Introduction

• The question of human flourishing generates diverse responses, indicating that there are different understandings of what constitutes a flourishing life.
• Human flourishing refers to the broadest assessment of the quality of human life, beyond specific concepts like pleasure, wellbeing, welfare, affluence, virtue, and others.
• While one may argue that human flourishing is nothing more than one of these specific assessments (e.g., pleasure), it does not imply that flourishing is limited to that concept, as these categories are conceptually distinct.
• Components of flourishing (e.g., happiness, wisdom) are constitutive of flourishing, meaning they are part of what it consists in, while means to flourishing (e.g., affluence, education) enhance these components.
• The first category, components, takes priority, as we cannot assess what enhances flourishing until we understand what flourishing itself consists of.
• Different substantive conceptions of flourishing vary in what they consider key components and how they relate or prioritize these components.
• Personal value refers to a life being good for the person living it, while ethical value refers to the broader worth or goodness of a life.
• Some features (e.g., friendship, knowledge, love) contribute to both personal and ethical value, but personal and ethical value are often weighted differently.
• Certain experiences (e.g., chronic pain) may detract from personal but not ethical value, while selfless labor for a good cause may contribute to ethical but not personal value.
• Personal value is connected to a person’s experiences (e.g., enjoyment, intensity), and their successes in the world. However, these elements can sometimes diverge: successes may be unknown or unappreciated, and failures may enrich inner life.
• Ethical value involves two main ideas: good character (virtue, admirable aims, feelings) and ethical achievement (the significance of one’s conduct). These can come apart as one’s character is influenced by social factors, and achievements may stem from less admirable motives.
• Distinguishing between experience, success, character, and achievement can provide structure to understanding human flourishing, though the relationship between them and their contributions to flourishing is complex and varies.
• There is a diversity of views on human flourishing due to differing perspectives on what constitutes it and how to weight its components.
• The perspective taken on flourishing affects how one prioritizes these components:
  • Prospective reflection on one’s life may emphasize ethical over personal value, while reflecting on a child’s life may prioritize happiness over other factors.
  • Experience and character may weigh more heavily when reflecting on another’s life with practical intent, while success and achievement might be more important in retrospective evaluations.
• The choice of perspective is essential in understanding flourishing, as it influences how one perceives the relative importance of each dimension.
• When thinking about another’s life prospectively, respect for autonomy is crucial. This means accepting the individual’s own measure of flourishing and acting in accordance with their values, rather than imposing one’s own ideas.
• Respecting autonomy does not require universal agreement on what constitutes flourishing (e.g., happiness or knowledge), but involves supporting the individual’s own directives, even if those directives are not arrived at through the path one would approve of.
• Autonomy here is not about self-legislation or directing oneself, but having one’s own purpose and choosing what matters to one’s flourishing.

Social Justice

• Human flourishing is central not only to personal and ethical reflections but also to political discourse on justice, especially in evaluating social institutions and policies.
• Justice is about the equitable treatment of individuals and groups within a society. It concerns social systems and institutions, which define property rights, labor divisions, kinship relations, and how conflicts are resolved.
• A criterion of justice assesses whether social institutions treat individuals morally and equitably. This criterion presupposes a measure of human flourishing designed to evaluate how institutions affect people’s lives.
• Social institutions may impact present non-participants (e.g., global effects of the US political and economic systems) and the flourishing of past and future persons (e.g., pollution, resource depletion, cultural preservation).
• Aristotle’s view that past persons’ flourishing is irrelevant can be disputed. One’s flourishing might depend on long-term impacts of their life’s work, such as the continuation of their projects after death or the preservation of their creative work.
• It’s important to include the interests of past, future, and non-participants when evaluating justice, though present participants generally bear more responsibility for shaping and maintaining social institutions.
• Justice should not be assessed institution by institution but rather by considering how multiple institutions function together. For instance, compulsory male military service may not be unjust in isolation, but broader institutional reforms could improve overall justice.
• A holistic understanding is needed to assess the justice of social institutions, as foreign and supranational institutions significantly influence national structures. This is particularly true for politically and economically weaker countries that depend on international orders for their functioning.
• Institutional interdependencies are crucial but often overlooked by moral philosophers, social scientists, politicians, and the public. We tend to evaluate national institutions based on how they affect citizens, neglecting their impacts on foreigners and the global institutional order.
• Globalization highlights these interconnections, making it impractical for countries to agree to disagree about justice based solely on their unique histories, cultures, or geopolitical contexts. Human lives are increasingly affected by global institutions like governance, trade, and diplomacy, which cannot be treated in isolation.
• A universal criterion of justice is necessary for evaluating the global order and institutions with international impacts. This criterion must be universally accepted to facilitate moral judgments and guide reforms, ensuring justice for all.
• Both moral and pragmatic reasons support the development of this universal criterion. This requires extending respect for autonomy to include societies and cultures, allowing for a diversity of institutional schemes and ways of life while still adhering to shared global justice principles.
• The autonomy of societies should be understood as having their own way of life, endorsed by their members, not necessarily through deep reflection or agreement with other cultures. The universal criterion of justice should avoid imposing Western ideals and must accommodate cultural differences to gain global acceptance.

Paternalism

• The idea of autonomy in justice has been discussed, where we often aim to promote someone’s good as they define it. However, applying this nonpaternalistic approach to justice is problematic for two reasons.
• First, social institutions impact different persons and groups in diverse ways, and we must compare how they affect flourishing across these differences. This requires a common measure, which is challenging because flourishing involves deeper issues than mere preferences.
• A key complication is distinguishing between fulfillment (actual realization of desires) and satisfaction (belief that desires are fulfilled). It is difficult to determine how much weight a person places on fulfillment versus satisfaction for every desire and how this can be objectively assessed in a justice framework.
• Another complication involves desires about desires, where individuals may wish for different desires or regret their own desires. It is unclear how such tensions should be addressed when comparing institutional schemes.
• Second, social institutions not only shape the environment but also shape values and aspirations. People’s ideas about a good life are influenced by the institutions under which they grew up. Thus, assessing justice based on personal desires is problematic because values are shaped by social conditions, leading to a circular problem where oppressive systems could seem just if they shape individuals to accept them.
• The failure of the nonpaternalistic strategy highlights the need for a substantive conception of human flourishing that accounts for how institutions influence values and aspirations. This recognition forces us to consider our responsibility in shaping the social world for future generations.
• Shaping social institutions with a substantive conception of human flourishing requires a degree of paternalism, which can be made more acceptable through four key principles.
• First, the universal criterion of justice should work with a thin conception of human flourishing, focusing on basic means to flourishing rather than its specific components. This could include necessities like nutrition, clothing, shelter, basic freedoms, social interaction, education, and participation, which should be secured by just social institutions for all. This approach respects cultural diversity by supporting institutions acceptable to a wide range of conceptions of flourishing.
• Second, the universal criterion should be modest, defining justice as meeting a solid threshold rather than aiming for the highest attainable point on an open-ended scale. This threshold should be compatible with a diversity of institutional schemes, requiring them to treat affected persons in a minimally decent and equitable way.
• Third, the universal criterion should not be understood as exhaustive. Societies should be free to impose their own more demanding criteria of justice on national institutions, or judge foreign or global institutions by those criteria.
• Fourth, while more ambitious national criteria can exist, they must not undermine the universality of the modest universal criterion. The universal criterion should take preeminence in situations of conflict or scarcity, ensuring it remains the foundation of any national criteria.
• Taken together, the universal criterion functions as a core in two ways: it serves as a common ground for overlapping conceptions of human flourishing and ambitious justice criteria, and it is the essential core of these criteria, containing only the most important elements for justice. The goal is to create a morally plausible and internationally acceptable universal core for justice.

Justice in first approximation

• The task is to create a widely acceptable core criterion of basic justice that assesses social institutions based on how they treat persons, respecting the autonomy of individuals and cultures.
• This criterion focuses on the basic goods needed for individuals to develop and realize a personally and ethically worthwhile life.
• To specify an operational criterion of justice, three key questions need to be answered, particularly regarding what basic goods are necessary.
• The demand for basic goods should be severely limited in four ways:
  • (a) Only essential goods needed for a worthwhile life should be included.
  • (b) The demand for basic goods should be limited to a minimally adequate share, where only necessary amounts of goods (e.g., food, freedom of association) are required.
  • (c) Individuals should have access to the basic goods, not necessarily possess them. It is not a flaw if some choose to forgo certain goods (e.g., fasting, living as hermits), as long as they can access them if needed.
  • (d) Basic goods should be limited probabilistically, recognizing that absolute guarantees (e.g., physical integrity) are impractical, but reasonable security should be provided.
• If social institutions ensure that each person has reasonably secure access to minimally adequate shares of all basic goods, they are considered fully just under this criterion.
• To compare institutional schemes that are not fully just, the following needs to be addressed:
  • How should shortfalls in basic goods (e.g., nutrition, freedom) be weighted against each other to determine how far any person or group falls below the minimum required for justice?
  • A standard of living can be constructed by assigning values to affected persons based on their access to basic goods, with values ranging between 0 and 1 for those who fall below the threshold.
• The standard of living is a thin core notion of human flourishing that is practical, simple, and applicable for global criteria. This approach is pragmatic and allows for an international standard that balances human flourishing with clarity and simplicity, even if one does not believe human flourishing is quantifiable or discontinuous.

Essential Refinements

• Social institutions should not only be assessed by how they ensure access to basic goods but also by how they affect individual flourishing.
• For example, a significant risk of premature death through avoidable causes, such as police violence, should raise concerns about the justice of social institutions.
• Moral weight should be assigned differently to different risks (e.g., police violence vs. motor vehicle accidents) in assessing the justice of a society.
• Consequentialist and hypothetical-contract theories (e.g., Rawls) may lead to problematic conclusions if they focus solely on the quality of life that social institutions offer, ignoring the moral implications of how those institutions affect citizens.
• To avoid such issues, social institutions should be assessed based on their impact on basic-good shortfalls, and not just whether these shortfalls are institutionally avoidable.
• A sixfold distinction can be made regarding how social institutions may relate to avoidable basic-good shortfalls:
  • Scenario 1: Officially mandated shortfalls (e.g., laws preventing access to certain foods).
  • Scenario 2: Shortfalls due to private conduct legally authorized (e.g., food sellers refusing to sell).
  • Scenario 3: Social institutions create avoidable shortfalls through economic conditions (e.g., poverty preventing access to food).
  • Scenario 4: Private conduct creating shortfalls that is legally prohibited but inadequately enforced.
  • Scenario 5: Social institutions fail to address the effects of natural defects (e.g., genetic disorders).
  • Scenario 6: Social institutions fail to address self-caused defects (e.g., health consequences of smoking).
• These distinctions are intended to help identify the different levels of injustice in each scenario and their implications for the core criterion of justice.
• The moral significance of basic-good shortfalls is not only about the causal role of social institutions but also their implicit attitude toward such shortfalls.
• For instance, domestic violence (a shortfall in women’s security) is morally more unjust if it is not legally prohibited or if the legal system actively endorses it.
• The initial sixfold classification of how institutions relate to flourishing should consider moral distinctions between types of institutional influences and how they reflect societal attitudes.
• A more morally plausible criterion of justice must incorporate factors beyond magnitude and frequency, considering:
  • Social costs of reforms: The costs of addressing a basic-good shortfall, such as traffic-related deaths or child abuse, must factor into whether such shortfalls are deemed unjust.
  • Distribution of shortfalls: Justice may depend on who suffers from the shortfalls. Disproportionate suffering by certain groups (e.g., women, racial minorities) may amplify the perceived injustice, especially if cultural or social factors contribute to these disparities.
• Anonymity condition in justice theories assumes no difference between who suffers hardship, but group correlations (e.g., gender, race) may alter the moral evaluation if disadvantaged groups are disproportionately affected.
• A morally plausible justice criterion must account for the social dynamics that contribute to basic-good shortfalls, especially if certain groups suffer more due to cultural practices or social factors.
• The complexity of these factors contrasts with simpler theories of justice, like Rawls’s original position, which does not adequately address these nuanced social mechanisms and inequalities in suffering.

Human Rights

• A core criterion of basic justice might best be formulated using the language of human rights, understood in an institutional sense.
• Human rights should be seen as claims on coercive social institutions (e.g., governments), and secondarily as claims against those who uphold these institutions, contrasting with interactional views that do not presuppose social institutions.
• The familiar institutional understanding of human rights, which calls for legal rights to be formally incorporated into laws, is too strong and too weak:
  • Too strong: Secure access to certain goods (e.g., nutrition) may exist without formal legal rights.
  • Too weak: Legal rights alone may not guarantee secure access if people are unaware of their rights or lack resources to enforce them (e.g., domestic workers facing abuse despite legal protections).
• A more plausible concept of human rights focuses on ensuring secure access to certain basic goods through coercive social institutions, avoiding the requirement for juridification in all cases.
• Human rights can be realized in various economic and cultural contexts without insisting on the same legal structures everywhere, as long as secure access is ensured.
• Even if legal rights are a common means to secure human rights, they need not always correspond directly to the human rights themselves. Non-legal practices like community solidarity can also play a role.
• For example, a human right to adequate nutrition might be best realized through social mechanisms like land distribution and welfare policies, not just legal guarantees for food.
• In certain cases, legal rights could be part of the human right, but the inclusion of such demands might render the concept too demanding for the purpose of a core criterion of justice.
• For instance, religious liberty could be protected without a formal constitutional right if it is culturally embedded in a society’s practices.
• Human rights can be used to account for differentiations based on how social institutions relate to basic-good shortfalls.
• For example, the German constitution guarantees the right to life and inviolability of person, but its judicial interpretation recognizes differentiations in violations:
  • Serious violations: Death due to violent police interrogation.
  • Less serious violations: Death from unofficial violence condoned by the state.
  • Non-violations: Death from preventable causes like lack of medical treatment, if the state is unwilling to pay for it.
• The proposed concept of human rights follows a similar logic, but instead of focusing on government actions, it addresses how society as a whole should design the basic rules of life.
• Human rights are not about individual government actions, but about institutional structures that ensure secure access to basic goods for all.
• The probabilistic ex-ante perspective means a complaint can be raised against social institutions when they fail to secure physical integrity, not just when an assault occurs.
• Fulfillment of human rights is about ensuring physical integrity does not fall below certain thresholds.
• These thresholds vary based on:
  • Different human rights and sources of threats.
  • Social costs of reducing threats.
  • Distribution of threats across different population segments.
• Differentiations like these must be integrated into how human rights are specified.

Specifications of Human Rights and responsibilities for their realization

• The core criterion of basic justice starts with the personal value of human life, aiming to determine the social conditions necessary for individuals to lead a minimally worthwhile life.
• This approach respects human autonomy with minimal assumptions about ethical values, assuming that almost all humans feel a deep need for an ethical world view to judge their life’s value.
• Global interdependence creates a plurality of ethical views across cultures, leading to the need for social institutions that allow people to develop and live by their own ethical world view.
• The essential presuppositions for such autonomy include:
  • Liberty of conscience: The freedom to develop and live according to one’s ethical world view, including freedom of access to information and association.
  • Political participation: The freedom to shape social systems, express criticisms, and participate in political decision-making.
• Basic goods important for both ethical and personal value include:
  • Physical integrity, subsistence (food, shelter, healthcare), freedom of movement, basic education, and economic participation.
  • These should be recognized as human rights, but only up to certain quantitative, qualitative, and probabilistic limits.
• Many people today lack secure access to these basic goods, highlighting the underfulfillment of human rights.
• Responsibility for underfulfillment should be ascribed to social institutions and the individuals involved in them, especially considering global interdependence.
• It’s easy to ignore global interdependencies, attributing human rights violations to local factors within a country.
• A deeper understanding of global institutional factors reveals their role in human misery and suggests that reforms to global and national systems could improve human rights fulfillment.
• Individuals involved in coercive social institutions share a moral responsibility to ensure these institutions fulfill the core human rights.
• Responsibility for underfulfillment (e.g., hunger in Brazil) lies with both global and national institutions and the people supporting them.
• Those responsible should either discontinue their involvement or compensate by working for institutional reform or protecting the victims of unjust institutions.
• The extent of compensation depends on one’s involvement in and benefit from the maintenance of these institutions.

Conclusion

• The essay addresses the measure of human flourishing needed to assess the justice of social institutions, emphasizing the need for a low specificity criterion for a universally acceptable core of basic justice.
• A conception of human rights is proposed as a suitable measure, as it is substantial enough to critique the status quo and respects the autonomy of diverse cultures, provided it follows the institutional understanding outlined earlier.
• This conception demands that all social institutions be designed so that, insofar as reasonably possible, all human beings have secure access to the objects of their human rights.
• Acceptance of this core criterion of basic justice does not prevent particular societies from adopting more specific criteria of justice, tailored to national needs.
• These national measures might include:
  • Additional rights (e.g., constitutional rights).
  • Addressing social inequalities.
  • Compensating for genetic handicaps or bad luck.
  • Providing subsidies for fulfilling religious duties.
• However, these additional needs should be secondary to the universal human needs recognized by the global human rights framework.
• The preeminent moral task of our age is to ensure that coercive institutions provide each person with secure access to minimally adequate shares of:
  • Basic freedoms and participation.
  • Food, clothing, shelter, education, and healthcare.
• The formulation, global acceptance, and realization of this requirement is the central ethical priority.