What are the basic goods of a flourishing human?

A good place to begin is with the discussion of the basic goods of “the good life”, by Robert and Edward Skidelsky in their book How Much is Enough (2012). The relevant discussion is in Chapter 6, entitled ‘Elements of the Good Life’. I published a somewhat critical review of the book on this blog some years ago, but I saw some merit in the authors discussion of human flourishing.

The authors adopt the following criteria to identify basic goods:

Universality: not specific to eras or cultures;

Finality: not just serving as a means to a more basic good;

Sui generis: not incorporated in some other good;

Indispensability: lack of the good leads to loss or harm.

I accept those criteria.

The authors identify the following seven basic goods:

• Health: ‘‘the full functioning of the body, the perfection of our animal natures”.
• Security: ‘‘an individual’s justified expectation that his life will continue more or less in its accustomed course, undisturbed by war, crime, revolution or major social and economic upheavals”.
• Respect: an individual’s feeling that others ‘‘regard his views and interests as worthy of consideration, as things not to be ignored or trampled on”.
• Personality: ‘‘the ability to frame and execute a plan of life reflective of one’s tastes, temperament and conception of the good”.
• Harmony with Nature: ‘‘a sense of kinship with animals, plants, and landscapes”.
• Friendship: ‘‘all robust, affectionate relationships”, including work relationships etc. as well as family relationships.
• Leisure: “that which we do for its own sake”, not just time off work.

That list summarises 17 pages of discussion, so it may not do justice to the authors’ deliberations. Nevertheless, it provides a basis to consider whether items have been identified appropriately, and whether anything important has been left out.

Health is obviously an essential characteristic of a flourishing human. The authors want to discourage “an obsession with longevity”, but it is reasonable to assert that flourishing involves living healthily for the term of one’s natural life.

Security is important, but it serves as a means to other goods, including a long and healthy life and psychological well-being (an important omission from the authors’ list of basic goods).

Having others respect of one’s views and interests feels good, but it isn’t indispensable to individual flourishing. Respect for one’s natural rights (life, liberty and property) is certainly indispensable, but serves as a means to other goods, including the ability to live a long and healthy life, interact with others for mutual benefit, and to the acquire human and physical capital that contributes to flourishing.

“Personality” does not seem to capture adequately the ability to frame and execute a plan of life reflective of one’s tastes, temperament and conception of the good. The authors use the term personality, rather than autonomy or practical reason, because it implies “spontaneity, individuality and spirit”. Those aspects of personality could be more appropriately incorporated under psychological well-being. The basic good corresponding to framing and executing a plan of life seems to me to be best described as accepting responsibility for self-direction.

Living in harmony with nature is important to human flourishing, and not just because of environmental impacts on human health and well-being. As I see it, the motivation for living in harmony with nature stems from deep-seated intuitions about our kinship with other living things.

Friendship doesn’t seem the most appropriate word to capture the wide variety of relationships that the authors put under this heading. The relevant basic good seems to me to be positive relationships.

Leisure is usually thought of as time off work, rather than engagement in doing things for their own sake. Martin Seligman uses the term ‘engagement’ to refer to the relevant basic good in his book Flourish (2011).

The other four elements of well-being identified in Seligman’s PERMA acronym (discussed here) are positive emotion, relationships, meaning and achievement. Of these, Skidelsky and Skidelsky only directly acknowledge relationships as an element of the good life. It seems to me that positive emotion and a sense of achievement are essential characteristics of a flourishing human.

Meaning requires a little more discussion. Seligman defines ‘meaning’ as belonging to and serving something that you believe is bigger than the self. This makes sense if serving the self means pursuit of personal pleasure. Those who see their lives as meaningful could be expected to value more things in life than their own pleasure.

So, here are the basic goods that I would expect a flourishing human to have:

1.  The prospect of a long and healthy life.
2. Wise and well-informed self-direction.
3.  Positive relationships with family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances and trading partners.
4. Psychological well-being: emotional stability, positive emotion, satisfaction with material living standards, engagement in doing things for their own sake and learning new things, perception of life as meaningful, a sense of accomplishment, optimism, resilience, vitality, integrity, and self-respect.
5. Living in harmony with nature.

What do I plan to do with this list? My interest is in the factors that lead to differences in opportunities for human flourishing in different countries. For example, which are the countries where some person chosen at random is likely to have the best prospects of a long and healthy life? How can we explain why the prospects for that individual are better in those countries?

Such questions will be explored in later posts.

What is it important to know about freedom, liberty and natural rights?

Dear readers, this article summarises the conclusions of a series of recent posts on this blog relating to freedom, liberty and natural rights.

It might help you in reading the article to think of it as an outline of the chapter on freedom in a book about freedom, progress and human flourishing. It would help me if you could provide comments below, or by email, on whether you think the article captures adequately what it is important to know about liberty.

The meaning of freedom, liberty and rights. 

Freedom sounds good, but the meaning of the word depends on context. For example, when people talk about freedom from fear, or freedom from want, they may have something important to say about human flourishing, but it isn’t necessary related to personal freedom or economic freedom, which are aspects of liberty. My focus in this post is on liberty.

Liberty has a more precise meaning than freedom. I adopt Friedrich Hayek’s definition of liberty as “a state in which coercion of some by others is reduced as much as is possible in society”. In the civic republican tradition, liberty is sometimes defined more broadly to encompass political freedoms, including the right to political participation. To avoid confusion, however, I think it best to stick with Hayek’s definition.

Rights refer to things that one is morally or legally entitled to do or have. As with freedom, the precise meaning depends on context and qualifier words. A negative right is a right not to be subjected to an action of another person or group whereas a positive right is an entitlement to have another person or group do something. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights encompasses not only the negative right to liberty and positive legal rights (including political freedom) but also economic and social aspirations that cannot necessarily be met by anything that a person or group might do.   

My focus here is on natural rights, including the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness - as famously proclaimed in the United States Declaration of Independence. The inclusion of “pursuit of happiness” as a right in the Declaration might appear to be redundant since pursuit of happiness is encompassed in our understanding of liberty. In 18^th century America, however, an inalienable right to liberty could have been interpreted in civic republican terms. At that time, pursuit of happiness was widely perceived as the activity of human flourishing, as perceived by Aristotle. (Further explanation is provided in an earlier post.)

Liberty is worth having.

Anyone who lives in a liberal democracy should ask themselves from time to time what it would be like to live without liberty. What would your life be like if you lived in a country where you didn’t have freedom of religion, where you could be jailed for expressing views not approved of by political leaders, where you could be subject to arbitrary arrest, where your property could be arbitrarily seized by the government, or where your freedom to  move around was restricted? Such countries are still easy to find.

The right to freedom of speech is particularly important because free speech helps to protect liberty more generally. Some restrictions on freedom of speech have long been widely accepted as desirable, for example to discourage incitement to violence. However, recent efforts in some liberal democracies to make it a crime to offend others based on identity characteristics - such as ethnicity, religion or gender - have potential to curtail freedom of speech substantially. Even when people strive to be respectful in the way they present their views, some people with opposing viewpoints are likely to claim to be offended if they can thereby stifle debate on controversial topics.

Norms of liberty make it possible for individuals to flourish in different ways.

As explained by Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl: 

“Individual rights are … needed to solve a problem that is uniquely social, political and legal. … How do we allow for the possibility that individuals might flourish in different ways … without creating inherent moral conflict in … the structure that is provided by the political/legal order? How do we find a political/legal order that will in principle not require that the human flourishing of any person or group be given structural preference over others? How do we protect the possibility that each may flourish while at the same time provide principles that regulate the conduct of all?”  (Norms of Liberty, 2005, p 78).

A discussion of views of other authors who have also advanced metanormative arguments for individual rights was posted on this blog some years ago.

 

Moral intuitions support natural rights.

Natural rights are inherent in human nature. They have traditionally been seen to be endowed by God, but widely-held intuitions about natural rights can also be explained in terms of the evolution of the ethics of respect. Moral intuitions that it is good to respect the lives and autonomy of others provide support for norms of liberty that maximize the opportunities available for all to flourish. As discussed in a recent post, it seems reasonable to suppose that the ethics of respect evolved because of the benefits that voluntary cooperation for mutual benefit brought to individuals and communities.  

Those who seek to deny the existence of natural rights tend to argue that individual rights are bestowed by governments, so it is legitimate for governments to remove them if that serves what they see as the “greater good”. There are times when individual rights do need to be compromised (e.g. via compulsory land acquisition) to prevent a community being held to ransom by an individual, but this should not be done lightly and fair compensation should be provided.

Respect for the rights of others has been advocated as an ideal since ancient times.

In ancient Greece, the poems of Hesiod, which appear to date from the 8^th or 7^th century BCE, urge people to comply with rules of just conduct rather than to seek to benefit via predation. In his poem, Works and Days, Hesiod advises his brother Perses, to “put away all notions of violence” for “fish, and wild animals, and the flying birds” may “feed on each other, since there is no idea of justice among them,” but “to men [Zeus] gave justice,” which is the “best thing they have.”  Hesiod condemns both force and fraud: the grabbing of goods either by “force of hands” or by “cleverness of … tongue.” (Further discussion here.)

Perceptions of natural law have not always supported universal human flourishing.

Aristotle (384-322 BCE) was the great philosopher of individual human flourishing. His emphasis on the natural capacity of humans to use reason to guide themselves and exercise appropriate moderation in their behaviour provides a basis for understanding human flourishing to be an essentially self-directed activity.

Nevertheless, Aristotle argued that it was natural to make slaves of defeated enemies. He viewed the system of conquest and slavery as a natural system governed by internal sources of change. By identifying the whole system as natural he was able to disregard the use of force at the heart of it.

The perception of what was natural of Cicero, the Roman statesman, lawyer and philosopher who lived from 106 BC- 43 BC, was more supportive of liberty. He argued that “nature made us just that we might participate our goods with each other, and supply each others’ wants”.

(Further discussion here and here.)

Reason and spontaneous legal processes both played a part in recognition of natural rights.

Beliefs and values supporting natural rights of individuals to life, property and liberty seem to have travelled from Cicero to the modern world through both the spontaneous evolution of rules and evolution of reasoning about the natural law. Those different transmission processes interacted. There were periods when reasoning about natural law held back recognition of individual rights to participate in mutually beneficial activities e.g. lending and borrowing. Eventually, however, reasoning about natural law reinforced and extended individual rights recognised under common law. (Further discussion here and here).

Rule of law protects natural rights and enables people to live in peace.

From the 12th century onwards, with the advent of centralised monarchies in Europe, homicide came to be viewed as an offence against the crown, rather than a civil matter. That enabled societies to avoid the violence associated with do-it-yourself justice. More effective justice systems penalised plunder, and thereby promoted peacefulness and improved incentives for mutually beneficial exchange.  

Evolution of the rule of law provided greater protection to natural rights by requiring people to refrain from initiating or threatening any forceful interference with other individuals or their property.  (Further discussion here.)

Systems of government preferment are an infringement of natural liberty.

Adam Smith argued that it was an unjust infringement of natural liberty for the powers of government to be used to assist some economic groups at the expense of others. Smith’s ideal of everyone being free to pursue their own interests in their own way is consistent with Francis Hutcheson’s earlier explanation of the right to natural liberty in terms of pursuit of happiness. (See this post).

In The Law, published in 1850, Frédéric Bastiat foresaw the potential for the universal franchise to endanger natural rights. He was concerned about the use of the power of the state by some groups to seize and consume the products of the labour of others. Legislation that seriously endangers natural rights is difficult to reconcile with rules of just conduct that have evolved to foster mutually beneficial interactions. (See discussion here.)

The right political participation should be viewed as a natural right.

Moral intuitions supporting the right to political participation presumably evolved because human flourishing has always required individuals to participate actively with others in decisions relating to provision of collective goods. Such involvement is less active in modern societies in which many collective goods are provided by remote government agencies and citizen involvement usually involves little more than voting.

The exercise of voting rights provides citizens with some protection against tyranny, but increasing numbers of people in the liberal democracies nevertheless feel unhappy about the outcomes of democratic political processes. That unhappiness may stem to an important extent from unrealistic expectations of what political processes can deliver. It seems likely to increase as low productivity growth reduces government revenues and demographic change increases political demands on governments.

Technological advances that enhance opportunities to seek mutual benefit in cooperative enterprises offer hope that people will in future be able to exercise their natural political rights in ways that give them more involvement in decisions that affect them.

(More discussion here and here.)

For liberty to prevail the ‘real constitution’ must be pro-liberty.

It is illusory to think of political institutions as external to society. The rules of the game exist only insofar as they are continually maintained in existence by human agents acting in certain systematic ways. The constitution of a free society is a pattern of interactions in which people give one another incentives to act and keep acting in ways that tend to maintain liberty. It is not the rules per se that gets disputes resolved, but rather the incentive structure that makes the system’s administrators likely to act in accordance with such rules.

Sheldon Richman defines the real constitution as the set of dispositions that influence what most people will accept as legitimate actions by the politicians and bureaucrats who make up the government. He derives support for this concept from Roderick Long’s observation that “government is not some sort of automatic robot standing outside the social order it serves; its existence depends on ongoing cooperation, both from the members of the government and from the populace it governs”.

It follows that for liberty to prevail the real constitution must be pro-liberty. As a corollary, tyranny cannot persist in any jurisdiction when the real constitution is pro-liberty.