A Teleology of Flourishing for Plural Societies

We advance a teleology of flourishing for plural societies. Rather than beginning with indices, we begin with ten lived ends—first-person signatures of a flourishing life: vitality; agency/flow; autonomy; belonging; mattering; openness/awe; narrative coherence; play/joy; hope/prospect; and non-domination. Instruments may assist these ends but must never define them. We therefore propose Public Flourishing Indicators (PFI) in two tiers—PFI-Lite for everyday support and PFI-Pro for high-stakes audits—always vetoable by narrative, mini-publics, and a lexical justice floor of non-domination. We show how to adjudicate clashes among ends, offer design patterns (CRC2, Harbor Ward Polycenter, Redfield Starter) once a non-domination floor is in place, and sketch a realistic bootstrapping path from low-trust beginnings to binding oversight. We position this paper alongside Non-Zero Ethics (NZE) and Agents and Patients in Plural Societies (APPS) so the trio jointly supplies ends, standing, and steering—without letting instruments eat the goal. We add a short note on three tendency-generators (AIC) and an empirical appendix using the Harvard Flourishing Index (FI) (sentinel-only) with two micro-items (Flow/Awe).