Malcolm Morano
Research Interests: Ethics (especially Metaethics and Moral Psychology), Social and Political Philosophy, Existentialism
My research explores how “meaning” can be used as an ethical concept, analyzing concerns about life’s meaning with the goal of illuminating their connections to issues in political theory and the foundations of ethics. What are we thinking when we think that what we’re doing is “meaningful”? Is this a separate issue from worries about “the meaning of life”, or are they related? And how do these concepts relate to the ideas of our life’s purpose or narrative? The ultimate aim of asking these questions is to see how meaning might form a foundational concept in an ethical framework, alongside (or perhaps instead of) the right and the good. I argue for the theory of meaning that underlies this project in my article, “The Puzzle of Intelligibility and the Meaning of Life,” forthcoming in the Philosophical Review.
At the same time, I hope to bring out how this approach to ethical theory can help us grapple with social and political issues of modernity—secularism, liberalism, and technological advancement. These core features of our way of life have developed rapidly over the past hundred years, and it is easy to imagine that this may have left many people today with inadequate resources for understanding and orienting themselves toward their lives and the activities that constitute them. I believe these issues are thrown into sharp relief when we have a rich framework for analyzing the structure of concerns about life’s meaning, and that understanding the problems through this framework has the promise of suggesting new alternatives for social and political life.