A Framework for the Good by Kinghorn Kevin;

Author:Kinghorn, Kevin;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Published: 2016-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

4.3 ARE RELATIONSHIPS THE KEY TO OUR WELL-BEING?

Although God is relational by nature, and although the Christian perspective I am endorsing is that our flourishing consists in relating rightly to others, it would be too strong to claim that the flourishing of any possible creature God creates could occur only through participation in personal relationships. There could be creatures who flourish in isolation and who, like amebas, even reproduce asexually. Though in a minimal sense their flourishing would depend on their being related to God (after all, in the Christian worldview all creatures will be sustained in existence by God), it is not necessary that their flourishing depend, as human flourishing does, on their being in loving relationships with others. There might conceivably be creatures, for instance, that flourish as they reflect other aspects of God—such as aesthetic ones. Christian hymns of worship sometimes speak of human limitations to appreciate the beauty of God. And it is entirely possible that there could be other creatures whose ultimate flourishing chiefly consists in their much greater capacity to recognize and contemplate the aesthetic aspects of God’s nature. Still, the Christian view of human flourishing that I wish to explore sees it as an essential fact about any human that he or she will ultimately flourish only by relating to God and others in loving, self-giving ways.

A comparison with Robert Adams’s views is instructive here. Adams has proposed that human well-being consists in enjoyment of the excellent, where “excellence” for a finite thing involves its resembling God, who is infinite, personified excellence.19 Though this proposal shares with my own account certain central, Christian affirmations—such as that human flourishing ultimately depends on one’s relation to God—it differs from my own account in important respects. As we saw in chapter 1, Adams, following Plato, understands the Good (or, as Adams calls it, the “excellent”) in terms of “that which is worthy of love or admiration” (1999, 13). For Adams, something can have goodness—which is an intrinsic quality—whether or not anyone is enjoying it.

By contrast, I argued in chapter 1 that the meaning of “good” cannot be divorced from the question of whether that which is said to be good is promoting someone’s interests or well-being. In chapter 2 I made a similar affirmation about the nature of goodness, arguing, in contrast to Adams, that “what is good” cannot be separated from “what is good for” someone.

Differences in theistic, ethical frameworks can often (if not always) be traced to differing conceptions of the nature of God. Perhaps the heart of the differences between Adams’s account of goodness and my own account involves the different aspects of God we wish to emphasize. While Adams emphasizes the intrinsic qualities of God that are worthy of “love and admiration,” my own starting point in describing God is to emphasize the point that God is life itself. On my account, then, God is the source of goodness because God brings life—that is, states of flourishing—to finite creatures like us. Adams may be correct that any contingent being or thing that is good will resemble God in some way.

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