Flourishing in critical dialogue

Abstract

We discuss certain critiques of the research literature on flourishing. We fully agree with calls for greater attention to qualitative work, to cultural differences, and to questions of power and justice concerning flourishing. We argue, however, that in spite of notable differences in understandings of flourishing across cultures, there is also a great deal that is held in common, including on topics considered by some as more controversial, such as character and virtue. We also argue that while qualitative research and understanding is important, it is likewise important not to be dismissive of rigorous quantitative research even if certain groups find its results to be unappealing. We further propose that the best way to navigate diverse understandings of flourishing in pluralistic contexts is to identify those aspects of flourishing which are in fact held in common, and to promote these together, but then to acknowledge that certain understandings of flourishing will vary by culture or religious tradition, and to allow and enable each community to exposit, study, and promote flourishing, as it understands it, in critical dialogue with others.

Full text

Review
Flourishing in critical dialogue
Tyler J. VanderWeele
a
,
*
, Brendan W. Case
a
, Ying Chen
a
, Richard G. Cowden
a
, Byron Johnson
b
,
Matthew T. Lee
b
, Tim Lomas
a
, Katelyn G. Long
a
a
Harvard University, 12 Arrow Street, Suite 100 Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA
b
Baylor University, USA
ARTICLE INFO
Keywords:
Flourishing
Wellbeing
Character
Qualitative
Quantitative
Global research
ABSTRACT
We discuss various critiques of the research literature on flourishing. We fully agree with calls for greater
attention to qualitative work, to cultural differences, and to questions of power and justice concerning flourishing.
We argue, however, that in spite of notable differences in understandings of flourishing across cultures, there is
also a great deal that is held in common, including on topics considered by some as more controversial, such as
character and virtue. We also argue that while qualitative research and understanding is important, it is likewise
important not to be dismissive of rigorous quantitative research even if certain groups find its results to be un-
appealing. We further propose that the best way to navigate diverse understandings of flourishing in pluralistic
contexts is to identify those aspects of flourishing which are in fact held in common, and to promote these
together, but then to acknowledge that certain understandings of flourishing will vary by culture or religious
tradition, and to allow and enable each community to exposit, study, and promote flourishing, as it understands it,
in critical dialogue with others.
1. Introduction
In a recent paper in Social Science and Medicine,Willen (2022) offers a
critical perspective on revisiting the question of the meaning of, and
research and policy efforts concerning, flourishing and its promotion,
and invites greater interdisciplinary dialogue on this topic (Willen,
2022). We are grateful for her paper and believe that many of the
questions Willen raises, and the critiques she offers, are indeed valuable
and merit considerable attention in the years ahead. There is much in her
discussion and analysis concerning the need for greater attention to
qualitative work, cultural differences, and questions of power and justice,
with which we agree. However, it was also the case that the research on,
and conceptualization of, flourishing that has been the focus of the
Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University and our collaborators
(Institute for Studies of Religion, 2021;Crabtree et al., 2021) came under
particular critique in her analysis. We would thus like to take the op-
portunity to offer a response concerning the points on which we agree
with Willen, and those concerning which we disagree, or concerning
which we think further clarification is needed. These latter points
concern the role of communities in flourishing, the relation between
character and flourishing, the role of quantitative research, and how best
to navigate the search for consensus and common ground amidst diverse
understandings of human flourishing. There is obviously a much larger
literature on flourishing than we will survey here and numerous con-
ceptualizations and a great deal of empirical work has been carried out
(Ryff, 1989;Deci and Ryan, 2000;Keyes, 2002;Diener et al., 2010;
Seligman, 2012;Huppert and So, 2013;VanderWeele, 2017;Lee et al.,
2021). The present paper is not intended as a comprehensive review of
that literature but rather as a response to Willen's important paper and
points.
2. Points of convergence: qualitative work, cross-cultural
understandings, and justice
There were several points in Willen's critique with which we are in
full agreement –and these were arguably in fact the focus of her piece.
We fully agree, first, that qualitative work is important and that under-
standing “emic”perspectives concerning the views and experiences of
everyday people as to “what flourishing looks or feels like, what makes
flourishing possible, or what might stand in the way and thwart their
ability to flourish”(Willen, 2022) is important. We believe that any
quantitative approach to assessment will always be partial and will al-
ways be missing part of people's life and experience. To that point, a
number of our research projects strive towards the ideal of a mixed
* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: tvanderw@hsph.harvard.edu (T.J. VanderWeele).
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
SSM - Mental Health
journal homepage: www.journals.elsevier.com/ssm-mental-health
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmmh.2022.100172
Received 6 September 2022; Received in revised form 4 November 2022; Accepted 16 November 2022
Available online xxxx
2666-5603/©2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-
nc-nd/4.0/).
SSM - Mental Health xxx (xxxx) xxx
Please cite this article as: VanderWeele, T.J. et al., Flourishing in critical dialogue, SSM - Mental Health, https://doi.org/10.1016/
j.ssmmh.2022.100172

methods approach, incorporating a qualitative component. Our efforts to
develop various psychometric scales, for instance, have involved cogni-
tive interviews in which we explore how the various proposed item
phrasings are interpreted by individuals from various cultures and con-
texts. We likewise believe that understanding people's experiences can
lead to better conceptualizations of what it means to flourish (Delle Fave
et al., 2016) and can also identify, and generate ideas concerning, ways in
which flourishing can be enhanced, or in which barriers that inhibit
flourishing can be removed. We believe that qualitative research is of
value, both in its own right, and also, though certainly not merely, with
respect to its influence on quantitative research, and that the best un-
derstanding is attained by bringing quantitative and qualitative work
together. Qualitative work can uncover insights not possible with
quantitative work alone.
Second, we believe that understandings of, and experiences of,
flourishing will indeed vary across cultures and across religious and
philosophical traditions (Lambert et al., 2020;VanderWeele et al., 2021;
Lomas, 2022). We do believe also that there are numerous elements that
are held in common across traditions –a point to which we will later turn;
but that there is some cultural variability and relativity in understandings
seems clear.
Third, we agree that questions concerning inequities in power and
resources, matters of justice and structural conditions, and documenting
and responding to minority experiences, have not to date received
adequate attention in the flourishing literature, and merit more careful
attention and consideration. We agree also that “people's ability to reach
their potential …. will depend to a significant extent on the structural,
material, political, economic, social, environmental, and ideological
conditions in which they inhabit, and in which they form and develop.”
There are clearly many challenges tied to navigating the tension between
the complex arrangement of proximal (e.g., individual agency) and distal
(e.g., structural conditions) factors that shape and make flourishing
possible, and some of our prior work has acknowledged that any attempt
to understand the well-being of individuals should be sensitive to the
multilayered socio-ecological contexts in which they live (Counted et al.,
2021;Lomas and VanderWeele, 2021;Lomas et al., 2021;Cowden et al.,
2022;H€
oltge et al., 2022;Lee and Mayor, 2022). In our own under-
standing of flourishing (VanderWeele, 2017;Lomas and VanderWeele,
2022), flourishing includes, but is not reducible to, health and financial
resources. However, since flourishing includes health and financial re-
sources, the rich literatures, which Willen cites, on questions of power,
inequity, resources, and justice on health, and on financial consider-
ations, pertain to flourishing as well.
That issues of structure, power, and justice have on the whole
received less attention for flourishing may, at least with regard to the
empirical literature, in part be due to not having as much data on certain
aspects of flourishing, such as meaning or character or social connection,
as we do with health. Recognizing this, we have been making efforts for
more widespread data collection on various other aspects of flourishing
(Institute for the Study of Religion, 2021;Crabtree et al., 2021), which
we hope also empowers better empirical study concerning issues of dis-
tribution, justice, resources, and opportunity. With respect to other ef-
forts, one of our team (Lomas) has sought to bring these issues to the fore
in positive psychology, co-editing a Handbook entitled “Critical Positive
Psychology”(Brown et al., 2017), featuring 36 chapters which all
endeavor to explore flourishing through a critical lens. We have also
carried out work examining the connection between flourishing, faith,
justice reform, and positive criminology (Johnson, 2011;Johnson et al.,
2021). In this work we should also recognize, however, that there may be
differing patterns when we examine other aspects of flourishing as
compared to what we find for material resources. Examples of this
include higher levels of purpose in poorer developing countries than in
richer developed countries (Diener et al., 2011), which is the reverse of
what one finds with happiness; or higher levels of purpose and character
strengths or social connectedness among black or Hispanic individuals
than among white individuals (Lee et al., 2022). The assets and strengths
of communities that are materially more disadvantaged should also be
understood and appreciated and reflected upon, in addition to attending
to matters of justice and material inequities. However, once again, the
central point that both as a research community, and as a society, we
need to pay greater attention to issues of power, equity, and justice as
they concern flourishing we very much agree with.
We thus fully agree with Willen's concern to emphasize the need for
greater attention to qualitative work, cultural differences, and questions
of power and justice. Despite these numerous important points of
agreement, there were a number of perhaps more secondary points
concerning which we disagreed, or concerning which we thought our
work was possibly mischaracterized, and we would like to respond to
these as well.
3. Flourishing and community
First, we disagree with what seemed to be the implied characteriza-
tion of our work as being done in ways that “focus tightly on individual
mental (and at times physical) health”[emphasis added]. Although much
of our research has focused on individual well-being and flourishing, and
we believe that individual-level assessments along these lines (e.g.,
happiness, health, meaning, character, relationships, and financial re-
sources) are important (VanderWeele, 2017), our Program's research also
focuses on the essential connection between flourishing communities and
individual well-being. For instance, we have published a number of pa-
pers on the ways in which young people's school and family environ-
ments affect their well-being in early adulthood (VanderWeele et al.,
2017;Chen et al., 2019,2020,2021) or as well as on how participation in
religious community promotes individual flourishing. We fully recognize
that individual flourishing can only be sustained in the context of healthy
communities (VanderWeele, 2017;Lomas and VanderWeele, 2022).
In addition to individual assessment of well-being and the role of
communities in shaping it, we have also put forward measures of com-
munity well-being (VanderWeele, 2019) and have collected data on these
measures in a number of school-, city-, and religious community settings.
We have also embedded a handful of such communal well-being ques-
tions concerning trust, belonging, satisfaction with community, etc. in
the Global Flourishing Study (Institute for the Studies of Religion, 2021;
Crabtree et al., 2021), which Willen references. Much of this work is still
underway and it is far more difficult to attain adequate sample sizes
concerning the number of communities needed to carry out informative
empirical analyses than is the case with individual well-being, but we
believe communal well-being is a central part of flourishing.
This brings us to a second point of clarification. Willen claims, with
regard to our work, that “Here, flourishing often is used interchangeably
with ‘well-being.’” It is true that both in much of ordinary discourse, and
in much of what we have written, the words are effectively used inter-
changeably. We do, nevertheless, believe there are subtle nuances in the
scope of these words and we have, when the context requires, tried to be
more precise about how we understand these terms (Lomas and Van-
derWeele, 2022;VanderWeele and Lomas, 2022). To that end, a key
point of differentiation which we are increasingly emphasizing is that
whereas well-being may be best considered the property of human beings
(or other individual entites), flourishing is a property of human beings
and the contexts in which they are situated.
Etymologically, flourishing has a connotation of consonance with,
and nourishment from, one's environment –being derived from a Latin
root meaning “to blossom”–and moreover implies that the environment
itself is doing well. An organism may perhaps “thrive”even amidst an
inhospitable environment, but the “blossoming”associated with flour-
ishing strongly suggests an environment which actively supports that
blossoming. Put another way, we would argue that a person can expe-
rience well-being in spite of their environment, but flourishing intrinsi-
cally also means that not only is the person doing well, but the contexts in
which they live are also good. We have previously used as a definition of
flourishing: living in “a state in which all aspects of a person's life are
T.J. VanderWeele et al. SSM - Mental Health xxx (xxxx) xxx
2

good”(VanderWeele, 2017). However with respect to the points above,
we have subsequently proposed elsewhere (Lomas and VanderWeele,
2022;VanderWeele and Lomas, 2022) that flourishing be understood as
“the relative attainment of a state in which all aspects of a person's life are
good including the contexts in which that person lives”, and that well-being
be understood as “the relative attainment of a state in which all aspects of
a person's life are good as they pertain to that individual.”This latter notion
is still very broad, but concerns the individual, whereas flourishing also
includes that person's context.
If a person is doing well within an impoverished or corrupt envi-
ronment, we might say they have attained a degree of well-being, but
they are not fully flourishing - the community and environment around
them is not good. Flourishing thus, in this understanding, encompasses
well-being but also extends beyond it in important ways. Social
connection and good community we believe are not only causally related
to various aspects of flourishing (Berkman et al., 2014;Holt-Lunstad
et al., 2015;Weziak-Bialowolska et al., 2022a) but are in fact constitutive
of flourishing as well.
4. Character and virtue
Perhaps one of our more substantive disagreements with Willen
concerns the role of character and virtue as it relates to flourishing.
Undoubtedly, how virtue is understood, or what character strengths are
given greatest emphasis, will vary somewhat by culture. As noted above,
we entirely agree with the position that there is cross-cultural variation.
This seems beyond dispute. On that note, one of the team (Lomas) has for
several years been assembling a cross-cultural lexicography of “un-
translatable”words –i.e., without exact equivalent in English –relating
to flourishing. One of the main categories of the project is character and
virtue, and in that respect an analysis of this category –using qualitative
methods, specifically Grounded Theory –revealed interesting cross-
cultural nuances in how these topics are experienced and understood
in different cultures and languages (Lomas, 2019). However, this
research also highlighted significant points of commonality across
diverse cultures.
To this latter point, we do believe that there is a lot more held in
common across cultures than Willen seems to allow for. Willen writes,
“The question of how perspectives differ is an empirical one-and it merits
qualitative inquiry.”We agree. In fact, impressive work has gone into
assessing commonalities and differences in perspectives on character and
virtue across cultures (Peterson and Seligman, 2004;Dahlsgaard et al.,
2005). Dahlsgaard et al. (2005), for instance, survey philosophical and
religious traditions in a number of different geographical, historical, and
cultural contexts including China (Confucianism and Taoism), South Asia
(Buddhism and Hinduism), and the West (Athenian philosophy, Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam) to document varying emphases given to ques-
tions of moral behavior and the good life. In their analysis they conclude
that six core virtues recur throughout these various writings and these are
courage, justice, humanity, temperance, wisdom, and transcendence.
Using this analysis they make the case that the convergence they uncover
“suggests a nonarbitrary foundation for the classification of human
strengths and virtues.”Thus, some of the empirical work Willen calls for
has in fact in part been done. This work does not principally support the
supposed assumption that “Western values and assumptions are …uni-
versally salient; ”rather it demonstrates that they are not distinctively
Western. To give but one example outside of the West, while Buddhism
does recognize the role of contextual factors in well-being (not least
through the foundational idea that all life is interconnected), much of its
teaching is devoted to the ways in which a person can in themselves –
through cultivating character and engaging in practices like meditation –
attain flourishing through their own actions and choices.
One might complain about some of the specific details about
Dahlsggaard et al.‘s analysis, but the broad conclusions seem fairly clear:
character and virtue are almost universally valued across cultures and
many of the central character strengths are shared. Indeed, the second
piece (Cele et al., 2021) in Willen's special issue concerns an under-
standing of flourishing in Soweto, South Africa, and has, as one of its
central emphases, according to Willen, a “powerful role of moral values,
including moral obligations associated with expectations of reciprocity.”
Again, the notion that character and virtue are an important part of
flourishing seems evident across many different cultures and traditions.
By contrast, theories of human nature and flourishing which
marginalize the role of individual character seem to be more distinctively
Western and parochial. A number of political theorists have noted that,
for all their fundamental opposition in other respects, Marxist collec-
tivism and liberalism –the two great political ideologies of the modern
West –both signally downplay the role of individual character in human
flourishing, the former in favor of determining role of class relations, the
latter in favor of the supposed public goods that can emerge when doing
so, even from “private vices”(Legutko, 2016;Milbank and Pabst, 2016;
Deneen, 2018). Far from attention to virtue and vice constituting a
Western imposition on the world's cultural diversity, it is perhaps the
modern West's tendency of neglecting character which has exerted a
pervasive, and sometimes destructive, influence on the wider world, as
with the rapid “Americanization”of the globe following waves of trade
liberalization in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries
(Barber, 1995;McCarraher, 2019).
Relatedly, it is unclear the extent to which Willen allows for a role for
character or individual choices and responsibility in flourishing. As noted
above, we agree with Willen's contention that “people's ability to reach
their potential …. will depend to a significant extent on the structural,
material, political, economic, social, environmental, and ideological
conditions in which they inhabit, and in which they form and develop.”
However, this still leaves open the question as to whether this is the
whole of the story, or whether individual decision-making and character
likewise have important roles in shaping one's flourishing. Willen pro-
poses that “the time has come to wrest older ideas of potential from their
dependence on moralizing concepts of ‘character’or ‘virtue.’” Willen
likewise criticized Waterman (1984) because “he does suggest that some
people exhibit moral failure by ‘defaulting’on their potential …his
discussion of why some people ‘default’on their potential fails to
distinguish between causes rooted in personal decisions or conduct and
those rooted in adverse life circumstances.”
We certainly acknowledge that adverse life circumstances can play an
important role in inhibiting flourishing, but it is unclear in her critique
whether Willen would acknowledge that personal choices and character
matter as well. We believe that both the philosophical literature and the
empirical literature strongly support the contention that character mat-
ters for well-being and, as with social connectedness, the relation is not
only causal but also constitutive (Plato, 4th-C BCE/2004;Aristotle, 4th-C
BCE/1995;Gander et al., 2020;Weziak-Bialowolska et al., 2021,2022b).
Again, in our view, both character and structural conditions are relevant.
As with other dichotomies (nature vs. nurture, genes vs. environment),
we believe a position that neglects either side is deficient. Both are
relevant and often interact in important ways. Life circumstances and
structural conditions unquestionably matter, but so do personal choices
and the formation of character. Indeed, one could argue that to deny any
power of agency and self-determination in that respect would be highly
disempowering to the people who may face the greatest structural bar-
riers in life, and indeed ultimately could lead to a passive fatalism.
Conversely, the belief that one may, by the force of individual character
and will, improve one's lot in life is sometimes among the most
empowering and inspiring messages a person can receive. Crucially, such
a belief is not merely wishful thinking, but is borne out by the research.
Neglect of the importance of character also has the potential to inhibit
opportunities to promote flourishing. Interventions have been devel-
oped, and evaluated in randomized trials, to promote various aspects of
character. These have included interventions that have effectively pro-
moted gratitude (Davis et al., 2016;Cregg and Cheavens, 2020),
forgiveness (Wade et al., 2014), compassion (Kirby et al., 2017), patience
(Alan and Ertac, 2018), and perseverance/grit (Alan et al., 2019). These
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3

are arguably not particularly western or Christian values, or character
strengths; but rather they are valued, to varying degrees, by many cul-
tures (Dahlsgaard et al., 2005;Rye et al., 2000). Moreover, these same
randomized trials have indicated that these character interventions have
also in turn promoted other aspects of well-being including happiness,
physical health, and sleep quality (Emmons and McCullough, 2003;Kirby
et al., 2017;Davis et al., 2016), lowering depression and anxiety (Wade
et al., 2014;Kirby et al., 2017;Cregg and Cheavens, 2020), increasing
hope (Wade et al., 2014), and even improving educational test scores
(Alan et al., 2019). Again, what may be a particularly Western perspec-
tive is to say that character does not matter, or to downplay its role in
flourishing.
Neglecting the importance of character, and focusing only on life
circumstances and structural conditions, also has the potential to inhibit
the flourishing of those who are in fact structurally disadvantaged. It may
well be the case that those who are in fact materially advantaged are the
ones who can, to some degree, still manage to do reasonably well even
after making poor life decisions or neglecting matters of character. Ma-
terial resources can sometimes cover up, or provide a buffer, after things
have gone wrong following poor decisions. Those who are more mate-
rially disadvantaged may not have this luxury. As an example, a recent
paper (Watts et al., 2018) received a great deal of media attention (e.g.
Calarco, 2018) for supposedly undermining, with new data, the notion
that self-control or delayed gratification had any causal role in one's
well-being. The contention that delayed gratification had such a role was
popularized by what is sometimes referred to as the “marshmallow test”:
earlier studies (Shoda et al., 1990;Mischel et al., 1989) had indicated
that the longer children were able to delay eating a marshmallow in order
to have two later, the better they did with respect to subsequent cognitive
and academic competence and ability to cope with frustration and stress.
The new study (Watts et al., 2018) reported that the associations were
substantially attenuated when using a large sample, and controlling for a
host of other variables. The media reporting (Calarco, 2018) interpreted
the results as indicating that it was affluence, not self-control, that
mattered.
Some of the paper's analyses were themselves potentially problematic
with respect to this interpretation insofar as the researchers controlled
for variables that may have in fact been much better measures of self-
control than was the marshmallow test itself (e.g. a battery of items to
assess the child's externalizing problems; Watts et al., 2018, p. 1165).
However, perhaps more problematically with respect to media reporting,
the additional analyses reported in the paper in fact indicated that there
was evidence that the delayed gratification assessment using the
marshmallow test was nevertheless predictive of subsequent outcomes
specifically for lower SES families. Although not definitive, delayed
gratification it seems may have mattered notably more for lower SES
families than others. Character perhaps had a stronger role in shaping life
outcomes for those who were disadvantaged. While the academic paper
itself was reasonably cautious, and well-reported, with respect to the
evidence and interpretation of the results, the media reporting that fol-
lowed (e.g. Calarco, 2018), and the use made of it, was problematic. The
message that self-control, as an aspect of character, does not matter
arguably does the most harm to those most disadvantaged. Our point is
not that it is the responsibility of the disadvantaged to fill the gap of their
having fewer resources by “making good character choices.”Rather it is
that individual choices and character do contribute something, and that
ignoring issues of character, both in general and across
socio-demographic lines, likely limits our understanding of flourishing in
a diversity of circumstances, and risks further inequalities.
Character and virtue are also important because they can enhance the
well-being of others and of the community. If a virtue is understood as a
habit in accord with reason to attain the good, or said another way, a
pattern of practice following sound thinking that moves towards the good
of oneself and others, then it effectively follows, by definition, that virtue,
properly understood, will contribute to others' good. The virtue of justice
is sometimes conceived of as “a steady and enduring will to render to
each his or her due [or right]”(Justinian, 533/1985); the virtue of
generosity as the habit of “giving good things to others freely and
abundantly”(Allen, 2018); the virtue of mercy or compassion as the habit
of “heartfelt sympathy for another's distress, impelling us to [help] him or
her if we can”(Aquinas, 1274/1948; cf. Augustine 426/1998). Each of
these virtues concerns bringing about good for others. Good character
contributes to the good of others. There is moreover experimental evi-
dence that the recipient of an action of goodwill is more likely to go on to
act similarly, and that the contagion effects of such beneficent action may
extend so far that a positive interaction between two persons can prop-
agate through a social network and ultimately affect the interaction of
two other persons neither of whom know either person in the original
pair (Fowler and Christakis, 2010). Good character thus has the potential
to promote good and generous actions amongst others. Good character is
also critical to the promotion of well-being insofar as the character and
actions of leaders can powerfully shape the health and well-being of
communities and even of nations (Dayrit and Ambegaokar, 2015). The
virtues of practical wisdom and justice are needed for leaders to govern
wisely and rightly so as to preserve and promote the health and
well-being of all. The virtues of fortitude and temperance are often
needed to endure the challenges, stresses, and conflicts that good lead-
ership can entail. It seems evident both now and throughout history, that
the character of a community's or country's leaders can profoundly affect
the health and well-being of others.
Willen's paper perhaps does not come down definitively on the
question of whether character or its effects are important for well-being,
but much of what she writes leaves the reader wondering.
5. Quantitative research on flourishing
We also wondered about Willen's view on the role of quantitative
research in understanding the determinants of flourishing, and also the
conditions under which specific research studies can be dismissed, or
alternatively, need to be taken seriously. As noted above, we very much
agree that qualitative research complements, and should regularly sup-
plement, quantitative research. However, concerning quantitative
empirical studies, Willen comments, “some identify virtue as a core
aspect of a flourishing life, then proceed to define virtue in ways that
comport with a culturally particular …conception of moral value. Ex-
amples include studies claiming that people who participate in a religious
community, or who get, or stay, married, are more likely to flourish than
others. From an anthropological standpoint, both the presumptions
undergirding such claims and the methods used to investigate them de-
mand critical review.”
The question of whether participation in religious community or the
choice to get or stay married has an effect on a particular aspect of well-
being is arguably an empirical one, which is indeed how we have framed
it in our research, rather than these being a necessary part of virtue. The
answer to the empirical question will likely vary by context, but this too
is amenable to empirical inquiry. Our reading of Willen's statement is
that if such empirical research delivers conclusions which anthropolo-
gists find unsettling then either the categories, or the methods, or both,
become suspect. While we appreciate a critical stance towards empirical
research, and indeed the first author of this paper has devoted the better
part of his academic pursuits to methodological work on making
empirical research, especially concerning causality, more rigorous
(VanderWeele, 2015,2021;VanderWeele et al., 2020;Lash et al., 2021),
the position implicit in what is written seems to border on dismissive
skepticism of potentially even the most rigorous quantitative research.
We believe it is important to critically evaluate the quality of both
quantitative and qualitative evidence. Quantitative and qualitative
research are complementary to one another, and it is worthwhile
acknowledging that high-quality evidence from both types of research
are necessary if we are to develop a balanced and integrative under-
standing of flourishing.
We believe that the empirical evidence concerning the effects of
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4

religious service attendance and marriage on various aspects of flour-
ishing is in fact relatively strong and robust. For religious service atten-
dance, evidence for effects on reducing all-cause mortality and
depression risk is now available from meta-analyses of rigorous longi-
tudinal studies (Chida et al., 2009;Garssen et al., 2021), is robust in
sensitivity analysis to potential unmeasured confounding (VanderWeele
et al., 2022;Balboni et al., 2022), and is furthermore either supported by
a fairly clear understanding of the mechanisms (Strawbridge et al., 2001;
Li et al., 2016;Kim and VanderWeele, 2019) or, in the case of depression,
by quasi-experimental designs (Fruehwirth et al., 2019). Likewise, the
tendency of religious beliefs to induce pro-social behavior (including
greater honesty, fairness, and impartial prosociality) has been assessed
experimentally in a number of settings (cf. Shariff et al., 2016;Henrich,
2020: 123–26). While much of the more rigorous research has been
carried out in western contexts, this is not exclusively the case, and at
least for all-cause mortality (Yeager et al., 2006;Litwin, 2007;Balboni
et al., 2022) and pro-sociality (Barro and McCleary, 2003;MacFarquhar
and Schoenhals, 2006;Henrich, 2020: 146–47) the effects seem present
across cultures and even in more secular contexts (Teinonen et al., 2005;
La Cour et al., 2006;Zeng et al., 2011). In the United States, moreover,
the effects of religious service attendance on health seem particularly
pronounced for more disadvantaged black communities (Li et al., 2016;
VanderWeele et al., 2017). The same pattern has been found when
examining religious service attendance and crime and delinquency
(Johnson et al., 2000a;Johnson et al., 2000b;Jang and Johnson, 2001;
Jang and Johnson, 2003;Jang and Johnson, 2004). While the evidence
for, and effects sizes concerning, the associations between marriage and
health in contemporary societies are perhaps not quite as substantial as
those for service attendance, these associations are now too also sup-
ported by meta-analyses of longitudinal studies (Manzoli et al., 2007;
Wood et al., 2007), with at least some, albeit not definitive, evidence for
similar effects in non-Western contexts (Manzoli et al., 2007).
One might complain that the outcomes that are examined in the
observational studies discussed above (e.g. longevity, depression, life
satisfaction) are too narrow and more nuance and study is needed for
other outcomes. We are sympathetic to such positions. It is in part in
response to such considerations, that we have proposed that such
empirical research be conducted using “outcome-wide”designs (Van-
derWeele, 2017b;VanderWeele et al., 2020) that examine evidence for
effects on numerous outcomes at once, covering a broad range of aspects
of flourishing (see Chen et al. (2020) for an example concerning religious
service attendance, or Chen et al. (2019) for parenting practices). Such
studies could in principle examine both more universally valued and
shared outcomes, and those that are more culturally specific, and we
would encourage study of as broad a range of well-being outcomes as is
practically feasible.
The choice of exposure or phenomena or outcome to investigate (or of
what studies to undertake more generally) is of course shaped by
investigator discretion and by the investigators’values and areas of in-
terest, but to equate empirical investigation of specific relationships with
“defin[ing] virtue in ways that comport with a culturally particular …
conception of moral value”seems to be a misunderstanding of quanti-
tative empirical research. In any case, it was not entirely clear under what
conditions Willen thinks it is reasonable to dismiss particular quantita-
tive research studies.
6. Flourishing in global perspective
Towards the end of her piece, Willen claims that flourishing is “a
concept on the rise, garnering significant attention from researchers, and
significant investment from private funders, including some whose
framing and goals threaten to flood the landscape with a narrow set of
questions and approaches and crowd out alternatives and critiques,
including those articulated in this series.”In the context of her paper, it
seems that the Global Flourishing Study (Institute for the Study of Reli-
gion, 2021;Crabtree et al., 2021) we have initiated was in part in view.
As Willen notes, this study is “a US$43 million, five-year, 22-country
‘Global Flourishing Study’involving ‘approximately 240,000 partici-
pants.’” What is not noted is that the survey went through multiple
rounds of qualitative, quantitative, and interdisciplinary critique and
feedback, ranging from workshops on cross-cultural and translational
issues; to feedback from over 150 scholars in over 30 different disciplines
from more than 20 countries in all 6 populated continents; to cognitive
interviews and pilot testing in each of these countries, in multiple lan-
guages, with over 1000 participants in these qualitative interviews
(Crabtree et al., 2021). While it is the case that our Program's 12-item
flourishing measure (VanderWeele, 2017) is included among the ques-
tions being used in the annual survey (to assess happiness, health,
meaning, character, relationships, and financial security), a host of other
questions on well-being that extend beyond the topics of those 12
questions are also being used in the Global Flourishing Study, questions
shaped by the feedback of the numerous scholars who engaged in the
survey development process. Moreover, even the limited 12-item
assessment was shaped so as to try to capture aspects of flourishing
that are nearly universally desired (VanderWeele, 2017), and these
various domains and survey items have already received extensive
cross-cultural evaluation (Węziak-Białowolska et al., 2019;H€
oltge et al.,
2022). The conceptual framework (VanderWeele, 2017) that informed
the development of our Program's 12-item flourishing measure is not
intended to be prescriptive or reductionistic, but rather is sufficiently
flexible to allow for further context-specific adaptation and addition so
that a reasonable balance between universal and particularist un-
derstandings of flourishing can be achieved.
Moreover, our work with the Global Flourishing Study is intentionally
seeking to engage with understandings of well-being from non-Western
perspectives. The Global Wellbeing Initiative, which one of us (Lomas)
helps lead, and several others of us have participated in, is examining
various non-Western perspectives on well-being and trying to give them
greater prominence in well-being research (Lambert et al., 2020;Lomas,
2022). For instance, peace, balance, and harmony arguably receive
greater emphasis in non-Western contexts, and correspondingly have
received comparatively little attention in Western well-being research,
even though these aspects of well-being are desired and are important
throughout the world (Lomas et al., 2022;Delle Fave et al., 2016). As-
sessments of these constructs of peace and balance we thus have also
incorporated into the Global Flourishing Study, and elsewhere (Xi and
Lee, 2021), and we will continue to supplement our data collection ef-
forts as other non-Western and cross-cultural understandings of
well-being become clearer. In spite of our efforts to engage scholars
across the globe, the Global Flourishing Study itself is undoubtedly still
strongly shaped by Western viewpoints, and by our own perspectives.
Some of this is simply reflective of the nature of well-being and flour-
ishing research today, and the geographical and cultural distribution of
well-being and flourishing researchers at present; but we have and will
continue to make efforts towards enriching the Global Flourishing Study
with non-Western perspectives as well. Further qualitative, and quanti-
tative, research will undoubtedly assist with this task, and will hopefully
yet further enable the study to constitute a valuable open-access longi-
tudinal data resource, covering much of the world's population, with
broad assessments of a range of individual, social, and structural factors.
7. Tradition-specific understandings of flourishing and of
spiritual well-being
While we aim to study aspects of flourishing that seem applicable
across cultures, we do, as noted above, believe that certain aspects of the
understanding of flourishing will be culturally specific. As such, if these
are going to be studied quantitatively in a sensible manner, then this will
ultimately require the development of tradition-specific measures. This
too we have acknowledged elsewhere (VanderWeele et al., 2021). One
aspect of flourishing that we believe will be highly culturally relative is
that of spiritual well-being. For much of the world's population, some
T.J. VanderWeele et al. SSM - Mental Health xxx (xxxx) xxx
5

notion of spiritual or religious well-being is considered important (Diener
et al., 2011) and for many this is the most important aspect of flourishing.
But what constitutes spiritual well-being clearly varies across religious
and spiritual traditions. While measures have been proposed to attempt
to assess a generic version of spiritual well-being (Paloutzian and Ellison,
1982;Fisher, 2010), such assessments arguably do not correspond to
what persons within a given religious or spiritual tradition consider most
important. To study spiritual well-being well, from either a qualitative or
a quantitative perspective, will require tradition-specific approaches.
Indeed this seems to directly follow from, and is arguably illustrative of,
the notion that the understandings of flourishing do themselves vary
across cultures and ought to be considered within cultural context.
Nonetheless, Willen seems particularly critical of the influence of
Christianity on flourishing research. The two times she raises Christian
understandings of well-being it is in the context of critique of the notion
that there might be normative claims being put forward. She writes, “At
times, scholarship in this tradition appears to stake normative claims
about the relationship between specific (i.e., Christian, EuroAmerican)
conceptions of virtue and religious engagement and the capacity to
flourish”and “some flourishing scholarship nonetheless seems to harbor
an assumption that Western values and assumptions are, or should be,
universally salient …For instance, some identify virtue as a core aspect of
aflourishing life, then proceed to define virtue in ways that comport with
a culturally particular—i.e., Western, generally Christian—conception of
moral value.”
Our view would be that, yes, Christian understandings of flourishing
do make normative claims, as do Muslim, or Jewish, or Buddhist, or
Hindu, or secular understandings of flourishing. Western culture and
values have no doubt been influenced by Christian thought, among other
cultural forces. Moreover, even many Western secular values, including a
commitment to universal human dignity and to universal rights to life or
liberty, were themselves shaped by Christian thought (Holland, 2019;
Witte, 2022). Any assessment put forward by scholars from a particular
culture will inevitably reflect that culture's own intellectual tradition and
history, regardless of attempts to be universal or ecumenical. One can
attempt to ignore these facts, or try to shame others away from putting
forward their normative claims or understandings, or one can simply
acknowledge that all of these religious and cultural traditions (including
non-religious ones) do put forward normative claims and have particu-
larist understandings (Sayer, 2020;Smith, 2014), and that the right
response is not to deny this, or wish it were not so, but to try to under-
stand the similarities and differences amongst the claims being put for-
ward, to try to evaluate the reasonableness of, evidence for, and
coherence of, these normative claims, and to work together on ways to
navigate, from a practical perspective, the diverging understandings. In
our view the best way forward is to allow each tradition to put forward its
normative claims and understandings; to seek to understand what is held
in common and what differs; to promote together those aspects of
flourishing concerning which there is a shared understanding; and to
empower, as best as possible, each distinct community to pursue the ends
which it deems most important, while acknowledging and respecting the
differing ends of other communities and traditions. Indeed this seems like
the logical conclusion of accepting some degree of relativity in the un-
derstanding of flourishing across cultures.
Willen exhorts “fellow flourishing researchers to avoid assuming that
opportunities to flourish necessarily hinge on any particular under-
standing of ‘virtue’or ‘character,’or any particular moral outlook or
orientation, and instead approach morality and moral commitments
through a broadly ecumenical and comparative lens.”Yet this call seems
itself to undermine the notion that understandings of flourishing are
themselves culturally relative. Understandings of morality, while
certainly partially shared, do also vary somewhat across cultures. When
specific traditions or cultures consider virtue as a part of flourishing then
“opportunities to flourish”depend in part on how virtue is itself under-
stood. Specific religious and philosophical and cultural traditions do put
forward normative claims. Moreover, to argue that this should not take
place is itself a culturally specific value judgement; to dismiss all
tradition-specific truth claims concerning flourishing is itself a norma-
tive, particularist, and arguably not especially tolerant position.
8. The search for consensus
Our alternative proposal, in contrast to avoiding particular normative
positions, would again be to identify those aspects of flourishing which
are in fact held in common, to focus on those together, and then to
acknowledge that certain understandings of flourishing, or of character
or virtue, or of spiritual well-being, or communal well-being, will indeed
be dependent upon a particular moral outlook; and then to allow and
enable each of these traditions to exposit, study, and put forward its own
understandings, and truth claims, in dialogue with others. As we have
argued above, there is a lot more held in common than it may at first
seem. The importance of health, and of financial or material sustenance,
have long been acknowledged by most cultures and by most people. But
we believe that the scope for near-universal consensus on the importance
of various aspects of flourishing extends far beyond this. We have argued
above, based on the cross-cultural analysis of others (Dahlsgaard et al.,
2005), that aspects of the understanding of the importance of character
and virtue have likewise been held in common across traditions and
cultures through most times and places. We believe the same is also true
of happiness, of meaning and purpose, and of social relationships and
community life (VanderWeele, 2017). We can reasonably pursue these
things together. These aspects of life do not exhaust the notion of flour-
ishing, and cultural- and tradition-specific understandings of flourishing
should be examined –both qualitatively and quantitatively –to better
understand and promote flourishing. However, we believe that begin-
ning with what is held in common, and trying to, as best as possible,
achieve a maximal shared vision of flourishing, rather than focusing
exclusively on health and financial resources, holds considerable
promise.
Concerning attempts to achieve consensus, Willen argued that
“qualitative findings show how the very idea of flourishing, including the
words used to capture and communicate about it, are shaped and
informed by local sociocultural and political-economic context, yielding
grounded insights that call into question the possibility of asserting any
universal (or universalizing) definition of flourishing.”While we would
again agree that the “idea of flourishing, including the words used to
capture and communicate about it, are shaped and informed by local
sociocultural and political-economic context,”we nonetheless think that
it is worthwhile to also seek what is universal across cultures and con-
texts. The relative success of the universal declaration of human rights
(United Nations, 1948) is illustrative of what might be possible when
seeking consensus. We believe such possibilities also extend to numerous
aspects of the assessment and promotion of flourishing as well. Crucially
though, seeking consensus and paying attention to universals does not
mean flattening or overlooking meaningful differences between people
and cultures. Perhaps a useful notion to invoke here is that found in
Wilber (2001) on the concept of “universal pluralism.”This seeks to
avoid the pitfalls of both universalism (which, in asserting a common
human nature, can sometimes overlook genuine cultural differences) and
pluralism (which, in emphasizing cultural diversity, risks downplaying
and even ignoring what people have in common), and to honor both
perspectives. So, for example, religiosity/spirituality may be a near
universal dynamic across the globe, but the myriad ways this expresses
itself is truly pluralistic.
The possibility of trying to find a near-universal consensus, we would
propose, might even potentially extend as far as a definition of flour-
ishing. By embedding some ambiguity into the language employed in a
definition, we believe flourishing can be defined in a way that can
resonate across cultures, both acknowledging the tradition-specific as-
pects of flourishing, while also embracing what is universal. Our pro-
posed definition of flourishing, as noted above, is living in “a state in
which all aspects of a person's life are good”(VanderWeele, 2017).
T.J. VanderWeele et al. SSM - Mental Health xxx (xxxx) xxx
6

Understandings of what is “good”will vary, to some extent, across cul-
tures and traditions. But the definition provided above gives room for this
and also acknowledges the extremely broad scope of the notion of
flourishing in terms of “all aspects of a person's life,”thereby also
providing space for more culturally specific understandings. An alter-
native definition that perhaps can, by embedding some ambiguity, attain
near-universal consensus and accommodate tradition-specific conceptu-
alizations might be achieved by broadening the World Health Organi-
zation's definition of health (WHO, 1946) to include a spiritual
dimension so as to read, “a state of complete physical, mental, social, and
spiritual wellbeing,”which we have referred to elsewhere as the WHO þ
framework (Lomas and VanderWeele, 2022;VanderWeele and Lomas,
2022). We would argue that such definitions, while having ambiguity
intentionally present, are sufficiently broad so as to accommodate
tradition-specific or culturally-specific understandings of flourishing.
At the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard, some of the work that
we have been doing is indeed devoted to exploring and more explicitly
developing -empirically, theoretically and theologically-a Christian un-
derstanding of flourishing (VanderWeele et al., 2021;Case, 2021;Long
and VanderWeele et al., 2022;VanderWeele, 2022b,2022a). However,
yet another goal of the Program has been to try to work towards a
maximally expansive understanding of flourishing around which near
universal consensus can be achieved (rather than a more limited
consensus around physical health and income), including notions of
happiness, health, meaning, character, social relationships, and financial
resources.
As above, we do not view these goals as necessarily in tension and, in
fact, we believe that each goal can help facilitate the other. While
Christian understandings and Christian theologies play a role in the work
and life of the Program, we have, on the Program's long-term staff, also
those who would identify more closely, in terms of belief and/or practice,
as atheist or agnostic or Buddhist. Their diverse beliefs and perspectives
have helped shape the Program's work and will continue to contribute to
our working towards a more expansive understanding of flourishing. One
of the team (Lomas) has also recently received a Templeton grant to
explore Muslim perspectives on well-being. We furthermore have major
research collaborations and partnerships with program affiliates from
Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, and secular perspectives. We believe that such
interaction both helps us to stretch towards a more expansive consensus
in the understanding of flourishing, and also enriches the understanding
of what is unique to each tradition, and why it might be important. Cross-
cultural and cross-religious discourse is important both for consensus,
and for the understanding of and the respecting of differences across
traditions.
Willen notes that interdisciplinary discourse is also critical and en-
courages greater interdisciplinary engagement around flourishing and
promotes bringing together “perspectives from the qualitative social
sciences (and humanities) [to] enrich the way we think about flourishing,
investigate it, and work to promote it at different levels and in different
domains.”We once again fully agree. It is for this reason, that the
research staff at the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard includes not
only psychologists, sociologists, epidemiologists, public health experts,
statisticians, and educational researchers, but also philosophers, theolo-
gians, and historians. For a topic as important as flourishing, we think
that universities should promote, support, and fund such interdisci-
plinary work, and we have likewise also tried to support others interested
in interdisciplinary collaboration (e.g., Lee et al., 2021). However, as
above, we likewise think that on a topic such as central as flourishing, it is
important to bring together various religious and cultural perspectives
into dialogue, and not give primary, or sole, prominence to contempo-
rary, Western, secular, perspectives. To understand and study and pro-
mote flourishing in a satisfactory manner, we need interdisciplinary
teams, and we also need understanding of cross-cultural and
cross-tradition issues, so that, as best as possible, we come to holistic
approaches to the understanding and promotion of human flourishing.
9. Conclusion
In summary, Willen calls for greater qualitative work on flourishing,
greater recognition of the culturally relative nature of our understandings
of flourishing, and greater attention to considerations of power, oppor-
tunity, and justice concerning flourishing. We agree with all three of
these points. However, we likewise think that, with a sufficiently
expansive conceptualization of flourishing, while some aspects of flour-
ishing will vary across cultures and traditions, it is also the case that
much more is universal than has perhaps been routinely acknowledged.
Moreover, by focusing on what is nearly universally shared we can
promote together, not only health and financial resources, but also
happiness, meaning, character, good relationships, and various other
domains of well-being (VanderWeele, 2017;Lambert et al., 2020;Tay
and Pawelski, 2022). To neglect seeking such consensus, including on
matters of character, is to forfeit these opportunities. Yet we also believe
that it is the case that neglecting tradition-specific aspects of flourishing
and spiritual well-being will also ultimately leave our understandings of
flourishing, and efforts at societal action, deeply impoverished. We need
to seek common understandings, but we simultaneously need to also to
be aware of and understand normative claims, and the disagreements and
differences these may entail. We need to work together to promote what
is universal, and to navigate what is culturally specific, hopefully in ways
that ultimately enhance human flourishing for all.
Credit author statement
Tyler J. VanderWeele prepared the original draft of the manuscript.
Brendan W. Case,Ying Chen,Richard G. Cowden,Byron Johnson,
Matthew T. Lee,Tim Lomas,Katelyn G. Long assisted with the paper's
conceptualization and provided critical review and editing.
Funding
The research was supported by John Templeton Foundation grant
61665.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare the following financial interests/personal re-
lationships which may be considered as potential competing interests:
Tyler VanderWeele reports financial support was provided by John
Templeton Foundation. Tyler VanderWeele reports a relationship with
Flourishing Metrics that includes: speaking and lecture fees. Tyler Van-
derWeele has patent licensed to Flerish.
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