The Deep Structure of Flourishing: Universal Human Development and Cultural Diversity

Human flourishing exhibits vast cultural diversity – monastic contemplation, scientific inquiry, communal traditions, entrepreneurial innovation, and many other forms of meaningful life. Yet this diversity does not imply that flourishing is arbitrary or purely relative. Flourishing, defined as living a sustained life of adaptive, meaning‑making (Moore, forthcoming d), is the topic of this paper. It argues that just as there is a deep structure in all languages (universal grammar), flourishing, too, possesses universal, innate deep structural conditions that are realised in culturally variable surface forms. These deep conditions are three innate capacities: cognitive capacity (self‑construction, self‑location, trajectory projection, causal inference, narrative integration), agentive capacity (sustained intention and coherent action), and moral capacity (forming and revising a conception of a meaningful life, taking responsibility). These capacities are species‑typical and developmentally real; they require enabling institutional scaffolds – visibility, symmetry, contestability, and repair – in order for a society of strangers to enable its participants to fully exercise these capacities and develop and sustain flourishing lives. The scaffolds are not themselves innate; they are analogous to the social interaction necessary for language acquisition. The framework reconciles universalism and pluralism without collapsing into cultural imperialism or relativism, and it provides a diagnostic basis for evaluating whether any large‑scale civilisation supports the deep structure of flourishing.