Needs, Goods and Self-Actualization

Johnson, Matthew Thomas (2013) Needs, Goods and Self-Actualization. In: Evaluating Culture : Well-Being, Institutions and Circumstance. Springer, pp. 42-71. ISBN 9781349333769

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to begin to advance a response to the ‘Bongo-Bongo’ objection to universal accounts of well-being. Building upon Gray’s broad-brush treatment of the notion of well-being, I wish to circumvent the empirical rejection of universalism by advancing apparently intrinsic, immanent human goods. The nature of this approach, which will extend into the next chapter, is to distinguish between immanent, fundamental or first-order goods, of which we may be unconscious, and experientially acquired derivative desires, of which we are always conscious (Adler 2006, 11; see also Kenrick et al. 2010, 295). So long as we hold that humans are fallible in their recognition of the good and its various constituents, cultural acknowledgment or consensus is unnecessary — failure to acknowledge the good or to promote that good in valuable forms may, though, be indicative of a cultural deficit. For the purposes of this project, I require a ‘thick vague’ account of the good which identifies core features of human well-being without constraining, through ethnocentric or ideological bias, the forms in which that good is realized. The approach I wish to advance is a eudaimonic fundamental goods view of well-being grounded in the Aristotelian relationship between doing and being. To this end, I set aside theistic conceptions of the good which concern an afterlife on the grounds that they are unfalsifiable.