How can human beings flourish together in a plural and changing society?

 Human development and societal development are mutually constitutive processes. People develop their cognitive, moral, emotional, and social capacities within relationships and institutions, while those institutions are continually reproduced and changed through human action. Developmental space is therefore neither exclusively individual nor exclusively structural: it arises through the interaction of people with social, economic, political, epistemic, and ecological conditions.

Relational embeddedness is the first condition of human development. Learning, identity, autonomy, recognition, and moral responsibility develop within networks of care, communication, trust, and social interaction. Inclusive and dependable relationships create the security needed for reflection, cooperation, and personal growth. Environments characterized by uncertainty, exclusion, or structural domination restrict these possibilities. Societies should consequently be evaluated not only by the characteristics of individuals but also by the quality of the relationships and institutions they organize.

Pluralism is a second structural condition. Differences in values, perspectives, identities, and ways of life are not deviations from social order but inherent features of historically developing societies. Pluralism can promote innovation and adaptation by preserving alternative forms of knowledge and possible solutions. It also creates tensions when interests and interpretations conflict. The relevant institutional challenge is therefore neither to suppress difference nor to leave it entirely unregulated. Suppression reduces creativity and adaptive capacity, while unmanaged pluralism may produce fragmentation. Sustainable pluralism requires institutions capable of accommodating disagreement within a shared order[1].

Pluralism depends on solidarity[2]. Individuals and groups are structurally interdependent in production, care, education, knowledge transmission, infrastructure, and political coordination. Solidarity is therefore more than personal goodwill: it consists of institutions that organize mutual dependence[3] through public services, social protection, collective infrastructure, and shared responsibility. When these arrangements weaken, risks are individualized, inequality increases, and trust declines. Solidarity enables differences to persist without causing social disintegration[4].

Conflict is an unavoidable consequence of pluralism and interdependence. Stable societies are not those without conflict, but those capable of regulating conflict and using it as a source of correction. Courts, democratic procedures, public deliberation, journalism, science, and civic mobilization allow power to be challenged, errors to be identified, and institutions to adapt. Correctability is therefore essential to sustainable development. When criticism cannot influence institutions, tensions may accumulate and develop into destructive polarization, violence, or systemic fragility. At the same time, stability without correction produces rigidity and stagnation.

All social development occurs within the material boundaries of the biosphere. Economic and institutional systems depend on natural resources, functioning ecosystems, and climatic stability. Ecological conditions are not an external policy concern but a constitutive condition of human development. When societies exceed ecological limits, short-term gains may undermine the possibilities available to future generations. Social evaluation must therefore include the capacity to reproduce material and ecological conditions over time.

These social conditions form an integrated and tension-filled system:

• Pluralism without solidarity can produce fragmentation.

• Solidarity without pluralism can become conformity.

• Conflict without regulation can become destructive.

• Stability without correctability can become stagnation.

• Ecological overshoot can eventually undermine every other developmental condition.

Human development consequently takes place across four interconnected dimensions:

• Relational constitution: identities and capacities develop through social interaction.

• Structural embeddedness: relationships are shaped by institutions, economic arrangements, and knowledge systems.

• Asymmetrical interdependence: dependence can be reciprocal or become domination, depending on the distribution of power.

• Ecological situatedness: all development remains bounded by the material capacities of the biosphere.

This framework shifts social analysis away from isolated indicators and static outcomes. Economic growth, institutional stability, or individual autonomy cannot be understood separately from power, care, knowledge, inclusion, and ecological continuity. The quality of a society lies in its dynamic capacity to create, protect, distribute, correct, and transmit developmental space.

The resulting institutional challenge is not to design a single ideal social order. The challenge is to build arrangements that remain dependable without becoming closed, that sustain solidarity without demanding sameness, that organize conflict without suppressing it, and that protect present security without exhausting future ecological possibilities. Institutions cannot determine how people ought to flourish. They can, however, distribute the material, relational, epistemic, and political conditions under which people are able to participate in shaping their lives together.

Institutions themselves can become rigid, exclusionary, or concentrated in the hands of powerful actors[5]. The task is therefore to establish arrangements that combine continuity with correction: they must regulate pluralism, organize solidarity, constrain domination, protect reliable knowledge, process conflict, and respect ecological boundaries while remaining open to criticism and adaptation.

 

Would you like to explore how a relational understanding of humanity can transform democracy, law, the economy, and public institutions? Click the link below to read the full book, Becoming Human Together, and discover a new framework for building a more humane, democratic, and correctable society within ecological limits.

(PDF) Becoming Human Together: Rethinking Democracy, Power and Institutions for a Complex and Changing World

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[1] John Rawls, Political Liberalism, expanded ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).

[2] David Miller, Principles of Social Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Keith Banting and Will Kymlicka, eds., The Strains of Commitment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198795452.001.0001. Solidarity can support redistribution but may also create boundaries of exclusion.

[3] Eva Feder Kittay, Love’s Labor (New York: Routledge, 1999); Joan C. Tronto, Caring Democracy (New York: New York University Press, 2013); Martha Albertson Fineman, “The Vulnerable Subject,” Yale Journal of Law & Feminism 20, no. 1 (2008): 1–23

[4] Iris Marion Young, Responsibility for Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John G. Richardson (New York: Greenwood, 1986), 241–258.

[5] Elinor Ostrom, “Beyond Markets and States”; Young, Responsibility for Justice. The proposed synthesis of autonomy, recognition, solidarity, plurality, and ecological responsibility is normative and should be identified as such.