Can a moral monster - a person whose life is characterised by immoral actions - live a meaningful life? Pre-theoretical intuitions appear divided. For some, moral monsters can't live a meaningful life because they were immoral, while for others they did because morality is irrelevant. So what is the relationship between morality and meaning? This article contends that both sides are partially correct but for the wrong reasons: moral monsters don’t live meaningful lives, but morality is irrelevant for meaning. First, (...) it is argued moral monsters live meaningless lives not because of immoral actions per se, but rather the harm they cause. Second, that moral monsters can live meaningful lives confuses meaningfulness with significance. Significance, I propose, is conferred upon a life when one's actions impact others' well-being for good or ill. On the view, moral monsters live meaningless but significant lives. (shrink)

Philosophers have long argued that duties to oneself are paradoxical, as they seem to entail an incoherent power to release oneself from obligations. I argue that self-release is possible, both as a matter of deontic logic and of metaethics.

In this paper I argue that, contrary to both H. L. A Hart and Patrick Devlin, and in sympathy with D. G. Brown, it is possible to read Mill as arguing in On Liberty that morality should be enforced, by public moral disapprobation by society, and by fines, imprisonment, execution, etc., by the state, when it will promote the general welfare. The difference between Mill and his predecessors is that they had no standard for morality other than the subjective standard (...) of what society liked and disliked, whereas Mill has an objective standard: it is immoral to harm others (without their consent). Harm to oneself can never be immoral: "A person who shows rashness, obstinacy, self-conceit—who cannot live within moderate means—who cannot restrain himself from hurtful indulgences—who pursues animal pleasures at the expense of those of feeling and intellect… [these] self-regarding faults previously mentioned, which are not properly immoralities, and to whatever pitch they may be carried, do not constitute wickedness." Harm to others (without their consent) is immoral and is prima facie publicly criticizable and criminalizable: "When, by conduct of this sort, a person is led to violate a distinct and assignable obligation to any other person or persons, the case is taken out of the self-regarding class and becomes amenable to moral disapprobation in the proper sense of the term.". (shrink)