In an episode of The Simpsons entitled, “Homer’s Enemy”, Homer Simpson invites his co-worker, Frank Grimes, to a surprise dinner. Frank is a man who has had to work hard his entire life and has little to show for it and, arguably because of this, he despises Homer. Frank finds Homer boorish, incompetent, and a person who constantly disrespects personal and professional boundaries. When Frank arrives (and immediately expresses he’s in a rush to get to his second night job at the local foundry), he is dumbfounded by what he witnesses.

Aside from Homer having a well paying secure job which he is hopelessly unqualified for, Homer also has an amazing wife, three talented children, a large double storey house, two cars, and a variety of photos which stand as a testament to the incredible life he has lived (so far). Here is a sampler of such events: Homer has won multiple awards including a Grammy and a Pulitzer, averted nuclear disaster several times, became a renowned outsider artist, climbed to the peak of a dangerous mountain, stopped a runaway monorail saving hundreds of lives, became a mastermind criminal known as ‘the Beer Baron’, counts President Gerald Ford as a friend, became an astronaut and visited outer-space, was a professional boxer and fought the heavyweight champion, bowled a perfect game, and toured with famous musical acts such as The Smashing Pumpkins and Peter Frampton.

Frank, bereft due the perceived injustice of it all, finally loses it:

God, I’ve had to work every day of my life; and what do I have to show for it? This briefcase and this haircut. And what do you have to show for your lifetime of sloth and ignorance? Everything! A dream house, two cars, a beautiful wife, a son who owns a factory, fancy clothes, and lobster for dinner! And do you deserve any of it? No. I’m saying you’re what’s wrong with America, Simpson. You coast through life, you do as little as possible and you leech off decent, hard-working people, like me. If you lived in any other country in the world, you’d have starved years ago. You’re a fraud - a total fraud.

Through Frank’s eyes we see how well off Homer Simpson is and how incredibly fortunate and lucky he is to have the life he does. There is, I think, little to dispute about the claim that Homer’s life is a good life - a life high in personal well-being - even when it is, by and large, the product of dumb luck.Footnote 1 But is Homer’s life meaningful? Would we say that Homer Simpson lives a meaningful life?

If the literature is anything to go by, the answer to these questions will be ‘no; Homer does not live a meaningful life’. But why? Because he was lucky. As Frank Grimes observed, Homer is not responsible for the states-of-affairs and events which make up his own life story. Luck, it would seem, vitiates meaning; a state-of-affairs which would otherwise confer meaning fails to do so if it is the product of luck, chance, or happenstance. In other words, a life cannot be accidentally meaningful.

That luck is thought to be incompatible with meaningfulness produces an anti-luck constraint upon theories about meaning in life:

Anti-luck Constraint: for a theory about meaning in life to be a plausible contender, that theory must ensure that a meaningful life cannot be the product of luck, accident, chance, or happenstance.

Any theory about meaning in life which violates the anti-luck constraint is thus considered an inadequate theory.

In this article, I argue we should reject the anti-luck constraint. Meaning in life, I contend, is compatible with luck; a life can be accidentally meaningful. Indeed, a life can be very meaningful even if it completely violates the anti-luck constraint. To advance this argument, I examine two cases which appear to show that luck is incompatible with meaning in life. The first I call the lucky idiot; a person who causes some state-of-affairs to come about without any intention of doing so. The second I call the incompetent villain; a person who intends to bring about some nefarious state-of-affairs but accidentally produces the opposite state-of-affairs. When we examine these archetypes more closely, I argue, we shall find good reasons for thinking their lives are meaningful.

This article proceeds as follows. I begin (§ 1) by outlining the existing literature; the basic building blocks that lead to the anti-luck constraint, the role of praise and choice, and the few who argue otherwise and why their answers are insufficient. Next (§ 2), I examine the lucky idiot. I argue that, contrary to the literature, the widespread pre-theoretical intuition is that we find such lives meaningful regardless of whether or not they meet the anti-luck constraint. After which (§ 3) I consider the incompetent villain. I contend that lives can be accidentally meaningful because saying otherwise results in an inconsistency across the vectors in which luck, responsibility, and meaning intersect. I conclude that we should reject the anti-luck constraint.

1 The Anti-Luck Constraint

One popular way of approaching the concept of meaning in life is by way of paradigm cases. Paradigm cases are those cases which we intuitively find to be the best examples of meaningful lives. In compiling such a list we can try and identify the common denominator or denominators between such cases which vindicate our intuitions about them (Kauppinen, 2016, p. 283).

It is not difficult to generate a list of paradigm cases and the literature itself is rife with examples (Bramble, 2015, p. 445; Purves & Delon, 2018; Smith, 1997, p. 212; Svensson, 2017, p. 48; Temkin, 2017, p. 23; Thomas, 2018, p. 265; Wolf, 2016, p. 256). Lives which are often cited as being paradigm cases of meaningful lives include (but are not limited to) Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, Marie Curie, Mother Theresa, Albert Einstein, Nelson Mandela, and Paul Gauguin. For a theory about meaning in life to be a candidate, we expect that theory to vindicate our intuitions about why these lives are meaningful; what features these lives share which render them as exemplars.

One observation is that the aforementioned lives appear to be primarily responsible for whatever state-of-affairs they intended to bring about. They themselves played a significant role in the shaping of their own lives. We might call this the responsibility thesis:

Responsibility Thesis: state-of-affairs S confers meaning upon a life if (i) the person whose life it is intended to bring about S, and (ii) that same person is primarily responsible for bringing about S.

The responsibility thesis, or something akin to it, is popular within the literature, whether it be explicitly or tacitly endorsed. For example, Luper (2014, p. 201) argues that “having meaning entails having and achieving a purpose”, Brogaard and Smith (2005, p. 444) argue that meaningfulness “must be the result of the person’s own efforts and of his or her own decisions”, while Calhoun (2018, p. 21) defends the view that a state-of-affairs confers meaning “when it is an end that you, in your own best judgement, have reasons to value”. On these views, had the events of Homer’s life been the fruits of his own labours, then his life would have been meaningful.

If we reconsider Homer Simpson and Frank Grimes in light of the responsibility thesis, neither of their lives seem particularly meaningful. The reasons for why, however, differ. For Frank, his life does not seem meaningful because while he intended to bring about some state-of-affairs, he failed to bring them about. For Homer, however, it was rarely (if ever) the case he intended any particular outcome, and he arguably was not agentially responsible for bringing about any of those states-of-affairs. If the relevant states-of-affairs found throughout Homer’s life were not the product or result of his agency, then what was? The answer, it seems, is luck; Homer got lucky.

What do we mean by luck? For our purposes, we can get by with an intuitive notion of luck which, I think, we can understand as being “factors over which one has little or no control” over (Metz, 2013, p. 68). Of course, even then, there appear to be many different types of luck, and some of them do not appear to vitiate meaning. For example, my physical appearance, place of birth, natural skills and dispositions etc., are (arguably) a product of luck. Yet, even so, any relevant meaning-conferring state-of-affairs which were dependent upon these contingent facts would be vitiated due to this type of luck (Himmelmann, 2013; Nagel, 1979, pp. 24–38; Williams, 1981).

The type of luck we seem concerned with here is what we might call resultant luck, i.e., “luck in the way one’s actions and projects turn out” (Nagel, 1979, p. 28).Footnote 2 So, if some state-of-affairs is a result of factors in which one has little to no control over, and not primarily due to one’s own actions (or intentions), then that state-of-affairs will not confer meaning. We can dress this idea up as a constraint upon theories about meaning in life:

Anti-luck Constraint: for a theory about meaning in life to be a plausible contender, that theory must ensure that a meaningful life cannot be the product of luck, accident, chance, or happenstance.

Like the responsibility thesis, the anti-luck constraint is found within the literature. Metz, for example, is explicit about where he stands upon the subject, saying that it “appears that luck cannot on its own ever bring about the positive good of meaning to one’s life; one has to perform certain actions under one’s control” (2013, p. 69). Others, however, tacitly endorse the anti-luck constraint by their endorsement of two principles which are seemingly incompatible with luck: praiseworthiness and choice worthiness. It is widely acknowledged that a life which is meaningful is considered worthy of praise; to be lauded and held in high esteem. For example, Metz writes that meaning might be “those aspects of a life for which the person whose life it is may sensibly have great esteem and for which others may sensibly have great admiration” (2001, p. 147), Cottingham points out that “to describe an activity, or a life, as meaningful is evidently to approve or commend it” (2003, p. 20), while Wolf notices that people often, when judging another’s life meaningful, might look upon them “with envy or admiration” (2010, p. 7). Kauppinen takes admirability, or praiseworthiness, as a pivotal tool in our conceptual analysis of meaning in life:

In short, then, it seems that when we say that someone’s life is meaningful or want our own lives to be as such, what we say or want is that certain positive attitudes are fitting towards it. Consequently, asking what makes our lives meaningful amounts to asking what makes agential pride, admiration, and elevation fitting (Kauppinen, 2016, p. 283).Footnote 3

Meaningfulness also appears to be choice-worthy too. Intuitively, if some action were to make a life more meaningful then we would take that as a reason for performing said action; we recognise it is better to perform actions which confer meaning when the option is available to do so. Meaning, it seems, has intrinsic value. That meaning in life is both praise and choice worthy is corroborated when we reflect upon paradigm cases. As Hammerton notes (2022, p. 125), when we reflect upon paradigm cases of highly meaningful lives (e.g., Einstein, Gandhi, etc.), they are greatly admired, while there is no admiration for paradigm cases of meaningless lives (e.g., Sisyphus, a person in an experience machine, etc.). We praise and admire meaningful lives and, if given the choice, we would choose to live a meaningful life than not.

States-of-affairs which are the product of resultant luck appear to be incompatible with both praise, admiration, and choice worthiness (Hammerton, 2022, pp. 125–128). First, if a state-of-affairs is brought about by luck, then there appears to be nothing to praise or admire about that life. This is easiest to see when we compare modal counterparts. Consider Homer Simpson*, in which all the states-of-affairs I listed in the introduction were the direct product of his efforts; it was he - and not luck - which was primarily responsible for bringing them about. When we consider the original Homer to Homer*, it is Homer* whose life appears aptly fitted for praise and admiration. We would also - according to the literature - believe Homer’s* life to be meaningful, as opposed to the original Homer (Algoe & Haidt, 2009; Kauppinen, 2019; Zagzebski, 2015, p. 214).

Second, as Hammerton (2022, p. 127) argues, if meaningfulness is something of intrinsic or final personal value, we would choose it for its own sake. If we were to choose original Homer’s life, it would be because of its instrumental value in bringing about the relevant state-of-affairs, and not because it contains this final personal value. Homer’s successes are not achievements, unlike Homer* whose successes are; they are not purposefully intended and brought about primarily through the execution of his actions (Bradford, 2015, 2022; Keller, 2009; Pritchard, 2009).

We should, of course, not expect unanimous agreement upon the anti-luck constraint or even the responsibility thesis. In his own investigation about the relationship between resultant luck and meaning in life, Hammerton (2022) presents us with a ‘puzzle’ which turns upon us having a shared pre-theoretical intuition that certain cases involving states-of-affairs which are brought about by resultant luck are comparatively more meaningful than an identical life in which those states-of-affairs are absent. For example, Hammerton offers us ‘theorem’ (2022, pp. 123–124), a case in which Sofya spends years of effort producing a mathematical theorem. After Sofya’s death and beyond her anticipations or intentions, her theorem ends up resolving a longstanding problem in particle physics resulting in a major scientific breakthrough.

Hammerton writes that most people will share the pre-theoretical intuition that Sofya’s life is made more meaningful due to her work leading to a major scientific breakthrough, even though she is not responsible for the relevant state-of-affairs. He pushes this point by asking us to consider the following:

To see this more clearly consider a slight variation on THEOREM where Sofya lives the same life, proving the same obscure theorem, yet no significant practical application is ever found for it. The only difference between these two lives is that, in the first, Sofya’s life work contributes to a major scientific breakthrough, whereas, in the second, it does not. When comparing these two possible lives most will agree that the first life is more meaningful then the second (Hammerton, 2022, p. 124).

Though Hammerton recognises that such a pre-theoretical intuition is assailable, he asserts that it is at least strong enough to count as a basic intuition about meaning in life. And while I share the intuition that Sofya’s life is made more meaningful due to this resultant luck, when considering the literature such a position appears to be the exception rather than the rule.Footnote 4 Further still, Hammerton offers us no justification for this intuition.

My goal for this article, then, is to show why resultant luck does not vitiate meaning. I intend to argue that a life can be accidentally meaningful. In light of ‘theorem’, we can understand my aim as providing us with both a reason for thinking it plausible that many do indeed share the pre-theoretical intuition that Sofya’s life is meaningful, and a justification for that intuition. To do so, I shall explore two types of cases which occur within the literature: first ‘the lucky idiot’; second ‘the incompetent villain’.

2 The Lucky Idiot

An example of someone who does not satisfy the responsibility thesis and violates the anti-luck constraint is what I shall call the lucky idiot. The lucky idiot is a person who, despite their shortcomings, ends up causing the relevant states-of-affairs by way of dumb luck. A lucky idiot may or may not intend to bring about those state-of-affairs; either way, they are not agentially responsible for bringing them about.

The lucky idiot is a popular archetype and fiction provides a treasure trove of examples. Aside from Homer Simpson, there is Maxwell Smart, Inspector Gadget, Bullwinkle J. Moose, and Mr. Magoo. These characters, others like them, manage to succeed not because of their own skill, but through sheer dumb (resultant) luck. At best, a lucky idiot can be said to have been causally related to bringing about the relevant state-of-affairs, much in the same way a billiard ball causes another billiard ball to move. A lucky idiot appears to not satisfy the responsibility thesis and violates the anti-luck constraint.

Brogaard and Smith (2005) assert for a life, action, or event, to be meaningful it must be (i) the product of the agent’s abilities, (ii) in alignment with dispositions, and (iii) a product of their free will. A rough way of putting it is that, whatever is meaningful must be primarily attributed to the agent; the agent must be responsible for the results or outcomes.Footnote 5

To make their case, Brogaard and Smith (2005) produce their own example of a lucky idiot: Forrest Gump, the titular character of the film, Forrest Gump. Forrest is a man with a learning disability who, despite his condition and the many social barriers which are erected because of it, has an impactful and decorated life. For example, he is direct inspiration for Elvis Presley’s (in)famous dance moves, is placed on the All-American (football) Team, a Vietnam war-hero, a ping-pong tennis champion, instigated the Watergate scandal, founded a multi-million dollar shrimp company, married his childhood sweetheart and had a child with her. These are just some of the events which occur during his life, all of which he is causally responsible for. However, only a few of them (if any) is he responsible for in the robust way described above. Before moving on I should spell out the details of some of those mentioned events to show they fail to satisfy the responsibility thesis nor the anti-luck constraint.Footnote 6

Forrest Gump became a member of the All-American Team for American Football through a series of fortunate events. It begins by him fleeing onto an active college football field in order to not be run over by his high-school bullies. It just so happens that the coach notices how fast he is and gets him into college so he can play football. Gump had no intention of playing football, and nor while he is playing it does he have any idea how it works; he is always told to “run” when he gets the ball, and always has to be told where he should be running (and, later, people learn he has to be told to “stop”, otherwise he’ll just run out of the stadium). His successes place him on the All-American Team which allow him to meet President John F. Kennedy. At no point in this course of events does Forrest Gump display the sort of robust agency required by the responsibility thesis; he never forms any intentions or goals and simply does what others tell him to do. It is, instead, a series of lucky events that allow Forrest Gump to end up where he does.

The formation of Bubba-Gump Shrimp, his multimillion dollar company, also comes about due to luck, though in a different way. In a rare instance, Forrest Gump shows significant agency with regards to the endeavour of creating a successful shrimping business; he sets this end and pursues it because he had made a promise to his deceased friend, Benjamin Buford “Bubba” Blue, who was killed in action during the Vietnam War. He spends the last of his money on a boat and pursues his chosen goal. Initially, Forrest Gump is woefully unsuccessful in this endeavour (which shouldn’t be a surprise given he doesn’t know anything about catching shrimp). So how did he end up with this multimillion dollar shrimping company? Well, because Hurricane Carmen wiped out all of his competition, leaving Forrest Gump with the only shrimping boat. With no competition and plenty of shrimp to catch, the company took off. Though Forrest Gump was successful, it was not an achievement, as the outcome was primarily creditable to luck (good luck for him; bad luck for the ships/business that were ruined) of being the only surviving vessel of Hurricane Carmen.

While a fictitious example, we may still ask ourselves whether a life such as Forrest’s can be meaningful. According to Brogaard & Smith the answer is clearly ‘no’:

The Forest [sic] Gump figure, whose actions affect the world positively but who is not responsible for his achievements, does not, by our lights, lead a meaningful life. This raises the question of how the factor of responsibility contributes to the meaning of a life. One can be responsible in this sense for a result simply by being a cause of the result, just as a short circuit can be a cause of a fire. Even if Forest [sic] Gump is the cause of the positive outcomes of his actions, he is still not responsible for his actions in the sense that is relevant here (Brogaard & Smith, 2005, pp. 447–448).

As we can see, the lesson they draw from the Forrest Gump example is that for a life to be meaningful the agent whose life it is must be more than merely causally responsible for those outcomes. The agent must be responsible in the right sort of way, i.e., through their agency. All of their argument accords to the responsibility thesis and the anti-luck constraint; the state-of-affairs which make up Forrest Gump’s life are the product of resultant luck.

How might one respond? Well, first, I should like to draw attention to the fact that our purported intuition about Forrest Gump is supposed to be pre-theoretical. That is, the intuition serves as the motivation for adopting the responsibility thesis and, by extension, the anti-luck constraint. If our intuition were contra Brogaard & Smith’s, this would severely undercut any motivation for adopting the anti-luck constraint. They appear to make the same error as Hammerton; they suppose without argument that their pre-theoretical intuition is widely shared.

I raise this point because, when I reflect upon whether Forrest Gump lived a meaningful life, my intuition is that the answer is an obvious ‘yes’, regardless of whatever resultant luck intervened or whatever relevant agency was absent. Indeed, I would go so far as to invoke cases like Forrest Gump to elicit the intuition that the anti-luck constraint is unneeded. Of course, I would just be making the same mistake which I have (either rightly or wrongly) accused both Brogaard & Smith and Hammerton of; what reason can I provide for thinking that my pre-theoretical intuition is the one in which many people might have?

I dare say we have good reason for supposing my favoured pre-theoretical intuition is widespread amongst us rather than theirs, especially in light of Forrest Gump. That said, I will concede that there is something to the idea that, for a life to be meaningful, the events which make it up must have been purposefully planned and executed.

This idea might go some way towards explaining why there is widespread pity for persons with disabilities and the general fear of becoming one themselves.Footnote 7 Though our societal attitudes towards persons with disabilities has greatly improved in the last decade or so, there is still much further to go. And it is certainly true that our attitudes towards persons with disabilities in previous decades, such as the 1990s when Forrest Gump was released, were quite shameful, and his negative attitude towards persons with disabilities is reflected in various scenes throughout Forrest Gump. Here are some such examples. In Gump’s formative years, he was bullied by a group of kids who in their young years threw rocks and stones at him, while in their teen years those same people would chase Gump down in their pickup truck. In several other scenes people ask Gump if he is “stupid or something?” when interacting with him (hence his famous retort: “stupid is as stupid does”). Jenny, Gump’s childhood friend often disparages or rejects him due to his disability (in one instance he retorts: “I may not be a smart man, but I know what love is”). And in a scene set during New Years celebration, Forrest rejects the advances of a woman, in which both the woman and her friend once again ask if “he stupid or something” and leave calling him (and his friend, Lieutenant Dan), “retards” and “freaks”.

People with certain types of disabilities, so society thinks or has thought, do not, or cannot, live meaningful lives because they lack the required capacity for it, namely, their agency.Footnote 8 However, as I shall now argue, this idea is naive and easily overturned, revealing that we recognise it is mistaken and/or misguided.

Regardless of what one thinks of the film’s artistic merits, we cannot deny Forrest Gump was both an incredibly successful and memorable story. One reason for this, I think, is precisely because the film’s narrative subverted our aforementioned naive and prejudiced intuition that persons with disabilities can’t live meaningful lives. The film plays upon the audience’s expectations of what sort of a life a person like Forrest Gump can live. Much of the pathos and comedy of the film comes from such subversion. Before we saw the film, we thought a life like Forrest Gump could not be meaningful. This is, to repeat, presumably why we pity him for being ‘afflicted’ with his disabilities and fear ourselves as having them. But after we finish the film we learn something important: a person like Forrest Gump can live a meaningful life even though they are not responsible in the agent-relevant ways we mistakenly thought were required for meaningfulness. Even when the vast majority of the events which make up his life are the product of resultant luck, and not his own efforts, we think he lived a meaningful life. Contra Brogaard & Smith, I submit that Forrest Gump serves as a one-hundred-and-forty-two minute counter-example to the responsibility thesis and anti-luck constraint.

One objection to the above could be that I have mistaken the lesson of the film. Rather, Forrest Gump is an example of how a life can be accidentally good for the person whose life it is, (i.e., a life high in well-being) and not how a life can be meaningful. If so, we can still say a meaningful life is incompatible with resultant luck, whereas a prudentially good life is not.Footnote 9 Roughly, it might be more accurate to say the lesson we learn is that he can live a good life, but not a meaningful one (because one does not need to be agentially responsible for well-being, but must be for meaning).

But this objection does not track how we evaluate Forrest Gump’s life. Certainly, the film does show us how even a person with disabilities can live a rich and fulfilling life (even if by accident), but there is no pre-theoretical reason to think a meaningful life cannot function the same way, i.e., by being a product of resultant luck. Consider, for example, what someone might say upon watching Forrest Gump. People do not say: ‘Gee wizz, Forrest Gump sure lived a good life; shame his life was meaningless though!” Rather, it seems we exclaim: “Wow, despite my initial prejudices, Forrest Gump lived a good and meaningful life!”.

Other lucky idiots, such as the characters of Homer Simpson or Maxwell Smart, end up in approximately the same place as Forrest Gump; it is counter-intuitive to say that their lives would be good lives but meaningless. Their lives, like Forrest Gump’s life, are accidentally meaningful. Their lives are meaningful even though the outcomes brought about by their existence are not primarily creditable to their agency. It is rarely the case that the outcomes they are causally responsible for are the result of their intentions or plans - their success, in spite of their incompetence, is where the humour comes from.Footnote 10

Yet even if one were to bite the bullet, the anti-luck constraint still seems to produce the wrong judgements across other cases in which an individual obtains the relevant state-of-affairs through resultant luck. An example of such a life is that of Scottish physician and microbiologist, Sir Alexander Fleming. Sir Fleming’s life is considered highly meaningful primarily due to his discovery of penicillin, a discovery described as the “single greatest victory ever achieved over disease” (Bennett & Chung, 2001, p. 163) which also resulted in him sharing the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945. But it is well known that Fleming’s discovery of penicillin was the product of resultant luck - he was not looking for anything like penicillin and accidentally left out a petri dish by an open window with its lid open. When recounting his discovery, Fleming said:

When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly didn’t plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world’s first antibiotic, or bacteria killer. But I suppose that was exactly what I did.Footnote 11

However, if resultant luck were to undermine meaning then it would seem we would have to say the accidental discovery of penicillin did not confer any meaning upon Fleming’s life. Why? Because the discovery violates the anti-luck constraint, as Fleming neither aimed to bring about the state-of-affairs in question, nor acted intentionally to bring them about, and so is not agentially responsible for the discovery. If proponents of the anti-luck constraint are to remain consistent, then they must say that the accidental discovery of penicillin - the most significant feature of Fleming’s life - is actually void of all meaning. This result, I suggest, is a bullet too hard to bite; I suggest it is an easier pill to swallow that resultant luck is, indeed, compatible with meaning.

In this section I have argued we have good reason for rejecting the anti-luck constraint. To show why, I examined the lucky idiot, i.e., an individual who, despite their shortcomings, ends up causing the relevant state-of-affairs by way of dumb (resultant) luck. We saw that one such case used as motivation for the anti-luck constraint - Forrest Gump - actually reveals the opposite: our collective judgement after seeing the movie is a surprise that somebody like Forrest Gump can, indeed, live a very meaningful life even when the events of his life are the product of resultant luck. To add insult to injury, I argued that the anti-luck constraint produced counterintuitive results in cases which the meaning-defining feature of a paradigm case of a meaningful life, e.g., Sir Alexander Fleming, was the product of resultant luck.

Now, lucky idiots involve persons who either do not intend to bring about the relevant state-of-affairs or, even if they did, they were not agentially responsible for it; it was resultant luck. But one might think something is different about cases in which resultant luck brings about states-of-affairs which are, for lack of a better term, opposite of what one intended. To address these cases, we now turn to the incompetent villain.

3 The Incompetent Villain

In light of lucky idiots, it seems that resultant luck can confer meaning upon a life. Does this mean the end of the anti-luck constraint? Not necessarily; we needn’t throw the baby out with the bath water (at least, not yet). One might weaken the anti-luck constraint such that it allows certain types of resultant luck to confer meaning, while disqualifying others. We might think intentions or motivations still serve as a sort of side-constraint. How so? Well, we might think that having particular types of intentions vitiates meaning which otherwise would have been conferred by states-of-affairs produced by resultant luck. An example of someone who fits this description is what I shall call the incompetent villain. The incompetent villain is a person who, by way of resultant luck, ends up producing the opposite state-of-affairs than they had intended. Consider the following:

Dr. Mischief: The super-villain, Dr. Mischief, infiltrates a city’s water reservoir and poisons the water supply with the express intention of dooming the city. However a superhero called Commander Fistfight confronts Dr. Mischief, informing the villain that their nefarious plot has not only failed, but produced the opposite of what they intended. First, the city’s pipe infrastructure was revealed to be outdated and in need of repairs; had this gone unnoticed, the population would have become sick. Second, because Dr. Mischief easily infiltrated the water reservoir, an investigation found that funds for the reservoir’s security system had been embezzled by government officials - so Dr. Mischief also inadvertently helped weed out corruption. And third, the poison released by Dr. Mischief proved to be the antidote to a horrific virus which plagued the city, thus saving the population. In frustration, Dr. Mischief shoots Commander Fistfight with a laser gun only to be immediately told the shot fixed the hero’s bad shoulder.Footnote 12

In the above example, Dr. Mischief (i) was motivated to do harm, (ii) fully intended to do harm, (iii) acted with the express intention of realising their goal, and (iv) is even agentially responsible for the outcomes. The trip up comes at the end, when the outcomes of their actions were not intended, but just the opposite - instead of harming the city he helped it. Through incompetence and bad luck (or good luck, depending upon how you look at it), Dr. Mischief brought about states-of-affairs which were antithetical to their desires.

According to the responsibility thesis and anti-luck constraint, this would mean none of the outcomes Dr. Mischief was responsible for would confer any meaning upon their life. To be clear, those outcomes include: (1) revealing outdated pipe infrastructure, (2) revealing government corruption, (3) providing the antidote to a virus, and (4) fixing someone’s shoulder. We might be sympathetic to the notion that not all of these outcomes confer meaning upon his life, but it seems to me a stretch to think that none of them do. We might think, for example, that (1) and (2) would not count because Dr. Mischief did not do anything but merely revealed problems which others fixed. But (3) does seem to confer meaning upon their life, even when it was antithetical to their own aims.

Do these states-of-affairs, under these conditions, confer meaning upon Dr. Mischief’s life? I suggest that they do; Dr. Mischief’s life can be accidentally meaningful (Smuts, 2018, pp. 88–89). What reason do we have to think so? Let us consider six different configurations of intentions and outcomes:

  • (A) intended to do good and caused good.

  • (B) intended to do bad and caused bad.

  • (C) intended to do good but caused bad.

  • (D) intended to do bad but caused good.

  • (E) no intention to do good or bad but caused good.

  • (F) no intention to do good or bad but caused bad.

How would we classify the meaningfulness of such lives? It seems to me (A) lived a meaningful life while (B) did not; this seems uncontroversial. What about (C)? That life does appear to be meaningless, but arguably to no fault of the person whose life it was. We might say, for example, that (C) was meaningless but only because bad luck or incompetence came between intentions and results. That is to say, the life of (C) was accidentally meaningless. Suggesting a life could be meaningless by accident does not appear to be conceptually confused or controversial.Footnote 13

If these judgements are correct, then (D) is an outlier. But given we grant that a life can be accidentally meaningless, why can we not also grant that a life can be accidentally meaningful? We might think this is some type of question begging until we notice how much of an outlier (D) would be otherwise. Consider how we seem happy to judge lives such as (E) as meaningful whereas (F) is meaningless, even when there is complete absence of intention or motivation and the outcome is a product of resultant luck. And, surely, the meaning-status of both (E) and (F) is accidental, given that the results of (E) and (F) do not have any motivations or intentions to match up with. So if we are comfortable with luck and happenstance playing a deciding role in the meaning status of (C), (E), and (F), it seems we have less reason to think cases like (D) cannot be determined by luck. We can visually represent our findings as:

 

Caused good

Caused bad

Intended good

(A) meaningful

(C) accidentally meaningless

Intended bad

(D) accidentally meaningful

(B) meaningless

No intention

(E) accidentally meaningful

(F) accidentally meaningless

Suppose this were not enough to shake the judgement that the incompetent villain was not conferred meaning upon their life. What underlies this judgement? I suggest that what’s doing the work here is the supposed praiseworthiness and choice worthiness philosophers have tied to meaning in life.

As I described above, praise and choice are thought to play an important role in our conceptual analysis of meaning. One way of understanding this relationship is one of fitting attitudes, that is to say, what confers meaning is, in part or on whole, constituted by the appropriateness of feelings of pride, or joy, or esteem, or admiration, or praise, or inspiration, etc., whether by the person whose life it is or others. Kauppinen (2012, 2013, 2016) has been a vocal proponent of this view, and it goes some way in explaining why we might continue to treat the incompetent villain as a meaningless life; the incompetent villain’s life, or the events which make up their life, are not the appropriate fit for the kinds of attitudes I previously described (Brogaard & Smith, 2005, p. 457; Metz, 2001, pp. 147–150; 2013, pp. 31–32).

Martela (2017, pp. 236–239), however, offers us good reason to doubt this fitting attitude analysis of meaning. First, Martela develops a Sisyphus variation in which the mythical character enjoys showing off his strength by rolling a massive boulder in front of a stand of spectators admiring his feats of strength. Martela points out that while it might be appropriate for Sisyphus and the crowd to have particular attitudes towards his actions, e.g., pride, admiration, praise, etc., it remains an open question as to whether his life is meaningful:

Still, when going to bed after a hard day of rolling rocks, such a Sisyphus could have a kind of nagging feeling: “I enjoy my work, and I love being admired, but still… I am just rolling rocks. What does that amount to, what’s the point of it all? My brother became a fire fighter and is saving lives. Compared to his work, isn’t rolling rocks just a meaningless pastime?” (Martela, 2017, p. 237).

Yet, even if we were to limit the objects of such appropriate attitudes, such as in “having made a valuable contribution” (Kauppinen, 2013, p. 165), we run the risk of drawing arbitrary limits around which attitudes are relevant and when. As Martela notes, if there is “such an underlying rationale that makes the attitudes hang together as a unified whole” (2017, p. 238) then it is not at all obvious why we should include fitting attitudes into our conceptual analysis of meaning when we could just focus upon the underlying rationale itself.

Martela’s arguments provide us good reason for jettisoning praiseworthiness; but what of choice-worthiness? Hammerton is skeptical as to whether the above arguments could equally apply to choice or desirability, stating that without choice-worthiness or desirability, “it is difficult to make sense of the normative significance of meaning and the role it plays in our lives” (Hammerton, 2022, p. 129).

Even if Hammerton is correct, it does not seem to change the point that a life can be accidentally meaningful. Choice-worthiness, I argue, is not a function of desirability simpliciter, but made relative to alternative options. If we reconsider our (A) to (F) cases, we can arguably rank them in order from most desirable or choice-worthy to least. Is the life of an incompetent villain - which corresponded with (D) - a choice-worthy or desirable life? Our answer should be: ‘compared to what?’. Our decision cannot be made in a vacuum. Compared to the life of Commander Fistfight - which corresponds to (A) - the life of an incompetent villain does not appear choice-worthy. However, compared to, say, (B) or (F), does their life now seem choice-worthy or desirable? Since there are no better alternatives, the answer seems to be ‘yes’. And even if (A) were also available next to (B) and (F), the incompetent villain’s life would still be choice-worthy, just not as much as (A).

One might object that we would then be choosing (D) for instrumental reasons, not for personal final value reasons, which misconstrues why the choice for (D) is being made. I disagree. When (D) is choice-worthy it is so because it has more final value compared to the relative alternatives. Now, that does not mean the life of an incompetent villain is the most meaningful life, or very high in meaningfulness, but merely that it does seem to have some meaning; its choice-worthiness is due to that. And what seems to explain that meaning is the relevant state-of-affairs brought about by luck. States-of-affairs which one is agentially responsible for just confer additional meaning upon a life compared to those same states-of-affairs brought about by resultant luck, yet nonetheless those lucky states-of-affairs confer meaning. And this seems to add further reason for rejecting the anti-luck constraint. The life of an incompetent villain can be accidentally meaningful, even if such a life is not as meaningful when compared to a successful superhero.

4 Conclusion

In this article I have considered whether luck vitiates meaning in life. The answer, I submit, is ‘no’. A state-of-affairs can confer meaning upon a life even if that state-of-affairs is the result of luck, chance, or happenstance. We examined two cases which, on first glance, seem to support the claim that theories about meaning require an anti-luck constraint; the lucky idiot and the incompetent villain. Upon closer inspection, we found that both debunk the anti-luck constraint, rather than support it. With regards to the lucky idiot, we found that the reason such cases fascinate us is because, contrary to our naive intuitions, we judge such lives to be meaningful. With regards to the incompetent villain, we saw that by considering the different configurations of intention and outcomes, that describing such lives as meaningless was an inconsistent outlier compared to all the others which we accept could be accidentally meaningful or meaningless. Further still, when we reconsidered the role of praise and choice, we found that praise served, at best, as a proxy for what actually makes life meaningful, while choice only makes sense of comparative choices between lives, rather than anything conceptually substantive. I suggest, then, that we have good reasons for jettisoning the anti-luck constraint altogether.

Let us come full circle and return back to the initial question which kick-started this article: is Homer Simpson’s life meaningful? In light of the arguments I have advanced here, I think there is a better question to ask: ‘how could his life not be?’ Even though many of the events which make up his life are the result of luck, Homer’s life is incredibly meaningful, no matter how much of an idiot, or incompetent, he is.