Human Flourishing
Andrew Briggs and Michael J. Reiss
Can there be a bigger topic than human flourishing? Almost everyone cares about human flourishing, whether or not they use that term. Family roles, not only as spouse or parent, should be about promoting flourishing. Many professions, whether as teacher, pastor, solicitor, or doctor, are explicitly about promoting flourishing, and at their best so is every other way of earning a living and contributing to society through voluntary or employed service. Humans have been thinking about what it means to be human probably before writing was invented, and certainly ever since, whether it is Aristotle writing about εὐδαιμονία or the Psalmist asking God, ‘What is man that you are mindful of him?’.
In our book Human Flourishing: Scientific Insight and Spiritual Wisdom in Uncertain Times, published by Oxford University Press on 18 October 2021, we identify three dimensions of flourishing: the material, the relational, and the transcendent. The material dimension is the starting point, because it is hard to enjoy the other dimensions of flourishing if we lack the basic requirements of such things as water, food, shelter, and health care. But material prosperity by itself is unsatisfying, whether at the basic level required for survival or in the superabundance of the rich. Solitary confinement is a severe punishment. Humans are social animals; we need others. And yet, when all our material and relational needs are met, there still seems to be an appetite for something more. This can manifest itself in different ways at different times for different people; it may be enjoyment of a sunset, a painting, a poem, a symphony, a cathedral, or even a scientific discovery, in which we recognise a further reality which we can engage with even if we cannot pin it down. We call this the transcendent dimension.
These three dimensions may be distinct, but they are not isolated from each other. The closer we look, the more we find that they are entangled. That is why there are other possible analyses. For example, flourishing can be broken down into economic, physical, and psychological domains. The psychological domain includes happiness, which is affective, involving a preponderance of positive emotion, and life satisfaction, which is cognitive with consideration of more objective achievements.
Another kind of analysis identifies three criteria of life: life going well, life feeling well, and life doing well. Life going well has environmental components; do I have enough food, shelter, clothing, health care, education? Life feeling well has emotional components; it requires physical and mental health, but it is more than health alone and usually involves good relationships. Life doing well is about me as a responsible person; what goals am I setting myself implicitly or explicitly, and what am I doing to deliver them? It can be that for a time all three aspects are in harmony. When there are conflicts between them, maybe life doing well should trump the other two.
The material, relational, and transcendent dimensions of flourishing are strongly connected. Although it is theoretically possible for an individual to be self-sufficient in their food production, few in this planet actually are, and much of the evolutionary development of Homo sapiens has been towards ever greater cooperation. Just imagine trying to make your own ball point pen, let alone your own smart phone. We need each other for our material well-being. But we also use material means to build relationships. That is why we give presents. Parents build relationships with their children, in part by providing them with food, shelter, and clothing, and then books and toys and whatever. So, the interaction between the material and the relational dimensions of flourishing is two-way.
The entanglement between the transcendent and the other two dimensions is even stronger. A transcendent sense of awe and wonder may be inspired by the physical appearance of a starry sky, however elusive that may be in light-polluted urban environments. Transcendent experiences of poetry, art, or music are mediated by the physical experience of the word, the canvass, or the melody. They are often also relational; enjoyment of a creation is enriched by enjoyment of the creator, whether through personal knowledge of this evening’s performer or through the adoration of the doting parent for their child’s latest drawing. A moral imperative common to almost all world religions is to do for others what we would like them to do for us. George Bernard Shaw rejected this on the grounds that their tastes may not be the same, but it is not difficult to make allowance for personal preferences. Loving your neighbour as yourself is relational, and it is almost always material too, because time and again we express our love through material means, whether it be cooking a meal or mending a bicycle. Within the Christian tradition the material, the relational, and the transcendent are fused through the incarnation, whereby, as John expressed it, the founding principle of the universe became physically embodied in space and time.
Human flourishing is timeless. The context in which it is to be promoted is not. Every generation will have to ask afresh how established thinking about human flourishing must be either replaced or applied in new ways to new challenges. How can humans flourish within the extraordinary technological changes which are taking place before our very eyes? We consider the examples of machine learning and gene synthesis.
Machine learning thrives on data. Anyone who uses the internet, whether for browsing or communicating through email or social media, is offering their data to the cyberworld, which the machine learning engines of data companies harvest. Anyone in Europe who visits a new web site is likely to be asked whether they are willing to accept cookies. Why? Because the cookies enable the organisation behind the web site to harvest their browsing data. The power of machine learning is then available to learn about their preferences, and then to target them with the aim of changing their preferences. How will humans exercise responsibility for their preferences?
Machine learning is just that. Where previously the user might have programmed a computer to perform a task, now the machine is programmed to learn how to perform a task. Increasingly, the task may consist of decision-making. Machines are surpassing humans in a growing range of tasks, some of them involving highly complex analysis. Increasingly, questions will arise regarding which decisions are best left to machines, and which require human involvement. Where decisions require both technical and moral input, how will humans harness the strengths of the machines for the technical dimension while ensuring that the moral component remains firmly rooted in truth, meaning and purpose?
Gene synthesis is at an earlier stage of development than machine learning, but it may come even closer to the heart of what it means to be human. Already gene editing by techniques such as CRISPR-Cas9 enables individual genes to be edited. The technique has been rightly hailed for its potential for good. Nevertheless, the announcement in 2018 by He Jiankui of the birth of twin girls whose genomes he had edited in an attempt to prevent HIV infection provoked a shocked reaction, though apparently that has not inhibited further experiments involving gene editing of hereditary mutations associated with deafness. Meanwhile, other techniques such as prime editing and base editing seem to advance apace. Gene synthesis will take all this further, to the point where it may one day be possible to type in the complete genome of an organism, and synthesise the genes with sufficient fault-tolerant error correction to render the genome useful for information storage and synthetic biology.
How should we use the ability to edit and synthesise genes as the technologies become progressively available? There are practical questions of safety, which is why germ-line editing (for offspring yet-to-be conceived) should proceed with more caution than somatic gene editing (for that person only). There are also questions of regulation, which is about whether international standards can be agreed and how they can be enforced, in a way that will avoid unregulated clinics claiming to be able to eliminate inherited conditions by using inadequately tested and possibly harmful procedures. But even if such concerns can be satisfactorily addressed, the deeper questions will remain about how such capabilities should be used to promote human flourishing. A simple distinction between curing and enhancing proves, on closer examination, to be a difficult line to hold. We know that from other areas of health care. There is no rigorous demarcation between restorative skin surgery and the worst excesses of cosmetic surgery. Immunisation is given to healthy children not to cure MMR but to enhance their resistance to otherwise debilitating diseases. If we know that there are genetic contributions to cancer, heart disease, mental illness, and sexual preference, and if we learn the causal links, then how should prospective parents and physicians decide on responsible genetic intervention?
The technologies of machine learning and gene synthesis are as different as could be. The details of their regulation and the ethical decisions associated with them are correspondingly specific. And yet the deeper one digs to find foundational principles, the more the questions converge. What does it mean for people to be fully human? How can humans best behave responsibly? If that is true of the disparate technological changes, it is also true of other changes which impact human flourishing. They too prompt us to ask afresh what humans are for, and how human flourishing is to be promoted through the best of scientific insight and spiritual wisdom.
