Understanding the Conditions for Human Flourishing: Comments on Nicole Hassoun's <i>A Minimally Good Life</i>

Nicole Hassoun's important book comes at a difficult juncture in our politics—indeed a moment of crisis—not only in the United States but around the world, with comprehensive attacks not only on democracy but also on welfare-oriented policies, along with a rising nationalism that urges disregard of any considerations of global justice or of the rights and well-being of distantly situated people. Hassoun helpfully addresses this crisis by proposing the notion of a minimally decent life as the core notion in a view that seeks justice and meets norms of freedom, care, and rationality. I think that the weight that she places on the conditions needed for well-being or flourishing is salutary, and she usefully centers notions of care in her account of what she calls “common humanity.” In my comments, I will raise some questions internal to Hassoun's own philosophical account, including some that address the ground and limits of her argument, and I will highlight some issues that I think would benefit from her further analysis. But I also want to question her account from the standpoint of my own approach (presented in a series of books and articles from 1988 to the present), which overlaps with hers in several ways. It centers on the material and social conditions that people need for existing and for flourishing, but also appeals to a social ontology of individuals-in-relations and prioritizes people's interdependence and the cultivation of relationships, as well as their realization of projects and development of capacities over the course of their lives. Interestingly, like Hassoun, I have also focused on a notion of empathy as an important supplement to reason in these contexts, but I understand it to take political forms, as what I call “social empathy” rather than the interactional interpretation Hassoun gives it. (I will only be able to sketch some of the bare outlines of my own approach here, limiting it to some points of comparison with Hassoun's, but I have developed it extensively elsewhere.) Hassoun lays out the basics of her view primarily in the first chapter, which presents a freestanding account of the idea of a minimally good life. Some additional important philosophical features are introduced in Chapter 3, especially notions of justice and common humanity, as well as the connection to care. Regarding the basic conception, Hassoun distinguishes two senses of the minimally good life, an aspirational one and a really minimal one. It would seem that the aspirational interpretation of “minimally good,” which is her main one, is not very minimal at all, since it covers the conditions for flourishing and not just the bare conditions for existence or for human agency. This usage of “minimal,” which is likely intentional on Hassoun's part, would seem to diverge somewhat from the customary sense of the term, and may carry the potential for confusing some readers (or at least confounding their expectations). I myself wasn't always clear throughout the book which sense she is referring to, and what accordingly she is calling on societies to provide. Still, I certainly agree with her central and important focus on providing for the conditions for flourishing. However, Hassoun adds that such provision of the conditions is insufficient, in that people should not only be able to pursue the things that make their lives minimally good, but actually have to attain those (p. 50). That is quite a desideratum for politics, and I don't fully understand exactly how she expects that demanding standard to be met (or even measured). Yet, such social and political questions do not appear to be central in Hassoun's core analysis (as presented in her first chapter), where the account seems more ethical or interactional in orientation. This is evident from Hassoun's understanding of the basic idea of putting oneself into another's shoes, understood as “thinking about whether they would be content to live others' lives as those people” and which is further spelled out in terms of an appeal to empathy, understood in a demanding sense as follows: “The reasonable, free, caring person must fully understand the other person's circumstances, psychology, and history, in deciding whether they would contently live as the other person” (Hassoun 2024, 24 top, italics mine). I think we can ask several questions here. First, is it possible to know enough about another person's life to figure out if you would be content to live as those people, and what does the latter part really mean, that is, living another's life or living as another? It seems to me that this is asking more of empathy than anyone has in the literature to this point. (The sense of perspective taking involved in empathy is usually understood in some more particular regard or other, e.g., “how would you feel if someone did that to you?” or in the psychological contexts of relationships.) I think that Hassoun may be pointing to the idea of projecting yourself as living within the conditions others face, rather than strictly living as them. But to me it sounds a bit like science fiction to try to imagine myself having all the aims, desires, and needs of another, if I could know what those are. A related issue concerns the demandingness of the interpretation of empathy as fully understanding the other person's circumstances, psychology, and history (assuming one could know these). I'm not even sure that such a full understanding is desirable (or possible) for ethics, let alone for politics, where it is necessary to understand people at least to some degree in terms of groups or shared characteristics. Multiply this by a global context, and the burden on an individual for understanding all others fully in this way would be insupportable, if it were in fact meaningful, epistemically speaking. Even if one more modestly sees this instead as developing a disposition to empathize with others (as I propose elsewhere in regard to solidarity, Gould 2007, 2014), it cannot require fully understanding them. I have instead argued for what I believe to be a more realizable conception of empathy (Gould 2007, 2020), drawing on its original meaning as “Einfühlung,” involving feeling with others. Empathy in this sense has both cognitive (perspective taking) and sentimental dimensions. In social contexts, it requires an effort to additionally understand the social context of the other group(s) in a sense that is required by critical social theory, namely taking into account the background features of their lived context which may involve oppression and immiseration. But I believe it cannot require one-on-one full understanding of others if the notion is to have political effect. Moreover, I argue that empathy needs to be paired with and corrected by reasoning. For example, in global contexts, where we tend to empathize with individual others, for example, starving children or adults whose images are portrayed viscerally by the media, we need to be able to extend our empathy and concern not just to the particular person but to others similarly situated. This extension requires an act of reason that requires us to correct for our penchant to focus on and feel for the individual case. In terms of the core notion of understanding and providing the conditions for living and flourishing, on which I wholeheartedly agree with Hassoun and very much appreciate her own analysis of those, my account interprets these in terms of the human rights (but understood in a somewhat different interpretation from the more limited customary one). Contrary to Hassoun's complaint that human rights views tend to avoid specificity as to how they are related to the requirements for flourishing or, in her terms, a minimally good life (Hassoun 2024, 68, n21), I have tried to explicate several of these connections—interpreted in terms of a set of conditions for meeting needs and enabling people's self-developing or self-transformative activity (in Rethinking Democracy (Gould 1988, 31–90, 190–214), including its chapter on “What are the Human Rights?,” through Globalizing Democracy and Human Rights (Gould 2004, 38, 94–102), with its account of basic and nonbasic human rights and of three types of needs—material, recognitional, and relational—to Interactive Democracy (Gould 2014, 13–57), especially its chapters on a human rights approach to global justice and on a social ontology of human rights). In my view, perhaps the main advantage of adopting a human rights approach to specifying both the minimal and more maximal understandings of the conditions for agency and living well is that human rights are accepted worldwide as providing such standards. Such international recognition is of great significance, even if currently honored mainly in the breach. Of course, by human rights here, I mean not only the civil and political rights but also the economic, social and cultural rights. These have been recognized not only in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but also in the various Human Rights Covenants. And there are good philosophical reasons for remaining with such a human rights approach, in my view. I have argued that we should see them in the first place as justified social claims on each other for the provision of the conditions that we need (via institutions that would do so), and that they should additionally serve not only as constraints on nation-states and in transnational contexts, but also as goals to be realized in public policy and law. In this alternative approach, human rights specify the conditions, both primary and secondary, that people need for their self-transformative or self-developmental activity over time, whether individual or collective. In some ways like Hassoun, I have argued that a purely minimalist interpretation of human rights (as “the morality of the depths,” as Henry Shue puts it) is insufficient when they are understood as specifying these conditions. In my view, the notion of a set of necessary and enabling conditions of human activity follows from a conception of positive freedom, understood as a self-developmental process, which requires not only freedom from interference, oppression, and exploitation (i.e., negative freedom), but also access to the positive conditions of agency. (A critique of Berlin on liberty and an articulation of this alternative conception is in Gould 1988, 2013, 2014.) It is, therefore, a view of real or effective freedom in action, which presupposes but goes beyond our abstract freedom of choice. Moreover, this remains an egalitarian view, since (as I argue) each person has a prima facie equal claim on others for access to these conditions. Yet a (robust) human rights approach can help to address the possible overdemandingness of a positive freedom view, since it puts the focus on supplying the conditions for human activity rather than on assuring equal outcomes, and it also enables us to prioritize among the conditions (although this requires rejecting the standard reading of human rights as all at the same level). I suggest that we can distinguish between the conditions required for any human life activity whatever and those needed for the fuller development of persons over time. This in turn corresponds to a distinction between primary (or basic) human rights, including security and bodily integrity, basic liberty, and suchlike, and secondary ones required for fuller flourishing. Of course, these conditions cannot be provided directly by all others, but require the creation of institutions that would meet them (for everyone). Like Hassoun, I have previously argued that although states can be the initial context for such provision, we have an obligation to step in where states are not providing for these human rights, including creating new institutions that would do so (Gould 2014). Regarding the crucial relational aspect of this approach, which Hassoun also recognizes and rightly prioritizes in her own account, I understand self-developing or self-transformative activity to involve not only the standardly recognized development of capacities and realization of projects but also the cultivation of relationships over a lifetime, and interpret such activity as taking both individual and collective forms. Self-development in this sense presupposes self-determination (and collective codetermination), but the protection of such self-determination (and related notions of autonomy) does not suffice to capture what is required in the more biographical, processive, and developmental account I offer (Gould 1988, 2014). My view remains crucially anti-essentialist in that, unlike capabilities views, it resists specifying how individuals should develop themselves, at least for political (if not also ethical) purposes (Gould 1988, 2004). Whereas relatively universalistic claims can be made in connection with shared needs and a set of human rights, these understandings are themselves open to interpretation over time and from diverse cultural perspectives, although certain constraints, such as those given by our natural being and our existing within the natural world, as well as some of our basic needs, for example, for subsistence and social recognition, would have to be included in any list. I would add that in my view, from a practical standpoint, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights did a reasonably good job at spelling out these human rights, at least for the ways we live now. Regarding care and interdependence, they enter my own view as core features of the social ontology that underlies it. As Hassoun notes, it is important to recognize that we are tied to others, and both need care and give care. Moreover, there are interconnections between care, human rights, and global justice, and we can even propose a human right to care. (Gould 2004, 143–147; 2008; 2014, 132–147). For Hassoun, care comes in as a basic element of our common humanity, as she puts it. I agree with her on that point, except that there needs to be a way to grapple with the particularity of most people's care. It does not automatically extend beyond their families or other people close to them or who are part of their social group as they understand it, and it certainly does not often extend to the world as a whole. So there would need to be an argument as to how this extension should proceed. (Hassoun's claim that “Caring people…will sacrifice some of their interests for others” [Hassoun 2024, 62] would not seem to apply generally, although exceptional cases of caring for people beyond those close to us surely do exist. So I wonder if Hassoun's claim here is empirical, where it seems quite possibly false, or normative, where the grounds would seem to need more development than she provides.) I would note in passing that Hassoun may actually be operating with two values, autonomy and care (and thus not only care, seemingly contrary to her claim that it is care that is distinctive of our common humanity). In any case, a complete account would evidently require showing how those two norms are interrelated. In this connection, we can consider Hassoun's primary methodological proposal. She argues that a basic minimum is established in terms of a life that “reasonable, caring, free people would contentedly live.” In this regard, she says that her approach is, if not contractualist, then discursive (Hassoun 2024, 63), since these people are supposed to deliberate with each other. Here, I am concerned first of all about whether this approach is sufficiently cross-cultural. These people sometimes sound a lot like 21st century western progressives in their self-understanding, and it certainly seems to be an individualist (and indeed a liberal) view in this respect. Although this is not a decisive criticism by any means, it raises the possibility of the view having an ideological component, in tacitly bringing in presuppositions and perspectives from the present context and positing them as universal. Another issue is that the sort of “discursive” (if not contractualist) methodological approach Hassoun advocates might possibly incorporate the circularity (or question-begging) characteristic of some such counterfactual views. If the set up is that free and caring people are to decide on the minimum, it is not surprising that what they decide on as important will incorporate those very desiderata of freedom and caring (or conditions for them). That is, characterizing the deliberators as free, caring, and rational already builds into the choice situation the very values and concerns they would agree to or highlight, so it's not clear what the set up adds to our philosophical understanding. Clearly, too, the notion of deliberation is helpful, but it's not yet evident to me what role it is actually playing in Hassoun's account, since she says relatively little about it. I am also worried that the deliberation among restricted groups of people (e.g., policy makers) may actually turn out to be insufficiently respectful to those affected by their policies if the deciders don't also actually hear from those affected people through a dialogue with them. In my own view, policy makers and other powerful groups or institutions need to hear from the people affected, in a way that brings in the norm of democracy. (Gould 2004, 2014). A final note about method and its possible limitations. Aside from the issue of extending empathy from ethics to politics (discussed above), we can wonder whether Hassoun's project is in fact an exercise in ideal theory. Although she helpfully gives examples and analyses of several policy implications of her view, we can question whether a notion of a minimally good life is realizable without major transformations in the structures and systems that lead to and perpetuate domination and oppression, and the analysis of these structures and systems is not a main focus in this book, although I am confident that Hassoun will develop that analysis more fully in future work. I would argue that such structural and systemic concerns play a central role in blocking the realization of human rights in practice and so would need to be addressed not only by institutional reforms but centrally too by solidaristic social movements aiming at justice and the realization of these rights, so that people could have the conditions necessary for their freedom and their flourishing as social individuals. The author wishes to thank Johann Go, the Editor of this book symposium, for his helpful comments on the manuscript. The author declares no conflicts of interest.