Creating capacities for human flourishing : an alternative approach to human development

What are the core capacities that make for a flourishing life? It is an incredibly difficult question to answer. Every philosopher, public commentator and backyard critic seems to have a different view on the matter. Occasionally the terms of what makes for a good life are developed explicitly, but mostly the grounding of such claims is either left implicit or undeveloped. It is as if we all agree on what is good – something that is clearly not true – and spelling out the terms of a good life is unnecessary. In the Global North the most common appeals assume some variation on the capacities for freedom, connectivity, democracy, and inclusion, with the ideology of freedom usually prevailing. The initiating questions differ. What makes a life worth living? What capacities does a person need to lead a good life? Or what digital capacities should a person ideally have? These questions orient toward the personal and tend to stay focused upon the individual. They are very different from more socially expansive questions. What makes a city liveable? What capacities make for conditions of human flourishing? The first set of questions emphasises individual capacities as the basis of the enquiry; the second set begins with the social as their basis, and includes individual capacities but extends those to the form of social habitation or the conditions of human flourishing as they are lived both variably and relationally. Our approach begins with the last question: What capacities make for conditions of human flourishing? It suggests that if we can give a working answer to that question, then we have the foundation for answering all those other more narrowly framed or precisely oriented questions. Put the other way around, if we want to know the answers to practical and policy issues such as what makes for a liveable city, what constitutes good digital engagement or what capacities we need to learn in order to live a good life, we need to go back to the basics concerning human flourishing in general.