures and guides downstream acting; but the phenomenon in question rather inverts that relationship to one in which we act for the promise of caring in some particular (appropriate) manner. Second, this reliance on others is often itself technologically mediated by, for example, digital learning platforms, social media websites, cognitive-behavioral therapeutic exercises, and games; this raises interesting questions about the nature and ethics of influence through design, especially regarding the cultivation of caring. Chapters 1 and 2 develop a modest subjectivist theory of meaning in life in which becoming more fulfilled makes our lives more personally meaningful. Chapter 1 accounts for becoming more fulfilled as the process whereby we come to care more richly and deeply about something or someone by endeavoring to do certain activities well, where doing them well benefits the person or thing in question and requires us to care more richly or deeply than we presently do. It also addresses two arguments against subjectivism about meaning in life and shows that subjectivism need not be counter-intuitive. Chapter 2 says more about those activities by articulating a practical problem in our lives that personal meaning has some claim to ameliorating, and spelling out what patterns of agency address this problem. Based on my problem-first approach to personal meaning, this means that those patterns of agency should be viewed as what we can do to make our lives more personally meaningful. The practical problem arises from an overinvestment in the completion of tasks, which gives rise to a self-destructive exercise of our planning agency over time; and the solution is to refocus on inexhaustible activities driven by our own personal ideals. It also argues that rival proposals fail to offer a genuine solution; narrativist proposals, in particular, fail because narratives are not proper guides to living at all. Chapters 3 and 4 move toward a general theory of design-based influence by accounting for the nature and ethics of nudging and gamification, respectively, as central species of such influence. Chapter 3 accounts for nudging as having three parts, analyzed as the enabling, triggering, and manifesting of dispositions to reason with heuristics. It spells out an autonomy-based ethical worry about nudging according to which being nudged undermines an agent's ability to reason well and thus guide her own conduct; it then responds to that worry by showing how an agent can still reason well while being nudged. Along the way, three 'design specifications' for ethical nudging come into view, in which the agent's own normative judgment plays a central role. However, manipulation as a distinct worry also comes into view. Chapter 4 addresses that worry while analyzing gamification as inducing striving play. This renders gamification an interesting sub-species of nudging in which the heuristics in question are, additionally, provided to the influenced agent. It also argues that manipulative gamification and manipulative design more generally are best explained in terms of deception about the designers' own purposes, and that manipulative gamification typically hinders us from living meaningful lives. Looking ahead, these two chapters establish several ethical constraints on design-based support for cultivating caring