get your rulers out, kids, we're measuring meaning

I mentioned a couple posts ago a brief essay on happiness at Culture11 which I largely agreed with; now I will quote from one (in the same series on happiness, but this one is by Will Wilkinson) which I find self-evidentially absurd (and it saddens me to know that, clearly, not everyone agrees):

"More interesting, and much more compelling, were those who chose to admit the evidence, but argued that happiness isn't everything. Sure, family can be a pain, but it's meaningful. Indeed, the Newsweek article that imparted the unhappy news to a broad American audience noted that "parents still report feeling a greater sense of purpose and meaning in their lives than those who've never had kids." If meaning is an excellent reason to have children (and I'm not saying it isn't), perhaps it is also at least as good as happiness as an argument for generous child tax credits. And with meaning firmly in hand, perhaps happiness mavens disappointed by the numbers can jump from one paradox of prosperity to another.

Appeals to meaning are nice, but they just push the lump in the rug. What's so great about meaning, anyway? For that matter, what is it? How does one validate that x is in fact meaningful, or more meaningful than y? If meaning is going to carry a justificatory load in weighty personal and political deliberation, we can't just wave our hands about it. Intellectual virtue requires care. We need to get started on measuring meaning. There are many questions. How much is meaning worth to us in terms of happiness? How much is happiness worth in terms of meaning? There are no doubt many and varied sources of meaning. With science on our side, we are sure to discover that some of them are corrosive to other of our cherished values while some enhance them. Then we'll be well-situated to say goodbye to toxic meaningfulness. Goodbye national identity? Goodbye God? Who knows what we might find? Science is a source of excitement as well as wonder.

...

There is certainly more than one way of winning an argument, but there's just one way of knowing: the empirical way. If there's a way of knowing something about meaning -- including whether measuring meaning threatens meaning -- that's the way [emphasis mine]. There is nothing wrong with the pursuit of happiness. There is nothing wrong with the pursuit of meaning. But there is more than a little something wrong in blind pursuits when the means to enlightenment are at hand."

It must be very easy, being sure and right all the time (in particular, being sure and right that you have answered, definitively, the question "how do we know", a question to which a full third of the discipline of philosophy is devoted, is a neat trick). I suppose the reason I cannot be a libertarian of the Wilkinsonian variety is that I am neither sure nor right all the time.

More:
::I recommend to you this related post by Helen Rittenmeyer at Pomoco; your reading of it, however, will be incomplete unless you wade through the comments, particularly the exchange between Helen, Jonathan, and Ryan.