Human Flourishing Notes

A Greek and Western concept.
Relates to eudaimonia (good spirited, by Aristotle) to describe the pinnacle of happiness attainable by humans.
Often misrepresented by an overdeveloped and highly technological society.
The process of developing the capacities, strengths, and virtues of the individual in different areas of their life.

Is development and wealth (or access to comfort) always the measure of a well-lived human life?

Claims may not always representative of Western notions of human flourishing, they still operate within Western conceptions of a well-lived life.

E.F. Schumacher uses religious and moral principles to address human flourishing in "Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered."
“Right Livelihood” is one of the requirements of the Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path.
Spiritual health and material well-being are not enemies, they are natural allies (Schumacher, 2014, p.421).
Traditional Western economics misunderstands by prioritizing goods over people, or utility over creativity.
Some economists treat their field as a positive science rather than a social science with assumptions.

Focusing solely on wealth acquisition leads to unnecessary effort and dissatisfaction.

The source of wealth is human labor.
Automation can remove the cost in the process.
Employer: Disutility - labor as a letting go of leisure and comfort; in relation to this, wages are understood as a kind of compensation for the sacrifices made.

Employers envision “an output without employees,” while the work force envisions an “income without employment”.
If work is treated as something to escape and run away from, then every attempt to reduce workload is always preferable. The more processes decrease labor, the better.

Companies automate due to cost, leading to division of labor and specialization.
This efficiency is often misunderstood as progress or human flourishing.

Labor is:
- To give a man a chance to utilize and develop his faculties.
- To enable him to overcome his ego-centeredness by joining with other people in a common task.
- To bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence.

Focuses on goods rather than people.
Lacks compassion.
Reduces the soul to a worldly existence.
To favor leisure than work is to forget the complementarity of work and leisure in living and to destroy “the joy of work and bliss of leisure.”

Enhances the skill and power of humanity (Buddhist vision for human flourishing).
Reduces human work to a mechanical slave (leaves humanity to the position of serving the slave not the vision of human flourishing).

Civilization is about the purification of human character, not the duplication of wants and desires.
Liberation, not against physical well-being; attachment to money and wealth is the enemy of salvation.
It is not wrong to enjoy pleasurable things; it is wrong to live craving for them.

Prioritizes productivity over presence.
Determines development by consumption: the more one consumes, the better they are from those who do not.

Study of Buddhist economics is valuable even for those prioritizing economic growth.
Finding the right path to development: the Middle Way between materialist heedlessness and traditionalist immobility, finding “Right Livelihood”.

Every discovery, innovation, and success contributes to our pool of human knowledge.
Human flourishing is deeply intertwined with goal-setting relevant to science and technology.
The end goals of both science and technology and human flourishing are related, in that the good is inherently related to truth.