Hints and unknowns about human flourishing

Abstract

In this work it is understood, paraphrasing José Ortega y Gasset (1957), that man can be humanized, but the tiger can never «become tabby». This conceptualization of human flourishing would apply to an individual, beyond biological issues, and to the whole social order, depending on a certain class of results. However, the proposed hypothesis maintains that this concept deserves, in the absence of an adequate definition and satisfactory precision, to be presented in a negative sense, just as darkness is explained by the absence of light or freedom as the absence of coercion. In a similar sense, as Friedrich Hayek (1976/1988) presents justice in a provisional sense, as something that is discovered by detecting and defining what is considered unjust. With the same criteria then, human flourishing could be revealed in the present essay with the help of the analysis of the causes and the elements that would spoil it.