The Ethics of Meaning-Making

The search for "meaning" is not synonymous with "good"

Sufficiently uncompromising meaning-making is unethical violence. The ethically optimal amount of anomie is not zero. These two claims frame the problem this essay addresses: the human drive to generate meaning is powerful and indispensable, yet it becomes ethically dangerous the moment it seeks to eliminate uncertainty. Meaning-making promises orientation, coherence, and moral clarity, but it often delivers these by rearranging the world to fit the inward demands of the self. When meaning-making becomes uncompromising—when it refuses correction, resists limits, and converts ambiguity into simple narratives—it harms others not by conscious intention but by narrative necessity. The cure is not to abolish meaning-making but to restrain it with duties, submit it to feedback, and cultivate the virtues that allow a person to withstand the discomfort of not knowing.

---

Sloptraptions is an AI-assisted opt-in section of the Contraptions Newsletter. Recipe at end. If you only want my hand-crafted writing, you can unsubscribe from this section.

We’re reading Thomas More’s Utopia this month in the Contraptions book club.

---

HUD1 from my Bucket Art series

Meaning-making begins with selective framing. Before any explicit judgment, the mind has already chosen what features of a situation are salient and what may be ignored. This selection is not neutral. It is the first ethical act, for it determines what kinds of meaning will later seem natural. Consider a citizen in a developed country confronted with a sudden influx of refugees. One person’s meaning-making drive foregrounds suffering families, bombed cities, the universal vulnerability of human beings. Another foregrounds insecurity, cultural disruption, or competition for jobs and services. Neither is yet making an ethical argument, but each has already accepted a frame that prepares different moral postures. The danger is that these frames present themselves as reality rather than as partial, interest-laden constructions. Meaning arises within these frames—“a nation of refuge,” “a nation under strain”—but the framing itself has already tilted moral perception before moral deliberation begins.

From this point, the meaning-making drive tends to fail in two predictable ways. The first is escalation. Meaning-making intensifies its own commitments, because stronger narratives feel more clarifying, more purposeful, more definitive. A humanitarian impulse grows into an uncompromising demand for unlimited admission; a cautious impulse grows into a sweeping story of existential threat. The second failure is insulation. Once a narrative reduces discomfort or stabilizes identity, the meaning-making drive protects it from challenge. A citizen who sees openness as the core of their moral identity treats any acknowledgment of limits as betrayal; one who sees cultural stability as essential treats any refugee as a symbolic danger. Escalation inflates meaning beyond proportion; insulation petrifies it beyond revision. In both cases, the refugee—the actual person—disappears beneath the narrative.

A separate set of distortions emerges when the meaning-making drive serves as a defense against anomie. Sometimes the mind copes with uncertainty by instrumentalizing others, using them as props to stabilize the self. Refugees become exemplars of national virtue or of national decline, depending on what story quiets the citizen’s anxiety. At other times, the drive collapses entirely into nihilistic drift: if meaning cannot be stabilized, it is abandoned. In this mode, nothing seems to matter; duties are dismissed as futile; consequences as unknowable; moral engagement as pointless. This resignation is not ethically neutral. It withholds care precisely when care is needed and excuses refusal as lucidity. These failures—escalation, insulation, instrumentalization, and nihilistic drift—share a common origin: an intolerance for uncertainty. Without some capacity to endure ambiguity, meaning-making will either harden into dogma or dissolve into defeat.

Ethical frameworks exist, in part, to regulate these distortions. Deontological constraints act as fixed boundaries that the meaning-making drive cannot legitimately cross. Whatever narrative a citizen constructs about refugees, it cannot justify cruelty, arbitrary exclusion, or the return of vulnerable people to mortal danger. Duties do not intensify with fear or expand with idealism. They stand as limits beyond which meaning-making loses its moral claim. Consequentialist reasoning provides a different form of discipline by requiring the meaning-making drive to submit its preferred narratives to evidence. Predictions about security, integration, and public resources cannot be accepted merely because they support an emotionally satisfying meaning. Consequentialism disrupts insulation by insisting that narratives remain corrigible. Yet it, too, is vulnerable when meaning-making supplies the models rather than responds to them. A fearful narrative can dress itself in data; a romantic one can do the same. For consequentialism to function ethically, it must operate within the boundaries set by deontology and under virtues that discourage overconfidence.

Virtue governs the moral posture from which one interprets both duties and consequences. In the refugee context, compassion prevents dehumanization; practical wisdom prevents symbolic overreach; humility prevents meaning-making from mistaking its own perspective for self-evident truth; courage prevents it from collapsing into fear or nihilism. Virtue is what makes it possible to live with the ethically optimal amount of anomie—the portion of uncertainty that keeps meaning-making from hardening into violence or evaporating into indifference. Virtue thickens the person against the temptation to resolve tension prematurely.

Complexity magnifies every one of these dangers. Refugee movements arise from opaque geopolitical causes, produce uncertain social and economic outcomes, and provoke unpredictable reactions. In such conditions, meaning-making becomes more necessary and less trustworthy. The clearer a narrative feels in a complex situation, the more likely it is a product of the drive’s need for orientation rather than the world’s actual structure. Escalation becomes easier because partial information can be framed as decisive. Insulation becomes easier because counter-evidence is ambiguous enough to dismiss. Instrumentalization becomes easier because the mind longs for a stable story in an unstable world. Nihilistic drift becomes easier because real control is limited, and narrative coherence feels beyond reach.

This is why deontological limits, consequentialist feedback, and virtuous posture become more—not less—important as complexity rises. They prevent the meaning-making drive from mistaking its own simplifications for ethical insight. They ensure that meaning remains answerable to moral reality rather than replacing it. Deontology halts the drive at the point where harm becomes narratively tempting. Consequentialism forces the drive to engage with consequences rather than fantasies. Virtue cultivates the emotional resilience required to tolerate uncertainty without fleeing into zealotry or despair.

We can now restate the guiding propositions with their full force. Sufficiently uncompromising meaning-making is unethical violence because it subordinates other people to the inward demand for significance. The ethically optimal amount of anomie is not zero because only a remainder of uncertainty can prevent meaning-making from converting its preferences into universal truths. Ethics is the discipline that keeps meaning-making from overrunning reality. Meaning, when disciplined, can illuminate moral life. Meaning-making, when uncompromised, will distort it. The task is not to deny the meaning-making drive but to contain it, so that its need for orientation does not eclipse the world to which we are answerable.

Recipe

Here is the ChatGPT session

Summarize the protocol we used to produce this essay

We followed a clear, iterative co-authoring protocol that combined conceptual scaffolding, adversarial refinement, and stylistic calibration. In compact form, the protocol had these steps:

1. Establish a thesis–antithesis frame.
   We began with a conceptual tension (deontology vs consequentialism under complexity) and explored both sides without trying to resolve them.

2. Introduce controlled perturbations.
   You added constraints—e.g., allowing rules and goals to evolve—forcing the argument to adjust rather than collapse into familiar positions.

3. Add a mediating dimension.
   Virtue ethics was layered in not as a third theory but as a mode of embodiment. This created a three-channel regulatory model (rules, outcomes, posture).

4. Apply adversarial meaning-making analysis.
   We then introduced a second-order problem: meaning-making itself as an ethically distorting upstream force. This opened failure modes (escalation, insulation, instrumentalization, nihilistic drift).

5. Stress-test claims with a throughline example.
   A real-world scenario—citizens responding to refugees—was used to illustrate how each theoretical move behaves under pressure and complexity.

6. Reassess the balance of the argument.
   We revisited the thesis/antithesis in light of meaning-making distortions and complexity, updating the relative strengths and confidence.

7. Formulate leading propositions.
   You asked for aphoristic, Frankfurt-style claims; we generated candidates and converged on:

   • “Sufficiently uncompromising meaning-making is unethical violence.”

   • “The ethically optimal amount of anomie is not zero.”

8. Adopt a stylistic template.
   We used On Bullshit as a tonal reference and aligned the essay’s voice accordingly—plainspoken, morally direct, conceptually economical.

9. Draft section-by-section in analytical mode.
   Each section was written as rigorous discrete prose, with the meaning-making drive consistently distinguished from the meanings it produces.

10. Merge and smooth conceptual architecture.
    You requested continuous prose with minimal headings and no lists; we collapsed the scaffolding into a single argumentative flow.

11. Finalize as a continuous essay.
    The final product presents the reasoning without visible seams: the propositions, the refugee example, the failure modes, the ethical frameworks, and the synthesis appear as one coherent movement.