Action, Human Flourishing and Moral Discernment

Overview

Grasping the human action is crucial for both making decisions and managing people within organizations. The human action entails many elements previously dealt with, such as rationality emotions and motivations, will, learning and habits, along with relations with others. It also involves moral discernment, which is a significant human trait. This is the ability to perceive and evaluate the quality of actions and behaviors from the perspective of good and evil.

We encounter different activities in life. A mature person may well wonder how they all contribute to a good and happy existence. Some identify happiness with pleasure, others with satisfaction of desires, while still others, in the Aristotelian tradition, understand happiness as “good life” or “living well,” as “human flourishing”: pursuing fulfillment of the most noble human faculties. This entails a subjective feeling of happiness or inner joy for virtuous people.

Human flourishing may be related to moral discernment, although there are other proposals, with corresponding ethical theories. The first theory of moral discernment is based on feeling and emotions. Its current name is emotivism; in it, moral judgments are seen exclusively as expressions of sentiments. A second approach is rationalism-based. Two main proposals, generally presented as opposites, are considered mainstream within this second group: deontologism, in which duties are central, and consequentialism, especially the version known as utilitarianism, which focuses on the external effects of an action, balancing them in terms of pleasure and pain, satisfaction or dissatisfaction. The third approach is virtue-based and is aligned with the Aristotelian tradition. Here virtues are central and are often related to human flourishing or excellence.

Among human activities, work is prominent in the managerial context. It has productive and economic value, but it is also a means of human flourishing.