Invoking an Aristotelian view of human flourishing as a basis for social justice involves applying his principles in a more universal way than he did two thousand years ago. For scholarship focused on health, Aristotle's emphasis–that human flourishing is the end of all social activity–has great appeal, but what does it mean for humans to flourish in our various social contexts in the modern world?
What do healthy societies and individuals look like today and how might social innovation determine what they look like in the future? What is the next frontier in what constitutes flourishing societies and individuals and how does social innovation help us get there?
Amartya Sen's capability approach provides an example of how Aristotle's writings apply to modern scholarship. The capability approach links to Aristotle's conception of social and political ethics. The health capability model of internal and external capabilities for flourishing provides a rigorous and sound conceptual foundation for answering critical questions related to human flourishing and for pioneering approaches to promote it. The goal is to advance research on the next frontier of what healthy societies and individuals look like and social innovation on how to effectuate justice grounded in human flourishing.
We have a new opportunity to bring together collaborators through the interdisciplinary global research hub, the Health Equity and Policy Lab, to empirically test, through social experiments, the individual and collective capabilities necessary for healthy societies and individuals. We have a new opportunity to discover social innovations that will create the conditions for future flourishing. HEPL has done a vast amount of interdisciplinary research to establish a robust social science research infrastructure upon which to build a series of social experiments conducted by interdisciplinary and international research teams. This will establish an expansive global research community for social innovation.
One challenge is more precisely measuring and evaluating collective capabilities, as well as their dynamic interaction with individual capabilities. This helps us understand what various collective capabilities need to be developed to create societal conditions for individuals and communities to flourish. A second challenge relates to efforts to quantitatively represent qualitative data. This is an exciting challenge to crack the code of translating an individual's socially dependent experience of flourishing in a scalar fashion so that we can compare and contrast what internal and external individual capabilities are necessary to flourish.
A new standard of stages of capabilities development will illuminate what societies need to do collectively and at the individual level to develop the internal and external capabilities of people to flourish. This discovery of multiple stages of development of healthy societies and individuals is needed to promote human flourishing. We need to support social scientific studies of how societies and individuals go about this process of capabilities development for individual and societal flourishing and how we can leverage what we learn to develop a new frontier of what healthy societies and individuals need to look like in the future. To be successful, the funding should build on the conceptually robust research enterprise built by the Health Equity and Policy Lab, a global research hub. A key reason is that the Health Equity and Policy Lab approach is itself an exemplar of individual and collective capabilities development and flourishing. In its core values, research, how it works and pedagogy, the Health Equity and Policy Lab exemplifies both substantive and procedural principles that are consistent with the stages required to achieve flourishing.
3 years: What have initial social experiments provided in terms of lessons learned to be integrated into new research ideas for the second wave of experiments?
5 years: What are we learning about what it looks like for individuals and societies to flourish today and what social innovations are needed for flourishing in the future?
10 years: What are the various societal conditions that foster sets of internal and external capabilities development? What are the contours of successful flourishing at the individual and societal levels and what social innovations will help us get there?
Information on the Health Equity and Policy Lab can be found here: https://www.healthequityandpolicylab.com
These research ideas were submitted in response to Templeton World Charity Foundation’s global call for Grand Challenges in Human Flourishing, which ran from September through November 2020.
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