Self-fulfillment Eudaimonism and the Image of God
March 28, 2026
To him that overcometh will I give … a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.
— Revelation 2:17
The true name is one which expresses the character, the nature, the being, the meaning of the person who bears it. It is the man’s own symbol—his soul’s picture, in a word—the sign which belongs to him and to no one else.
— George MacDonald
Flourishing as the Kind of Thing You Are
Objective/Kind-based Eudaimonism
Example: Developmentalism
Plants, animals, and human beings … [flourish] by developing properly and fully, that is, by growing, maturing, making full use of the potentialities, capacities, and faculties that (under favorable conditions) they naturally have at an early stage of their existence. Anything that impedes that development or the exercise of those mature faculties—disease, the sapping of vigor and strength, injuries, the loss of organs—is bad for them.1
Objective/Kind-based Well-being
If \(S\) is flourishing, there is always some kind to which \(S\) belongs, and \(S\) is flourishing as a member of that kind. … [W]hat is good for human beings is to flourish as human beings (just as what is good for the member of some other biological species is to flourish as a member of that species).1
Objection: Betazoids
A thought experiment by Alexander Pruss and Hilary Yancey:1
Betazoids, an alien species from the series Star Trek, are identical to humans in all but one respect—betazoids are telepathic. Hannah and Bridget are Federation engineers leading remarkably similar and fulfilling lives. Neither is telepathic. However, Hannah is a human and Bridget is a betazoid. Furthermore, Bridget has no desire to be telepathic and does not know that she is a betazoid.
Anti-Alienation Constraint
A necessary condition stating that for something to be basically good for a person, it must have a connection to that person’s proattitudes or positive affect.
What is intrinsically valuable for a person must have a connection with what he would find in some degree compelling or attractive, at least if he were rational and aware. It would be an intolerably alienated conception of someone’s good to imagine that it might fail in any such way to engage him.1
Hybrid Response
William Lauinger’s Desire Perfectionism
Something (anything) is intrinsically prudentially beneficial for some (any) human if and only if, and because, (a) this thing is either a basic good or a state of affairs that instantiates a basic good for this human, where the basic goods are items such as knowledge, friendship, health, and accomplishment and where the basic goods are being conceived of as perfectionist goods and not as components of well-being, and (b) this human intrinsically desires this thing (or, if this human does not intrinsically desire this thing, then it is at least true that this thing is, for this person, an instance of a basic good that this human intrinsically desires).1
Flourishing as the You You Are
Subjective/Self-fulfillment Eudaimonism
Subject Dependence
what’s good for you must depend entirely on the particularities of what you are like, however idiosyncratic or atypical: it must depend wholly on what your wants, likes, values, hedonic or emotional propensities, or physical makeup are like.1
the constituents of an agent’s well-being are ultimately determined wholly by the particulars of the individual’s make-up qua individual (vs. qua group or class member).2
Goal Fulfillment
We can understand goals quite broadly, as something we may not always recognize in prospect but may rather discover only in retrospect: one way to have something as a goal is to be prone to meet it with joy, even if it never occurred to you to want it. Put another way, if you wanted to instill certain goals, such as companionship, into an organism, you might give it desires for those things; but you could also give it the propensity to be made happy by them, or unhappy by their absence. In fact, given that desires are often formed in ignorance of what their fulfillment would be like, the organism’s evaluative response tendencies—what makes it happy or unhappy, brings it pleasure or pain—might be the most reliable metric of what its most important goals are. People get all manner of weird ideas about what’s worth pursuing, but the things that make them happy tend to be less subject to whimsy.1
Kauppinen
The Telic Interpretation of Flourishing and Unflourishing
Flourishing consists in successfully realizing the formal aims implicit in the functioning of our fundamental capacities to a sufficient degree. Unflourishing in some respect consists in frustrating a formal aim, or realizing it to an insufficient degree.1
The Subjective Nature Thesis
Our fundamental capacities in the sense relevant for well-being are those whose functioning defines who we are. In the adult human case, they include at least the practical and theoretical rationality and the capacity for valenced experience.2
Self-Fulfillment Eudaimonism and the Image of God
“On Christian doctrine, human beings are created by God with a nature, which is or includes an image of God.”
– Elenore Stump, Image of God, p. 121.
Mere Resonator Theory
Each person has an essential capacity to image God in a specific way and no other creature has the capacity to image God in that way.1
From Problem of Pain
Be sure that the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to [God]; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you. The mould in which a key is made would be a strange thing, if you had never seen a key: and the key itself a strange thing if you had never seen a lock. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions. For it is not humanity in the abstract that is to be saved, but you—you, the individual reader, John Stubbs or Janet Smith. … Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it—made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.1
From “Membership”
The very word membership is of Christian origin, but has been taken over by the world and emptied of all meaning. In any book on logic you may see the expression “members of a class.” It must be most emphatically stated that the items or particulars included in a homogeneous class are almost the reverse of what St. Paul meant by members. By members … he meant what we should call organs, things essentially different from, and complementary to, one another: things differing not only in structure and function but also in dignity. … They are not interchangeable. Each person is almost a species in himself. … Its unity is a unity of unlikes, almost of incommensurables.1
VIP
Garcia is interested in Lewis’s work to help support the following claim.
- VIP
- Each person is supremely and irreplaceably valuable (where each person’s value is unique and each person’s uniqueness is valuable).
Mere Resonator Theory
Each person has an essential capacity to image God in a specific way and no other creature has the capacity to image God in that way.1
While his goal is to ground irreplaceably supreme value in the image of God, my purpose is different. I would like to propose that Lewis’s Mere Resonator Theory provides the foundation needed for integrating self-fulfillment eudaimonism with Christian theism. Specifically, it provides a meaningful way to identify not only our nature as humans with the image of God but also each person’s nature with a unique image of God. While we may find some overlap between natures, each person will flourish just as much by fulfilling the peculiarities of their nature as they do by fulfilling the common elements. Moreover, returning to Haybron’s definition of self-fulfillment eudaimonism, what is good for you will “depend entirely on the particularities of what you are like, however idiosyncratic or atypical.”2
George MacDonald, “The New Name”
Not only … has each man his individual relation to God, but each man has his peculiar relation to God. He is to God a peculiar being, made after his own fashion, and that of no one else; for when he is perfected he shall receive the new name which no one else can understand. Hence he can worship God as no man else can worship him—understand God as no man else can understand him. This or that man may understand God more, may understand God better than he, but no other man can understand God as he understands him.
George MacDonald, “The New Name”
As the fir-tree lifts up itself with a far different need from the need of the palm-tree, so does each man stand before God, and lift up a different humanity to the common Father. And for each God has a different response. With every man he has a secret—the secret of the new name. In every man there is a loneliness, an inner chamber of peculiar life into which God only can enter. … From this it follows that there is a chamber … in God himself, into which none can enter but the one, the individual, the peculiar man—out of which chamber that man has to bring revelation and strength for his brethren. This is that for which he was made—to reveal the secret things of the Father.1