Happiness and Human Flourishing
The chapter explores the concept of human flourishing drawing on two traditions, the Aristotelian–Thomistic virtue ethics tradition, and the new research tradition of positive psychology. These traditions may seem very different in origin, but they have s
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Happiness and Human Flourishing Knut J. Ims
Abstract The chapter explores the concept of human flourishing drawing on two traditions, the Aristotelian–Thomistic virtue ethics tradition, and the new research tradition of positive psychology. These traditions may seem very different in origin, but they have some fundamental similarities. Martin Seligman, one of the founders of positive psychology has summed up human flourishing using the acronym PERMA, where each letter indicate one element; Positive emotions, Engagements, Relationship, Meaning and Accomplishment. Seligman emphasizes the problems of hedonic pleasure and “happyology” in describing human flourishing.
The chapter concludes that the Aristotelian and Thomistic ethics capture the dyadic aspects of human wellbeing: the wellbeing that people experience as they live their lives, and the judgment they make when they evaluate their life. Both employ a virtue ethical perspective, which means that they are concerned about the importance of good character and how to build good characters as part of living in a good society. In modern economics and business the crucial question is: What does the modern, affluent consumer want? Does he or she want what she should want in order to promote her or his happiness? However, happiness and the good life has to be understood in the perspective of a culture. Then what is a good life in the Western culture? The Gross Domestic Product of a nation does not tell the whole story because GDP is based upon a welfarist approach. GDP gives a one-dimensional materialistic, economic view of human wellbeing, and is very destructive for the natural environment, for pollution. Even when we have a number of ‘just background institutions’ in the Western world, we have to determine the role of the Government and the role of ‘market mechanisms’ in order to promote individual well-being and secure the common good. In the Western world, the market expands continually to new domains in a culture where the individual consumer is assumed to be the “king” through his or her consumer sovereignty. We may well ask which values does the consumer reveal in K.J. Ims (*) Norwegian School of Economics, Bergen, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing AG 2017 P. Rona, L. Zsolnai (eds.), Economics as a Moral Science, Virtues and Economics 1, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-53291-2_7
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the market? This question is essential when we, like Etzioni, assume that we are all embedded in a community; which is nicely put in the formulation “I & We”. Etzioni writes: “The individual and the community make each other and require each other. Society is not a “constraint” not even an “opportunity,” it is us (Etzioni 1988: 9). Buscher (2002) gives a number of examples of how the ethics of the market have to be understood in relationship to society’s “frame of reference”. When economic policy since the 1980s has given the market a dominant influence, an ethical vacuum has emerged. As a consequence, we have to analyze the normative element
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