INTRODUCTION

The question of what constitutes human flourishing elicits an extraordinary variety of responses, which suggests that there are not merely differences of opinion at work, but also different understandings of the question itself. So it may help to introduce some clarity into the question before starting work on one answer to it.

That human persons are flourishing means that their lives are good, or worthwhile, in the broadest sense. Thus, the concept of human flourishing, as I understand it, marks the most comprehensive, “all-in” assessment of the quality of human lives. This concept is broader than many other concepts that mark more specific such assessments—including those of pleasure, well-being, welfare, affluence, and virtue, as well as those denoting various excellences and accomplishments. Understanding the conceptual relations in this way, one need not deny the substantive claim that the most comprehensive assessment of human lives is exhausted by one of the more specific assessments—that pleasure, say, is all there is to human flourishing. For this claim, that human flourishing is nothing more than pleasure (or virtue, or affluence, or any of the others), does not entail that the concept of human flourishing is no broader than the concept of pleasure. This latter conclusion would follow only if the contrary claim, that human flourishing is more than just pleasure, were self-contradictory, which, on my understanding of the concepts, it clearly is not.