Flourishing

A life going well through the full exercise of human capacities - a condition rather than a feeling.

Theme: Ethics and character
Tradition: Cross-tradition
Term: εὐδαιμονία · eudaimonia
Term fixed: c. 340 BC

In plain terms

A plant flourishes when it does what a plant of that kind does, and does it well - roots, height, leaf, flower, fruit. Nobody asks whether the plant feels good about it.

Applied to a person, flourishing means the same thing: a life in which human capacities are actually exercised rather than left idle. Thinking, choosing, making, judging, being among others. Someone comfortable and unoccupied is not flourishing, however contented, and someone struggling in the exercise of real capacities may be.

The advantage over happiness is that it can be assessed from outside and disputed with evidence. The cost is that it requires an account of what human capacities are, which is a claim about human nature - and every attempt to state one has been contested.

As a philosopher would put it

Aristotle's eudaimonia is activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, over a complete life, requiring sufficient external goods. The ergon argument grounds it in a function distinctive to human beings - rational activity - which is what makes the account objective and also what makes it vulnerable.

The modern reconstruction is the capability approach. Sen argues that development should be assessed by what people are actually able to do and be rather than by resources or by reported satisfaction, which sidesteps the adaptive-preference problem: someone who has adjusted their wants downward scores well on satisfaction and badly on capability.

Nussbaum supplies a list of central capabilities - life, bodily health, bodily integrity, senses and imagination, emotions, practical reason, affiliation, other species, play, and control over one's environment - offered as a partial and revisable account of a minimally decent human life. That is an objective-list theory with an Aristotelian ancestry, and it takes on the standard objection: who decides what is on the list.

Where you meet it

The Human Development Index was introduced in 1990 and was designed explicitly against GDP per capita as a measure of how a country is doing. It combines life expectancy, education and income into a single figure.

The reasoning behind it is Aristotelian by descent. The founding argument was that wealth is instrumental - it matters because of what it allows people to do and be - and that a country can be rich while its population is short-lived and unschooled. Kerala, with modest income and high life expectancy and literacy, became the standard illustration.

The index has been criticised from every direction: three indicators are too few, the weighting is arbitrary, and combining incommensurable goods into one number is exactly the move Aristotle warned against. Sen himself was reluctant about it, and defended it as a crude instrument that displaced a cruder one. What it demonstrates is that an ancient theory of what makes a life go well has become the standard framework for assessing states, complete with the objections it always attracted.

What is actually disputed

Whether there is a human function.

Aristotle's argument requires that human beings have a characteristic activity, as an eye or a carpenter does, and that living well is performing it well. The objection is that people are not artefacts and have no purpose given from outside, so the inference from what is distinctive to what is good does not go through - being distinctively capable of cruelty does not make cruelty good.

Defenders reply that the function is identified by what makes a life go well from the inside, not by an external designer, and that the capability lists are offered as revisable and cross-culturally negotiated rather than legislated.

Critics from within development ethics press further: any list encodes the values of whoever compiled it, and the appearance of objectivity is what makes that dangerous. Sen's own position - to specify capabilities but refuse a fixed list, leaving it to public reasoning - avoids the charge and gives policymakers less to work with.

Commonly confused with

Happiness c. 340 BC Happiness in modern usage is a feeling. Flourishing is a condition of a life and can be assessed by someone else, which is why policy uses it.

Defined against

Pleasure A life can be full of pleasure and empty of exercised capacity, which is the reason the two accounts of well-being cannot be combined

Philosophers

Aristotle The function argument, and eudaimonia as activity
Al-Farabi Flourishing as the end of a political community
Thomas Aquinas Natural ends fulfilled and completed
John Bordley Rawls Primary goods as the rival currency of assessment

Works

Nicomachean Ethics The central account
The Virtuous City Flourishing as a political achievement
Summa Theologiae Natural ends within a theological frame
A Theory of Justice The rival account of what should be distributed
After Virtue The modern argument for recovering the framework

Schools

Peripatetic school (Aristotelianism) Where the concept is formed
Thomism Where it is joined to a theological end
Falsafa Where it becomes political
Communitarianism Where it returns in modern political theory
Classical Utilitarianism The rival account of what makes a life good

Related concepts

Happiness c. 340 BC · Virtue c. 340 BC · The good life c. 400 BC · Moral personhood 1694 · Autonomy 1785

Flourishing is now the preferred translation of eudaimonia precisely because happiness has narrowed to a mood; the word carries the biological sense of a living thing developing as its kind does.