subject: Flourishing Human [print this page] Most people are capable at times of being well judging and careful, and able to think things through in a generous frame of mind. In such moods one can recognize two facts, and two demands entailed by them, which are profoundly important to ethical considerations.
The first fact is that we (for any "we") have a good idea of what, in a general way, conduces to human flourishing.
One can interpret the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as stating that understanding in full, but it can be put more summarily, shelter, warmth, food, companionship, health, freedom, security: this is easily the list of desiderata which irrespective of their historical or cultural setting most people would acknowledge as among the necessities of a good life.
The second fact might at first seem to conflict with the first. It is that there is a great variety of human interests, not all of which one can be confident of understanding.
No one can see things from everyone else's point of view; few can expect to achieve real insight into the needs and desires of others merely on the basis of knowing their own.
The conflict between the two facts is merely apparent. A relativist might dispute the first by saying that, if we think we know what people elsewhere or at other times regard as desirable, we risk misinterpreting them according to our own parochial views.
But this argument is at best only half right, for the first fact is that we have a perfectly good general understanding of what makes for human flourishing, even if as the second fact then adds we have to learn more to discover what is sufficient for such flourishing on an individual basis, taking background considerations into account.
Two demands follow immediately from these two facts. The first is that if we know the least of what makes for the flourishing of others, then, if those others lack it or are offered the opposite of it by, say, oppressors or natural disaster this makes a call on us.
To know that another is without the minimum that makes for human flourishing, and to ignore the fact, is wrong or at very least, deeply imprudent; for, in a world in which people recognize others' needs but ignore them, one will oneself be sure to suffer as a result.
The second demand is that, when we recognize the variety of human needs and desires, our first step must he to tolerate that variety, because it is so great that, as noted, we cannot always expect to have a ready insight into it; so the only way to avoid being mistaken, or prejudiced, or motivated by ignorance, is to be open-minded.
Again the point can be substantiated by appeal even to the lowest motivation. We each wish to live our own lives and make our own choices, and in doing so to be respected or at least tolerated by others. We wish for sufficient latitude from others to carry out our own projects, even when they do not understand what our projects mean to us.
