Good Parenting

Virtually everyone wants what’s best for their children. They want their children to be happy, healthy, comfortable, content, successful, and the list goes on. In philosophical terms, people want their children to flourish. But what makes a life flourish? It’s impossible to hit a target when the target is unknown. So, how do parents aim their children in the right direction? Can parents do anything to make sure their kids flourish?

For thousands of years, people have debated what makes a human life flourish. Plato said that the best life was that of a philosopher. Aristotle thought that flourishing meant living a life of reason. There have been many religious accounts of human flourishing throughout history. Much more recently, Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen have laid out a capacities-based account of flourishing. They say that humans have certain capacities like reason, love, friendship, art, etc. Human flourishing is developing as many of these capacities as you can.

In his book, Automation and Utopia, John Danaher summarizes the different views on human flourishing. He breaks the schools of thought on flourishing into two types: subjectivist and objectivist. The subjectivists believe flourishing is a personal matter. You are flourishing if your life makes you happy or if you hit your goals and things like that. Objectivists, on the other hand, say that personal preferences don’t matter. These tend to be list oriented. The life that checks the most boxes on the list is better than the life that does not.

Danaher himself supports a hybrid view. Flourishing has both subjectivist and objectivist elements. On the subjective side, a flourishing life needs to have pleasure and preference satisfaction. On the objectivist side, he says, “You need to satisfy objective states of being and develop certain capabilities in order to flourish.” His objective list contains education, health, family, friendship, community, knowledge, practical reason, and cognitive ability.

I don’t like any of these accounts of human flourishing. The subjectivists simultaneously set too low and too high a bar. I believe that’s why Danaher adds the objectivist view to it. It’s too low because if flourishing takes pleasure and preference satisfaction, there will be some awfully strange results. For example, every spoiled rich kid out there could be said to be living a flourishing life. Another group that, under this definition, could be said to be flourishing is drug addicts. Their preference is to take their drugs and the drugs make them happy.

The subjectivist bar is too high because a great many people simply can’t live a flourishing life because they lack the resources. The wealthy are the only ones who can consistently satisfy their preferences. Most of us live lives of compromise. We would prefer the brand name, but we buy generic. We would prefer the electric vehicle, but we buy a used gas powered one instead. I hate to think that none of these perfectly normal people can live a flourishing life.

The objectivists set the bar too high because very few people can excel at everything on any of the lists. Many people probably don’t even want to. Take health as an example. Are they saying that no one with a chronic illness or disability can live a flourishing life? Does everyone even want an education? If not, are those people excluded from human flourishing?

So, if both the subjectivist and objectivist views fail, what are we left with? One possibility is to simply accept that there’s no such thing as human flourishing, or, at least, that there’s no objective way to answer the question as to what constitutes a flourishing life. What does that mean, though?

On the pessimistic side, it means a kind of nihilism. Asking what constitutes human flourishing is nonsensical. Life has no meaning or purpose. Without a purpose there is nothing to aim at.

On a more optimistic note, it could mean that flourishing is not the type of thing that can be measured. In other words, flourishing is even more subjective than Danaher’s subjectivist view. Forget about pleasure and preference satisfaction. People are leading flourishing lives as long as they believe they are leading flourishing lives. Happiness and satisfaction may be what someone needs to flourish. However, someone else may believe their life is flourishing even though they lead a life of toil and drudgery. Imagine parents working multiple jobs to provide only a meager income for their children. No matter how hard their lives, they may believe their lives are flourishing as long as their kids grow up into successful adults. The Cratchits, from A Christmas Carol, can be seen as living flourishing lives. Another group that could be said to lead a flourishing life is those monks who wore hair shirts and practiced self-flagellation. No one could say that their lives were pleasant, but they had a freely chosen purpose.

The real key to a flourishing life is freedom to choose a purpose. Everyone has this freedom because the purposes don’t need to be anything grand. Even those in horrible poverty can choose purposes that align with their circumstances. Obviously, that does not mean that everyone does lead a flourishing life. A person’s purpose might be thwarted. A person whose purpose is their career, but consistently gets passed over for promotions is an example. Also, people may set their purposes to something unachievable. Someone may choose a purpose like being an Olympic champion even though that person is not great at any given sport.

The only purposes that are illegitimate are purposes that deprive others of an opportunity to flourish. A successful murderer is not living a flourishing life. Neither is a dictator or slaveholder with the desire to dominate others. This is a non-judgmental theory, but a person with the purpose of committing evil is less than human; therefore, they cannot participate in human flourishing.

The purpose part of freedom to choose a purpose should be fairly obvious. There is a teleological aspect baked into the idea of flourishing. It is goal oriented. I said before that people need something to aim at. Purpose gives them that target.

Freedom to choose is important for another reason. A person’s purpose cannot be imposed from the outside. That would lead to the problems of the objectivist stance. What happens if the person is uninterested in whatever purpose is chosen for them? What happens if the person is incapable of achieving their purpose? It would cut off even the possibility of flourishing for too many people.

So, what it comes down to is that there are as many ways for humans to flourish as there are humans. Naturally, more than one person can choose the same path to flourishing. A lot of people may find purpose in their careers and a lot may find purpose in family. There may be people whose purpose is in the traditional religious methods of flourishing. And still others may find it in developing their capacities. The important thing is that, even though not everyone will lead a flourishing life, everyone can achieve human flourishing.

For the parents wanting their children to flourish, to be happy, healthy, successful, etc., the aim should be to open as many opportunities for their kids as possible. This will look different for different families. And it will certainly be easier for some families than it is for others. The important thing is that it will create the possibility for all of our children to flourish. Ultimately, that is what we as parents all wish for.