Dying for a Cause: Meaning, Commitment, and Self-Sacrifice
Antti Kauppinen
Forthcoming in Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, ed. Michael Hauskeller.
Choose to die well while you can; wait too
long, and it might become impossible to
do so. – Gaius Musonius Rufus
All men must die, but death can vary in its
significance. – Mao Zedong
On the 18th of February 1943, members of the anti-Nazi resistance group White Rose
distributed copies of their sixth leaflet at the University of Munich. Before they left, one of
them, Sophie Scholl, flung the remaining copies into the atrium from the top floor. She was
seen and taken into Gestapo custody with her brother Hans. Being a young woman, Sophie
was given the option to recant and save herself, but she refused. In court, she explained their
actions as follows:
Somebody, after all, must make a start. What we said and wrote is also believed by so
many others. They just don't dare to say it out loud.1
Predictably, the Scholls were sentenced to death for treason and executed. While in prison,
Sophie discussed her coming execution with a cellmate, Else Gebel, who reported her saying
the following:
1
See http://www.mythoselser.de/texts/scholl-urteil.htm for the original German.
2
What does my death matter, if through our actions thousands of people will be shaken
and awakened? … I could also die of illness, but would it have the same meaning?2
Well, probably not. Dying for a cause can be more meaningful than dying from an illness,
including in the sense of giving meaning to one’s life. What I want to explore in this paper is
exactly what this means and why and when it is the case. For much of it, I will be mapping
out the conceptual space rather than giving arguments, since I don’t think philosophers have
written much directly on the topic, though of course Stoics and others have addressed issues
in the ballpark, as the quotes from Rufus and Mao suggest.
I will proceed as follows. First, I will distinguish between three varieties of meaning
in life, drawing in part on psychological research on experiences of meaning. Next, I will
define what I mean by a ‘cause’, and distinguish between the different ways one can be said
to die for a cause. I also consider examples of both successful and failed cases of promoting a
cause by risking or facing death. Third, I draw on the previous sections to set out conditions
for when dying for a cause contributes to the different varieties of meaning in life. In the final
section, I turn to the question of how dying for a cause can amount to self-sacrifice even
when it makes one life more meaningful and is therefore, on my view, in an important way in
one’s self-interest in the right circumstances.
2
From Else Gebel’s letter to Sophie Scholl’s parents, online in the original German at
http://www.mythoselser.de/texts/scholl-gebel.htm.
3
1. Three Meanings of Meaning in Life
I am going to start by clarifying what it means to say that someone’s life is meaningful or is
made meaningful by something. I am going to argue that there are at least three different
philosophically interesting things this could amount to.3
My argument begins with the assumption that someone’s life is meaningful if and
only if it is fitting to experience it as meaningful.4 The reason this connection matters is that if
there are many distinct experiences of meaning, it follows that there are many different ways
for life to be meaningful. And indeed, in recent work in psychology, it has become common
to think that there are indeed a number of distinct experiences of meaning. To be sure, quite
often psychologists speak as if there are just three different aspects of meaning, as Login
George and Crystal Park do in the following:
We define MIL [meaning in life] as the extent to which one’s life is experienced as
making sense, as being directed and motivated by valued goals, and as mattering in
the world.5
But as Frank Martela and Michael Steger rightly emphasize, these experiences of
intelligibility, purpose, and mattering can and do come apart and have different practical
roles.6 Let’s start with intelligibility. I have recently argued that psychologists tend to
exaggerate the role of intelligibility in experiences of meaning, especially when it comes to
merely perceiving patterns of some sort rather than randomness.7 But there is something to
3
For more details, see Antti Kauppinen, ’The Experience of Meaning’, in Iddo Landau (ed.), The Oxford
Handbook of Meaning in Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
4
For a defense of this assumption, see Antti Kauppinen, ‘Meaningfulness and Time’, Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research 84 (2012), 345–377, at 352–355.
5
Login George and Crystal Park, ‘Meaning in Life as Comprehension, Purpose, and Mattering: Toward
Integration and New Research Questions’, Review of General Psychology 20 (2016), 205–220, at 206.
6
Frank Martela and Michael Steger, ’The Three Meanings of Meaning in Life: Distinguishing Coherence,
Purpose, and Significance’, Journal of Positive Psychology 11 (2016), 531–545.
7
In Kauppinen, ’Experience of Meaning’.
4
the thought that for our own lives to make sense to us, we must see in their twists and turns
some recognizable variation of culturally available models (see especially the work of Helena
de Bres8). What I emphasize is that for us to find our lives intelligible in the sense that is
linked to having a reason to live and not merely as something that fits into an explanatory
framework, we must also regard the choices we’ve made as having been aimed at something
sufficiently good that offers a kind of narrative justification for them.9 This sort of
intelligibility can be called into question in cases of subjectively irrational life choices,
personal loss, or radical cultural change, which may result in disorientation – I don’t know
who I am or where I am going any more.
Even if you do find your life intelligible in this way, you may experience it as
meaningless in the sense of lacking purpose. As I use the term, experiencing our lives as
purposeful is a matter of having some orienting aim which we take to provide reasons for
action and which we believe our actions to serve. Sense of purpose is thus manifest in
enthusiastic motivation, and missing in boredom or depression. While it normally goes
together with intelligibility, there is such a thing as newfound purpose that you can have even
while experiencing your life as a whole as not making sense.
Finally, for us to experience our lives as meaningful in the sense of mattering is for us
to find that actions that express our authentic selves successfully serve some objective or
intersubjective value – that we purposefully make a positive difference to something or
someone important to us when it is challenging to do so. (Note that our lives can be important
without mattering in this sense.10) I think this kind of experience consists primarily in
8
Helena de Bres, ‘Narrative and Meaning in Life’, Journal of Moral Philosophy 15 (2016), 545–571.
See Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1981) for a classic account of this kind of view.
10
For importance, see Guy Kahane, ‘Importance, Value, and Causal Impact’, Journal of Moral Philosophy
(forthcoming). Briefly, the two key differences between importance and mattering are that a life or an action can
be important without mattering in virtue of making a large negative difference to intrinsic value (Stalin’s actions
were important), and in virtue of accidentally making a large positive difference to intrinsic value (if,
unbeknownst to me, my breathing out happened to produce chemicals that would stabilize the world’s CO2
levels, my life would be important!).
9
5
feelings of fulfilment, agential pride, self-esteem, and confident hope, which affectively
construe our past or on-going actions in such manner. Evidently, we can find our lives
intelligible or purposeful without experiencing such feelings. Experiences of meaninglessness
in this respect consist in feelings of failure or angst, which I take to be an existential feeling
involving the thought that nothing is ultimately worthwhile.11
While these experiences are distinct, I do think that there is what I call a negative
rational dependence among them. What I mean by this is that while you can have a sense of
comprehension without a sense of purpose, if you experience your life as lacking purpose, it
is not rational for you to experience it as (fully) intelligible either, because leading up to
something worth pursuing is an important part of the experience of intelligibility. Similarly, if
you think that your life doesn’t and won’t matter, it is not rational to experience a sense of
purpose, because it entails thinking that you won’t realize an objectively or intersubjectively
valuable aim. In this sense, experiences of mattering seem to me to be the most fundamental
experiences of meaning – existential anxiety rationally, and typically, undercuts sense of
purpose and the intelligibility of one’s life as a whole.
The table below (modified from Kauppinen forthcoming) summarizes the discussion
so far:
Dimension
Experience
type
Experience of
meaning
Experience of
meaninglessness
11
Sense-making:
contribution to a
desirable pattern
Sense of
comprehension
and narrative
justification
Disorientation
Purpose and
resonance:
contribution to
aims
Enthusiastic
future- or
present-oriented
motivation
Demotivation,
boredom,
depression
Mattering:
contribution to
value beyond
the self
Feelings of
fulfilment,
pride, and
self-esteem
Angst,
feelings of
failure
For existential feelings, see Matthew Ratcliffe, Experiences of Depression: A Study in Phenomenology
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
6
Next, if our lives are meaningful to the extent that it is fitting for us to experience them as
meaningful, distinguishing between these three kinds of experience suggests there are the
following three forms of meaning in life, or three ways in which experiences of meaning may
be warranted or correct in the light of opinion-independent facts about value and reasons:
MeaningI: S’s life is meaningfulI to the extent that the actions and events that
comprise it fit into a culturally recognizable narrative of pursuing some sufficient
good.12 (For example, you might be a knight errant seeking the Holy Grail, or a
former addict trying to make amends.)
MeaningP: S’s life is meaningfulP to the extent that she pursues high-level ends she
has subjective and objective reason to pursue. (For example, you might organize your
activities around the aim of preventing coral bleaching, or just taking care of aging
parents.)
MeaningM: S’s life is meaningfulM to the extent that her actions over time merit
fulfilment and pride, which entails (at least) non-accidentally successful pursuit of
challenging aims that she identifies with and has objective reason to pursue.13 (For
example, by the sweat of your brow, you might succeed in finding a way to prevent
coral bleaching.)
We might say that what ties all of these notions together is that they have to do with having a
reason to go on living or there being a point to one’s life. These are presumably the kind of
12
As Michael Hauskeller highlighted for me, this definition implicitly relativizes meaning-as-intelligibility to
culture. I think this is the right result – some lives that made perfect sense in the 13th century wouldn’t make
sense now. But those who think that intelligibility should not be relative can remove the word ‘culturally’ from
the thesis.
13
As Thaddeus Metz pointed out to me (personal communication), meaningfulness-as-mattering is compatible
with a degree of outcome luck – indeed, often projects that yield exceptional meaning when successful are
particularly risky, like organizing a union in a repressive political environment. Not everything that requires luck
is accidental.
7
things people wonder about when they ask if their lives have meaning. We might also say
that a life is superlatively meaningful to the extent that it is meaningful in all these ways.
For our purposes, it is important to say how events can be meaningful in the sense of
contributing to meaning in life. In ordinary talk, to be sure, we talk about meaningful events
more broadly, so that an event that has any kind of emotional resonance, or makes a
significant difference to what happens later, can be said to be meaningful. But here we are
interested in how an event like death can contribute to meaning in life. Given the earlier
distinctions, my proposal is the following:
An event contributes to meaningI to the extent that it promotes or constitutes one’s life
fitting into a culturally recognizable narrative of pursuing some good. (For example,
getting fired after a transgression contributes to intelligibility – a lot of events fit into
culturally recognizable narratives of pursuing some good. Getting fired without a
discernible cause, in contrast, can be disorienting and puzzling.)
An event contributes to meaningP to the extent that it promotes or constitutes having a
high-level aim that there is sufficient subjective and objective reason to have. (For
example, a moral insight or religious conversion might contribute to purpose in life.)
An event contributes to meaningM to the extent that it promotes or constitutes the
successful realization of a challenging identity-defining aim that there is sufficient
objective reason to pursue. (For example, doing research that turns out to result in a
new scientific discovery might contribute to mattering.)
8
2. Varieties of Dying for a Cause
With these distinctions in hand, let us turn to dying for a cause. Let’s start with the question
of what a ‘cause’ in the relevant sense is. I will say that when you take up a cause you commit
to trying to right a wrong. In paradigm cases, there is some group of people who are at least
perceived to be treated seriously unjustly by some other group of people who benefit from the
status quo, so that there is a strong (apparent) reason for anyone in a position to change this
intrinsically bad state of affairs to do so. The injustice could be denial of rights, denial of
national self-determination, or discrimination on a morally irrelevant basis. That is why there
is the cause of civil rights and Palestinian and women’s causes. Of course, not all causes
involve injustice to people – there are also environmental causes, and more broadly pursuit of
some important impersonal value that some people fail to respond to. Note that it follows that
when you have a cause, you have an antagonist, some group of people who benefit or at least
think they benefit from the way things are, and that antagonist is likely to be powerful, since
otherwise things wouldn’t be such as to favour their perceived interests over those of others.
And that means you have to fight for a cause, which will involve risk and thus require
courage. It is no wonder that successfully acting in the service of a good cause is a prime
candidate for leading a superlatively meaningful life – after all, people like Mandela and
Gandhi are paradigm examples of meaning.
2.1. Death and Intentionality
Turning to dying for a cause, then, the first basic distinction I shall make is between different
aims in relation to death. For the most part, when we think of someone dying for a cause, we
think of people who risk their lives in the service of some cause they are committed to. This
9
includes people like Hans Scholl, or the Parisians who set up barricades in 1870, or human
rights activists in many former parts of the Soviet Union. Such people do not in any sense
aim to die for their cause – indeed, they typically try their best to avoid death, as long as that
is compatible with working for their cause. But their commitment to it is so strong that they
would rather act and die than fail to act and live. Hans Scholl knew that he could easily be
caught for writing and distributing leaflets critical of the Nazi regime, and that he would be
executed if he were, but it was more important for him to follow his conscience than to live in
the relative safety of silence. While such people do not choose to die, they do choose to act in
the face of significant risk of death rather than betray their values, and can thus appropriately
be said to have died for their cause if they are killed in its service.
However, there are also people who do choose to die for a cause, and not merely risk
their lives for it. Perhaps the purest example of aiming to die for a cause are people who
publicly kill themselves to redirect the attention of the public to their cause. Think here of the
Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức who burned himself to death during the Vietnam War to
call attention to religious inequality in the country, or the Tunisian street seller Mohamed
Bouazizi, who likewise set himself on fire to protest arbitrary and humiliating treatment by
authorities, sparking the Tunisian revolution of 2011.14 Psychologists interested in selfsacrifice often focus on suicide bombers as an example of this category, and it does seem that
some of them specifically seek martyrdom (see Section 4). However, I suspect that many
suicide bombers simply use themselves as guidance devices for explosives and would save
themselves if they could – their aim is to kill other people, and their own death is a side effect
rather than a means to their aims.
14
For information about Đức and Bouazizi, I’m relying on their Wikipedia entries, respectively
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%ADch_Qu%E1%BA%A3ng_%C4%90%E1%BB%A9c and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohamed_Bouazizi.
10
Not all who can be said to choose to die unambiguously aim at death, however.
Consider hunger strikers like the Irish Republicans Terence MacSwiney in 1920 and Bobby
Sands in 1981. Roughly speaking, they demanded recognition as political prisoners rather
than mere criminals. They didn’t aim to die as such, but neither did they just accept a risk of
dying – after all, they knew they would die if they continued to reject nutrition.15 We might
say they placed their lives in the hands of their antagonist, forcing the British government to
choose between outrage at their deaths or yielding to their demands. Still, at the point at
which it became clear to them the British would not in fact yield, they did choose to do
something – refuse nutrition – which they knew would result in their death in the belief that
by doing so they would serve their cause.16 Indeed, Sophie Scholl stands out among the
members of the White Rose in making a similar choice in virtue of declining to recant, and
thus choosing to be killed rather than only risking being killed. (Of course, unlike the hunger
strikers, she didn’t kill herself.)
2.2. Death, Success, and Failure
Besides kinds of intentionality, we can also make an orthogonal distinction between death
successfully serving a cause and failing to do so. Sometimes a person’s death does have an
instrumental role in furthering a cause. The very fact that Bouazizi died in his selfimmolation in all likelihood played a role in the impact his act had. Similarly, Đức’s act
really did shock the conscience of the world and led to the US forcing the Vietnamese to
15
Since both MacSwiney and his comrades were Catholic (and fighting for the cause of predominantly Catholic
Irish people), the Catholic Church was forced to take a position on their hunger strikes. This resulted in
interesting theological debates about whether starving oneself to death in such circumstances was suicide (and
thus prohibited) or not (see Scull 2016). For example, Father P.J. Gannon pointed out in 1920 that in a hunger
striker ‘There is nothing of the mentality of a suicide, whose object is to escape from a life that has grown
hateful to him.’ (quoted in Scull 2016, 293)
16
As MacSwiney wrote during his strike, ‘If I die I know the fruit will exceed the cost a thousand fold. The
thought makes me happy.’
11
improve the treatment of Buddhists. MacSwiney’s death from hunger strike increased
sympathy for the Republican cause and inspired future revolutionaries from Gandhi to Ho
Chi Minh.17 Even the Scholl siblings had at least some reason to believe that if they were to
be caught and martyred, it would further the cause of resistance to the Nazis at least by
breaking the illusion of uniform support for the regime, though in fact the immediate effects
were minor.18 In all of these cases, the mechanism of promoting the cause is something like
the death redirecting the attention and motivation of other people in a way favourable to the
cause. If third parties are at all charitable, news of such deaths easily leads them to wonder
what is so wrong with the way that Buddhists or the Irish are being treated as to make some
of them willing to give up their lives to change it, or make the relevant injustice salient. Such
thoughts and inquiries can lead to anger and then action. And the very courage and
willingness to sacrifice displayed by people who take the risky first steps against some
powerful antagonist (recall Sophia Scholl’s insistence that ‘someone had to make a start’) can
itself inspire others to act on their convictions.
Of course, dying for a cause doesn’t always serve the cause in any way. It is not a
coincidence that it is not as easy to think of concrete examples of this – going unnoticed or
being soon forgotten is constitutive of failing to make a difference by dying. But take Joseph
Murphy, who was captured along with MacSwiney and also went on hunger strike in Cork
Gaol, dying on the same day as MacSwiney.19 As it happened, his sacrifice went nearly
unnoticed in the shadow of the more famous man’s death and can hardly be said to have
17
See Jason Perlman, ‘Terence MacSwiney: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Hunger Strike’, New York History
88 (2008). Online at
https://web.archive.org/web/20081204101849/http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/nyh/88.3/perlman.ht
ml.
18
Hanser describes the group’s aims as follows: “For them, an immediate, visible result was not an important
consideration. What was important was to launch a moral protest, to send out a cry of conscience. They wanted
to make a start at eroding the faith of the German people in their leadership, to let their fellow dissidents know
that they were not alone and that the monolith of public support for the regime was a propaganda myth.” (Noble
Treason, 167)
19
Perlman, ’MacSwiney’.
12
made any difference. Or, for a case of aiming to die, consider the death of Irina Slavina.
Who? She was a Russian journalist who burned herself to death in 2020 in protest at the
constant harassment of independent journalists by the authorities.20 Very sadly, her death
doesn’t seem to have made a difference, and I would wager that few of us have heard of it.
When it comes to cases in which people accept the risk of death for a cause, they don’t
usually even think death would promote the cause, but simply accept it as a potential price to
pay without allowing themselves to be deterred by it. For example, Rosa Luxemburg’s death
at the hands of the Freikorps in January 1919 didn’t help along a communist revolution in
Germany. We can summarize these distinctions and examples in the following table:
Death serves the cause
Death is accepted for
the cause
Death is chosen for the
cause
Death is sought for the
cause
Hans Scholl
Sophie Scholl, Terence
MacSwiney
Thích Quảng Đức,
Mohamed Bouazizi (?)
Death doesn’t serve the
cause
Rosa Luxemburg
Joseph Murphy
Irina Slavina
3. Living Meaningfully and Dying for a Cause
With this understanding of the varieties of dying for a cause, let us turn to the issue of how
death for a good cause might contribute to different kinds of meaning (I will discuss bad
causes later). Given what I said earlier about contributing to meaning as mattering, we get the
following principle:
20
The New York Times, October 2, 2020.
13
Death contributes to meaningM to the extent that it non-accidentally promotes or
constitutes the successful realization of a challenging and identity-defining aim that
there is objective reason to pursue.
Clearly, we must look here to cases in which death does end up serving the cause in some
way. Start with aiming at death. As far as I know, Đức was deeply committed to the
presumably good cause of religious equality in Vietnam, and resorted to self-immolation only
when nothing else worked. Promoting the aim in this way was certainly challenging, and took
a lot of courage. And as I noted above, his death really did make a difference as a result of the
bad publicity for the government, and was meant to do so. So it can be said to have
contributed significantly to his life being meaningful in the sense of mattering. It seems to me
that very much the same goes for cases of choosing to die without aiming at death, like those
of Sophie Scholl and Terence MacSwiney.
Where death is merely accepted, however, and thus only comes about as a side effect
of other efforts, it becomes in a relevant sense less expressive of who one is. It is not itself
either a part of the plan or a foreseen consequence of one’s choice. That is why I would
suggest that Hans Scholl’s death contributed somewhat less to meaningM than his sister’s,
since he didn’t get to make the choice about whether or not to die after being caught.
However, here it is good to remember that often the actions of people who fight for a
good cause at the risk of losing their lives make a greater positive difference than their deaths
– if you die in the course of blowing up the last bridge across the river to allow refugees to
escape, it is blowing up the bridge that makes your life matter, not your dying. Similarly,
even if Hans Scholl’s death as an event in itself contributed less to meaning than his sister’s,
he was the founder and leader of the White Rose and the main author of most of their
14
pamphlets, and those valuable activities chosen in spite of high risk of dying certainly were
expressive of his identity and gave considerable meaning to his life.
What about meaning as purpose, then? The earlier discussion suggests the following
criterion:
Death contributes to meaningP to the extent that it is a high-level aim that there is
subjective and objective reason to pursue.
Again, we see that dying for a cause does contribute to purpose in life for people who aim to
die for a cause and whose death serves it. But an important difference here is that dying for
the cause of free journalism can contribute to the meaningfulnessP of Irina Slavina’s life, for
example, even if it doesn’t end up serving the cause. Consequently, it can make motivation
and striving for it fitting. Some might protest here that someone like Slavina could also take
pride in her actions and is a rightful target of admiration, in spite of her death’s instrumental
inefficiency, which suggests that her death also contributes to meaning as mattering. I think
there’s some truth to this, but what it ultimately points to is just that we can see it as part of
the aim of someone like Slavina to show that there are still some people in Russia who have
the moral integrity to choose death rather than submission to autocracy. Her action certainly
realized that valuable aim and was to that extent successful even if it didn’t shake the
autocracy itself.
What about people who choose death without strictly aiming at it – does dying for a
cause contribute to purpose in their lives? I think it follows from what I have said that it
doesn’t. But I am not yet sure, because I am not quite sure what to say about the intentionality
of their dying for the cause, since it doesn’t seem like a mere foreseen side effect of, say,
refusing nutrition. In contrast, death itself clearly doesn’t provide purpose for those who
15
merely accept a significant risk of it for a cause. Other things being equal, their actions would
be just as meaningful were they miraculously saved. Imagine that rebel elements within the
German armed forces had rescued Hans Scholl at the last minute, and he would have survived
the rest of the war in Switzerland. That wouldn’t have in any way undermined the
purposefulness of his White Rose activities.
Finally, what about intelligibility and dying for a good cause? The principle looks
something like the following:
Death contributes to meaningI to the extent that it promotes or constitutes making the
actions and events that comprise one’s life fit into a culturally recognizable narrative
of pursuing some good (a hero narrative).
Here, I think it is good news all around for dying for a good cause. There definitely is a hero
narrative shared among a wide range of cultures, in which people sacrifice themselves for the
sake of the common good. For such a death to add to the arc of one’s life making sense, it
need not be in any way successful – dying in vain for a good cause is a common variant of
tragedy. Nor does it matter from the point of view of intelligibility if the death is an
unwelcome side effect of fighting a more powerful enemy. It will still provide a recognizable
closure that may be missing if one merely wastes away from illness.
The downside is that intelligibility is a low bar. Other things being equal, a life that
makes sense may be better for a person than a life that doesn’t. For example, Helena de Bres
argues that intelligibility allows for the goods of mutual understanding and community.21 But
these alone are not the kind of values for the sake of which it is a good idea to give up an
otherwise good life – especially since it also makes sense to give up your cause instead to
save your life.
21
De Bres, ‘Narrative’.
16
One question you might have at this point is that while it may be plausible enough
that events during your life contribute to its meaningfulness in something like the way I have
suggested, just when could death possibly make your life more meaningful? Seemingly, it
can’t do so once you die, and before that it hasn’t even happened. I don’t think this puzzle
can be solved without endorsing retrospective value change. Luckily, then, I have defended
such a view in various places.22 Roughly speaking, I believe that death can change the
teleological significance of prior actions that lead to it, and consequently make them more (or
less) meaningful.23
4. Meaning, Self-Interest, and Self-Sacrifice
In his book on the White Rose resistance movement, Richard Hanser says that for the
members of the movement ‘there was something worse than arrest, trial, and execution. What
was worse was living without protest under a system that, by its nature, was the enemy of all
decencies on which civilized intercourse among human beings rested’24. This is a very natural
thing to say about the cases we are interested in. But if it had been worse for Sophie Scholl to
live under the Nazis than to die, we are faced with a kind of puzzle. After all, it seems that
one of the reasons we admire people like her and are grateful to them if we are among the
beneficiaries of their act is that they sacrificed themselves for a good cause. Some may even
think that it is precisely sacrificing their lives for a cause that made them meaningful
(although I think this is a mistake – roughly, it’s doing objectively good things in the face of
challenges that gives meaning to their lives). But if dying for protesting was better for the
22
Such as Antti Kauppinen, ‘The Narrative Calculus’, Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics 5 (2015), 196–220
and Antti Kauppinen, ‘Prudence, Sunk Costs, and the Temporally Extended Self’, Journal of Moral Philosophy
17 (2020), 658–681.
23
Kauppinen, ’Prudence’, 668.
24
Hanser, Noble Treason, 20.
17
Scholls – most likely in virtue of making their lives more meaningful than otherwise – than
living much longer without protest, it seems they didn’t after all sacrifice themselves, since
they chose what was best for themselves. On the face of it, this is so implausible that it calls
into question the thesis that dying for a good cause can make one’s life meaningful.
To examine this challenge, let us start by defining self-sacrifice more precisely. As it
is standardly understood, self-sacrifice involves knowingly and voluntarily choosing an
option that is all-things-considered bad for yourself, and worse than other available
alternatives, because you regard something else as more important than your self-interest.25
Why are all these things required? Clearly, if you are forced to do something that is good for
others and bad for you, you are not sacrificing yourself (though you may be sacrificed), so it
must be a free choice. Similarly, if you choose to do something that is in fact all-thingsconsidered bad for you and good for a cause because of falsely believing that you are serving
your interests, you are not self-sacrificing, and merit little gratitude, so you must believe that
it is all-things-considered bad for you. Call this the subjective condition of self-sacrifice. (It is
evidently no self-sacrifice either if you do something you think is in some way bad for you,
but in other ways good for you, and the good outweighs the bad – it is no self-sacrifice to go
to a dentist.) On the other hand, if you falsely believe that serving some good cause is bad for
you when it in fact benefits you, that is not self-sacrifice either, though in this case you may
merit some admiration. So you must correctly believe, and better yet know, that serving the
cause is all-things considered worse for you. Call this the objective condition of self-sacrifice.
It must plausibly also be something positively bad and not just a less good option – at least, it
is not much of a self-sacrifice to holiday on Corfu rather than Santorini because it happens to
provide some benefit to refugee children.
25
See Mark Overvold, ’Self-Interest and the Concept of Self-Sacrifice’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 10
(1980), 105–118 and Chris Heathwood, ‘Preferentism and Self-Sacrifice’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 92
(2011), 18–38.
18
It follows that there are two basic ways in which dying for a cause can fail to amount
to self-sacrifice, setting aside the issue of positive badness:
Failure of subjective condition. If S believes she can either a) die for her cause or b)
give up her cause and live, and believes that a is all-things-considered better for her
than b, and chooses a because she believes so, she doesn’t sacrifice herself by
choosing a.
Failure of objective condition. If S can either a) die for her cause or b) give up her
cause and live, and a is all-things-considered better for her than b, she doesn’t
sacrifice herself by choosing a.
4.1 The Subjective Condition of Self-Sacrifice
Let us start our examination of when dying for a cause amounts to self-sacrifice with the
subjective condition. It is certainly possible for someone to reason in the following fashion:
‘Dying for the cause will make my life significantly more meaningful than giving it up to
live. Meaning is a really important good in a life. So, it is in my overall self-interest to lead a
significantly more rather than less meaningful life, even if it means losing many years of
happiness and other goods. So, I will fight for my cause at the risk or price of death.’ A
person who thinks this way will fail the subjective condition of self-sacrifice. Their reasoning
is relevantly similar to someone who thinks it is in her overall self-interest to go to a dentist,
even though it means enduring some unpleasantness for a while. But for our purposes, the
key question is whether someone who dies for a good cause must think in this way. And of
course, for each particular individual, such as Sophie Scholl, we can ask whether they did
think in this way.
19
The question of whether people who die for a cause in fact meet the subjective
condition is an empirical one. Psychologists have studied people’s motives for (apparent)
self-sacrifice or martyrdom26 especially in the context of suicide terrorism in places like
Palestine, Sri Lanka, and Chechnya. Interestingly for our purposes, the leading hypothesis,
defended by, among others, Arie Kruglanski and his colleagues, does seem to be that suicide
bombers are typically motivated by ‘quest for significance’27, or ‘the desire to count, to be
someone, to be recognized, to matter in the eyes of one’s group, according to its (sacred)
values’28 – roughly, a desire for meaning-as-mattering and living on in the collective memory
of one’s group – that is postulated to be a basic human motive, even a need. As Kruglanski
and colleagues put it,
On this analysis, the underlying motivation for suicide terrorism involves the coupling
of a quest for significance with a collective crisis situation, involving a perceived
threat to one’s group, and a terrorism-justifying ideology whereby a suicide attack is
portrayed as an act of heroic sacrifice (martyrdom) lending one’s existence and
demise an aura of supreme glory.29
This claim is supported by various sorts of empirical studies. Many are conducted in the
tradition of Terror Management Theory, according to which, very roughly, fear of death and
insignificance motivates people to attach themselves to groups and embrace cultural
worldviews or ‘ideologies’ that promise them at least symbolic immortality, a role in
26
Jocelyn Bélanger, Julie Caouette, Keren Sharvit, and Michelle Dugas, ’The Psychology of Martyrdom:
Making the Ultimate Sacrifice in the Name of a Cause’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 107
(2014), 494–515.
27
Arie Kruglanski, Xiaoyan Chen, Mark Dechesne, Shira Fishman, and Edward Orehek, ‘Fully Committed:
Suicide Bombers’ Motivation and the Quest for Personal Significance’, Political Psychology 30 (2009), 331–
357.
28
David Webber, Kristen Klein, Arie Kruglanski, Ambra Brizi, and Ariel Merari, ’Divergent Paths to
Martyrdom and Significance Among Suicide Attackers’, Terrorism and Political Violence 29 (2017), 852–874,
at 853.
29
Kruglanski et al., ’Quest for Personal Significance’, 337.
20
something greater than themselves.30 Consequently, being reminded of mortality (for
example, when one’s family members are killed by an occupying power31) or being made to
feel insignificant increases people’s motivation to support their group and make a mark on
the world in ways endorsed by the prevailing ideology, including by participating in suicide
missions when there is a grievance that calls for violent retaliation. And indeed,
unsurprisingly, many would-be suicide terrorists justify their actions by appeal to defending
their religion or nation.32 Conversely, people who strongly identify with their religion or
nation are more supportive of terrorism than others and are less anxious about their own
death.33
Of course, it doesn’t follow that people willing to die for a cause are at bottom on a
quest for personal significance – they could care about defending the honour or safety of their
ethnic group for its own sake and not only instrumentally. So the important question is
whether people would choose or risk death for a cause if there was a possibility to gain (or
restore, or avoid the loss of) significance in some other way, or if they didn’t see it as a
means to personal significance in the first place. The best evidence I have been able to find
for significance motivation comes from two sources: first, some suicide terrorists seem to
have turned to it after personal failure (doing something shameful, losing a job)34, and
second, some deradicalization programs, such as the one targeting incarcerated Tamil Tigers
30
See e.g. Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core: On the Role of
Death in Life (New York: Random House, 2015).
31
Anne Spekhard and Khapta Akhmatova, ‘The Making of a Martyr: Chechen Suicide Terrorism’, Studies in
Conflict and Terrorism 29 (2006), 1–65, found that all Checzhen suicide attackers in the 2002 Moscow theatre
siege had had family members killed or tortured by Russians or their cronies, which Kruglanski and colleagues
interpret as supporting the death reminder theory (‘Quest for Significance’, 339). One wonders, though, if
arousing righteous anger or desire for vengeance isn’t a simpler explanation – family deaths by natural causes
should also remind one of mortality, but would they motivate suicide terrorism? Similarly, Webber et al.
(‘Divergent Paths’) code terrorists who have lost a loved one to violence as being motivated by loss of one’s
own personal significance, which again ignores the simpler emotional explanation.
32
Kruglanski et al., ’Quest for Personal Significance’, 340–344.
33
Edward Orehek, Jo Sasota, Arie Kruglanski, Mark Dechesne, and Leianna Ridgeway, ‘Interdependent SelfConstruals Mitigate the Fear of Death and Augment the Willingness to Become a Martyr’, Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology 107 (2014), 265–275.
34
Webber et al., ’Divergent Paths’, 860.
21
in Srik Lanka, appear to succeed in virtue of offering people alternative routes to significance
by way of vocational education.35 While this evidence is inconclusive, it suggests that in
some cases risking one’s life for a cause is motivated by a deeper desire to gain or restore a
sense of mattering.
So, there is some psychological evidence that some people who die for a cause fail to
meet the subjective condition for self-sacrifice, since if you do something ultimately because
you think it will make your life more significant and therefore better in one way, you are not
knowingly choosing the option that is worse for you. But evidently the empirical results come
nowhere near showing that this must be the case. It is perfectly possible and is supported by
what we know about the Scholl siblings that somebody reasons along the following lines:
‘Getting ordinary Germans to rise up against tyranny is supremely important. This moral evil
must be stopped, even if it means losing many years of happiness and other goods for me. So
I will pursue rebellion against the regime even at the risk or price of death.’ Someone who
reasons in this way chooses an option they think is morally better in the belief that it is or
may easily be prudentially worse. She doesn’t aim at making her own life meaningful, but at
making the world less bad. She need not at all think about the meaning of her own life or her
self-interest, or how others will think of her afterwards. But whether she as a matter of fact
does so – and clearly, there is evidence in the quotations I started with that Sophie Scholl, for
example, wasn’t insensitive to meaning36 – the crucial thing is that she doesn’t make her
35
Arie Kruglanski, J Jocelyn J. Bélanger, Michele Gelfand, Rohan Gunaratna, Malkanthi Hettiarachchi,
Fernando Reinares, Edward Orehek, Jo Sasota, and Keren Sharvit, ‘Terrorism: A Love Story: Redirecting the
Significance Quest Can End Violence’, American Psychologist 68 (2013), 559–575, at 572–573.
36
There is even more to suggest that Hans Scholl was motivated to some extent to make his life matter.
According to the biographer Richard Hanser, his favourite book as a boy was ‘a collection of article-essays by
Stefan Zweig called Sternstunden der Menschheit, a title that loses something in English—“Stellar Hours of
Mankind”. In it Zweig described a variety of crucial moments from which some enduring significance for
coming generations flowed’ (Noble Treason, 53). It is unsurprising, then, that Hans ‘felt that he himself was
being summoned to act heroically’ and had ‘a deep strain of idealism that demanded that life have a meaning,
that activity have a basis in purpose’ (Noble Treason, 38). Perhaps it could be said that the felt need for
mattering initially got Hans to look for some way to make a valuable contribution, but most likely once he had
committed to the cause of undermining the regime, any self-directed motives faded into the background.
22
choices because she thinks it is best or most meaningful for her. She at least would act the
same way even if she didn’t think so.
To put it differently, what people seek whose choices meet the subjective condition of
self-sacrifice are things that make their lives meaningful de re, not things that make it more
meaningful de dicto. That is to say, it is true of the aims that they pursue, such as resisting the
dictatorship, that pursuing them makes their lives meaningful (that is the de re reading), even
though they don’t pursue them under the description of making their lives meaningful (as the
de dicto reading would have it). It is only if they pursued what makes their life meaningful de
dicto that they would be motivated to engage in self-focused reasoning about which option
would best promote meaning, and be prepared to change their project if another, less costly
option were to emerge. It is worth noting that such reasoning is at least to some extent selfdefeating, since if you, say, try to bring down a tyrannical regime just in order to make your
life more meaningful and just as long as you think it will do so, you are not genuinely
committed to bringing down the regime (since commitment would entail that you wouldn’t
trade it for another option just because it looked better from the perspective of your personal
meaning). And if your actions don’t express your commitment, they are not as deeply rooted
in who you are as they could be, and therefore contribute less to making your life meaningful
even if they are successful.
4.2 The Objective Condition of Self-Sacrifice
I have argued that we don’t have reason to think that people who die for a cause always or
generally fail the subjective condition of self-sacrifice. But what about failing the objective
condition? With some plausible additional assumptions, this is a real challenge to my view. I
have argued that dying for a cause can indeed make a person’s life more meaningful. If that is
23
combined with the assumption that meaning in life is a very important prudential good – that
it is very much in our self-interest to lead a more rather than less meaningful life – it follows
that it can relatively easily turn out that it is better for someone to die for a cause rather than
to live a longer, less meaningful life. And if that is so, then my view entails that even a person
who subjectively sets her self-interest aside may end up doing what is best for her, and thus
won’t sacrifice herself, because she fails the objective condition. This is a challenge to my
view, since people who die for a cause often do sacrifice themselves for it. So I must explain
why acts that give great meaning to our lives can nevertheless be all-things-considered bad
for us.
An easy way out would be to deny that meaning in any of three varieties I have
mentioned is in our self-interest. And there certainly are theories of well-being, such as forms
of hedonism and subjectivism, according to which it is only instrumentally or contingently
good for us, respectively, either by way of contributing to pleasure or happiness or by being
something we desire or value. If that were the case, it would be easy to show that in most
cases of dying for a cause the person would get more pleasure or satisfy desires better by
saving themselves. And even if some more objectivist theory of well-being is true, it could be
that meaning in life is a value that is distinct from well-being or self-interest. Some of the
things Susan Wolf says are in this vein, especially when she highlights the contrast between
reasons of self-interest and reasons of love, when the latter are involved in many meaninggenerating activities according to her.37 But if we look at her work more carefully, the real
contrast she tends to draw is between meaning and happiness.38 And plausibly, there is more
to self-interest than happiness.
37
38
Susan Wolf, Meaning in Life and Why It Matters (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), at 51.
E.g. Wolf, Meaning in Life, 49.
24
Most famously, the idea that happiness is not all that matters for well-being is
supported by the often misunderstood Experience Machine thought experiment.39 As Eden
Lin notes, properly construed it involves two subjects who lead experientially identical lives
and thus are equally happy, but while one of them derives her happiness from actual
achievements and interactions, the other’s experiences are surreptitiously generated by a
supercomputer she is plugged into while passively lying in a tank.40 If happiness were the
only thing that matters, the lives of these two people would necessarily be equally good for
them. But they are not – other things being equal, it is better for you to feel the same amount
of joy for actually winning a prize than for having the perfect illusion of doing so – so there
must be more to self-interest than happiness. But what else? I can’t argue for it here, but I
believe that meaningfulness (as mattering or purpose or both) is a good candidate for a
feature that unifies such things as valuable achievements and successful personal
relationships. Indeed, as many from Nozick onwards have suggested, the most appealing
explanation of why a perfectly happy life in an Experience Machine is not the best possible
one is that it is notably lacking in. All the standard tests for what kind of life is prudentially
good also point to meaning being among welfare goods – other things being equal, we wish
for our children to grow up to lead meaningful rather than meaningless lives, and not just
because we think that would be instrumentally beneficial to them; other things being equal,
we envy people who lead more rather than less meaningful lives, and so on. And it is not just
hedonism but also subjectivism that struggles to explain this, since for a subjectivist meaning
is only good for us if we desire or value it.41 Yet it seems all the more tragic if a child grows
up not valuing the things that would de re make her life meaningful.
39
Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974).
Eden Lin, ’How to Use the Experience Machine’, Utilitas 28 (2016), 314–332.
41
For sophisticated subjectivism, see Valerie Tiberius, Well-Being as Value Fulfillment: How We Can Help
Each Other to Live Well (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
40
25
So, there is at least a good prima facie case for thinking that meaning is a welfare
good, something in itself and non-instrumentally good for us. But that means we must take
head-on the challenge of showing how a significantly more meaningful life resulting from
dying for a good cause and thereby (or as a result of) successfully promoting it can be allthings-considered worse for you than saving oneself. Given that on any plausible theory of
well-being, meaningfulness is not the only welfare good, there are two possibilities: either the
losses in terms of other goods outweigh the gains in meaning, or there is a net loss of
meaningfulness. Fortunately for meeting the objective condition of self-sacrifice, we find
both of these in our paradigm cases.
Let us start with the more straightforward case, the greater loss of other goods. It is
probably not a coincidence that when we think about cases of self-sacrifice, we tend to focus
on the young who would otherwise have a lot of good life ahead of them. While it is difficult
if not impossible to give anything like precise weights to different components of any
pluralist conception of well-being, it seems clear that sixty years of a happy life that is neither
meaningless nor particularly meaningful is better for you than a very meaningful life that
lasts only twenty years. The Scholl siblings, for example, might well have survived the war
and gone on to live ordinary happy lives filled with friendship, achievement, and culture,
despite quite possibly occasionally feeling ashamed for having been quiet during the Hitler
regime. On the other hand, if a very old person goes out in a blaze of glory, her act may be
admirable for its inherent or instrumental value and the courage it takes to face pain, but may
well not amount to genuine self-sacrifice, if the alternative is joylessly withering away.
But wait – what if Sophie Scholl had, unbeknownst to all, a congenital heart condition
that would have caused her to die in March 1943 anyway? My account would then entail that
it is, after all, in Sophie’s best interest to die for her cause, so that it doesn’t amount to selfsacrifice. But that, to me, is the right thing to say. An informed advisor concerned only for
26
Sophie’s good would have good reason to tell her to choose the more meaningful option
rather than the marginally longer life that would be considerably less meaningful, even if it
contained somewhat more happiness. If you are not convinced, suppose that Sophie knew that
she was going to die soon anyway. Her choice of sticking with her group would look a lot
less like a self-sacrifice in that case.
A different kind of protest might start from the idea that even if Sophie would have
died a week later anyway, as long as she didn’t know that, her choice is admirable in virtue of
being an instance of self-sacrifice. My response is to grant that her choice would indeed be
admirable, but not because it would be a case of self-sacrifice, but because of her willingness
to sacrifice herself for a good cause. It would be analogous in this respect to jumping in front
of a raging bull in order to rescue some unknown children only for the bull to fall into a trap
just before it gets to you. In such a situation, you wouldn’t have in the end sacrificed yourself
to save the children – indeed, if a grateful billionaire mother granted your every wish as a
result, your action might well turn out to have been very much in your best interests. Still, the
gratitude wouldn’t be misplaced, since your action would nevertheless have manifested a
virtuous willingness to sacrifice yourself for the sake of a great value.
I take it that it should be fairly obvious that the more meaningful choice can result in
overall worse consequences for a person even if meaning counts towards self-interest. But it
can also be the case that the more meaningful choice results in overall loss in terms of
meaning itself. Consider the following possible lives for someone like Sophie Scholl:
Life A: Sophie gets caught for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets; Sophie refuses to
renounce her opposition; Sophie gets sentenced to death and executed on February 23,
1943.
Life B: Sophie gets caught for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets; under pressure, Sophie
recants and is sentenced to community service; immediately after the war, Sophie
27
begins collecting evidence of Nazi atrocities, and for the next five decades, keeps the
memory of the horrors alive for new generations, before succumbing to cancer on
June 7, 1997.
For reasons discussed earlier, life A is more meaningful than life B until February 23, 1943
(and indeed for a considerable time after). But as Sophie in life B begins her important work
in making sure that later generations never forget, her life gradually gains in meaning, and
may eventually overtake life A in that respect. What this shows is that even choices that
significantly contribute to meaning in life need not make the life more meaningful than it
would otherwise have been.42 They can thus amount to sacrifice in terms of meaning itself,
and not just in terms of other prudential goods.
5. Conclusion
To sum up, I have argued that dying for a good cause can contribute to meaning in life in its
various senses. If death itself is chosen and serves the cause, it plays a part in making one’s
life leading up to it matter. If death is a worthwhile aim in service of the cause, it can give
purpose to earlier efforts, even if it doesn’t have good consequences. And dying for a good
cause can make for a good ending to a heroic narrative, though that is not in itself worth
dying for. Insofar as having meaning in life is a good thing for an individual, there is thus
something to be said for dying for a cause from the perspective of prudence. This raises the
issue of how it nevertheless often amounts to self-sacrifice. The answer is that one need not
42
This is structurally similar to Valerie Tiberius’s observation that living up to one’s values right now can result
in net loss of value fulfillment in the long run, and thus amount to self-sacrifice. See Tiberius, Well-Being as
Value Fulfillment, 43.
28
choose to risk or face death because one thinks it is best or most meaningful for one, and
even if such death contributes to meaning, this benefit may be outweighed by other losses,
including those in terms of meaning itself.
While there thus can be something to be said for dying for a cause from the
perspective of meaning, morality, and self-interest, I do want to finish by cautioning against it
by pointing out three distinctive major risks. First of all, you might end up dying for a bad
cause. People can, notoriously, fool themselves into thinking that their own group, religion,
or race is objectively superior to others, and commit to righting perceived wrongs that are not
genuine wrongs. The cause of the Southern Confederacy is a paradigm example. Such causes
can, unfortunately, give one a sense of purpose and mattering. But they don’t, for all that,
make one’s life meaningful, because the ends one pursues are not objectively worth pursuing.
Second, even if the cause is genuinely good, it is almost always highly uncertain whether
one’s death will promote it, thus calling into question whether it will make one’s life matter.
And even if the action that leads to your death does promote the cause, it may be morally
wrong, as happens in the rare cases of suicide terrorism that kills innocent civilians in pursuit
of a genuinely good cause. Such wrongness may be a kind of undercutting defeater for a
contribution to meaning.43 And finally, even if the cause is good and one’s death would
promote it without moral wrong, it might not be good enough to make dying for it a
proportionate response. It may be important to protect neighbourhood parks against greedy
property developers, but you shouldn’t sacrifice your life for it. So if you wish to lead a
meaningful life and are lucky enough to be able to do so without risking your life, there is
much to recommend in living for a cause.44
43
I owe this intriguing suggestion to Frances Kamm.
I’d like to thank participants in the Meaning of Life and Knowledge of Death workshop for useful discussion,
especially Michael Hauskeller, Daniel Hill, Frances Kamm, and Thaddeus Metz, who sent me written
comments. I also owe a debt for Lilian O’Brien for her insights on several drafts of the paper.
44