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Abstract

This entry offers a deﬁnition of life by distinguishing between life as organic entity and life as meaningful existence. This distinction is meant to be a limited, but constructive, view of life, one that provides a framework for delineating and engaging bioethical issues pertaining to humans. To that end, the essay proceeds with an account of life as meaningful existence, elaborates the notion of meaningfulness, and brings out the implications of this notion for two bioethical issues: the morality of abortion and the human treatment of the environment.

Introduction

Two very general approaches to deﬁne life are biological and humanistic. The biological approach views life simply as organic matter. This approach is used to mark a distinction between living and nonliving things, with living things described as organic matter and nonliving as inorganic matter. Living things are organic because they respond to stimuli, and nonliving things are inorganic because they do not. Living things include animals, plants, fungi, algae, and other microorganisms, and nonliving things include rocks, mountain ranges, rivers, and the like.

The humanistic approach is concerned with the meaning and purpose of life. Essentially, it considers life either as having inherent meaning or as lacking it. These alternative positions within the humanistic framework obviously reﬂect competing views of life, one positive and one negative. The positive view presumes that life has inherent meaning (purpose or value), and the quest therefore is to search for and identify this meaning. This positive position includes religious and secular views of life (Kurtz 1969, pp. 1–14). The negative view, by contrast, denies that life has inherent meaning or purpose; as such, it recommends that humans simply resign themselves to and accept whatever comes their way. Rightly or wrongly, this position has been attributed to thinkers as diverse as Arthur Schopenhauer and eminent American lawyer Clarence Darrow (Edwards 1972, pp. 467–77). For the purpose of the present study, the deﬁnition of life to be elaborated focuses on the positive humanistic view. This is because the positive humanistic view is concerned with making sense of the world in which we live and the circumstances in which we ﬁnd ourselves. And, on this account, it is in the context of endeavoring to make sense of the world in which we live that we sometimes contend with issues of morality in general, of which the present bioethical investigations are reﬂective. But before amplifying this positive humanistic view, a few words need to be said about its negative alternative.

The negative humanistic view of life is obviously pessimistic and fatalistic in claiming that life has no meaning and that there is nothing we can do about our circumstances or situations except resign ourselves to whatever fate throws our way. Such a fatalistic outlook has one very signiﬁcant implication for morality: it entails that humans are not moral agents since an agent is one who can change or alter her/his condition by her/his deliberate choices and actions. But if this is the case about humans, then all our actions and decisions are beyond our control and we cannot help but act as we do. On such a view, then, we are no different from the river which is destined to ﬂow downstream or heat which is destined to rise. Indeed, our actions would not really be ours because they do not come about as a result of our volition. Rather, our supposed actions would be inexplicable occurrences, events that happen to us, perhaps much to our bewilderment and consternation. It follows from all this that we are not morally responsible entities. In short, the negative humanistic view’s assertion that life has no meaning has consequences that are detrimental to human engagement in moral activities. Because we do engage in moral activities, however, this negative humanistic position cannot be accurate in its view that life has no meaning. Given this background context, the positive position, which asserts the contrary view that life has meaning, now will be ampliﬁed.

Life As Meaningful Existence

To say that life has meaning is to say, among other things, that our day-to-day existence is goal oriented or purpose driven. This goal orientation is part and parcel of our makeup and of nature generally. For humans, what this means is that it is in our nature to set goals and to try to achieve those goals by engaging in the appropriate activities that will lead us to realizing them. In setting goals and in endeavoring to achieve them, we seek to alter the condition or situation in which we ﬁnd ourselves. We may not always succeed in achieving our set goals, but it is the very fact of proposing goals and seeking to achieve them by our actions, even in the face of failure, that makes our existence meaningful. And our existence has meaning because there is always something to hope for. This view of life as goal oriented is teleological, from the Greek word telos, which means purpose. It is this view of life that is expressed in some versions of the philosophy known as existentialism and that is also expressed in the belief systems of diverse religions and cultures all over the world.

Existentialism And Meaning

The central idea in existentialism is that humans should focus on the nature and manner of their existence, on what is called their concrete existence or lived reality, than worry about any supposed essence they may or may not believe in. The manner of our existence, in the sense of how we live life and what we make of our individual selves, is within the domain of our choice. Indeed, for the existentialist, the freedom to choose is what makes humans unique. Alasdair MacIntyre expresses this point very succinctly: “If any single thesis could be said to constitute the doctrine of existentialism, it would be that the possibility of choice is the central fact of human nature” (1972, p. 149). It is this central idea in existentialist philosophy that is expressed in the oft-cited existentialist creed that existence precedes essence.

The existentialist focus on lived reality is paramount because it means one can do something about one’s material condition, whereas one cannot do anything about one’s supposed essence. Essence here is understood as a ﬁxed, inalterable thing that constitutes human nature. Existentialists deny that there is such a thing. To say then that one can do something about one’s lived reality is to say that one has the capacity to change the circumstances in which one ﬁnds oneself. This notion is empowering in that it recognizes one’s agency; it recognizes one as a subject in contradistinction to an object. A subject can originate and terminate change through her/his voluntary actions; an object is not the kind of thing to originate or terminate change. To conceive of oneself as a subject, as an agent who can effect change, means that one recognizes oneself as of the kind to shape one’s life (or destiny or future) by setting goals and engaging in activities to realize those goals. For the existentialist, then, one makes choices that give meaning to one’s life.

The existentialist view has been of tremendous signiﬁcance to oppressed groups universally. These groups include racial and ethnic minorities, women, gays, lesbians and transgendered persons, the disabled, and the aged, among others. It has strengthened the beliefs of such groups that they can change the circumstances in which they exist as a result of oppressive forces and social practices. Indeed, members of such groups consider it an ethical imperative to choose to afﬁrm their humanity which is what is being called into question by the forces of oppression they are contesting. In choosing to afﬁrm their humanity, therefore, such groups are endeavoring to give meaning to their existence.

Other Determinants Of Meaning

While purpose or goal orientation is necessary for life to be considered meaningful, it is, however, not sufﬁcient. What this means is that, in order for life to be deemed meaningful there must be some form of purpose or goal driving the activities of the entity whose life is involved, simply because having activities that are purposeful or goal oriented does not mean that the life of the entity that performs such activities is meaningful in a morally signiﬁcant way. This is particularly true of animal life. Animals no doubt act in ways that are purposeful or goal oriented, but we do not consider animal life to have meaning as we do human life. So, what else is involved, in addition to purposefulness or goal orientation of activities, to give life meaning in a morally signiﬁcant way?

Two other determinants of meaning are value and self-worth (Baumeister 1991, pp. 32–47). Value is the need humans have for legitimation and justiﬁcation. Legitimation means that we are concerned about how others perceive and evaluate us morally. We want others to perceive and evaluate us in a positive light, so this desire motivates us to perform actions and engage in activities that we consider right/good and to refrain from or avoid performing actions that we deem wrong/ bad. By so doing, we are endeavoring to place a positive value on our lives (Baumeister 1991, p. 36). The same desire is what motivates us to justify ourselves. We seek to justify ourselves or, more speciﬁcally, our actions, especially when we believe that those actions will cause others to perceive and evaluate us negatively. To justify ourselves in such situations is to endeavor to present ourselves in a positive light despite the actions we have performed or to make excuses for performing them. But the very fact of us seeking to legitimate and justify ourselves at all is to give meaning to our life by way of the actions we perform. This endeavor is a basic human need.

Self-worth is the other determinant of meaning (Baumeister 1991, p. 44). It is a positive social value that an individual places on herself/himself and that makes her/him feel superior to others (Baumeister 1991, p. 44). This value may be owing to the individual’s status, occupation, wealth/income, accomplishment, etc. The point of placing such a value on the self is for others to acknowledge and respect us. This is all the more so when the value itself is a consequence of one’s own effort. In such situations, the individual wants to say “I deserve the status I occupy, or the wealth I have or the position I occupy in society.”

But not all social values that reﬂect meaning come from individual effort or achievement. Some are “inherited” or acquired as a result of the prevailing institutional structures in the society. Examples here are once racially stratiﬁed societies such as the American South and apartheid South Africa. These societies were structured in a hierarchy with whites at the top and blacks at the bottom, and interspersed between these two color spectra were various other colors of humans. Given such a social stratiﬁcation, an individual who happened to be white acquired more social value than members of nonwhite social groups and so felt superior to those others. A similar phenomenon is obtained in the caste system in India. In all such socially stratiﬁed societies, the individual who is positively valued is merely a beneﬁciary of a value she/he did not earn, and his/her counterpart who is negatively valued is a recipient of a value she/he did not deserve. All social values in such stratiﬁed systems are undeserved.

How does this issue of self-worth relate to the meaning of life? The value that one is deemed to have in society, whether acquired as a result of individual effort or inherited as a result of the very institutional setup and structures of the society, dictates how one thinks about the degree to which life has meaning. Those at the bottom of any society’s structures who believe that they cannot change the structures that overwhelm and dominate them generally think of life in a pessimistic way. They see life as an almost impossible uphill climb and view themselves powerless to do anything about their situation. On the other hand, those who beneﬁt from the institutional structures and setup of the society have a positive outlook on life and see life as meaningful. In this regard, they also see themselves as agents with an obligation to ensure the continuation of the status quo.

Religious Outlooks And Meaning

The foregoing determinants of meaning are what make human goal-oriented activities different from those of animals. These determinants also ﬁnd expression in various religious outlooks about the meaning of life. For example, in Judeo-Christian thought, this idea about human value and self-worth is present in various beliefs such as the belief that there is dignity in labor and the belief that life is sacred and hence that suicide and homicide are wrongful acts. Judaism in particular maintains that life is not an accident, something that merely happens to be given meaning by humans, as some existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre have maintained (Menkiti 1984, p. 178). Rather, Judaism believes that life was created by God who then gave it inherent meaning or purpose (Coopersmith 2014). Like Judaism, Islam too believes that God created humans, among other things, and endowed humans with free will. It is the possession of free will, the capacity for choice, which sets humans apart from other things in nature (Sadr 2014). Also of signiﬁcance, Islam considers religion as the medium through which humans manifest purposefulness in life (Akgunduz 2014).

There is no direct or explicit statement about the meaning and value of life in Buddhist thought, yet an attribution of a positive view of life can be made to Buddhism in light of certain Buddhist teachings about understanding and overcoming suffering. For example, central to Buddhist thought is the idea of how to liberate oneself from suffering (Sumedho 2001). Buddhists believe that suffering comes from “all the wrong assumptions we make about ourselves and the universe we live in” (Sumedho 2001). These wrong assumptions are about, among other things, unfulﬁlled wants, doubt, worry, and fear of the unknown (Sumedho 2001). Liberation therefore comes about through “mindfulness” or understanding of the experience of the suffering. Mindfulness means grasping the fact of the experience (of the suffering) and not trying to evade or avoid it. It does not matter what the experience is of. It may be of physical pain, trauma, or even cancer that one is going through. What is of signiﬁcance is that one must come to terms with the suffering experience. For Buddhists, when one comes to terms with the experience of the suffering, then one overcomes the suffering and gets liberated from it. In this way one ﬁnds bliss or happiness. It can be inferred from this Buddhist view of overcoming suffering that, for Buddhists, the human quest is for bliss or happiness. Life is indeed fraught with suffering, but how we attend to the suffering makes a difference in terms of whether we will be liberated from it and attain bliss or we will be mired in it indeﬁnitely in misery. To repeat, it is through the experiencing and overcoming of suffering that the meaning and value of human life is articulated in Buddhist thought.

Finally, in the belief systems of some traditional African societies, this idea about the meaning and value of life is presented through the conception of personhood held by members of the societies and the social roles assigned to persons. Most traditional African societies distinguish between person as a biological organism and person as a social/moral entity (Menkiti 1984, p. 172). Infants and children are persons in the sense of biological organisms but not persons in the sense of moral/social entities. Adults, by contrast, are persons in both senses. The reason for this distinction is that persons in the social/ moral sense are cognitively developed beings with assigned roles, duties, responsibilities, and obligations in and to the community. In this sense, moral/social persons are rights bearers. Because children are not cognitively developed to be assigned for social roles and stations, they are therefore not considered moral/social persons; hence, they are not rights bearers. On this conception of personhood, in short, rights are applicable to an entity only if the entity can also be assigned duties and responsibilities. Of course, children do grow up to becoming adults and, in consequence, acquire rights, duties, and responsibilities. But until such time when they are considered cognitively developed enough to be assigned social roles, they are not social/moral persons.

Menkiti characterizes the gradual process by which an individual progresses from biological personhood as a child to social/moral personhood as an adult as “processual” (1984, p. 172). This dual (or “processual”) conception of a person is signiﬁcant for the meaning and value of life because, for traditional African societies, it is through the individual’s contribution to the community, by way of her/his social role and status, that the individual’s life is rendered meaningful and valuable both to the community and to the individual herself/himself. Speaking of the Akan people of Ghana, Kwasi Wiredu expresses this view as follows: “To the Akan what gives meaning to life is usefulness to self, family, community, and the species” (1996, p. 57).

Bioethical Implications Of The Foregoing Views Of Life

The foregoing views about life, especially its meaning and value, have important consequences for certain moral issues that arise in bioethics. Two such issues are the morality of abortion and the human treatment of the environment. These will be elaborated in turn.

(i) Abortion: The moral view one expresses on the subject of abortion depends upon and reﬂects the concept of a person one holds. It has just been noted that some traditional African societies subscribe to a dual or “processual” concept of a person. The implication of such a concept of a person for the issue of abortion is that abortion will not be a moral issue to those societies. This is because the fetus, like children, is a biological organism but not a person, at least not in the social/ moral sense, and so does not have a right to life that is infringed by an abortion. This means, in effect, that the kind of moral conﬂict that animates discussions over abortion in some parts of the world, but especially in the West, does not apply in those traditional African societies. If there is a prohibition against abortion in those societies, then such prohibition would have to be for reasons other than considerations about fetal rights.

In the West, by contrast, the moral issue over abortion is presented as a conﬂict of rights. Speciﬁcally, it is a conﬂict between the fetus’ right to life and the mother’s right to make decisions about what happens in and to her body, in particular, and about her life as a whole, when she is pregnant. For antiabortionists, the very existence of a life at any stage of pregnancy precludes the woman from having any interest that overrides the fetus’ right to life. Even if the pregnancy would endanger the woman’s life and the woman would most probably die, some antiabortionists maintain that the fetus’ right to life is paramount and cannot be abridged (Noonan 2006). For the proabortionist, on the other hand, the fetus is a mere biological organism. It has not yet developed the characteristics – such as brain states, consciousness, and self-consciousness, among others – that would make it a social/moral entity and hence a rights claimant. Only when an entity has those characteristics does it become a person and then becomes a rights claimant. Until then, the entity has no rights that are being infringed if the woman chooses to have an abortion. On this view, a person is more than a biological organism; it is a social/ moral entity (Warren 2006).

It can be seen that the moral issue over abortion, as staked out by the antiabortionists and proabortionists, is driven by diametrically opposed and conﬂicting concepts of personhood. Antiabortionists hold what is known as a genetic concept of a person. On this concept, a person comes about when the genes of a man and a woman unite in conception. And a person is necessarily an entity that has rights. Paramount among a person’s rights is the right to life. Proabortionists, by contrast, hold a developmental or evolutionary concept of a person. On this concept, pregnancy produces a zygote which is a genetic human being. The genetic human being then develops over time and in stages until it becomes a person after it has acquired certain characteristics (mentioned above). On this view, being genetically human does not automatically entail being socially/morally human, and hence a person. It will be noticed that the proabortionist concept of a person is in some ways similar to the dual or “processual” concept of a person outlined above held in traditional African societies.

(ii) The Environment: A second issue that arises in connection with discussions about the meaning and value of life pertains to human treatment of the environment. For life to thrive in general and for human life to have meaning and value in particular, it must exist in an environment that is conducive to its sustenance. In bioethics, the environment itself is a closed-circuit, uniﬁed system that contains and sustains all life forms. It is a closed-circuit and uniﬁed system because every living thing contained therein is organically linked to each other, and all are dependent on each other for continued life. Given the mutual dependency of all living things, the environment therefore does not just refer to the space within which all living things exist, but also to the interaction among all life forms contained therein. In this regard, the environment is a life-support system for all organisms (MacKinnon and Fiala 2015, p. 350).

This conception of the environment challenges humans to treat the environment properly; otherwise all life forms will be endangered. The challenge obviously is for humans because only humans can effect changes in the environment for better or worse by their deliberate choices and actions. This is the reason that the discussion on how to treat the environment so that it would continue to be a life-sustaining system turns on an examination of the relation between human beings and the rest of nature.

Two dominant perspectives from which human relation with the rest of the natural world is examined are anthropocentric (human centered) and ecocentric (nature centered). The anthropocentric perspective views nature and all therein as existing for humans to use as we deem ﬁt. On this view, the only kinds of things that have intrinsic value are humans. This means that only humans are valued in and of themselves. All other natural entities, by contrast, only have use value, meaning that they have value only because humans consider them useful. And humans consider them useful because they contribute to human welfare. For example, seeing penguins walk as they do gives humans esthetic pleasure, so we value penguins. Seeing luscious mountains gives humans esthetic pleasure, so we value the mountains and would not want them degraded. But penguins, mountains, and all other natural objects do not have value in and of themselves.

This anthropocentric view of nature is often attributed to Western societies, especially given their Judeo-Christian belief that God gave nature to humankind as resources for sustenance, with the injunction that humans should “ﬁll (i.e., populate) the earth and subdue it” (Genesis Chapter 1, “The Story of Creation” verses 26–30). It is said that this belief has led to the unregulated exploitation of nature through industrialization, which in turn has produced devastating consequences for the environment. Thus, we have a host of environmental problems such as air and water pollution, smog, environmental degradation, increasing environmental waste with no ability to dispose of the waste generated, ozone depletion, acid rain, and global warming, to name a few.

But the anthropocentric perspective is not peculiar to the West, as African societies share a similar perspective. Mbiti has noted that “African ontology is basically anthropocentric: man is at the very centre of existence, and African people see everything else in its relation to this central position of man” (1988, p. 92). This anthropocentric view of Africans is again very easily seen from the African conception of rights, in particular, from their view about the kinds of things to which rights are ascribable. For Africans, persons are the only kind of entities that can be ascribed rights. As such, while it may be intelligible in the West to speak of animal rights, environmental rights, and so on, such statements are utterly unintelligible in African societies (see also Menkiti 1984, p. 177).

Anthropocentrism views nature as existing for humans to use as they see ﬁt, but this view by no means entails that the anthropocentrist does not care about the environment. The anthropocentrist can be just as concerned as her/his counterpart about pollution, smog, environmental degradation, and the like because such phenomena, if unchecked, endanger her/his welfare. As with her/his counterpart, the anthropocentrist does not want her/his welfare to be endangered, so she/he will argue just as forcefully for a clean environment as does her/his ecocentric rival. However, the anthropocentrist’s argument is not because she/he believes that the environment should be preserved for its own sake; rather, it should be preserved because of the beneﬁt that it will give to humans.

Ecocentrism is the alternative to and rival perspective of anthropocentrism. It views nature as having intrinsic worth, meaning that it considers all objects in nature to have value in and of themselves. Because of ecocentrism’s belief that objects have an intrinsic worth, its proponents thus advocate that humans should respect nature and desist from engaging in activities that lead to the destruction of all forms of life.

As an environmental movement that originated in the West, ecocentrism draws its motivation from the religious outlooks of and attitudes toward nature by non-Western peoples, particularly Asians and Native American. For example, Hinduism believes in the oneness of nature and in the divinity of nature “from the smallest animal and tallest tree, to the longest river and mightiest mountain, and even the stars and planets” (McDermott 2011, p. 1). Given this belief, Hinduism thus advocates a reverential attitude toward nature. Further, Hinduism believes that all objects in nature have intrinsic value and describes the interconnectedness of all natural entities using an analogy of the interconnectedness of the strands of a spider web. In light of this interconnectedness, humans should balance their needs for sustenance with upholding the intrinsic value of all life forms. Using the concept karma, Hinduism attributes the present environmental problems facing humans to human actions in previous times. Such actions range from excessive burning of fossil fuels to deforestation and animal farm breeding for human consumption (McDermott 2011, p. 4).

Similar to Hinduism, Native Americans too hold a religious attitude toward the environment in that they view objects in nature as entities to be treated with reverence (Lewis 1995). This is because they believe that all entities in nature, including the seasons, are organically related and are interdependent. On this view, the various types of entities, including humans, counterbalance each other and together they form a whole. But Native American attitude toward the environment cannot accurately be described as ecocentric even though Western environmentalists sometimes seem to give that impression. This is because Native Americans do not attribute intrinsic value to nature; rather they see all objects in nature as organically linked, and so a disruption of one part of nature will have devastating consequences for the other parts. It is for this reason, in their view, that humans should not upset the balance of nature. As David Rich Lewis puts it, Native Americans “recognized that they were part of creation and acted accordingly. Land and place were central to survival, to their beliefs, to their very identity. They [land and place] shaped their environments which, in turn, shaped them” (1995, p. 17).

The foregoing non-Western views about nature, and human relation with nature, have strongly appealed to Westerners concerned about environmental issues. The ecocentric movement draws upon this non-Western outlook to redeﬁne the Western view of the relation between humans and the environment. By so doing ecocentrists seek to address the environmental problems created by human activities. Their goal is to canvass support for a clean environment that is conducive to meaningful existence of life. For ecocentrists, meaningful existence extends to all living things because, in their view, all living things, including the environment itself, have intrinsic value.

Conclusion

The deﬁnition of life sketched out above has focused on the question: “what does it mean to say that life has meaning?” The answer to this question is meant to provide a framework within which to understand the myriad of bioethical issues with which we are confronted in society. These issues range from how to view human existence in relation to the rest of nature to the issue of the status of the unborn and hence of the morality of abortion, among other things. By elaborating meaningfulness as an essential element of human existence, attention is given to the fact of human agency as a distinctive feature of human existence contra that of animals. This crucial feature of human agency is meant to highlight the fact that humans are moral entities, meaning that their actions have moral signiﬁcance. Some of these actions are expressions of the very decisions humans make in bioethical matters. But above all, it is on account of this fact about human moral agency that our actions are deemed morally signiﬁcant in our various endeavors to give meaning to life.

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