Editorial

Citation

Choudhury, M.A. (2017), "Editorial", Humanomics, Vol. 33 No. 2, pp. 123-124. https://doi.org/10.1108/H-05-2017-091

Foreword

The significant scholarly works of Amartya Sen and Das Gupta separately have presented the concept of wellbeing not to be limited to individual self and microeconomic or macroeconomic concepts. Rather, the authors have raised the objective goal of wellbeing to the level of social interaction with inter-causality between individual and social choices. The result thus has been a distinctive recognition of the objective of attaining wellbeing in terms of socio-economic transformation, social rearrangement and uplifting of human capability. All these are taken up within the context of human empowerment. Thus, the elements that contribute to wellbeing through these paths of actualization are both trans-individual and interactively social in nature.

Consequently, ethical and moral values come into play in a significant way to define the preferences and choices of actions and responses that together characterize the human potential for good social possibilities. Thereby, such choices then enter the institutional, policy, market and social structures. Such unifying interactions are formalized and evaluated in multidimensional socio-cultural ways while also rendering the consequences to subtle methodologies and measurable modes of evaluation. The structural picture of conceptualizing and measuring wellbeing in the resulting socio-cultural sense thus takes up well-defined phases.

First, the epistemological formalism of the wellbeing precept is given its social meaning. The emergent methodology is then bestowed by its common acceptance across trans-cultural boundaries. The result thereby is formal development of norms and practices with trans-cultural validity. Such formal modes assume measurable forms of wellbeing relations in some subtle ways – quantitative or qualitative; normative or positive; deductive or inductive; a priori or a posteriori. The challenge in the current advancing age of inter-causal relationship of organic unity of being and becoming poses the substantive theme of integrating the various modes together. The result then would be relevance of individual choices and preferences in their social context. Morality and ethics would then become functionally meaningful as organically embedded belief and practice within human capability.

This special issue of the international journal that singularly develops the distinctive field of ethics as relational organism of unity between multidisciplinary diversity comprising the individual and culture embedded with multidisciplinary sociality has reflected some such issues. The field selected is the socio-religious one. Yet, the applied ideas of such socio-religious values, norms and practicality are conceptualized and exemplified. The imminent wellbeing criterion thereby assumes an explanatory perspective of social becoming. It thereby carries relational ethical relevance. The derived social becoming invokes a methodology and resultant formal model that together comprise a functional wellbeing criterion for the comprehensive perspective of human empowerment, potentiality and possibility. The assumption here is that, indeed, the moral and ethical human capability is possible across diversity of people and their interactive systems. Codetermination of useful social norms contrary to social differentiation thus defines the wellbeing criterion objective.

The wellbeing criterion can thus be defined as the functional model of the methodological episteme that is explained by the pervasive complementarities (thus participation) between diversities of the life-fulfillment choices that are characterized by their inter-causal variables and relations. The emergent meaning of ethics now assumes an inter-causal relational system in respect of the episteme of unity of knowledge. The papers in this special issue have explored some of the implications of such epistemic foundations of social rapport in terms of religious norms and their selected socio-economic implications.