Living well: Histories of well‐being and human flourishing

2019 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 275-280
Author(s):  
Mark Solovey ◽  
Deborah Weinstein
Keyword(s):  
Well Being ◽  
Human Flourishing ◽  
Living Well

Persons Together

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan L. Mittleman
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Image Of God ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Flourishing ◽  
Political Dimensions ◽  
Market Relations ◽  
The Image Of God

This chapter moves into the political and economic aspects of human nature. Given scarcity and interdependence, what sense has Judaism made of the material well-being necessary for human flourishing? What are Jewish attitudes toward prosperity, market relations, labor, and leisure? What has Judaism had to say about the political dimensions of human nature? If all humans are made in the image of God, what does that original equality imply for political order, authority, and justice? In what kinds of systems can human beings best flourish? It argues that Jewish tradition shows that we act in conformity with our nature when we elevate, improve, and sanctify it. As co-creators of the world with God, we are not just the sport of our biochemistry. We are persons who can select and choose among the traits that comprise our very own natures, cultivating some and weeding out others.

Human Flourishing Versus Desire Satisfaction

1999 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard J. Arneson
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Surprising Result ◽  
Human Flourishing ◽  
Prudential Value ◽  
Desire Satisfaction ◽  
Individual Good ◽  
Helping Others ◽  
Good For

What is the good for human persons? If I am trying to lead the best possible life I could lead, not the morally best life, but the life that is best for me, what exactly am I seeking?This phrasing of the question I will be pursuing may sound tendentious, so some explanation is needed. What is good for one person, we ordinarily suppose, can conflict with what is good for other persons and with what is required by morality. A prudent person seeks her own good efficiently; she selects the best available means to her good. If we call the value that a person seeks when she is being prudent “prudential value,” then an alternative rendering of the question to be addressed in this essay is “What is prudential value?” We can also say that an individual flourishes or has a life high in well-being when her life is high in prudential value. Of course, these common-sense appearances that the good for an individual, the good for other persons, and the requirements of morality often are in conflict might be deceiving. For all that I have said here, the correct theory of individual good might yield the result that sacrificing oneself for the sake of other people or for the sake of a morally worthy cause can never occur, because helping others and being moral always maximize one's own good. But this would be the surprising result of a theory, not something we should presuppose at the start of inquiry. When a friend has a baby and I express a conventional wish that the child have a good life, I mean a life that is good for the child, not a life that merely helps others or merely respects the constraints of morality. After all, a life that is altruistic and perfectly moral, we suppose, could be a life that is pure hell for the person who lives it—a succession of horrible headaches marked by no achievements or attainments of anything worthwhile and ending in agonizing death at a young age. So the question remains, what constitutes a life that is good for the person who is living it?

A Personal Narrative Conveying Human Flourishing

2021 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
James Wise ◽  
Keith Barney
Keyword(s):  
Personal Narrative ◽  
People With Disabilities ◽  
Therapeutic Recreation ◽  
Human Flourishing ◽  
Scholarly Literature ◽  
Practical Applications ◽  
Living Well ◽  
Narrative Method

Human flourishing is gaining recognition and support as a central aim of therapeutic recreation (TR) services. However, missing from the extant scholarly literature are concrete, extensive depictions of people with disabilities who are living well. This is a critical omission because people need to be aware there are a multitude of avenues that lead to flourishing and that what flourishing looks like can differ from person to person. Furnishing portrayals of living well helps people grasp the diversity associated with flourishing and enables them to select and pursue a particular portrayal or meld multiple portrayals into a composite best suited to them and their environments. This article begins addressing the deficit by presenting a detailed portrait of human flourishing via a personal narrative. The text also discusses practical applications associated with using the personal narrative method and concludes with future objectives.

scholarly journals Living well by letting go: Reliability and validity of a brief measure of nonattachment

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brad Elphinstone ◽  
Baljinder K. Sahdra ◽  
Joseph Ciarrochi
Keyword(s):  
Reliability And Validity ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Subjective Well Being ◽  
Suitable Alternative ◽  
Total N ◽  
Living Well ◽  
Autonomous Regulation ◽  
Long Form ◽  
Self Actualization ◽  
Letting Go

There is a growing literature on nonattachment, defined as a flexible, balanced way of relating to experiences without clinging to or suppressing them. We developed a 7-item Nonattachment Scale (NAS-7) by shortening a previously validated 30-item measure (NAS; Sahdra, Shaver & Brown, 2010). NAS-7 was found to display strong psychometric properties in American and Australian samples (total N = 504), including a unidimensional factor structure and measurement invariance across different samples. The correlations of NAS-7 with other theoretically relevant constructs were virtually identical to the long-form NAS. Across different samples, NAS-7 assessed nonattachment was associated with greater autonomous regulation, self-actualization, psychological and subjective well-being, and reduced materialism and depressive symptoms. NAS-7 is a suitable alternative to the long-form NAS as it takes about half the time to complete than the long form without a substantial loss of information.

Citizenship, Well-Being and Sustainability: Epicurus or Aristotle?

2006 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
John O’Neill
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Research ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Subjective Well Being ◽  
Material Consumption ◽  
Human Flourishing ◽  
Environmental Thought ◽  
Public World

AbstractThe paper addresses two questions central to recent environmental political thought: Can a reduction in consumption be rendered compatible with a maintenance or improvement of well-being? What are the conditions for a sense of citizenship that crosses different generations? The two questions have elicited two conflicting responses. The first has been answered in broadly Epicurean terms: in recent environmental thought appeal has been made to recent hedonic research which appears to show that improvements in subjective well-being can be decoupled from increased material consumption. The second has usually been answered in broadly Aristotelian terms: republicans have suggested that a public world and projects that are shared over generations are a condition of human well-being. These Epicurean and Aristotelian responses appear to look in opposite directions. They start from different accounts of well-being and appear to look in different places for human flourishing. This paper suggests that the broadly Aristotelian response is in fact owed to both problems. It shows that recent empirical research in the hedonic tradition can be rendered consistent with that Aristotelian response.

Living Well Within Planetary Limits: is it possible? And what will it take?

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Steinberger
Keyword(s):  
Energy Demand ◽  
Minimum Energy ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Research Community ◽  
Active Engagement ◽  
Low Carbon ◽  
Engineering Research ◽  
Living Well ◽  
Energy Footprint ◽  
Poor Outcomes

<p>This talk will report on the multiple research streams resulting from the Living Well Within Limits project. The Living Well Within Limits project investigates the energy requirements of well-being, from quantitative, participatory and provisioning systems perspectives. In this presentation, I will communicate individual and cross-cutting findings from the project, and their implications for the engineering research community. In particular, I will share our most recent results on global energy footprint inequality, implications of redistribution, as well as modelling the minimum energy demand that would provide decent living standards for everyone on earth by 2050. I will show that achieving low-carbon well-being, both from the beneficiary (“consumer”) and supply-chain (producer) sides, involves strong distributional and political elements. Simply researching this area from a technical, social or economic lens is insufficient to draw out the reasons for poor outcomes and most promising avenues for positive change. I thus argue for the active engagement of the research community.</p>

The Perfectionist Turn

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas J. Den Uyl ◽  
Douglas B. Rasmussen
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Human Flourishing ◽  
Living Things ◽  
Good For

This chapter argues against the claim advanced by Daniel Haybron, Daniel C. Russell, and Mark LeBar that human self-perfection is ultimately based on notions of well-being and human flourishing that we bring to our understanding of human nature and in favor of the idea that it is human nature itself that ultimately grounds our understanding of human well-being or human flourishing. In doing so, the question of whether there is some gap between (a) what it is to be a good human being and (b) what is good for a human being is addressed. It is shown that the arguments on behalf of a such a gap fail and that the version of perfectionism that is advanced—that is, individualistic perfectionism—is ideally suited to not only avoid such a gap but also to display their unity, especially when perfection is understood as a process of living things and not as some cosmic or metaphysical process.

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