UC Riverside

In recent decades, Aristotelian Naturalism has come to fruition as a powerful and unique approach to ethical philosophy, one which aims to ground our understanding of moral goodness in human nature considered from a perspective continuous with biological evaluations of natural soundness and defect. Moreover, this approach, following Aristotle, aims to integrate an account of human flourishing or well-being with moral goodness and virtue. However, philosophers in this tradition interestingly tend to say very little about the role of productive activity in a good life. Upon investigation, this is a consequence of a wider perspective on the nature of moral goodness, and how it relates to human function from a biological perspective. In examining this problem, I find that a new understanding of human function is needed, which in turn makes better sense of our core human capacities, including our capacity for production. I argue that Aristotle’s dismissal of productive activity is flawed and should be jettisoned, and that in fact production is a central constituent of a good human life, since human flourishing must be a self-sustaining activity, and production is the means by which human beings sustain their distinctive way of life, from both a material and a psychological perspective. From a material perspective, production is the means by which we can physically subsist and achieve safety and comfort, or produce values to trade with others for the same goal. From a psychological perspective, productive activity offers a unique kind of motivational power in our lives that enables us to achieve important values such as self-esteem and a sense of purpose. However, cultivating productive activity in one’s life in an excellent way is not easy, and requires the right disposition. This disposition I call the virtue of creativity. Creativity is the emotional disposition and intellectual grasp of the value of productive work in one’s life. On my conception, creativity involves two central components: a techne component (which involves pursuing excellence in a given craft domain) and a poesis component (which involves translating ones’s productive effort into a materially sustainable activity for one’s life).