CONCEPT
Eudaimonia (Vallor's Framework)
Aristotelian flourishing — not subjective happiness but the condition of a life going well, capacities fully developed and excellently exercised — Vallor's standard against which AI tools must be evaluated.
Eudaimonia is the ancient Greek term for human flourishing, usually mistranslated as 'happiness' in ways obscuring its meaning. Shannon Vallor insists on the distinction: happiness in modern English suggests transient subjective feeling measurable by satisfaction surveys; eudaimonia is the condition of a human life going well by the standard of what such a life can be when capacities are fully developed and excellently exercised. A person can be happy while character erodes, experiencing pleasure and satisfaction while the capacities constituting deepest flourishing atrophy. Vallor's framework makes eudaimonia — not engagement, not productivity, not user satisfaction — the standard by which AI tools should be evaluated. The question is not whether the tool produces good outputs but whether the practice of using it cultivates or erodes the character on which genuine flourishing depends.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics defines eudaimonia as the highest good achievable through action — the ergon (characteristic activity) of human beings performed excellently across a complete life. The