Development as Human Flourishing and Mutual Care: The Role of Accompanying

This contribution will focus on development from an anthropological and moral point of view. Development concerns human flourishing, which cannot take place apart from friendship, understood as love for common goods. Relationships of accompanying incarnate a specific form of friendship with ‘significant others’ able to recognize our inner value, to activate our deep desires and to enhance a practice of freedom as the capacity to recognize and reach the good. Development requires the presence of ‘networks of giving and receiving’ in which human beings, at different stages of development, take care of each other according to their resources, talents and skills. The social sciences therefore need to be informed by a relational anthropology rooted – rather than within individualistic and atomistic anthropologies – in common identities called ‘we-identities’. The latter are not based on contingent, public or convergent goods but on common goods that make that original unity (‘we’) something undecomposable.