![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This paper explores the notions of competitive and noncompetitive value and examines how they both affect meaning in life. The paper distinguishes, among other things, between engaging with competitive value and participating in a competition; between competitive value and comparative value; between competing with others and competing with oneself; and between subjective and objective aspects of both competitive and noncompetitive value. Since any competitive value is also comparative value, the paper criticizes Harry Frankfurt’s claim that comparative value is just a ‘formal characteristic of the relationship between two items’, from which nothing follows about their value or desirability. The paper also argues that, overall, noncompetitive value has the advantage over competitive value in terms of attaining meaning in life. Reasons for this claim include that: competitive value relates less than noncompetitive value to what is meaningful in life; competitive value is harder to attain than noncompetitive value; competitive value depends more than noncompetitive value on luck and on what other people do; and competitive value is more likely to lead to stress, hypocrisy, and aggression.
Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this paper were read at the Fourth International Conference on Philosophy and Meaning in Life (January 2022) and at the European Philosophical Society for the Study of Emotions Conference (June 2022). I am grateful to the participants in these conferences for their helpful questions and comments. I am also very grateful to Ora Burger, Marie Deer, Samuel Lebens, Thaddeus Metz, Saul Smilansky, Daniel Statman, Michele L. Waldinger, the Associate Editor and two anonymous referees for the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, and the Editor, Antony Eagle, for their helpful suggestions and comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The next four paragraphs draw on Landau Citation2017: 43–48.
2 I hold here, with many others, e.g., Wolf (Citation2010: 13–33), Kauppinen (Citation2012: 353–56, 361–67), and Metz (Citation2013: 220–39), that life’s meaning is primarily constituted by value. Hence, competitive and noncompetitive value are relevant to it. However, some, e.g., Goldman (Citation2018: 116–51), Repp (Citation2018), Seachris (Citation2019), and Thomas (Citation2019) hold that life’s meaning is primarily constituted by intelligibility rather than by value (although Seachris, more than Goldman, Repp and Thomas, recognizes that value, too, is important, moreover includes the recognition of value as part of what impacts intelligibility). For arguments questioning the intelligibility view and defending the value view, see Metz Citation2019: 409–11, and Landau Citation2021.
3 I am grateful to an anonymous referee for pressing me to clarify this point.
4 Owens (Citation2022: 125) distinguishes between institutionalized competitions (e.g., debating contests), in which rules about permitted actions and what constitutes winning are explicit, and less institutionalized competitions (e.g., the race to the North Pole), in which rules about permitted actions and what constitutes winning are less explicit. I suggest that the spectrum of competitive value, and perhaps competitions, is broader and also includes cases in which rules are nebulous, ad-hoc, unconscious, or even barely present, as when one compares oneself competitively to a person who was more beautiful but is now dead.
5 I am grateful to an anonymous referee for pressing me to clarify this issue.
6 There are also further differences between what is of competitive value and achievements. For example, according to Bradford (Citation2015: 4, 171–72), failures can be seen as achievements. But failures usually don’t bestow competitive value. The products of achievements cannot be the result of too much good luck (Bradford Citation2015: 64, 133). Yet, as was argued above, luck can play an important role in competitive value.
7 This is in some disagreement with Owens (Citation2022: 140), who holds that competitions, or games, are voluntary (although, for some caveats, see Owens Citation2022: 140: n. 27).
8 Following Nozick (Citation1981: 595, 610–11), Raz (Citation2001: 10–40), Cottingham (Citation2003: 21–31), Wolf (Citation2010: 13–33), and May (Citation2015: 50–59), I base my discussion on a hybridist conception of meaning in life, according to which a meaningful life has to fulfil both objective and subjective conditions. For one’s life to be meaningful, it has to include aspects of sufficient objective value, but one also has to care about these aspects or see them as meaningful: “meaning in life arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness” (Wolf Citation2010: 26). For differing, subjectivist views of life’s meaning, see, e.g., Taylor (Citation1981: 148–49), Frankfurt (Citation1988: 80–94), and Trisel (Citation2002: 79). For differing, objectivist views on life’s meaning, see, e.g., Metz (Citation2013: 182–84), Smuts (Citation2018: 75–99), and Bramble (Citation2015). However, much of what I say below under hybridism also holds under objectivism.
9 I am grateful to Thaddeus Metz for pressing me to see this point.
10 See footnote 8.
11 This is in disagreement with Owens’s (Citation2022: 130) view that ‘to treat an activity as a competition is to enjoy the contest, is to revel in the rivalry that it involves’.
12 Hussain (Citation2020), who focuses on competition in the sphere of political and institutional morality, also emphasizes that competitions can enhance estrangement and rivalry that undermine solidarity (e.g., 88, 96, 109). However, Hussain emphasizes institutional rules leading to strategic actions that enhance rivalry (84). I suggest that focusing on competitive rather than noncompetitive value often enhances rivalry and undermines community solidarity even when no strategic actions are involved. Likewise, Hussain focuses on associations in which ‘members are seriously constrained in terms of their liberty to exit or dissolve the association’ (85, 113). But I suggest that focusing on competitive value often also undermines group solidarity even in cases where members are at liberty to exit or dissolve the association.
13 Compare Hussain (Citation2020: 81) who, in the sphere of political morality, although generally very critical of competitions, holds that they may be good in the right degrees and circumstances.
14 This is also Hussain’s (Citation2020) general appraisal of competitions in the sphere of political morality. Owens (Citation2022: 125–28) seems to have a more favourable view of competitions, perhaps because he mostly discusses competitions in games and does not relate his discussion to meaning in life.
15 I am grateful to an anonymous referee for pressing me on this point.