Susan Rose Wolf

1. Introduction

Susan Rose Wolf (b. 1952) is an American moral philosopher whose work has significantly reshaped contemporary debates about free will and moral responsibility, the meaning of life, and the place of morality within a good human life. Working within the analytic tradition, she is widely cited for arguing that responsible agency depends less on metaphysically robust freedom than on an agent’s responsiveness to reasons and sanity, understood as an adequate grasp of evaluative reality.

Wolf is also a central figure in the contemporary revival of philosophical reflection on meaning in life, especially through her proposal that meaning arises from “active engagement in projects of worth.” This “hybrid” account links an individual’s subjective attachment to activities with the objective value of those activities, distinguishing meaning from both happiness and moral rightness.

A further strand of her work critiques the aspiration to be a “moral saint”, challenging theories that treat moral value as exhaustive of all that is normatively important. Across these topics, Wolf’s writings explore how moral, personal, aesthetic, and loving concerns interact, without reducing one to another.

Her influence extends beyond philosophy into law, psychology, and theology, where her accounts of sanity, responsibility, and meaningful activity have informed discussions of criminal culpability, psychopathology, well-being, and spiritual vocation. Although she is often read as a compatibilist about free will and a pluralist about value, her work is primarily characterized by careful attention to ordinary moral experience and by efforts to clarify the variety of values that shape human lives.

2. Life and Historical Context

Wolf was born on 19 December 1952 in Brooklyn, New York, to parents who were themselves academics: her mother, Lillian Wolf, was a mathematics educator, and her father, Arthur M. Wolf, a historian. Commentators often suggest that this background in quantitatively and historically rigorous disciplines helped orient her toward precise argument and sensitivity to context.

She studied philosophy at Yale University (B.A. 1974) during a period when analytic ethics was increasingly focused on metaethics, utilitarian and Kantian normative theory, and emerging work on practical reason. Proceeding to Princeton University for graduate study, she completed her Ph.D. in 1978 under Thomas Nagel, whose writings on reasons, the subjective–objective contrast, and moral luck provide an important backdrop to her own concerns with multiple standpoints in practical reasoning.

Wolf’s early academic appointments at Harvard University and the University of Maryland, College Park in the late 1970s and 1980s coincided with an intense phase of Anglophone debate on free will, compatibilism, and moral responsibility, shaped by figures such as Harry Frankfurt, P. F. Strawson, and Peter van Inwagen. Her essays from this period enter directly into those discussions, while adding a distinctive psychological and evaluative dimension.

In 2002 she joined the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as Edna J. Koury Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, at a time when UNC was becoming a major hub for normative ethics and moral psychology. Her later work on meaning in life emerged amid a broader turn in moral philosophy and empirical psychology toward questions of well-being, narrative identity, and purpose.

3. Intellectual Development

Wolf’s intellectual development is often described in terms of successive, but interconnected, phases that track shifts in her central questions rather than sharp breaks in position.

Early Focus on Responsibility and Free Will

In the late 1970s and 1980s, Wolf concentrated on moral responsibility under determinism. Influenced by Nagel and contemporary compatibilist debates, she asked what conditions must obtain for agents to be fairly held responsible, even if their choices are causally determined. Essays such as “The Importance of Free Will” and “Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility” developed an account in which reasons-responsiveness and sanity play the central roles.

Broadening to Practical Reason and Value

Around the time of Freedom Within Reason (1990), Wolf’s focus widened from responsibility narrowly conceived to the structure of practical reason and the variety of values. She examined how moral reasons relate to aesthetic, personal, and prudential reasons, and questioned views that equate rationality with morality. This period includes her influential critique of the ideal of the moral saint, through which she explored tensions between moral demands and a rich human life.

Turn to Meaning in Life

From the 2000s onward, Wolf increasingly addressed questions about meaning in life, culminating in her Tanner Lectures, Meaning in Life and Why It Matters. Here she integrated earlier concerns about love, value, and reasons into a broader framework that distinguishes meaning from happiness and moral worth, and that emphasizes projects of worth as central to meaningful lives.

Interdisciplinary Refinement

More recent work shows Wolf engaging with legal theory, psychology, and theology, refining her accounts of blame, psychopathology, and ordinary meaningful lives. This stage is characterized by applications of her earlier theoretical ideas to concrete questions about criminal responsibility, addiction, and the value of everyday relationships and work, while maintaining continuity with her long-standing interest in how agents relate to what is truly valuable.

4. Major Works

Wolf’s main ideas are articulated across a mix of books and widely reprinted essays. The following table highlights central works and their primary themes:

Influential Articles

• “The Importance of Free Will” (1981)
  Proposes a reasons-responsiveness account of moral responsibility and challenges the view that indeterministic free will is necessary for holding agents responsible.

• “Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility” (1987)
  Introduces the sanity condition: responsibility requires that an agent be in sufficient contact with moral and evaluative reality to appreciate reasons.

• “Moral Saints” (1982)
  Argues that lives dedicated solely to maximizing moral goodness may be unattractive and may crowd out other human excellences, raising questions for ethical theories that implicitly valorize such lives.

These works are frequently cited together, since they collectively elaborate Wolf’s interconnected views on responsibility, meaning, love, and the plurality of values that structure human agency.

5. Core Ideas on Free Will and Responsibility

Wolf’s contributions to debates on free will and responsibility center on the claim that moral responsibility depends primarily on an agent’s reasons-responsiveness and sanity, rather than on a metaphysically robust power to do otherwise in an indeterministic sense.

Reasons-Responsiveness

In “The Importance of Free Will” and Freedom Within Reason, Wolf develops the idea that a responsible agent must have the capacity to recognize and appropriately respond to reasons. It is not required that one could have done otherwise in a strong libertarian sense; rather, one must be such that, in relevantly nearby circumstances with different reasons, one’s will would have differed.

Sanity Condition

In “Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility,” Wolf adds a sanity requirement: to be responsible, an agent must be in sufficient contact with reality, including its moral and evaluative aspects, to appreciate reasons as they are. Agents whose evaluative faculties are grossly distorted by brainwashing or severe psychopathology may fail to be responsible even if they act voluntarily.

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“To be responsible, an agent must be sane; that is, she must be able to see and appreciate the world, including its moral aspects, in roughly the way it really is.”

— Susan R. Wolf, “Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility”

Position within the Free Will Debate

Commentators generally classify Wolf as offering a compatibilist-friendly account, since her conditions are in principle compatible with determinism. However, she avoids committing to a full metaphysical compatibilism, focusing instead on normative conditions of fairness in blame and praise.

Her view is often compared with:

Debate persists over how to specify “sanity” without circularity and whether reasons-responsiveness alone can ground intuitions about desert and accountability.

6. Meaning in Life and Projects of Worth

Wolf’s account of meaning in life is one of the most discussed contemporary theories in this emerging field. She argues that meaning is neither reducible to subjective happiness nor to moral goodness, but instead arises from a distinctive relation between agents and valuable aspects of the world.

Hybrid Theory of Meaning

Wolf characterizes meaningful lives as those involving:

1. Subjective attraction: the agent is actively and lovingly engaged in an activity, relationship, or pursuit.
2. Objective attractiveness: the engaged object is a “project of worth”, that is, it has some independent value.

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“Meaning arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness.”

— Susan R. Wolf, Meaning in Life and Why It Matters

This “hybrid” view combines subjectivist insights (importance of engagement, passion, identification) with objectivist claims (some projects are genuinely more meaningful because they are more worthwhile).

Projects of Worth

Wolf uses “projects of worth” broadly to include:

• Creative and intellectual activities (e.g., science, art, scholarship)
• Relationships of love and care
• Social, political, or moral causes
• Sometimes, forms of work or craftsmanship

She remains neutral on providing a complete theory of objective value; her view presupposes that some things are more worthy than others, but allows for pluralism and controversy about which.

Distinguishing Meaning, Happiness, and Morality

Wolf emphasizes that:

• A life can be happy but meaningless (e.g., contented but trivial pursuits).
• A life can be morally admirable but relatively low in meaning (e.g., dutiful but emotionally disengaged action).
• Meaning is a separate dimension of evaluation, though it often overlaps with happiness and morality.

Critics debate whether Wolf’s notion of objective worth can be specified without appealing to controversial moral or aesthetic standards, and whether meaningfulness should be tied so tightly to projects rather than to, for instance, narrative unity or self-authorship.

7. Moral Saints, Value Pluralism, and the Good Life

In her influential article “Moral Saints”, Wolf questions whether the ideal of being as morally good as possible is compatible with a fully good human life, and uses this critique to illuminate the plurality of values.

The Moral Saint Problem

Wolf distinguishes two idealized types:

She argues that both ideals would likely crowd out non-moral excellences such as a sense of humor, appreciation of art, and personal hobbies. A life wholly dominated by moral demands, she suggests, may be less than fully good, even if morally optimal.

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“A life in which a person is as morally good as possible need not be, and sometimes clearly is not, a life that is as good as possible for the person to lead.”

— Susan R. Wolf, “Moral Saints”

Value Pluralism

From this starting point, Wolf defends a form of value pluralism:

• There are moral values (e.g., justice, benevolence), but also
• Non-moral values (e.g., artistic excellence, intellectual achievement, playful creativity, personal attachment).

She maintains that a good life must integrate multiple types of value, and that it can be rational to pursue non-moral projects even when this does not maximize moral goodness.

Relation to Ethical Theories

Wolf’s discussion has been read as a challenge to:

• Utilitarianism and some forms of Kantianism, when interpreted as endorsing an overriding moral ideal.
• Views that equate practical rationality with moral duty.

Defenders of those theories respond in various ways, for instance by softening the demandingness of moral ideals, or by arguing that a properly specified moral theory already accommodates space for non-moral pursuits. The debate has made Wolf’s essay a standard reference point in discussions of moral demandingness and the shape of a well-rounded life.

8. Methodology and Style of Argument

Wolf’s philosophical methodology combines analytic rigor with sustained attention to ordinary moral experience. Commentators often stress several characteristic features.

Use of Thought Experiments and Cases

Wolf frequently employs concrete examples and thought experiments—such as brainwashed agents, psychopaths, or idealized “moral saints”—to probe intuitions about responsibility, meaning, and value. These cases aim to reveal tensions in prevailing theories and to motivate revised conditions such as sanity or reasons-responsiveness.

Reflective Equilibrium and Common Sense

Her work typically proceeds by seeking a form of reflective equilibrium:

• She treats commonsense judgments about blame, admiration, and meaning as significant data.
• She also allows that these judgments can be revised in light of broader theoretical considerations.

This approach yields views that many commentators regard as moderate or middle path positions—avoiding both radical skepticism about responsibility and overly demanding moral ideals.

Interdisciplinary Sensitivity

Wolf engages closely with moral psychology, legal theory, and theology, but usually as an analytic philosopher rather than as an empirical researcher. She draws on empirical and doctrinal work to sharpen her questions about sanity, addiction, or vocation, while keeping her primary focus on normative and conceptual analysis.

Stylistic Features

Observers often note that Wolf’s prose is:

• Clear and accessible, even when addressing technical debates.
• Self-critical and modest, explicitly canvassing objections and limits of her own proposals.
• Humanly attentive, incorporating examples from literature, popular culture, and everyday life rather than exclusively relying on highly abstract scenarios.

This combination of methods has made her writings widely used in both advanced research and introductory teaching, facilitating dialogue between specialists and non-specialists on issues of responsibility and the good life.

9. Impact on Ethics, Law, and Moral Psychology

Wolf’s ideas have had notable influence across several fields, partly because they offer theoretically structured yet psychologically realistic accounts of responsibility and meaning.

Ethics and Political Philosophy

In ethics, her critique of moral sainthood and her emphasis on value pluralism have contributed to:

• Debates about moral demandingness, influencing how utilitarians, Kantians, and virtue ethicists articulate ideals of ethical life.
• Renewed interest in non-moral goods—aesthetic, personal, and playful—as integral to theories of well-being and practical reason.

Her hybrid theory of meaning has become a standard reference in discussions of well-being and life evaluation, often contrasted with hedonistic, desire-satisfaction, and purely objective-list theories.

Law and Responsibility Practices

Wolf’s notions of sanity and reasons-responsiveness have been taken up by legal theorists analyzing:

• The conditions under which criminal defendants should be considered legally responsible.
• How mental illness, brainwashing, addiction, or extreme socialization may undermine or mitigate culpability.

While legal doctrine typically uses different terminology, scholars have drawn parallels between Wolf’s sanity condition and standards for competence, insanity defenses, and assessments of mens rea.

Moral Psychology and Interdisciplinary Research

In moral psychology and related empirical fields, Wolf’s framework has helped shape:

• Operationalizations of meaning in life that track both subjective engagement and perceived objective value in psychological scales and studies.
• Discussions of narrative identity and purpose, where her emphasis on “projects of worth” offers a conceptual structure for empirical research.

Psychologists and theologians have also engaged with her distinction between meaning, happiness, and moral goodness, using it to interpret survey data on life satisfaction, altruism, and religious vocation.

The following table schematically summarizes areas of influence:

Interpretations of her impact differ in emphasis, but there is broad agreement that her work has provided a shared vocabulary for interdisciplinary discussion of responsibility and meaningful agency.

10. Legacy and Historical Significance

Wolf’s legacy within contemporary philosophy is typically framed in terms of her role in re-orienting central debates about responsibility, value, and the good life.

Reframing Free Will and Responsibility

Historically, discussions of free will often centered on the metaphysics of indeterminism. Wolf’s focus on reasons-responsiveness and sanity helped shift attention toward normative and psychological conditions for fair blame and praise. Subsequent responsibility theorists frequently position their own accounts—whether compatibilist, semi-compatibilist, or skeptical—in relation to her proposals.

Establishing Meaning in Life as a Core Topic

Wolf is widely credited with helping to establish meaning in life as a central category in analytic moral philosophy, distinct from but comparable in importance to happiness and morality. Her hybrid model and phrase “projects of worth” have become standard points of reference in both philosophical and empirical literatures, and are often included in historical overviews of the field.

Shaping Debates on Moral Demandingness and Value Pluralism

“Moral Saints” has had enduring impact on how philosophers conceptualize the limits of moral demands. It is regularly cited in discussions of:

• Whether moral requirements should be seen as overriding all other values.
• The place of personal projects and relationships in accounts of well-lived lives.

This has contributed to a broad movement in late 20th- and early 21st-century ethics toward less austere and more pluralistic pictures of human flourishing.

Historical Placement

In historical surveys of analytic ethics, Wolf is commonly situated alongside figures such as:

Assessments of her historical significance emphasize her role in bridging abstract theory with everyday moral experience, and in providing conceptual tools—sanity, projects of worth, moral sainthood—that continue to structure debates across ethics, law, and moral psychology.