Human flourishing and more-than-ordinary vulnerable persons
From this it would appear that for MacIntyre the flourishing of a human being qua
human being is possible if and only if an individual has developed the capacity of
independent practical reasoning. However, this is surely an impoverished view for the
experience of many nurses and other health care professionals (and some teachers) is
that flourishing can be found among those human beings who have an apparently
limited capacity for independent practical reasoning. The child with severe learning
difficulties might not be able to make the sorts of choices MacIntyre takes as definitive
of independent practical reasoning but may still respond to her or his environment in
ways that demonstrate the capacity for joy, pleasure, distress, annoyance, pain and
various other emotions as well as an ability to respond to particular other human beings
(mother, father, nurse and so on). Such responses might be equated with mere animal
responses of the kind associated with, for example, dogs and other pets, but without an
understanding and a knowledge of both the inner states of, say, dogs and cats on the one
hand and of severely handicapped humans on the other, it would be premature to state
categorically that human flourishing is absent.
Many such human beings can be described as more-than-ordinarily vulnerable as
defined in Chapter 2 and in MacIntyre’s terms such individuals would not seem to be
candidates for human flourishing at all. In his defence he does say that “It is not... that
one cannot flourish at all, if unable to reason” (ibid p. 105) but he does not provide us
with an account of flourishing for those who are unable to reason. He does, however,
recognise that there are times when we all inevitably fall back on dependency by which
he seems to mean when our capacity for independent practical reasoning is
compromised in some way. Additionally, part of his argument for the human need for
the virtues revolves around this idea of a natural human tendency to move from
dependency towards independence coupled with a recognition that we are all in some
sense interdependent because each of us may become dependent during periods when
we might normally expect to be independent. Yet, his vision of this ‘life journey’ fails
to recognise that there are those for whom the achievement of fully realised independent
practical reason is at best unlikely and on most accounts this fact does not prevent us
from considering such persons as human beings who can, to some degree, flourish.
Moreover, we usually understand such flourishing in human rather than in mere animal
terms. At the very least we recognise that there are things that can hinder or help such
persons to flourish in whatever limited ways they are capable of flourishing.
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