A Just Eudaimonia - The Everyday Fabric of a Shared Life and the Praxis of Flourishing 【（Preliminary）Draft】

ENGLISH

Philosophy of Intimacy and the Theory of Justice · Paper XI

A Just Eudaimonia: The Everyday Fabric of a Shared Life and the Praxis of Flourishing

On the Cultivation of Habit and Household, the Unfolding of Each Within a Common Field, and a Flourishing That Justice Constitutes

[ Working Draft ]

Wanhong — Working draft, not for citation or circulation

君子之道，造端乎夫婦；及其至也，察乎天地。
The way of the noble person takes its rise in the relation of husband and wife; in its furthest reach, it is discerned in heaven and earth.

君子素其位而行。
The noble person acts from the place where he is.

A good life is not secured and then lived; it is the unfolding, of each and of both, of a life tended in common.

— 《中庸》 Zhongyong (The Doctrine of the Mean), ch. 12 and ch. 14; and a remark of the author’s own.

For her, with whom the first name was made that no one else could read, and in whose eyes I first saw that I had been seen seeing.
结发为夫妻，恩爱两不疑。
To the one I love most.

Abstract

This paper, the eleventh in a series on the philosophy of intimacy and the theory of justice, develops the empirical praxis of the good relation whose conditions the prior paper established in the abstract. Where the prior paper held that the practice of a good relation is the cultivation of a field rather than the construction of a structure, that the matter of this field is the everyday sensory and habitual fabric of a shared life, and that a good field satisfies two conditions, the eudaimonic and the just, of which the just constitutes rather than merely constrains the eudaimonic, the present paper asks how a shared life is in fact cognised, practised, assessed, and sustained across its course. It treats that course as a cycle, and the cycle as its primary object: a recurrence of cognition, practice, evaluation, reflection, and renewed cognition, turning across the time of a relation from its beginning, through its marriage, into its later years. The cycle is shown to be a real cycle in the dynamical sense, not a linear sequence of stages but a self-sustaining movement whose persistence is the condition of the relation’s existence, so that the cessation of the cycle is not a relation at rest but a relation extinguished.

Five frameworks for the cognition and practice of flourishing are distinguished, the positivist, the evidentialist, the normative, the virtue-theoretic, and the phenomenological, and they are treated not as competing theories of one measurable object but as the symmetry-broken phases, in the sense of the prior paper, of an object no single framework possesses. The frameworks are the resources the cycle draws upon at the moments suited to each, and the paper proceeds by traversing the moments of the cycle in turn, drawing the appropriate frameworks into each. A cognitive and computational basis for the whole is established first: appraisal, before it is an explicit measurement, is a continuous and largely unconscious inference upon the partially observable state of a relation, conducted in a value that is not symbolised, and formalised as the belief updating of a decision process whose objective is itself revised by its running, which is the decision-theoretic form of the prior paper’s thesis that there is no fixed meta-value-grammar. On the free-energy reading of this inference, the continual appraisal by which a relation is maintained is the activity by which it holds itself in existence, and the cessation of appraisal is the beginning of its extinction.

The paper carries three commitments through its length. The first is an operational concession: a practice requires what is assessable, and the paper therefore restricts itself, where it must assess, to value as structured into an assessable proxy, in the explicit awareness that the proxy is not the value the prior papers held to be transversal across the registers and irreducible to symbolisation. This is the first occasion in the series on which an incomplete value is adopted deliberately, and it is the honest discharge of the prior result rather than its abandonment. The second commitment concerns the assessment of justice: a relation’s distribution of returned value, taken relative to a baseline set by the coupling of the parties, is shown to admit a statistical signature, the skewness of the distribution, by which the exploitation of one party within an apparently satisfying relation becomes visible where aggregate measures of satisfaction conceal it. The justice of a relation’s value cycle is rendered, under the concession, as a testable hypothesis about the symmetry of a return distribution against a coupling-based baseline, modelled as a branching process on the relational network. The third commitment concerns the cycle as a whole: the cycle accumulates a phase, in the sense of the prior paper’s holonomy, and its regime is fixed by two independent questions, whether it persists and, if it persists, what sign of phase it accumulates. Three regimes follow, the flourishing spiral of a persisting cycle of positive phase, the catastrophic cycle of a persisting cycle of negative phase, and the extinction of a cycle that ceases to turn, with the passage between them understood as a bifurcation. Justice is shown to be the internal condition of the flourishing spiral and not a constraint upon it, since a relation whose return distribution is severely skewed cannot accumulate a positive phase for the party consigned to its low-return tail.

In keeping with the thesis that no single framework possesses the whole, the paper terminates not in a synthesis but in plural conclusions, each stated to the boundary of its framework, and it holds throughout that the flourishing of a shared life is cultivated and not constructed, assessed in proxy and not possessed, and sustained as an open spiral and not secured as a state.

1. Introduction

This paper is the eleventh in a series on the philosophy of intimacy and the theory of justice, and it takes up the empirical task the prior paper deferred. The prior paper established that the practice of a good relation is the cultivation of a field rather than the construction of a structure, that the matter of this field is the everyday sensory and habitual fabric of a shared life, and that a good field satisfies two conditions, the eudaimonic and the just, of which the just constitutes rather than merely constrains the eudaimonic. It established these as conditions, in the abstract, and it deferred to a subsequent paper the question of how a shared life is in fact cultivated, assessed, and sustained in the more empirical register of habit, household, and the quality of a life lived together. The present paper takes up that question.

The question is how flourishing is known, practised, assessed, and reconceived across the course of a shared life. The course of a shared life is treated here as a cycle, and the cycle as the primary object: a recurrence of cognition, practice, evaluation, reflection, and the renewed cognition that follows, turning across the time of a relation from its beginning through its marriage and its later years. The cycle is not a linear sequence of stages completed once. Its moments interpenetrate and feed back upon one another, and one of them, evaluation, runs through all the others as an unbroken undercurrent rather than occupying a single station. The cycle is, moreover, the condition of the relation’s existence. A relation in which value ceases to be generated and returned, in which the parties cease to revise their sense of one another, in which practice halts, is a relation whose cycle has stopped; and a relation whose cycle has stopped does not persist in a steady state but decays. The continued turning of the cycle is the condition of the relation’s survival, and the character of its turning, whether it spirals upward, repeats at a loss, or winds down, is the difference between a flourishing life, a life of slow catastrophe, and the extinction of the bond.

The frameworks by which flourishing is known and assessed are treated, in this paper, as resources the cycle draws upon rather than as the primary object. Positivism, evidentialism, normative theory, virtue ethics, and phenomenology each furnish an epistemology and a practice of flourishing, and each is drawn upon at the moments of the cycle to which it is suited; but none governs the cycle as a whole, and the absence of a single governing framework is, as the prior papers established, not a defect but the condition of an object no single framework possesses. The frameworks are the symmetry-broken phases, in the sense of the prior paper, of the cognition and practice of flourishing; the cycle is the movement across them.

The paper carries three commitments that run through its length. The first is an operational concession. The paper is a practice, and a practice requires what is operable and what is assessable; it therefore restricts itself, where it must assess, to value as structured into an assessable proxy, and it does so in the awareness that the structured proxy is not the value that the prior papers held to be transversal across the registers and irreducible to symbolisation. This is the first occasion in the series on which an incomplete value is chosen deliberately, and the choice is the honest discharge of the prior result rather than its abandonment: since the value that is real cannot be cashed without occupying the place of the barred Other, the honest course, where assessment is required, is to concede that what is assessed is a proxy and to bear responsibility for its incompleteness. The second commitment concerns the assessment of justice: a relation’s distribution of returns is shown to admit a statistical signature, the skewness of the distribution of value returned relative to the coupling of the parties, by which exploitation within an apparently satisfying cycle becomes visible. The third concerns the cycle as a whole: the cycle accumulates a phase, in the sense of the prior paper’s holonomy, and the sign of that phase distinguishes the good cycle from the bad, while the persistence of the cycle distinguishes both from extinction.

The paper is the programmatic and foundational text of the part of the series concerned with the praxis of flourishing, and it is written at the length and the level of detail that a foundation requires, in the expectation that the subsequent papers will draw upon the instruments it develops rather than re-deriving them. Its scope is correspondingly broad: it situates its conception within the philosophy of well-being and the theory of justice, develops the cognitive and dynamical apparatus of the lifecycle, treats each moment of the cycle through the several frameworks, develops the quantitative assessment of justice and surveys the existing instruments of measurement, traces the cross-cultural variation of flourishing and its practice, displays the apparatus on an extended case, and meets the objections its approach invites.

The paper proceeds as follows. It surveys the frameworks and states its method (§2), and situates its conception within the philosophy of well-being and the theory of justice (§3). It recapitulates the dynamical-systems vocabulary it will employ (§4); establishes the cognitive and computational basis of appraisal, in which evaluation is shown to be a continuous and largely unconscious inference before it is an explicit measurement (§5); and specifies the lifecycle as a real cycle whose persistence conditions the relation’s survival (§6). It sets out, in an analytic matrix, the contribution of each framework at each moment in both its epistemological and its practical layer (§7), and then treats the moments of the cycle in turn, cognition (§8), practice (§9), evaluation (§10), reflection (§11), and re-cognition (§12), each as the site at which several frameworks are drawn upon for the task proper to it. It considers the cycle as a whole, in its three regimes of flourishing, catastrophe, and extinction (§13); displays the whole apparatus on an extended longitudinal case (§14); traces the cross-cultural variation of flourishing and of the practices of marriage and family (§15); states its foundational role in the series and the instruments it bequeaths to the papers that follow (§16); meets the objections its approach invites (§17); and concludes in plural conclusions (§18). A formal appendix gathers the notation and the key concepts (Appendix A) and develops the spectral, decision-theoretic, and dynamical formalisations the main text employs (Appendix B).

2. Background and Method

This section surveys the frameworks the paper draws upon, states their relation to one another, and declares the methodological concession under which the paper’s assessments are made. The frameworks are surveyed not as competitors among which the paper selects, but as the resources the cycle of a shared life draws upon at the moments suited to each. Five are distinguished, by the epistemology of flourishing each carries.

2.1 Five frameworks for the cognition and practice of flourishing

Positivism, in the sense the paper employs, is the position that flourishing is an observable and measurable matter of fact, accessible through its indicators and tractable by quantification. Its developed form in the study of well-being is the tradition of subjective well-being, in which well-being is operationalised as life satisfaction together with the balance of positive over negative affect, and measured by validated instruments (Diener 1985). The hedonic tradition that underwrites these measures is gathered in Kahneman, Diener and Schwarz (1999), and its instruments include scales of positive and negative affect (Watson, Clark and Tellegen 1988) and of quality of life (WHOQOL 1998). Alongside the subjective measures stand the objective indicators of quality of life, the measurable conditions of a life, and the apparatus of psychometrics by which any such measure is assessed for reliability and validity. The positivist commitment is that what cannot be brought, however indirectly, to measurement cannot be a matter of knowledge in the strict sense.

Evidentialism, as a practical epistemology, is the position that a belief, and the practice founded on it, ought to be proportioned to the evidence, and revised as the evidence revises. In the study of flourishing its developed form is evidence-based practice, in which an intervention is warranted by the weight of controlled evidence that it produces the effect claimed for it. Evidentialism is not identical to positivism, though the two are allied: positivism concerns what flourishing is, an observable fact, while evidentialism concerns how belief about flourishing ought to be formed and updated, by proportioning to evidence. The distinction matters to the paper, because evidentialism, in its deeper form, is the epistemology of belief revision as such, and so reaches below the explicit weighing of studies to the continuous updating of belief that the paper locates at the basis of all appraisal (§5).

Normative theory is the position that flourishing is not exhausted by what is the case but involves what ought to be valued: that a good life is constituted by ends there is reason to hold worthy, and not merely by the satisfaction reported or the conditions observed. Its most developed contemporary form, and the one most consonant with this series, is the capabilities approach, in which the measure of a life is the substantive freedom of a person to be and to do what that person has reason to value, the capabilities rather than the achieved functionings alone (Sen 1999; Nussbaum 2011). The approach has a precedent in the recovery of an Aristotelian conception of flourishing as vulnerable to circumstance (Nussbaum 2001). The capabilities approach is consonant with the series because its central notion, the substantive freedom to unfold what one has reason to value, is closely allied to the conception of flourishing as the unfolding of each party’s own dynamics that the prior papers developed.

Virtue ethics is the position that flourishing, eudaimonia in its classical sense, is the activity of a life in accordance with excellence of character, and that such excellence is acquired through habituation. In Aristotle the virtues are states of character, formed by the repeated performance of the corresponding actions until they become a settled disposition, a hexis; eudaimonia is then the activity of the soul in accordance with these acquired excellences over a complete life (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics). The contemporary recovery of this conception, against the modern reduction of ethics to rules, is owed in large part to MacIntyre (1981), and its extension to the virtues of acknowledged dependence to MacIntyre (1999). The Confucian tradition of self-cultivation supplies a parallel account, in which the person is formed through sustained cultivation, ritual practice, and the ordering of the household and its manners, the good life being an attained and maintained cultivation rather than a state secured once (Tu 1985). The classical sources of this tradition include the Analects and the doctrine of the mean (Zhongyong). Both traditions locate flourishing in the formation of disposition through habit, and both thereby connect the cognition of flourishing to its practice in a way the other frameworks do not, which is why virtue ethics is the framework proper to the practical moment of the cycle (§9).

Phenomenology and hermeneutics together name the position that flourishing is lived and interpreted before it is measured: that it is given, in the first instance, as the felt quality and the understood meaning of a life, and that this givenness is not a defective approximation to a measurable fact but the matter itself, to which any measure is answerable. The phenomenological tradition supplies the account of the lived and intersubjective texture of experience on which the prior papers drew; the account of perception and the lived body is owed to Merleau-Ponty (1945), and the diagnosis of the reduction of the lived world to its measurable indicators to Husserl (1936); the hermeneutic tradition supplies the account of understanding as the interpretation of meaning within a circle that cannot be exited for a view from nowhere. Against the positivist commitment, this framework holds that the reduction of flourishing to its measurable indicators discards precisely what flourishing is, and that the understanding of a shared life is closer to the interpretation of a text than to the reading of an instrument. The structure of such understanding, as a circle that cannot be exited for a view from nowhere, is developed by Gadamer (1960).

2.2 The frameworks as symmetry-broken phases

These five frameworks are not five candidate theories of one measurable object, among which evidence will eventually decide. They are five phases, in the sense the prior paper gave the term, of the cognition and practice of flourishing: each is the determinate form the understanding of flourishing assumes under the conditions of a particular discipline and a particular task, and none is the undivided structure of which the others are partial views. The positivist measures what can be measured and is silent on what cannot; the phenomenologist describes what is lived and resists its reduction to measure; the normative theorist specifies what ought to be valued and cannot guarantee its realisation; the virtue theorist describes the formation of disposition and cannot legislate character; the evidentialist proportions belief to evidence and is mute where evidence cannot reach. Each says, in its own broken phase, what no other can say, and each is silent where another speaks.

The relation among them is therefore not one to be resolved by the victory of one framework, nor by their eclectic combination into a single super-framework, which would be the metalanguage the series has argued does not exist. It is the relation of a polyphony to a truth that no single voice possesses, and the burden of the cycle is to draw upon each at the moment to which it is suited, without subordinating the others to it. This is the methodological inheritance of the prior paper, transposed from the disciplines of the theoretical papers to the frameworks of the practical one, and it is a dialectical-materialist rather than a relativist commitment: the frameworks are partial determinations, each from its position, of a flourishing that is real and in production, and not so many incommensurable language games among which there is no fact.

2.3 The operational concession

A practice requires what is operable and what is assessable. The cultivation of a shared life proceeds by actions that can be taken and revised, and its revision requires some assessment of whether the cultivation tends toward the good. But the prior papers established that the value at issue in a relation is transversal across the three registers, emergent on their coupled dynamics, and not exhausted by any symbolisation; and they established that to fix such a value in a determinate, possessable structure, to cash it, is the operation of settling, and the occupation of the place of the barred Other. There is, accordingly, a tension at the centre of any practical and assessing treatment of flourishing: assessment requires that value be structured into an assessable form, and the value that is real resists exactly that structuring.

The paper meets this tension by a concession it states openly and bears throughout. Where it must assess, it restricts itself to value as structured into an assessable proxy, and it holds that this proxy is not the value the prior papers established to be irreducible. The structured proxy is an instrument of practice, warranted by its operational use, and it is not a representation of the real value, which it cannot be. This is the first occasion in the series on which an incomplete value is adopted deliberately rather than diagnosed as a failure, and the adoption is the honest discharge of the prior result rather than its reversal. Since the real value cannot be cashed without occupying the place of the Other, the honest course, where a practice must assess, is not to claim that the assessment reaches the real value, which would be that very occupation, but to concede that what is assessed is a proxy, to use it for what it is operationally worth, and to bear responsibility for its incompleteness. The concession governs every assessment the paper makes, and most consequentially the quantitative assessment of justice in §10, whose results are to be read as operationally valid and not as the measurement of a relation’s real worth.

The concession also fixes the standing of the explicit, instrumented evaluation that the positivist framework supplies. That evaluation is not thereby disparaged. It is, on the contrary, indispensable to a practice, since a practice without assessment cannot be revised; and the structured proxy it yields is, within its operational limits, a real gain, public, comparable, and accumulable in a way that the unstructured appraisal is not. The concession is not a verdict against measurement but a specification of its standing: the measure is an operationally warranted proxy for a value it does not reach, to be used as such and not mistaken for the value itself. The paper now turns to the vocabulary in which the cycle and its regimes will be described.

3. The Philosophy of Well-Being and the Theory of Justice

The paper’s conception of a just eudaimonia stands in two philosophical lineages that a foundational treatment must make explicit: the philosophy of well-being, which asks what a good life consists in, and the theory of justice, which asks what is owed among those who share a life. This section locates the conception within each, not to derive it from them, since it was developed on the independent grounds of the prior papers, but to situate it, to mark its agreements and departures, and to make available to the later argument the distinctions these literatures have drawn.

3.1 The philosophy of well-being

The philosophy of well-being distinguishes three families of theory of what makes a life go well, a division owed in its canonical form to Parfit (1984). Hedonistic theories hold that well-being consists in the balance of pleasure over pain, of positive over negative experience; the good life is the happiest life, and the tradition descends through the classical utilitarians and Sidgwick (1907). Desire-fulfilment theories hold that well-being consists in the satisfaction of a person’s desires, whether or not the satisfaction is experienced as pleasant; the good life is the life in which what one wants is achieved, and the theory has the advantage of grounding a person’s good in that person’s own valuings rather than in an external standard. Objective-list theories hold that certain things are good for a person whether or not they are desired or found pleasant, that there is a plurality of goods, knowledge, friendship, achievement, virtue, and the like, whose possession makes a life better independently of the person’s attitude toward them; the good life is the life furnished with the items on the list.

The conception of this series stands in a determinate relation to these three. It is not hedonistic: the paper has argued at length that the felt satisfaction of a life is a structured proxy that a forged flourishing can satisfy (§11.3), and that a relation may produce a high balance of positive affect while being, in its distribution of return, unjust and therefore no eudaimonia. It is not a simple desire-fulfilment theory: the paper has held that the value at issue is not exhausted by what the parties happen to want, since a party may, through habituation to a diminished position, cease to want what the foreclosure of their unfolding has put beyond reach, so that the satisfaction of their now-diminished desires is compatible with the foreclosure of their flourishing. The conception is closest to an objective-list theory, in that it holds the unfolding of each party’s own dynamics, and the justice of the cycle that sustains it, to be good for the parties whether or not they are felt or desired; but it differs from the standard objective-list theory in two respects. It does not offer a list of goods but a structure, the open spiral of a returning cycle, within which the goods of a particular shared life are generated rather than enumerated in advance; and it grounds the objectivity of this structure not in an external standard imposed on the parties but in the dynamics of generation and return that the prior papers derived, so that what is good for the parties is what their own generative activity, justly sustained, produces. The conception is, in the vocabulary of the philosophy of well-being, an objective-list theory whose single item is a structure rather than a content, and whose objectivity is that of a generative process rather than of an imposed standard.

3.2 The theory of justice

The condition of justice that the series holds to be constitutive of eudaimonia stands in relation to the principal contemporary theories of justice, and the relation illuminates both what the paper’s justice condition is and what it adds. The dominant modern theory of distributive justice, owed to Rawls, concerns the fair distribution of primary goods, the goods any rational person is presumed to want, among them not only income and opportunity but the social bases of self-respect, and it assesses a social arrangement by the principles that would govern this distribution were they chosen from behind a veil of ignorance (Rawls 1971). The paper’s justice condition is distributive in form, since it concerns the distribution of returned value among the parties of a relation, and the skew of the return distribution (§10.2) is a measure of distributive injustice within the relation; the inclusion, among Rawls’s primary goods, of the social bases of self-respect is of particular pertinence, since the party consigned to the low-return tail is deprived not only of returned value but of the self-respect that being returned to sustains.

A second tradition, relational egalitarianism, holds that the concern of justice is not in the first instance the distribution of goods but the character of the relations in which people stand, that justice obtains when people relate as equals rather than when goods are distributed by a pattern, and that the point of equality is the abolition of relations of domination, exploitation, and subordination (Anderson 1999). The paper’s justice condition is, in this respect, relational as much as distributive: the injustice it identifies is the reduction of one party to the sustaining fuel of a relation, a relation of exploitation and subordination within the shared life, and the skew of return is the signature of such a relation and not merely of an unequal distribution. The two construals, the distributive and the relational, are for the paper two aspects of one condition, the distribution of return being the measurable trace of the relational standing of the parties.

A third tradition supplies the connection to recognition. The debate between redistribution and recognition, joined by Fraser and Honneth, concerns whether injustice is fundamentally a matter of maldistribution, to be remedied by redistributing goods, or of misrecognition, the failure to accord a person or group due standing, to be remedied by recognition (Fraser and Honneth 2003). The paper’s account integrates the two: the return of value to its generator is at once a redistribution, the circulation of value back to the party who produced it, and a recognition, the acknowledgement of that party as a generator whose contribution is owed a return rather than a source from which value may be taken without acknowledgement. The skew of return measures a maldistribution; the foreclosure of unfolding (§10.3) measures a misrecognition, the failure to accord a party the standing of one whose own development matters; and the paper holds these to be two faces of a single injustice, as the redistribution-recognition debate, in its more integrative resolutions, has come to hold.

A fourth tradition, the ethics of care, is the one nearest the paper’s subject matter and the one whose insight the paper most directly formalises. The care tradition, arising from Gilligan’s identification of a moral voice oriented to responsibility and relationship rather than to abstract right (Gilligan 1982), and developed into a political and philosophical ethics by Held and others (Held 2006), holds that the care through which dependents are sustained is morally central and systematically undervalued, and that a just account of social life must reckon the labour of care as labour rather than effacing it as natural or freely given. Kittay’s analysis of dependency and the labour it requires is of particular pertinence, since it identifies exactly the sustaining labour whose under-return the paper’s skew measure is constructed to detect (Kittay 1999). The paper may be read as supplying, for the central case of the intimate relation, a formalisation of the care tradition’s core claim: that the labour of sustaining a shared life is labour, that it generates value, and that its systematic under-return is an injustice with a measurable signature. The ethics of care supplies the moral insight; the skew of the return distribution offers a structured proxy for its violation.

3.3 The location of the paper’s conception

The paper’s conception of a just eudaimonia is, in sum, an objective-list theory of well-being whose single item is the structure of a justly returning cycle, joined to a theory of justice that is distributive in its measure, relational in its content, integrative of redistribution and recognition, and formalising of the ethics of care. The conception was not assembled from these positions but developed on independent grounds, and its relation to them is one of convergence rather than derivation: the prior papers’ account of generative justice, the return to the creator, and the unfolding of each arrived, by its own route, at a conception that the philosophy of well-being and the theory of justice illuminate from their several directions. The convergence is itself an argument of a kind, since a conception reached independently and found to gather the insights of several established traditions has a claim to have articulated something the traditions severally approach; but the paper rests its conception on the prior derivation and offers the convergence as corroboration and not as ground.

Figure 1. The lifecycle of a shared flourishing as a cycle. The five moments — cognition (what flourishing is), practice (habit, household), evaluation (appraisal, measure), reflection (re-examining), re-cognition (revised sense) — are arranged around a ring and turn into one another. At the hub sits appraisal (belief update), joined by faint spokes to every moment: evaluation, as the continuous and largely unconscious updating of a belief about the state of the relation, runs through every moment before it is ever an explicit measurement. Three arrows lead outward from the ring to the three regimes — the flourishing spiral (positive phase), the catastrophic cycle (negative phase), and extinction (the cycle halts). The persistence of the cycle is the condition of the relation’s survival; the sign of the phase it accumulates over a turn distinguishes the flourishing spiral from the catastrophic cycle, and the halting of the cycle is extinction.

4. A Recapitulation of the Dynamical Vocabulary

The paper describes the lifecycle of a shared flourishing in the vocabulary of dynamical systems, and the central terms are recalled here in a form sufficient for the use made of them. The recapitulation is brief and non-technical, and it carries forward the qualification (standard treatments of the notions recalled here are Strogatz 1994 and Hirsch, Smale and Devaney 2013), established at length in the prior paper, that the relation is modelled by a dynamical system only as a structural analogy, and that the analogy is subject to the limit there identified, that the law governing a relation is itself reconfigured by what the relation generates, so that no fixed system captures it in full. The vocabulary is employed for what it makes visible, and not as a claim that a relation is a system of the standard kind.

4.1 States, evolution, and trajectories

A dynamical system is specified by a space of states, the configurations the system may occupy, together with a rule of evolution that carries each state to its successor in time. The history of the system is a trajectory through the state space, the path traced as the state evolves under the rule. For a relation, the state space is the space of configurations a shared life may occupy, and the trajectory is the relation’s history; the rule of evolution is the relation’s own dynamics, which, as the prior paper insisted, is not fixed but is reconfigured by the relation’s products, a qualification held in reserve throughout what follows.

4.2 Fixed points, stability, and decay

A fixed point is a state that the rule of evolution carries to itself, a configuration at which the system, once arrived, remains. A fixed point is stable if trajectories that begin nearby are drawn toward it, and unstable if they are driven away. A trajectory that loses the energy or the input sustaining its movement winds down toward a fixed point and there comes to rest. For a relation, the pertinent fixed point is the state in which the relation’s movement has ceased, in which value is no longer generated, exchanged, or returned, and the parties no longer revise their sense of one another. This terminal rest is not a benign equilibrium but the cessation of the relation as a living process, and the paper names it extinction (§13). A relation that is not sustained decays toward it.

4.3 Attractors and limit cycles

An attractor is a set of states toward which trajectories from a region of the state space are drawn, and on which they thereafter remain. A fixed point is the simplest attractor. A limit cycle is an attractor of a different kind: a closed trajectory, a loop in the state space, toward which neighbouring trajectories are drawn and along which the system then circulates indefinitely. A limit cycle is a self-sustaining oscillation, a movement that maintains itself by returning, again and again, through a cycle of states rather than coming to rest at a point. The relevance to the present paper is direct: a living relation is modelled not by a fixed point, which would be its cessation, but by a sustained cyclic movement, the lifecycle of cognition, practice, evaluation, reflection, and renewed cognition, which maintains the relation by its continued turning. The persistence of this cyclic movement, rather than the attainment of any resting state, is the mark of a living relation.

4.4 The phase accumulated around a cycle

A system that returns, around a cycle, to its starting configuration in the state space need not return unchanged in every respect. A quantity carried along the cycle may, on return to the starting configuration, fail to coincide with its initial value, and the discrepancy, the phase accumulated around the loop, is the holonomy on which the prior papers turned. A cycle of vanishing holonomy returns everything to where it began, a pure repetition that goes round without rising. A cycle of positive holonomy returns to the starting configuration with a gain, a spiral that ascends as it returns. A cycle of negative holonomy returns with a loss, a winding that depletes as it turns. The distinction between the good and the bad cycle, developed throughout the series, is the sign of this accumulated phase, and it is carried over here to the lifecycle of a shared flourishing: the same five moments may be traversed in a manner that ascends, in a manner that merely repeats, or in a manner that depletes, and the difference is the holonomy of the turn, not the identity of the moments traversed.

4.5 Bifurcation

The qualitative behaviour of a dynamical system may depend on parameters, the slowly varying conditions under which the system evolves. As a parameter is varied, the system’s behaviour may change smoothly through a range and then, at a critical value, change in kind: a stable fixed point may lose its stability, a limit cycle may appear or vanish, an attractor may divide. Such a qualitative change at a critical parameter value is a bifurcation. The relevance is that the regime of a relation, whether it sustains a flourishing spiral, settles into a depleting cycle, or decays toward extinction, may not change gradually with its conditions but may shift in kind at a threshold, a small further change in the sustaining conditions carrying the relation across a critical value into a qualitatively different regime. The language of bifurcation is the language in which the paper describes the passage of a relation from one regime to another (§13), and it captures a feature the gradual language of more or less well-being does not, that the difference between a sustained and a collapsing relation can be a difference in kind reached by a small change in degree.

5. The Cognitive and Computational Basis of Appraisal

Before evaluation is an explicit measurement, it is a continuous and largely unconscious inference. The parties to a shared life do not, for the most part, assess their relation by deliberate procedure; they are appraising it constantly, beneath reflection, registering in the texture of an ordinary day whether things are well or ill between them, whether the relation is tending toward warmth or toward distance, whether the shared life is rising or declining. This section establishes that appraisal is, at its basis, an inference upon a partially observable state, conducted in a value that is not symbolised; that the explicit, instrumented evaluation of §10 is a structured proxy laid over this basal inference; and that the framework which best renders the basal process is the framework of belief updating, which is evidentialism reaching below the deliberate weighing of studies to the continuous revision of a belief about an unobservable state.

5.1 Appraisal as a biological process

The appraisal of a situation is, in the first instance, a biological event and not a deliberation. The tradition of appraisal theory in the psychology of emotion holds that emotion arises from an evaluation of a situation with respect to a being’s concerns, and that this evaluation runs through rapid, multilevel, largely automatic checks before any of it becomes available to reflection (Lazarus 1991; Scherer, Schorr and Johnstone 2001). That emotion and cognition are not separable faculties but aspects of one evaluative process is argued by Pessoa (2008), and the constructed and inferential character of emotional appraisal by Barrett (2017). The felt quality of a moment in a shared life, the ease or the disquiet that arrives unbidden after an exchange, is the registration of such an appraisal, an evaluation already accomplished beneath awareness and delivered to consciousness as a feeling. The neuroscience of this process locates it in the rapid integration, by prefrontal and associated circuits, of present perception with prior expectation, and the issuing of an evaluation of the current state on which decision is then based. Crucially, the process operates on quantities the subject does not and cannot fully articulate: the appraisal proceeds in a value that is felt and acted upon before, and often without ever, being symbolised. The basal appraisal is conducted in exactly the unsymbolised value the prior papers held to be the real one.

A component of this process deserves emphasis, because it grounds the connection to the matter of the field. Interoception, the sensing of the body’s internal condition, is increasingly understood as itself a process of inference, in which the felt bodily state is the brain’s best estimate of the causes of its internal signals, and emotion a reading of this estimate in context (Seth 2013). The felt sense of how a relation stands, the bodily ease or unease that is the first and most constant appraisal of a shared life, is on this account an interoceptive inference, and its data are in large part the sensory and habitual fabric the prior paper identified as the matter of the field: the meals, the rooms, the rhythms, the contact, registered in the body before they are formulated in thought. The appraisal of a relation is, at its basis, the body’s continuous inference upon the texture of the shared life.

5.2 Appraisal as inference upon a partially observable state

The formal structure of this basal appraisal is rendered by the framework of decision under partial observability. An agent that cannot observe the true state of its world directly, but only through partial and noisy observations, must maintain a belief, a probability distribution over the possible states, and update this belief as observations arrive; it then chooses its actions on the belief rather than on the unobtainable true state. This is the structure formalised as the partially observable Markov decision process, in which a hidden state evolves, the agent receives observations that depend on it, the agent maintains and updates a belief over the hidden state, and the agent selects actions to secure value over time (Kaelbling, Littman and Cassandra 1998). The general framework of learning to act for value under uncertainty is set out in Sutton and Barto (2018).

The structure maps onto the appraisal of a relation with a precision that is instructive, and the mapping carries the commitments of the prior papers into the vocabulary of decision.

The appraisal of a relation as inference upon a hidden state. The basal appraisal of a relation has the structure of inference upon a partially observable state. The true state of the relation is hidden, not observable directly, in keeping with the prior result that the real value of a relation is transversal across the registers and not exhausted by any observation. What is observed is the everyday sensory and habitual fabric of the shared life, the matter of the field, which depends on the hidden state without revealing it fully. Each party maintains a belief, not a determinate verdict but a distribution, over the state of the relation, in keeping with the prior account of relational value as superposed rather than definite. The belief is updated as the fabric is lived, and action, which is practice, is taken upon the belief. The appraisal is thus an inference, conducted in an unsymbolised value, upon a state that no observation discloses in full.

The mapping has a consequence that connects this section to the formal dilemma of the prior paper. A standard process of this kind operates with a fixed value function, a fixed specification of what the agent is to secure. The appraisal of a relation does not. What the parties are to secure, the good of the relation, is itself reconceived across the lifecycle, at the moment of re-cognition (§12); the value function is rewritten by the process it governs. This is the reflexive reconfiguration of the prior papers, and it reappears here as the non-standard feature that the value function of the relational decision process is not fixed but is revised by the cycle, which is the decision-theoretic form of the thesis that there is no fixed meta-value-grammar.

5.3 Self-maintenance and the imperative to keep inferring

A development of the inferential account binds appraisal to the survival of the relation. On the free-energy account of the functioning of adaptive systems, an organism maintains itself, holds itself away from the disordered states that would dissolve it, precisely by continually minimising the discrepancy between its expectations and its sensory states, which is to say by continually inferring and acting to make its inferences good (Friston 2010). The process-theoretic development of this principle, in which perception and action jointly minimise expected surprise, is given by Friston et al. (2017). Perception, action, and the maintenance of the organism’s own existence are, on this account, one process: to cease to infer and to act upon the inference is to cease to maintain the boundary that constitutes the system, and so to dissolve.

Transposed to the relation, this account supplies the deep form of a thesis the paper will develop in dynamical terms (§13). The continual appraisal of a relation, the unbroken updating of each party’s belief about its state and the action taken upon it, is not an optional accompaniment to the relation but the activity by which the relation maintains itself. A relation in which the parties cease to appraise, cease to update their sense of one another, cease to act upon that sense, is a relation that has ceased to perform the activity by which it holds itself in being, and it dissolves toward the terminal rest of §4.2. The imperative to keep inferring, on this account, is the imperative to keep the relation in existence; the cessation of appraisal is the beginning of extinction.

5.4 The two registers of evaluation

The foregoing establishes a distinction that governs the paper’s treatment of evaluation. There are two registers in which a relation is evaluated. The first is the basal, continuous, largely unconscious inference described in this section: an appraisal conducted in unsymbolised value, upon a hidden state, through the lived fabric of the shared life, and running through every moment of the cycle without occupying any one of them. This is evaluation in its primary and pervasive form, and it is conducted in the real value the prior papers defended. The second is the explicit, instrumented, structured evaluation that the positivist framework supplies and that §10 develops: a deliberate measurement, conducted at particular moments, in which some aspect of the relation is brought to a structured and assessable form.

The relation between the two registers is the relation the operational concession named (§2.3). The explicit evaluation is a structured proxy laid over the basal inference: it takes the unsymbolised belief that the parties continuously maintain and renders some structured aspect of it in a form that can be measured, compared, and accumulated. The proxy is operationally valuable, since the basal inference, precisely because it is unsymbolised, is private, incommunicable, and unaccountable, while the structured measure is public and checkable. And the proxy is incomplete, since the structuring discards exactly the unsymbolised remainder in which the real appraisal is conducted. To evaluate a relation explicitly is to symbolise, for operational use, a belief that is in its nature unsymbolised, and the gain in publicity is paid for in a loss of the real. The paper’s treatment of explicit evaluation in §10 proceeds under this understanding throughout: the measures it discusses are structured proxies for a basal appraisal they do not reach, and evidentialism, which is the epistemology of the basal belief updating itself, is the framework within which both the basal inference and its structured proxy are to be understood.

6. The Lifecycle as a Real Cycle

This section specifies the object the paper takes as primary. The lifecycle of a shared flourishing is a cycle, in the dynamical sense recalled in §4: a sustained cyclic movement that maintains the relation by its continued turning, rather than a linear sequence of stages completed once and for all. The section establishes three things about this cycle: that it is not linear but a movement whose moments interpenetrate and feed back; that its persistence is the condition of the relation’s existence, so that the cessation of the cycle is the relation’s extinction; and that it turns, across the time of a relation, through nested repetitions from a beginning, through a marriage, into the later years.

6.1 The moments of the cycle, and their non-linearity

The cycle is articulated into five moments: cognition, the apprehension of what the flourishing of this shared life consists in; practice, the cultivation and the action through which it is pursued; evaluation, the assessment of how the relation stands; reflection, the re-examination of that assessment and of the cognition that framed it; and re-cognition, the revised apprehension with which a further turn of the cycle begins. These are moments and not stages. A stage is completed and left behind; a moment is a recurring aspect of a movement that is always, in some measure, engaged in all of them at once. The parties do not first complete their cognition of the good, then practise, then evaluate, then reflect, then begin again. They practise on a cognition that is still forming; they evaluate continuously, as §5 established, while they practise; their reflection revises their practice mid-course; and their cognition is reconceived without waiting for a turn of the cycle to be complete. The moments interpenetrate and feed back upon one another, and the articulation into five is an analytic device for treating, in turn, aspects of a movement that does not in fact proceed in turn.

One moment in particular refuses localisation. Evaluation, as the basal and continuous appraisal of §5, is not one station of the cycle but an undercurrent running through all of them: the parties are appraising the state of the relation while they cognise its good, while they practise, while they reflect, and while they reconceive. The treatment of evaluation as a distinct moment (§10) concerns its explicit and instrumented form, the deliberate measurement undertaken at particular junctures; the basal evaluation, the unbroken belief updating, pervades the whole. The cycle is, in this respect, a movement with a continuous monitoring of its own state, in the manner of a system that maintains itself by never ceasing to estimate where it stands.

6.2 The persistence of the cycle as the condition of the relation

The central claim of the section concerns what the turning of the cycle is for. It is not that the cycle is a useful description of a relation that would exist in any case. The turning of the cycle is the activity by which the relation exists, and its cessation is the relation’s end.

The persistence of the cycle is the condition of the relation’s existence. A relation is a living process maintained by the continued turning of its cycle, and not a state that, once attained, persists of itself. The continued generation of value, its circulation and return, the unbroken appraisal of the relation’s state, and the practice taken upon that appraisal, are the activity by which the relation holds itself in being, in the manner of a self-maintaining system that exists only so long as it continues to infer and to act (§5.3). A relation in which this activity ceases does not persist in a quiescent but intact condition; it decays toward the terminal rest in which value is no longer generated or returned and the parties no longer revise their sense of one another. The cessation of the cycle is therefore not a relation at rest but a relation extinguished. To be in a living relation is to be engaged in the continued turning of its cycle; to cease the turning is to let the relation lapse.

This claim distinguishes the present account from any treatment of relational well-being as a state to be reached and thereafter possessed. There is no state of an achieved flourishing that, once secured, maintains itself without the continued activity of the cycle, just as there is no fixed point of a living relation that is not its cessation (§4.2). The good of a shared life is not banked; it is generated, again and again, in the turning, and a relation that ceases to generate it does not hold what it had but loses it. The implication for practice is developed throughout the paper: the work of a shared life is not the attainment of a condition but the sustaining of a movement, and the most consequential failure is not the failure to reach a state but the cessation of the turning.

6.3 The cycle across the time of a relation

The cycle turns, and a relation is many turns of it, nested and accumulating. A single exchange may be a small turn, cognised, practised, appraised, reflected upon, and reconceived within an afternoon. A season of a relation is a larger turn, and the passage from courtship to a settled life, from a settled life through its trials, into the later years, is the largest turn the paper considers. These turns are nested: the small turns compose the seasons, and the seasons compose the arc of a shared life. The marriage at which a relation may arrive is not the end of the cycle but a transformation of its conditions, after which the same moments recur under altered circumstances, the cognition of the good revised by years of shared practice, the practice settled into the habits and household of §9, the evaluation informed by a long history, the reflection deepened, and the re-cognition carrying forward what the prior turns have accumulated.

This accumulation across turns is the lifecycle’s holonomy (§4.4). The re-cognition with which a turn ends is not identical to the cognition with which it began; the difference, accumulated over a turn, is the phase the turn has acquired, and accumulated over many turns, it is the long ascent or the long decline of a shared life. A relation whose turns accumulate a positive phase rises across its history, its cognition of the good deepening, its practice enriching, its parties developing through their shared life into more than they were. A relation whose turns accumulate a negative phase declines across its history, however intact its form, depleting its parties turn by turn. And a relation whose cycle ceases to turn neither rises nor declines but ends. These three possibilities, the rising spiral, the declining cycle, and the cessation, are the three regimes the paper treats as a whole in §13, after it has traversed the moments of a single turn. The paper now enters the cycle at its first moment, the cognition of what the flourishing of a shared life consists in.

7. The Frameworks across the Moments: An Analytic Matrix

The frameworks of §2.1 are drawn upon at the moments of the cycle to which each is suited, and the paper’s treatment of the moments (§8 through §12) develops this drawing-upon in prose. Because the relation of five frameworks to five moments is not easily held in view across the sections that develop it, this section sets it out in a matrix, which serves as a map of the treatment to follow and as a statement, in compact form, of the foundational claim that each framework contributes a distinct epistemology and a distinct practice at each moment. The matrix distinguishes two layers, since each framework, at each moment, both cognises the moment’s object in a characteristic way, its epistemological layer, and guides the moment’s action in a characteristic way, its practical layer. The two layers are presented in two tables, the first for the epistemology and the second for the practice.

The matrix is to be read as an analytic device and not as a partition. The moments interpenetrate (§6.1), and the frameworks are not assigned exclusively to moments but are each available at each moment, more central at some and more peripheral at others; the entries record the characteristic contribution of each framework at each moment, the contribution the prose develops where it is most consequential. A cell records how a given framework, at a given moment, takes up that moment’s task, and the reader tracing a single framework down a column will find its distinctive standpoint maintained across the moments, while the reader tracing a single moment across a row will find the polyphony of frameworks that the moment draws upon.

Table 1. The epistemological layer: how each framework cognises the object of each moment of the cycle.

Framework	Cognition	Practice	Evaluation	Reflection	Re-cognition
Positivist	Flourishing as a measurable matter of fact	Practices as interventions with measurable effects	Measurement by validated instruments	Measures read against their limits	Revision of measured baselines
Evidentialist	Belief about the good proportioned to evidence	Supported practices, warranted by controlled evidence	Belief updating on the evidence of the lived fabric	Re-proportioning of belief as evidence revises	Carrying forward the updated belief
Normative	Flourishing as the substantive freedom of each to unfold	Practice as the realisation of capability	Assessment against the specification of just flourishing	Whether the specification was met, and at whose cost	Re-specification of the good in light of the turn
Virtue-theoretic	Flourishing as activity in accordance with cultivated excellence	Habituation; formation of hexis and family manner	The state of the dispositions formed	Whether the dispositions are excellences or their contraries	Disposition carried forward, deepened or narrowed
Phenomenological	Flourishing as lived and interpreted before measured	Cultivation of attention to the shared life	Thick description; the felt and meant quality	The lived meaning the measures discarded	The reopened, unsymbolised apprehension

Table 2. The practical layer: how each framework guides the action of each moment of the cycle.

Framework	Cognition	Practice	Evaluation	Reflection	Re-cognition
Positivist	Specify measurable targets for the shared life	Adopt practices with established effects	Administer the instruments; compute the proxies	Do not possess the measure as the truth	Reset targets to the new baseline
Evidentialist	Form belief about the good in proportion to evidence	Employ supported practices within their limits	Update belief on the lived evidence	Revise belief; resist over-confidence in the measure	Begin the turn on the revised belief
Normative	Specify what this shared life ought to value	Make room for each party’s capability to unfold	Test return and unfolding against the specification	Reassert the question of justice	Re-specify the good for the next turn
Virtue-theoretic	Discern the excellences this shared life requires	Cultivate, do not legislate, the dispositions (§9.4)	Read the dispositions formed	Guard against the hardening of habit into rule	Carry the cultivated disposition into the turn
Phenomenological	Attend to the lived sense of the good for these two	Cultivate the quality of attention	Describe thickly; refuse the metric’s last word	Return the question to the unsymbolised register	Reopen the apprehension for the next turn

The two tables together state, in compact form, the foundational structure the paper develops: that the cognition and the practice of a shared flourishing are conducted at five moments, that each moment draws upon five frameworks, and that each framework contributes, at each moment, both a way of cognising the moment’s object and a way of guiding its action. The prose of the sections that follow develops the cells of this matrix where each is most consequential, the normative and the virtue-theoretic at the moment of cognition (§8), the virtue-theoretic and the evidential at the moment of practice (§9), the positivist most fully at the moment of evaluation (§10), and the reassertion of the unsymbolised and the just at the moments of reflection and re-cognition (§11, §12). The matrix does not replace that development, since the prose alone can state the tensions among the frameworks and the qualifications each entry requires; it provides the map within which the development is to be read, and the assurance that the treatment of the moments, though it foregrounds the framework most consequential at each, rests on the full matrix of frameworks and moments that this section sets out.

8. Cognition: What the Flourishing of a Shared Life Consists In

The cycle is entered at the moment of cognition, the apprehension of what the flourishing of this shared life consists in. The task of this moment is not the measurement of a flourishing already defined, which belongs to evaluation, but the prior apprehension of what is to count as flourishing for these two, in this life: the framing within which all subsequent practice and assessment proceed. Three frameworks are drawn upon at this moment, the normative, the virtue-theoretic, and the phenomenological, and each contributes a distinct component to the cognition; the moment closes by stating the normative specification of a just flourishing on which the paper’s later evaluation will rest.

8.1 The normative component: flourishing as the unfolding of each

The normative framework supplies the cognition that flourishing is not the satisfaction reported nor the conditions possessed but the substantive freedom of each party to unfold what that party has reason to value. The capabilities approach is the developed form of this cognition: the measure of a life is the range of beings and doings genuinely open to a person, the capabilities, and not merely the functionings achieved or the resources held (Sen 1999; Nussbaum 2011). Transposed to the shared life, the cognition is that the flourishing of the relation is the substantive freedom of each party to unfold that party’s own dynamics, the development of each into what each has it in them to become, sustained rather than foreclosed by the shared life.

This cognition fixes two things the other components and the later evaluation depend on. It fixes that flourishing is plural and not aggregate: it is the unfolding of each, and not a single quantity of relational satisfaction to which both contribute and in which their distinct developments are merged. A shared life has not flourished if it has produced a large sum of satisfaction unevenly distributed, with one party developed and the other foreclosed; the unfolding is of each, severally, or it is not the flourishing the cognition specifies. And it fixes that flourishing is a freedom and not a state: it is the openness of each party’s development, the capability of unfolding, and not a particular condition attained, which preserves at the level of cognition the thesis that flourishing is not a state to be banked but a movement to be sustained.

The distinction the capabilities approach draws between a capability and a functioning bears directly on the cognition of a shared flourishing, and it is worth drawing out. A functioning is a being or doing achieved; a capability is the substantive freedom to achieve it, whether or not it is in fact achieved. The distinction matters because a shared life may produce achieved functionings, a party who is fed, housed, and occupied, while foreclosing the capability of which they are the husk, the party’s substantive freedom to have done and become otherwise. A relation in which one party’s functionings are provided for, but in which that party has no real freedom to pursue the developments they have reason to value, has supplied the functioning and foreclosed the capability, and it has not, on this cognition, sustained that party’s flourishing. The point guards against a characteristic misreading of a shared life, in which the provision of a comfortable condition is taken for the flourishing of the one provided for; the cognition the normative framework supplies is that flourishing is the freedom to unfold, and that a comfort which forecloses the freedom is the mark of a foreclosure and not of a flourishing. The cognition also fixes what the later evaluation must therefore attempt, the assessment not merely of what each party has and does but of what each party is genuinely free to become within the shared life, which is the most demanding of the things the evaluation is asked to proxy and the one its proxies reach least adequately (§10.3).

8.2 The virtue-theoretic component: flourishing as activity in accordance with cultivated excellence

The virtue-theoretic framework supplies a cognition the normative framework leaves implicit: that the unfolding of a party’s dynamics is not a spontaneous expansion but an activity in accordance with excellences that are cultivated, and that the shared life is among the principal sites of their cultivation. In the Aristotelian account, eudaimonia is the activity of a life in accordance with excellence of character, and such excellence is acquired by habituation, the repeated performance of the corresponding actions until they settle into a disposition (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics). In the Confucian account, the person is formed through sustained self-cultivation, much of it conducted in the ordering of the household and the practice of its daily observances (Tu 1985). The conception of the person as constituted in relation, and of autonomy as itself developed rather than presupposed, is consonant with the self-determination tradition in psychology (Ryan and Deci 2000). The cognition these traditions supply is that the flourishing of a shared life is not only the freedom of each to unfold but the activity of each, in accordance with excellences that the shared life cultivates, so that the relation is not merely the condition under which each develops but a principal medium of the development.

This component connects the cognition of flourishing to its practice, and so prepares the moment of practice (§9). Because the excellences in accordance with which a life flourishes are cultivated by habituation, the cognition of what flourishing consists in already points toward the formation of habit and the ordering of a common life as the means of its pursuit. The virtue-theoretic cognition is, in this respect, the cognition that flourishing must be practised into being, and it forbids in advance any conception of the good life as a condition that could be secured otherwise than through the cultivation of disposition over time.

The virtue-theoretic component supplies, further, a cognition that the normative framework taken alone might miss: that in a shared life the excellences are cultivated jointly, and that some of them are excellences of the relation and not only of the parties severally. The patience, the attentiveness, the generosity, and the justice that a good shared life requires are dispositions formed in the parties by the practice of the shared life itself, each party habituated by the relation into the character the relation needs and, in being so habituated, developed; and there are, besides, excellences that belong to the pair, a way of attending to one another, a manner of repair after conflict, a shared bearing toward the world, which are dispositions of the relation, cultivated by its practice and possessed by neither party alone. The classical treatment of such friendship, as a relation in which each wills the good of the other for the other’s sake and in which the friends are a condition of one another’s flourishing, is Aristotle’s (Nicomachean Ethics, Books VIII–IX). The cognition that flourishing is activity in accordance with cultivated excellence thus carries, for a shared life, the recognition that the relation is a principal medium of the parties’ development and the bearer of excellences of its own, and that to cognise the flourishing of a shared life is to cognise the excellences, of each party and of the pair, that the life is to cultivate. This recognition is what the moment of practice will take up, under the constraint that the cultivation of these excellences must guide and not legislate the relation’s habit-forming dynamics (§9).

8.3 The phenomenological component: flourishing as lived and meant

The phenomenological framework supplies the cognition that flourishing is, before it is anything assessable, lived and understood: given as the felt quality and the apprehended meaning of a shared life, and not in the first instance as a fact about it. This component is a corrective to the other two as much as an addition. It holds that the normative specification of capabilities and the virtue-theoretic account of cultivated excellence, however just, remain abstract until they are referred to the lived texture of a particular shared life, in which alone the flourishing of these two has its concrete sense. The cognition of what flourishing consists in, for a given couple, is finally an interpretation of their shared life from within it, a hermeneutic apprehension of what their flourishing means, and not the application to them of a general specification from without.

The phenomenological component also supplies the cognition that what is apprehended at this moment is in large part unsymbolised. The felt sense of what a good shared life would be, for these two, precedes and exceeds its articulation; the cognition of flourishing is, at its root, the basal apprehension of §5, conducted in a value not yet brought to words. This connects the moment of cognition to the account of appraisal and guards the moment against the supposition that to cognise flourishing is to formulate a definition of it. To cognise flourishing, at this moment, is in the first place to apprehend, in the lived and largely unsymbolised register, what the good of this shared life would be, and only secondarily to articulate it.

8.4 The frameworks in concert and in tension

The three components are drawn upon together, and they do not perfectly agree. The normative framework specifies flourishing as the unfolding of each, abstractly and for any couple; the virtue-theoretic framework locates it in the cultivation of excellence through shared habit; the phenomenological framework refers it to the lived and unsymbolised meaning of a particular life and resists its abstract specification. The tension is productive and is not to be resolved by the dominance of one component. The normative specification without the phenomenological reference is empty, a general account not yet referred to any actual life; the phenomenological apprehension without the normative specification is mute, a felt sense not yet articulated into anything that could guide practice or be assessed; and both without the virtue-theoretic component float free of the habituation through which alone a flourishing is brought into being. The cognition of flourishing is adequate when the three are held together, the normative specifying what is to be valued, the phenomenological referring it to the lived meaning of this life, and the virtue-theoretic binding it to the cultivation through which it is pursued.

8.5 The normative specification of a just flourishing

The moment of cognition closes by stating, for use in the paper’s later evaluation, the specification of a just flourishing toward which the cognition tends. The specification gathers the cognition of this moment with the results of the prior paper.

The normative specification of a just flourishing. A shared life flourishes justly when its cycle of value satisfies the following, jointly. The value generated in the shared life circulates and returns to those who generate it, no party being reduced to a source of value from which it is extracted without return. The unfolding of each party’s own dynamics is sustained, neither party’s development being foreclosed for the sake of the other’s or of the relation’s. And the cycle is sustained as a living and open movement, its value neither settled into a possessed condition nor cashed into a closed account, but generated anew in the turning. The first is the condition of justice, carried from the prior paper’s account of generative justice and the return to the creator. The second is the eudaimonic condition, the unfolding of each. The third is the condition of the cycle’s life, its sustenance as an open spiral rather than a closed repetition. A flourishing that meets the eudaimonic condition while failing the just is not a diminished flourishing but, as the prior paper established, no eudaimonia at all, the development of one purchased by the foreclosure of another. The three conditions are therefore not a list of desiderata to be traded against one another but the joint specification of a single thing, a just eudaimonia, and they furnish the normative basis against which the paper’s later evaluation is conducted.

This specification is the product of the moment of cognition, and it is the standard the moment of evaluation will require. It is stated normatively, as what ought to be valued, and not yet as anything measured; the passage from this normative specification to an operational assessment, with all the concession that passage requires, is the work of §10. The cycle now turns to the moment at which a flourishing so specified is pursued: the moment of practice.

9. Practice: The Cultivation of Habit and Household

The cycle turns to practice, the cultivation and the action through which a flourishing, cognised in its normative specification, is pursued. The task of this moment is the formation of the shared life such that the just eudaimonia of §8.5 is generated, and the governing constraint, carried from the prior paper, is that this formation is a cultivation and not a construction: the shared grammar of a relation cannot be legislated from a position of possession, but only tended into an openness within which it continues to be jointly reconfigured. Three frameworks are drawn upon at this moment, the virtue-theoretic, the evidential, and the phenomenological, and the moment is organised around the tension between cultivating a disposition and not legislating it.

9.1 The virtue-theoretic component: flourishing as habituation

The virtue-theoretic framework is the framework proper to the moment of practice, because it alone holds that flourishing is brought into being through the formation of disposition by habit. In the Aristotelian account, the excellences in accordance with which a life flourishes are acquired by habituation: one becomes just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, until the disposition is settled into a hexis, a stable state of character from which the corresponding action flows without struggle (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics). The practice of a shared flourishing is, on this account, the habituation of the two parties, severally and together, into the dispositions in accordance with which their shared life is good: the formation, by repeated practice, of the settled ways of attending, responding, and caring that constitute a good shared life.

The matter of this habituation is the everyday sensory and habitual fabric the prior paper identified as the matter of the field. A habit of a shared life is formed in the recurrence of concrete practices: a way of taking a meal together, a manner of greeting and parting, an ordering of the common rooms, a rhythm of attention to one another. These recurrences are the habitus in the sociological sense, the durable dispositions, inculcated by a form of life, that generate the practices of that form of life and reproduce it (Bourdieu 1990); and they are the family manner, the customs and bearing transmitted across a shared life and, in time, across generations. The cultivation of a shared flourishing is conducted in this fabric: not in the formulation of principles for the relation, but in the formation, by recurrence, of the dispositions borne in the concrete texture of the days.

The mechanism by which a disposition forms from a recurrence is worth making explicit, because it governs what the cultivation of a shared life can and cannot do. A practice repeated becomes easier, then expected, then a part of how the shared life is, until at last it is performed without deliberation and felt as natural, the disposition having settled into the hexis from which it flows unbidden. This is why the matter of a shared flourishing is the small and recurrent rather than the large and singular: it is not the grand resolution but the repeated practice that forms a disposition, not the declaration of how the two will live but the daily living of it that settles into the family manner they come to have. A couple does not become attentive to one another by resolving to be attentive; they become attentive by attending, in the concrete recurrences of their days, until attention is the disposition from which they act. The cultivation of a shared flourishing works, accordingly, on the recurrences: it tends the daily fabric such that the practices worth settling into dispositions are the ones that in fact recur, and it does so knowing that what recurs will become, in time, what the parties are. This is also why the corruption of a shared life is so often gradual and unremarked, a small unkindness or a small neglect, recurring, settling by the same mechanism into a disposition, until the relation has acquired a character no one resolved upon and each performs without deliberation. The formation of disposition by habituation is neutral as to the disposition formed, and the cultivation of a shared flourishing is the tending of the recurrences such that the dispositions formed are the excellences of §8.2 and not their contraries.

9.2 The constraint: cultivation without legislation

The formation of a shared disposition stands under a constraint that distinguishes cultivation from its corruption. The prior paper established that to possess and modify the generative structure of a relation from a position claimed to be external to it is exploitation in the symbolic register, the appropriation of a jointly generated generativity to a single legislator, who thereby reduces the other from a co-author of the shared life to an object governed by it. Applied to the formation of habit, this yields the constraint that the cultivation of a shared disposition must guide the relation’s own dynamics without legislating its productions: it must tend the conditions under which good habits form and reform themselves jointly, and it must not impose a fixed habit as a rule the other is required to obey.

Cultivation guides the formation of habit; legislation possesses it. The cultivation of a shared habit is the tending of the conditions under which a disposition forms and continues to reform itself in the joint practice of both parties; it guides the relation’s own habit-forming dynamics without fixing their product. The legislation of a habit is the imposition, by one party from a position claimed to be external, of a fixed disposition as a rule the other is required to keep; it possesses the relation’s habit-forming dynamics and fixes their product. The two are distinguished as the cultivation of a field is distinguished from the construction of a grammar, and as guidance is distinguished from possession in the prior paper’s account of symbolic justice. A habit that is cultivated remains jointly authored and open to joint reform, and the disposition it forms is the disposition of both; a habit that is legislated is the disposition the legislator has fixed, and its imposition reduces the other to its object. The formation of a shared disposition is just when it cultivates and unjust when it legislates, and the difference is not in the content of the habit but in whether the habit-forming dynamics is guided or possessed.

This is the central tension of the moment of practice, and it admits of no general procedure for its resolution, since a procedure for forming the right habits, applied from outside the joint practice, would itself be a legislation. The tension is managed, in the manner of the prior paper’s practice, subtractively: by the cultivation of the conditions under which good habits arise rather than the imposition of the habits themselves, by the preservation of the other party’s capacity to reform a shared habit rather than the fixing of it, and by the recurrent question whether a habit of the shared life is still jointly authored or has hardened into a rule one party keeps and the other imposes. A family manner is well cultivated when it remains the joint and revisable bearing of both, and ill cultivated when it sets into a regime one administers and the other obeys.

9.3 An operational vocabulary for cultivation without legislation

The constraint is stated as a principle, and a foundational treatment owes the subsequent papers an operational vocabulary in which the principle can be applied, since a principle that cannot be brought to bear on the recurring practice of a shared life is of little use to a praxis. This subsection supplies such a vocabulary, under the operational concession: the terms it introduces are operational instruments for the conduct of a practice, and not measurements of the unsymbolised value the practice serves.

The first instrument is a set of signals by which the drift from cultivation toward legislation may be recognised before it has hardened. The drift is gradual, by the mechanism of habituation (§9.1), and it is therefore most often unremarked; the signals are the marks by which it may be caught. A shared habit is drifting toward legislation when its revision by one party comes to be treated by the other as a transgression rather than as a contribution; when the justification offered for a practice ceases to be a reason the other could weigh and becomes an appeal to how things are done; when one party’s deviation from a practice is met with correction rather than with inquiry; when the practices of the shared life are increasingly described by one party in the language of rule, expectation, and obligation rather than in the language of joint preference; and when the question whether a practice still suits both parties is met with the answer that it is the practice, as though its being established were a reason for its continuance. These signals are operational and defeasible, and no one of them is decisive; their accumulation is the operational sign that a habit is hardening from a joint bearing into an administered rule, and that the cultivation has begun to legislate.

The second instrument is a repertoire of subtractive operations, the operations by which a legislating practice is returned toward cultivation. The repertoire is subtractive because the constraint forbids the additive remedy, the imposition of a better rule, which would be a further legislation; what cultivation can do is remove the conditions under which the legislation operates rather than impose a corrected practice. The subtractive operations include the suspension of a hardened practice, its deliberate setting-aside for a season so that the parties may discover whether it is jointly wanted or merely established; the reopening of a foreclosed question, the deliberate return of a settled practice to the status of an open joint preference; the withdrawal of the language of rule, the deliberate redescription of a practice from obligation to preference; and the restoration of the other party’s standing to revise, the deliberate cession, by the party who has come to administer a practice, of the authority to do so. These operations do not impose a just practice; they remove the conditions under which an unjust one is maintained, and return the relation’s habit-forming dynamics to the joint authorship from which a just practice may, but need not, arise.

The third instrument is the preservation of betrayability, which the prior paper identified as the mark of a relation that has not foreclosed itself. A shared habit preserves betrayability when its continuance remains contingent on the continued joint willing of both parties, so that either could, in principle, decline it, and its continuance is therefore a renewed joint choice rather than a settled fact. A habit that has lost betrayability is one whose continuance no longer depends on being willed, that persists by its mere establishment and would persist against the will of a party who came to decline it; and such a habit, however benign its content, has become a legislation, since it binds independently of joint willing. The preservation of betrayability is the operational form of the cultivation-not-legislation constraint at the level of the individual habit: a practice is cultivated, and not legislated, to the extent that it remains betrayable, that its continuance remains a renewed joint choice and does not harden into a fact that binds without being willed. The maintenance of betrayability across the habits of a shared life is, accordingly, the central operational task of a just practice, and the signals and subtractive operations above are the instruments of its maintenance.

These three instruments, the signals of drift, the subtractive operations, and the preservation of betrayability, compose an operational vocabulary in which the cultivation-not-legislation constraint can be applied to the recurring practice of a shared life. They are offered to the subsequent papers as the operational form of a principle the present paper states, and they stand, like all the paper’s operational apparatus, under the concession that they are instruments of a practice and not measurements of the value the practice serves.

9.4 The evidential component: supported practice and its limit

The evidential framework contributes to the moment of practice the resources of evidence-based practice: the body of controlled findings concerning which practices conduce, on average and in studied populations, to the maintenance and the deepening of a shared life. Such findings are a genuine resource. That certain practices of attention, of repair after conflict, of the just division of a shared life’s labour, conduce on the evidence to its flourishing is a real gain for practice; that much of this sustaining labour is emotional labour, and is systematically under-recognised as labour, is argued by Hochschild (1983) and Folbre (2001); and to disregard it on the ground that each relation is singular would be to discard a public and accumulable knowledge for a private intuition that is frequently mistaken.

The evidential component carries a limit that the operational concession has prepared. Evidence supports a practice by establishing that it produces a measured effect in a studied population; it speaks, therefore, in the register of the structured proxy, and of the average. It cannot establish what the cultivation of this shared life, in its singularity and its unsymbolised texture, requires, and it cannot reach the unsymbolised value in which the relation’s good finally consists. The evidential component is thus a resource to be drawn upon and not a sufficient guide: it furnishes supported practices that the cultivation may employ, while the determination of what this shared life requires remains a matter of the joint and largely unsymbolised appraisal of §5, to which the evidence is an input and not a substitute.

9.5 The phenomenological component: the cultivation of attention

The phenomenological framework contributes to practice the cultivation of attention: the formation, as itself a habit, of a quality of attending to the other and to the shared life. The practice of a shared flourishing is not only the formation of dispositions to act but the formation of a disposition to attend, a settled readiness to perceive the other’s state, the texture of the shared life, and the small alterations by which a relation rises or declines. This is the practical correlate of the basal appraisal of §5: since the relation is maintained by the continuous appraisal of its state, the cultivation of the quality of that appraisal, the formation of a fine and unbroken attention to the shared life, is among the principal practices of its flourishing. The cultivation of attention is, moreover, the practice least assimilable to legislation, since attention cannot be imposed as a rule but only formed as a disposition, and it is therefore the practice in which the cultivation-not-legislation constraint is most nearly automatic.

9.6 The frameworks in concert

The three components compose the practice of a shared flourishing. The virtue-theoretic framework supplies its form, the formation of disposition by habituation in the concrete fabric of the shared life. The evidential framework supplies supported practices the cultivation may draw upon, within the limit that they are proxies and averages and not the singular requirement of this life. The phenomenological framework supplies the cultivation of attention, the disposition to appraise the shared life finely and without cease. And the whole stands under the constraint that the formation of disposition is a cultivation and not a legislation, a guidance of the relation’s own habit-forming dynamics and not the possession of it. The practice so composed generates the value whose circulation the next moment of the cycle assesses; the cycle now turns to the moment of evaluation, at which the question is how a shared life so cultivated is to be assessed, and at what cost to the value the assessment cannot reach.

10. Evaluation: The Appraisal of a Shared Life and Its Cost

The cycle turns to evaluation in its explicit form. The basal appraisal of §5 runs continuously through every moment; the present moment is the deliberate, instrumented assessment undertaken at particular junctures, in which some aspect of the relation is brought to a structured and assessable form. This is the moment at which the operational concession (§2.3) is most consequential, and the moment at which the positivist framework is most directly drawn upon, though, as will appear, every framework has its own evaluative practice and the frameworks do not agree on what evaluation is. The section first sets out the several evaluative practices, then develops, as its principal contribution, a quantitative assessment of the justice of a relation’s value cycle.

10.1 The several practices of evaluation

Evaluation is not one practice but several, drawn from the several frameworks, each assessing a different aspect in a different register.

The biological appraisal is the continuous interoceptive and affective evaluation of §5.1: the felt registration, beneath reflection, of how the relation stands. It is the most pervasive evaluation and the one conducted in the value nearest the real, and it is at the same time the least communicable and the least accountable, since it is unsymbolised. It is the ground the other evaluations structure, and not a competitor to them.

The decision-theoretic appraisal is the belief updating of §5.2: the revision, on the evidence of the lived fabric, of each party’s distribution over the state of the relation. It is evaluation in the register of probability rather than verdict, and it carries the recognition that the state assessed is hidden and the assessment therefore irreducibly uncertain.

The psychological appraisal is the structured self-report of appraisal theory and its instruments: the assessment of the relation through the parties’ reports of their own appraisals, as in the measurement of relationship satisfaction. It renders the basal appraisal partially communicable by structuring it into reportable form.

The positivist evaluation is the measurement proper: the assessment of the relation by validated instruments yielding comparable and accumulable quantities. Its instruments are many, and they measure distinct things. Life-satisfaction and affect scales measure subjective well-being; quality-of-life instruments measure the conditions of a life; relationship-satisfaction and adjustment scales measure the parties’ assessment of the relation; eudaimonic and self-determination instruments measure reported growth, autonomy, and the sense of an unfolding life. Representative instruments are, respectively, the satisfaction-with-life and affect scales (Diener 1985; Watson, Clark and Tellegen 1988), quality-of-life assessments (WHOQOL 1998), dyadic-adjustment scales (Spanier 1976), psychological well-being scales (Ryff 1989), and measures grounded in self-determination theory (Ryan and Deci 2000; Deci and Ryan 1985); the eudaimonic turn in this measurement is represented by Seligman (2011). Each is a structured proxy, validated for its reliability and its correlation with other measures, and each is, within its operational limits, a real gain: public, comparable across relations and across time, and accumulable into a body of findings. The positivist evaluation is the developed form of explicit assessment, and the paper neither disparages it nor mistakes it for the appraisal of the real value it proxies.

The phenomenological evaluation is the thick description and the hermeneutic assessment of the shared life: the close interpretive characterisation of how a relation stands, conducted in narrative rather than number, and answerable to the lived meaning of the relation rather than to a comparable metric. It is evaluation that resists the structuring the positivist evaluation requires, on the ground that the structuring discards what is to be assessed, and it stands to the positivist evaluation as the interpretation of a text stands to the counting of its words.

These five practices do not agree on what evaluation is, and the disagreement is not to be resolved by the victory of one. They are evaluative phases, in the sense of §2.2: the positivist measures and is silent on what it cannot structure; the phenomenologist interprets and resists the metric; the decision-theorist quantifies uncertainty and the psychologist structures self-report; the biological appraisal grounds them all in a value none of them reaches. A relation is evaluated well when the practices are drawn upon together and none is mistaken for the whole, and most particularly when the structured measures are read as proxies and not as the appraisal of the real.

10.2 The instruments of explicit evaluation: a survey

The positivist evaluation of flourishing and of relationships has produced, over the past half-century, a substantial body of validated instruments, and the cultivation of a shared life that would assess itself explicitly draws upon them. This subsection surveys the principal instruments, classical and contemporary, and then locates them within the framework of the paper, in order to make precise both what they supply and what, by their construction, they cannot reach.

10.2.1 The principal instruments and what they measure

The instruments divide by the construct they target. A first family measures subjective well-being in the hedonic tradition, which construes well-being as life satisfaction together with the balance of positive over negative affect. The Satisfaction with Life Scale assesses the cognitive, evaluative component with five items (Diener 1985); the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule assesses the affective component with twenty (Watson, Clark and Tellegen 1988); and the tradition is gathered in Kahneman, Diener and Schwarz (1999). A second family measures eudaimonic well-being, which construes well-being as the realisation of human potentials rather than the balance of feeling. Ryff’s Scales of Psychological Well-Being operationalise this in six dimensions, autonomy, environmental mastery, personal growth, positive relations with others, purpose in life, and self-acceptance, in forms of eighteen, forty-two, and eighty-four items (Ryff 1989; Ryff and Keyes 1995); self-determination theory supplies measures grounded in the satisfaction of the basic needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness (Ryan and Deci 2000; Deci and Ryan 1985); and the PERMA framework adds engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment to positive emotion (Seligman 2011). A third family measures quality of life through objective and mixed indicators, of which the World Health Organization’s quality-of-life assessment, covering physical, psychological, social, and environmental domains, is representative (WHOQOL 1998). A fourth family, central to the present paper, measures relationship quality: the Dyadic Adjustment Scale assesses the quality of a couple’s relationship with thirty-two items across consensus, satisfaction, cohesion, and affectional expression (Spanier 1976), while the Relationship Assessment Scale offers a brief, seven-item, unidimensional measure of global relationship satisfaction (Hendrick 1988).

Contemporary work has extended this measurement from the individual and the couple to the population and the globe, and from a single index to multidimensional batteries. National and international instruments now assess well-being at the level of whole societies. The World Happiness Report ranks more than one hundred and forty countries on a single life-evaluation question, the Cantril ladder, on which respondents place their lives between the worst (0) and the best (10) possible, averaged over a three-year window from the Gallup World Poll (WHR 2026). The OECD’s Better Life Index assesses well-being across eleven dimensions, among them housing, income, jobs, community, education, environment, health, life satisfaction, safety, and work-life balance, drawn from twenty-four indicators and aggregated under user-assigned weights (OECD BLI). And the Global Flourishing Study, a longitudinal panel of more than two hundred thousand participants across twenty-two countries, measures flourishing across six domains, happiness and life satisfaction, physical and mental health, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, close social relationships, and financial and material stability (VanderWeele et al. 2025; VanderWeele 2017). These instruments are summarised in Table 3.

Table 3. Principal instruments for the quantitative measurement of well-being, quality of life, and relationship quality.

Instrument	Tradition	What it measures	Source
Satisfaction with Life Scale	Hedonic SWB	Cognitive life satisfaction; 5 items, 7-point	Diener (1985)
PANAS	Hedonic SWB	Positive and negative affect; 20 items	Watson et al. (1988)
Ryff Scales (PWB)	Eudaimonic	Six dimensions of positive functioning; 18–84 items	Ryff (1989); Ryff & Keyes (1995)
Self-determination measures	Eudaimonic	Autonomy, competence, relatedness need-satisfaction	Ryan & Deci (2000)
PERMA	Eudaimonic	Positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, accomplishment	Seligman (2011)
WHOQOL	Quality of life	Physical, psychological, social, environmental domains	WHOQOL (1998)
Dyadic Adjustment Scale	Relationship	Consensus, satisfaction, cohesion, affection; 32 items	Spanier (1976)
Relationship Assessment Scale	Relationship	Global relationship satisfaction; 7 items, unidimensional	Hendrick (1988)
World Happiness Report	Macro/national	Single life-evaluation (Cantril ladder); national averages	WHR (2026)
OECD Better Life Index	Macro/national	Eleven dimensions, 24 indicators, user-weighted	OECD BLI
Global Flourishing Study	Eudaimonic/macro	Six domains incl. character, meaning, relationships; longitudinal	VanderWeele et al. (2025)

10.2.2 The instruments within the framework of this paper

The survey makes possible a precise statement of what the existing instruments supply to the assessment of a shared flourishing and what they do not. Located within the framework of this paper, each instrument proxies some component of the normative specification of §8.5, and the location reveals a systematic gap. The hedonic instruments proxy the felt quality of a life, an aspect of the eudaimonic condition, and they proxy it at the level of the aggregate or the mean, which is exactly the level at which the maldistribution of return is invisible (§10.3.3). The eudaimonic instruments proxy the unfolding of each party’s potentials, and so come nearest the eudaimonic condition of the unfolding of each, but they measure the individual’s functioning in isolation and do not assess whether one party’s unfolding is purchased by another’s foreclosure. The relationship instruments proxy the parties’ satisfaction with the relation, again at the level of each party’s report, and a relation may score well on them while distributing its returns unjustly, since a favoured party’s high satisfaction and an habituated party’s adjusted satisfaction together yield an unremarkable aggregate. The macro instruments proxy well-being at the level of populations and are not addressed to the internal justice of a particular shared life at all.

The systematic gap is the condition of justice. No instrument in the survey measures whether the value a party generates returns to that party, nor whether one party is consigned to the low-return tail of §10.3.3; the instruments measure satisfaction, functioning, and conditions, each at the level of the party or the aggregate, and the distribution of return among the parties, relative to their coupling, is not among the constructs they target. This is not a defect of the instruments within their own traditions but a boundary of those traditions, and it is the boundary at which the paper’s quantitative assessment of justice (§10.3) is directed. Table 4 locates the instruments within the framework, by the component of a just eudaimonia each proxies and by the moment of the cycle at which each is principally drawn upon, and it records, in its final column, that the condition of justice is the one no existing family of instruments supplies.

Table 4. The instruments located within the framework of the paper: the component of a just eudaimonia each proxies, the moment of the cycle at which each is drawn upon, and whether it registers the condition of justice.

Family	Component of a just eudaimonia proxied	Cycle moment	Registers justice?
Hedonic SWB	Felt quality of life, at the aggregate or mean	Evaluation	No; mean conceals skew
Eudaimonic	Unfolding of each party’s potentials, in isolation	Cognition, evaluation	Partially; misses foreclosure by the other
Relationship quality	Each party’s satisfaction with the relation	Evaluation, reflection	No; aggregate conceals maldistribution
Quality of life	Objective conditions of a life	Practice, evaluation	No; not addressed to return
Macro/national	Population-level well-being	(Not intra-relational)	No; not addressed to a particular relation
Skew of return (this paper)	Justice: return to each relative to coupling	Evaluation, reflection	Yes; this is its object

The two tables together state the contribution of the paper’s quantitative assessment against the background of the existing instruments. The existing instruments, classical and contemporary, measure satisfaction, functioning, conditions, and their population aggregates, and they do so with a validity and an accumulability the paper does not match and does not attempt to match. What they do not measure, by the construction of the constructs they target, is the distribution of return among the parties of a relation, and so the condition of justice that the prior paper held to be constitutive of eudaimonia. The skew of the return distribution is offered as the structured proxy for exactly this gap: not a replacement for the existing instruments, but an addition orthogonal to them, addressed to the one component of a just eudaimonia that the survey shows no existing family of instruments to register.

10.3 The quantitative assessment of justice

The paper now develops, as the principal contribution of this moment, a quantitative assessment directed at the condition of justice in the normative specification of §8.5. The condition of justice is that the value generated in the shared life circulates and returns to those who generate it, no party being reduced to a source from which value is extracted without return. The assessment of this condition admits of a structured proxy that makes visible a feature the satisfaction measures cannot, the systematic maldistribution of return that constitutes exploitation within an apparently satisfying relation. The assessment is offered under the operational concession throughout: it is a structured proxy for the justice of a relation’s value cycle, operationally valuable and not a measurement of the relation’s real worth.

10.3.1 Expected recyclability

The first quantity is the expected recyclability of value in the relation: the probability that a value generated by one party is met, within the relation, by a response that regenerates value in turn, rather than being absorbed without return. A contribution to a shared life, an act of care, an effort of attention, a piece of the relation’s sustaining labour, may be met in one of three ways. It may be met by a response that itself generates value, an acknowledgement, a reciprocation, a deepening, so that the contribution sets a further turn of the cycle in motion; this is the recyclable case. It may be met by a response that neither regenerates nor depletes, a neutral absorption in which the contribution is received and nothing further follows; this is the lossy case. Or it may be met by a response that depletes, a contribution received and answered with a withdrawal or a demand for more, so that the act of giving leaves the giver with less than before; this is the extractive case. The expected recyclability is the probability, characteristic of the relation, that a contribution falls into the first case rather than the second or the third.

So defined, recyclability is the proxy proper to the condition of the cycle’s life. A cycle sustains itself when the value it regenerates, turn upon turn, at least balances the value it loses to neutral absorption and extractive response; and whether it does so is governed by the recyclability. There is a threshold: above a critical recyclability, contributions regenerate faster than they are lost, and the cycle of value is self-sustaining or growing; below it, contributions are lost faster than they regenerate, and the cycle winds down, its sustaining labour meeting diminishing response until the parties cease to contribute and the relation decays toward the extinction of §13. The condition is recognisable in its phenomenology. A relation of high recyclability is one in which giving feels generative, in which an effort made is met by a response that makes further effort worth making; a relation of low recyclability is one in which giving feels thankless, in which contributions disappear into a partner who receives without regenerating, and in which the giver, over time, contributes less because the contributions return nothing. The decline of recyclability below its threshold is the quantitative form of a relation’s running down, and it is to be distinguished, as the next quantities require, from the maldistribution of return among the parties, which a relation of adequate aggregate recyclability may still exhibit.

10.3.2 Return relative to a coupling-based baseline

The second quantity concerns the distribution of return among the parties, assessed against a baseline set by the coupling of the relation. The intuition the quantity formalises is that the degree of return that is just is not fixed but depends on how deeply the parties are coupled. Coupling, here, is the degree to which the parties’ goods are bound together, the extent to which what benefits one benefits the other and what the relation generates is held in common rather than apportioned. In a loosely coupled relation, say an association of convenience, the parties’ goods are largely separate, and a contribution by one may justly yield most of its return outside the relation, to the contributor’s separate good; little is owed back through the relation, because little was staked in common. In a deeply coupled relation, a shared life fully joined, the parties’ goods are bound together, and a contribution by one is made into a common store from which return is owed back to its generator through the relation; much is owed back, because much was staked in common. The coupling thus sets a baseline expected return: the share of the value a party generates that, given the depth of the coupling, ought to circulate within the relation and return to that party rather than be absorbed elsewhere.

The baseline is what makes the assessment of return a normative and not merely a descriptive matter. To observe that a party’s contributions return little to that party is not yet to find an injustice, for in a loosely coupled relation little return is owed. The injustice is the shortfall of actual return below the baseline the coupling sets: a party in a deeply coupled relation, who has staked a shared life in common and whose contributions therefore ought to return to that party through the relation, but whose actual return falls systematically below that baseline, is a party from whom value is extracted under the very depth of coupling that ought to have returned it. This is the characteristic structure of exploitation within intimacy, and it is invisible to an assessment that does not set the baseline by the coupling: the deeply coupled party who is under-returned has given most and is owed most, and it is precisely the depth of the coupling, read without the baseline, that can be made to look like generosity freely given rather than value unjustly retained. The assessment compares the actual return to each party against the coupling-based baseline, and reads a systematic shortfall as extraction.

10.3.3 Skewness as the statistical fingerprint of injustice

The third quantity is the principal instrument of the assessment. Consider the distribution, across the parties and across time, of value returned relative to value generated. In a just relation, this distribution is, relative to the coupling-based baseline, approximately symmetric: returns are distributed among the generators in proportion to their generation, and no generator is systematically consigned to the low-return tail. In an exploitative relation, the distribution is skewed: value returns disproportionately to one party, while another party, characteristically the party who bears the larger share of the relation’s sustaining labour, generates value that is systematically under-returned and is consigned to the tail of the distribution.

Skewness of the return distribution as the statistical fingerprint of injustice. The injustice of a relation’s value cycle has a statistical signature in the skewness of the distribution of returned value relative to the coupling-based baseline. A just cycle returns value to its generators in proportion to their generation and to the coupling, yielding a distribution that is approximately symmetric about the baseline. An exploitative cycle returns value disproportionately to one party and consigns another systematically to the low-return tail, yielding a distribution skewed away from the under-returned party. The skewness of the return distribution is therefore a structured proxy for the injustice of the cycle, and it makes visible a maldistribution that aggregate measures of satisfaction conceal: a relation may exhibit high mean satisfaction while its return distribution is severely skewed, the high mean being the satisfaction of the over-returned party and the skew the signature of the other’s exploitation. The skewness is read, under the operational concession, as a proxy for injustice and not as its measurement; a symmetric distribution is necessary but not sufficient for justice, and a skewed one is evidence of, and not identical to, exploitation.

The skewness measure has the methodological merit of being orthogonal to the satisfaction measures, and so of detecting what they systematically miss. An aggregate or mean measure of relational satisfaction is raised by the satisfaction of the over-returned party and is insensitive to the maldistribution beneath it; a relation can score well on mean satisfaction precisely because the party it favours is well satisfied, while the party it exploits is consigned to the tail. The skewness reads the shape of the distribution rather than its mean, and so detects the maldistribution the mean conceals. This is the formal counterpart, in the assessment of a relation, of the prior paper’s thesis that a satisfaction purchased by the foreclosure of another is no eudaimonia: the mean satisfaction is high, and the relation is nonetheless unjust, and the injustice is legible in the skew.

The mechanism by which one party comes to occupy the low-return tail deserves to be made concrete, because it is the recurring structure the measure is designed to detect. A relation distributes, among other things, its sustaining labour: the work of attention, of care, of maintaining the household and the relationship itself, the emotional and reproductive labour without which the shared life does not continue. The systematic under-recognition of this labour as labour, and its uncompensated extraction, is documented by Hochschild (1983) and analysed in the economics of care by Folbre (2001). This labour generates value, much of it, since the shared life it sustains is the medium of the relation’s whole flourishing. When this labour is borne disproportionately by one party, and when the value it generates returns disproportionately to the other, the bearer of the sustaining labour is the party consigned to the tail: she generates a large share of the relation’s value and receives a small share of its return, and the gap is the measure of her exploitation. The structure is the more durable for being concealed by its own ideology, in which the sustaining labour is figured as freely given, as natural to the one who bears it, or as no labour at all, so that its under-return is read not as extraction but as the order of things. The skewness measure is constructed to make this structure legible against that concealment: it does not ask whether the bearer of the labour reports satisfaction, which she may, having been habituated to expect no return, but whether the value she generates returns to her, which, in the exploitative case, it does not.

A contrast makes the orthogonality to the mean vivid. Consider two relations that score identically on a measure of mean satisfaction. In the first, both parties contribute to the sustaining labour, the value each generates returns to each in proportion to the coupling, and the return distribution is approximately symmetric; the shared mean satisfaction is the mark of a flourishing that both enjoy. In the second, one party bears almost all the sustaining labour and receives little return, while the other receives most of the relation’s value and bears little of its cost; the over-returned party is highly satisfied, the under-returned party reports a satisfaction depressed but not absent, having adjusted her expectations to her position, and the mean of the two is, by construction, equal to the mean of the first relation. The mean satisfaction does not distinguish these relations; the skewness does. The first has a symmetric return distribution and the second a severely skewed one, and the skew of the second is the signature of an exploitation that the equal means conceal. The measure earns its place exactly here: it sees, in two relations a satisfaction survey would rank together, the difference between a flourishing both parties share and a flourishing one party extracts from the other.

10.3.4 A model for the test, and a hypothesis

The skewness measure presupposes a model, since a distribution of return cannot be assessed for its skewness without a model of how return is generated, against which the observed distribution is compared. The paper indicates the form of the required model without claiming to have validated it, in keeping with the concession. The relation is represented as a network whose nodes are the generators, the two parties and the coupled others, characteristically family, whose value the relation also circulates, and whose edges carry the couplings, the weighted channels along which value propagates from one generator to another. Value generated at a node does not remain there; it propagates along the edges, a portion returning to its origin, a portion passing to coupled others, a portion lost from the network altogether. The propagation is modelled as a branching process on this network, in the manner of the prior series’ formalisation of generative recursion: the mathematics of such propagation, in which quantities at nodes generate quantities at successors and the probability of eventual return is the object of interest, is the classical theory of branching processes (Harris 1963); value at a node produces, in expectation, value at adjacent nodes in proportion to the edge weights, each such product producing further value in turn, and the expected return to a generator is the probability, accumulated over all the paths by which value may travel and return, that value originating at that generator’s node finds its way back to it. The coupling of the relation enters twice, as the topology of the network, which generators are joined to which, and as the weights on the edges, how strongly; and together these fix, for each generator, the coupling-based baseline of §10.3.2, the expected return that the coupling structure would yield were propagation unbiased, neither favouring nor disfavouring any generator beyond what the couplings themselves dictate.

On such a model a hypothesis test becomes statable, and its terms can be given exactly. Let the normalised return to a generator be its actual expected return divided by its coupling-based baseline, so that a value of one is the return the coupling alone would yield, a value above one a generator favoured beyond its coupling, and a value below one a generator disfavoured below it. The null hypothesis is that return is unbiased: that the normalised return is, in expectation, equal across generators, so that the distribution of normalised return is symmetric about its centre and no generator is systematically favoured or disfavoured beyond the coupling. The alternative is that return is systematically biased: that some generator, characteristically the bearer of the sustaining labour, has a normalised return whose expectation lies significantly below the others, so that the distribution is significantly skewed against that generator. The test statistic is the skewness of the observed distribution of normalised return, and the test asks whether an observed skew lies within the range compatible with the null of unbiased propagation or is large enough to reject it in favour of systematic extraction. The paper advances the form of this test, and not a validated instrument. The model requires assumptions that have not here been discharged, on the propagation probabilities, on the independence of the branching, and on the stationarity of the couplings over the period of estimation; the estimation of returns in an actual relation, the assignment of value to acts of care and its tracing through the network, is a substantial empirical problem the paper does not solve; and the result, were it obtained, would be a structured proxy for injustice under the concession, evidence of extraction and not its measurement. The contribution is the form: that the justice of a relation’s value cycle is, in principle and under the concession, a testable hypothesis about the skewness of a return distribution against a coupling-based baseline, and not a matter on which only impression can be brought to bear.

10.4 The operationalisation of return, and a worked illustration

The assessment of justice requires that the abstract notion of the return of value be operationalised into a quantity that could, in principle, be estimated; this subsection sets out the operationalisation and illustrates it on a deliberately simple example, under the operational concession throughout.

The operationalisation proceeds in four steps. First, the contributions of each party over a period are identified: the discrete acts of generation, the pieces of sustaining labour, the cared-for occasions, that each party contributes to the shared life. Second, to each contribution is assigned a value, in a common unit, proxying the value it generates for the shared life; the assignment is the most contestable step, and the concession applies most stringently here, since the value of an act of care is exactly the unsymbolised quantity the proxy cannot reach, and the assignment is an operational stipulation and not a measurement. Third, for each party the return is identified: of the value generated in the shared life, the portion that returns to that party, whether directly or through the relation’s circulation. Fourth, the return to each party is normalised by the coupling-based baseline of §10.3.2, the return the coupling structure would yield under unbiased propagation, to give the normalised return on which the assessment of skewness is conducted.

A worked illustration, with stipulated numbers, shows the quantities in operation; the numbers are illustrative and carry no empirical claim. Consider a deeply coupled relation of two parties, A and B, over a period in which the shared life generates value, in the common unit, of 100. Suppose B bears the larger share of the sustaining labour and generates 60 of this value, while A generates 40. In a just cycle, given the depth of the coupling, the return to each would be approximately proportional to generation: B would receive a return near 60 and A a return near 40, the normalised returns of both being near 1, and the distribution of normalised return approximately symmetric. Suppose instead that the relation returns value disproportionately to A: of the 100 generated, A receives a return of 65 and B a return of 35. The normalised return to A is then 65/40 ≈ 1.6 and to B is 35/60 ≈ 0.58. The distribution of normalised return is now skewed: A sits well above the baseline of 1, and B well below it, in the low-return tail. The skewness of the normalised-return distribution, negative for B, is the statistical fingerprint of §10.3.3, and it is legible here despite the relation’s possibly high mean satisfaction, since A, the over-returned party, may report great contentment, and B, habituated to bearing the sustaining labour for little return, may report a satisfaction only moderately depressed, so that the mean of the two is unremarkable while the skew is severe. The illustration shows the quantities the assessment computes; it does not show that they can be estimated easily in an actual relation, which, as §10.3.4 stated, remains a substantial empirical problem the paper does not solve.

10.5 The evaluation of the unfolding of each

The condition of justice admits the structured proxy just developed. The eudaimonic condition, the unfolding of each party’s own dynamics, is the most resistant to structuring, because it lies nearest the unsymbolised value the proxy cannot reach, and the paper records its resistance rather than overcoming it. Two proxies are nonetheless available and worth stating, under the concession.

The first is the rate at which each party’s intended undertakings are in fact accomplished: the proportion of what a party sets out to be and to do that the party, within the shared life, achieves. The intended undertakings of a party are the projects, the developments, the becomings that party has reason to value and sets out upon, the unfolding of that party’s own dynamics in concrete form: a body of work, a craft, a friendship, a course of study, a way of living the party means to grow into. The proxy tracks, over time, what proportion of these a party accomplishes rather than abandons. A shared life that sustains the unfolding of each is one in which each party’s intended undertakings are, over time, accomplished at a rate that does not systematically decline, the relation making room for and conducing to the development each sets out upon; a shared life that forecloses one party’s unfolding is one in which that party’s intended undertakings are systematically unaccomplished, the development that party set out upon stalling and then ceasing to be attempted. The rate of accomplishment is a coarse proxy, since not every intended undertaking ought to be accomplished and not every abandonment is a foreclosure, but a systematic decline in one party’s rate, sustained over the seasons of a shared life, is a structured signature of an unfolding being foreclosed.

The second proxy refines the first by attributing the shortfall, and it is the more telling of the two. Of a party’s intended undertakings that are not accomplished, the assessment distinguishes those not accomplished for reasons extraneous to the relation, the ordinary attrition of projects that any life suffers, from those not accomplished because the shared life foreclosed them: the undertakings a party set aside, deferred, or abandoned on account of the relation, because the relation’s demands left no room for them, because the sustaining labour the party bore consumed the time and the energy they required, or because the party’s development was tacitly understood, by both parties, to be the one that would yield. It is this attributed shortfall, and not the gross rate of abandonment, that proxies foreclosure. A party may accomplish few of their intended undertakings for reasons that have nothing to do with the relation, and a relation is not thereby indicted; but a party who systematically abandons their undertakings on account of the relation, while the other party’s undertakings proceed, is a party whose unfolding the relation is foreclosing in favour of the other’s. A systematically high proportion of intended undertakings foreclosed on account of the relation, concentrated in one party, is the proxy for the foreclosure of that party’s unfolding, and it couples directly to the assessment of justice. The party whose unfolding the relation forecloses is characteristically the party consigned to the low-return tail of §10.3.3, for the same sustaining labour that returns little value to its bearer is what consumes the room her own undertakings would have required; the two proxies, the skew of return and the concentration of foreclosed undertakings, are two structured signatures of one exploitation, read in the register of value returned and in the register of development foreclosed.

The foreclosure of unfolding as a proxy coupled to the skew of return. The foreclosure of a party’s unfolding admits a structured proxy in the proportion of that party’s intended undertakings that are abandoned on account of the relation, and this proxy is coupled to the skew of the return distribution. The party whose unfolding the relation forecloses is characteristically the party from whom value is extracted without return, so that a concentration of foreclosed undertakings in one party and a skew of the return distribution against the same party are two signatures of a single injustice, the reduction of that party to the sustaining fuel of a relation that returns to it neither value nor the freedom to unfold. The proxies are read under the concession, as structured signatures of an exploitation they evidence and do not measure, and they leave the unsymbolised remainder of each party’s unfolding beyond their reach.

10.6 The poetic condition, and the limit of evaluation

The third condition of the normative specification, that the cycle be sustained as a living and open movement rather than settled into a closed repetition, is the least amenable to structuring, and the paper records only the direction a proxy would take. The condition is that the relation’s recurrences, its habits, its shared signs, its rituals, continue to accumulate an irreducible remainder on each traversal, the positive holonomy of the prior paper, rather than emptying into a repetition that returns nothing new. A proxy would assess whether the relation’s recurrences are generative, whether a shared practice traversed again yields something not contained in its prior traversals, or have become a closed repetition traversed without gain. The paper does not develop a measure of this, and holds that it is at best semi-quantitative, since the accumulation of an irreducible remainder is close to the unsymbolised value that no structuring reaches. The poetic condition marks the limit at which the evaluation of a shared life passes beyond the structured proxy and returns to the basal and unsymbolised appraisal from which it was abstracted.

10.7 The standing of the whole evaluation

The evaluation developed in this section, in all its practices and proxies, stands under the operational concession, and the concession is to be restated as the section closes, because the next moment of the cycle, reflection, turns precisely on it. Every structured measure of this section, the satisfaction scales, the recyclability, the skew of return, the rate and attribution of accomplished undertakings, is a structured proxy for a value it does not reach, operationally valuable and incomplete. The measures are public where the basal appraisal is private, comparable where it is singular, accumulable where it is evanescent, and these are real gains that warrant the measures’ use. The measures are, at the same time, structured symbolisations of an appraisal whose object is unsymbolised, and they discard exactly the remainder in which the relation’s real value consists. To use them is to accept this exchange knowingly, for the operational gain it brings; to mistake them for the appraisal of the real value is the error the next moment of the cycle, reflection, exists to correct.

11. Reflection: The Re-examination of the Evaluation

The cycle turns to reflection, the re-examination of the evaluation and of the cognition that framed it. The task of this moment is to hold the structured results of evaluation against the value they proxy and do not reach, and so to prevent the structured measure from being mistaken for the appraisal of the real. The moment draws upon the normative and the virtue-theoretic frameworks, which return here to reassert what the measures cannot contain, and upon the phenomenological framework, which reasserts the lived meaning the structuring discarded. It is the moment at which the operational concession is most stringently enforced, and the moment that prevents the evaluation of §10 from hardening into a possessed truth about the relation.

11.1 The blindness of the measures, and forged flourishing

The first work of reflection is to recall what the measures cannot register. A high score on a satisfaction scale is compatible with a relation that is unjust, since the mean satisfaction is raised by the contentment of a favoured party and is insensitive to the maldistribution beneath it (§10.3.3); it is compatible with a relation that forecloses one party’s unfolding, since the foreclosed party may report satisfaction with a life it has been habituated to expect nothing more from; and it is compatible with a relation whose cycle has settled into a closed repetition that returns nothing new, since the comfort of the familiar registers as satisfaction. A relation may, in short, score well and be a forged flourishing: a satisfaction that has the measurable marks of the good without its reality, in the manner the prior paper analysed as the forged holonomy, the closed cycle that wears the appearance of the spiral.

Measured satisfaction is compatible with forged flourishing. A high measured satisfaction is necessary neither for nor sufficient for a just eudaimonia. It is compatible with injustice, since an aggregate measure is insensitive to the skew of return; with the foreclosure of a party’s unfolding, since a foreclosed party may report contentment with a diminished expectation; and with a closed and depleting repetition, since familiarity registers as satisfaction. The measured satisfaction is therefore a structured proxy that a forged flourishing can satisfy, and the work of reflection is to read the measures against the conditions they cannot register, the skew of return, the foreclosure of unfolding, and the closure of the cycle, and so to distinguish a measured satisfaction that marks a real flourishing from one that marks a forged one.

This is the point at which the orthogonal instruments of §10 earn their place. The satisfaction measure alone cannot distinguish the real flourishing from the forged, since both score well on it. The skew of return and the concentration of foreclosed undertakings can distinguish them, since the forged flourishing, however high its mean satisfaction, exhibits the skew and the foreclosure that the real flourishing does not. Reflection is the moment at which the satisfaction measure is read against these orthogonal proxies, and a high satisfaction accompanied by a severe skew is recognised for what it is, the contentment of the favoured party in an unjust relation.

11.2 The return of the question of justice

The second work of reflection is to reassert the question of justice, which the aggregate measures structurally suppress. An evaluation conducted in means and totals asks how satisfying the relation is, and does not ask to whom its satisfactions accrue and at whose cost. Reflection reasserts the second question. It reads the skew of the return distribution as evidence of who is consigned to the low-return tail; it reads the concentration of foreclosed undertakings as evidence of whose unfolding the relation forecloses; and it identifies, where these signatures coincide, the party reduced to the sustaining fuel of the relation, the party who generates value that does not return and whose own unfolding is set aside on account of a shared life that returns to it neither. The question of justice is the question the prior paper held to be constitutive of eudaimonia rather than additional to it, and reflection is the moment at which it is brought to bear on the results of evaluation, against the tendency of the aggregate measures to suppress it.

11.3 The evaluation may not be possessed as the truth of the relation

The third work of reflection is the most consequential, and it is the point at which the operational concession bears most stringently. The structured evaluation of a relation, once conducted, presents a standing temptation: to be taken as the truth of the relation, the authoritative account of how things stand, against which the parties’ own appraisals are to be corrected. To yield to this temptation is to commit, in the register of evaluation, the error the prior paper identified as the cardinal one.

The evaluation may not be possessed as the truth of the relation. The structured evaluation of a relation is an operationally warranted proxy, and it may not be possessed as the truth of the relation. To take the measure as the truth, as the authoritative account against which the parties’ own appraisals are to be corrected, is to install the evaluation in the place of the barred Other: to treat a structured proxy as the standpoint from which the real value of the relation is known, which is the standpoint the series has established does not exist. The error repeats, in the register of evaluation, the cardinal error of the prior paper, the private certainty of one’s own goodness, now as the certainty conferred by a measure; and it is the same occupation of the place of the Other, the same settling of an open and unsymbolised appraisal into a possessed and closed determination. The authority of the evaluation is operational, defeasible, and answerable to the basal appraisal it proxies; it is an instrument of the relation’s continued appraisal of itself, and not a verdict upon the relation delivered from outside it. The measure is to be used and not believed, consulted and not obeyed, held as a proxy and never possessed as the truth.

This is the deepest cut of the operational concession. The concession permitted the structured measure, for its operational gain, on the understanding that it is a proxy for a value it does not reach. Reflection enforces the understanding by refusing the measure the authority of truth: the moment the evaluation is possessed as the truth of the relation, the concession is broken, and the proxy that was admitted as an instrument becomes a new metalanguage, a structured idol installed in the place the series has kept empty. The measure that said a relation was well is not the relation’s being well, and the measure that said it was ill is not the relation’s being ill; both are proxies, to be weighed in the continued appraisal that no measure concludes. Reflection keeps the place of the Other empty against the measure’s claim to fill it, and so returns the evaluation to its standing as an instrument of a self-appraisal that remains, in the end, unsymbolised and unconcluded.

11.4 Reflection as the safeguard of the cycle

The three works of reflection together safeguard the cycle against the characteristic failures of its evaluative moment. Reading the measures against forged flourishing safeguards against the complacency of a high score; reasserting the question of justice safeguards against the suppression of cost by aggregate; and refusing the measure the authority of truth safeguards against the installation of a structured idol in the place of the real. Reflection is, in this respect, the moment at which the cycle protects itself from its own instruments, and it prepares the moment of re-cognition by returning, corrected and chastened, to the cognition with which the cycle began. The relation that has reflected does not carry forward its measures as truths; it carries forward a revised and re-opened appraisal, in which the measures have been weighed and found to be proxies, and the question of how things really stand between the two has been returned to the unsymbolised register in which it is finally settled, and never finally settled. The cycle now turns to re-cognition, in which this revised appraisal becomes the cognition of a further turn.

12. Re-cognition: The Closing and Reopening of the Turn

The cycle turns to re-cognition, the moment at which the revised and reopened appraisal carried out of reflection becomes the cognition with which a further turn begins. The task of this moment is the least like a discrete operation and the most like a passage: it is the carrying forward of what the turn has accumulated into the cognition of the next, and it is the point at which the lifecycle is seen to be a spiral rather than a circle. The moment is brief to state and consequential in what it establishes about the cycle as a whole.

12.1 Re-cognition is not a return to the initial cognition

The cognition with which a turn of the cycle ends is not the cognition with which it began. The turn has passed through practice, through the evaluation of what the practice generated, and through the reflection that read the evaluation against the value it could not reach; and the cognition that emerges carries the accumulated difference. What the parties take their flourishing to consist in, at the close of a turn, has been altered by the turn: deepened where the turn ascended, narrowed where it declined, and in either case not identical to the cognition that opened it. Re-cognition is this altered cognition, and the lifecycle is therefore not a circle that returns to its starting point but a spiral that returns to the starting configuration bearing the phase the turn accumulated.

Re-cognition carries the holonomy of the turn. The cognition with which a turn of the cycle closes differs from the cognition with which it opened by the phase the turn has accumulated, and re-cognition is the carrying of this difference into the next turn. The lifecycle is accordingly a spiral and not a circle: it returns to the moment of cognition, but to a cognition altered by the turn, and the accumulated alteration over many turns is the long ascent or the long decline of a shared life. A turn that ascends returns a deepened cognition of the good, enriched by what the turn generated and corrected by what reflection found; a turn that declines returns a narrowed cognition, impoverished by what the turn depleted; and a turn traversed without ascent or decline returns the cognition unchanged, the closed circle of a repetition that goes round without rising. Re-cognition is the moment at which the phase of the turn is registered in the cognition of the next, and through which the holonomy of the lifecycle accumulates across the history of a relation.

12.2 The accumulation across the time of a relation

The registration of each turn’s phase in the cognition of the next is the mechanism by which a shared life rises or declines across its history. A relation is many nested turns (§6.3), and the re-cognition that closes each turn sets the cognition of the next, so that the phases compound: a relation whose turns severally ascend compounds its ascent, its cognition of the good deepening turn upon turn, its practice enriching, its parties developing through the shared life into more than they were; a relation whose turns severally decline compounds its decline, however intact its outward form. The passage from courtship through marriage into the later years is, on this account, the compounding of the phases of its turns, and the difference between a shared life that has flourished across its arc and one that has declined across it is the accumulated holonomy of its many turns, registered at each re-cognition and carried into each successive cognition.

This is the point at which the lifecycle’s relation to the time of a real shared life is most concrete. The marriage at which a relation arrives is not the completion of the cycle but a re-cognition of unusual depth, a turn at which the cognition of the good is reconceived under the altered conditions of a life now formally and practically joined; and the later years are the compounding of the turns that follow it. The cognition of flourishing is, across this arc, never fixed and never finally attained, but reconceived at each re-cognition in the light of what the prior turns have made of the parties and of their shared life. The good of a shared life is, in this respect, not a destination the cycle approaches but the very substance of its turning, generated and reconceived at each turn and accumulated, for better or worse, across them all.

12.3 The openness of the spiral

The spiral does not close. Re-cognition opens a further turn, and there is no final re-cognition at which the cognition of the good is fixed once and for all and the cycle comes to rest in a completed understanding. To suppose such a final re-cognition would be to suppose a state of achieved and possessed flourishing, the closed circle of a cognition that no longer revises, which is, by the argument of §6.2, not the completion of the relation but its cessation. The good of a shared life is unguaranteeable and processual, in the sense the prior paper established, and its cognition is correspondingly unfinished: reconceived at each turn, never possessed as a final understanding, and carried forward into a further turn that the cycle, so long as the relation lives, continues to open. Re-cognition is therefore not the cycle’s conclusion but its renewal, and the lifecycle, considered as a whole, is an open spiral that the relation sustains by continuing to turn. The paper now considers this whole, in the three regimes its turning may assume.

13. The Good, the Catastrophic, and the Extinguished Cycle

The paper has traversed the moments of a single turn. It now considers the cycle as a whole, in the regimes its turning may assume across the history of a relation. Three regimes are distinguished, by the conjunction of two questions: whether the cycle persists, and, if it persists, what sign of phase it accumulates. The two questions are not of the same order. The first concerns the existence of the relation, the second its character; and the regimes they jointly define are the flourishing spiral, the catastrophic cycle, and extinction.

13.1 Persistence and phase as two questions

The dynamical vocabulary of §4 distinguishes two features of a cyclic system that bear on a relation. The first is whether the system sustains its cyclic movement at all, or decays toward the terminal rest of a fixed point. The second, for a system that does sustain its movement, is the phase it accumulates around a turn, positive, vanishing, or negative. These are independent: a cycle may persist with a positive phase, persist with a negative phase, or fail to persist; and the three regimes of a relation are the three outcomes of this pair of questions, the fourth combination, a non-persisting cycle with a phase, being empty, since a cycle that does not persist accumulates no phase.

Three regimes from two questions. The regime of a relation is fixed by two independent questions: whether its cycle persists, and, if it persists, what sign of phase it accumulates over a turn. A persisting cycle of positive phase is a flourishing spiral, which ascends as it turns. A persisting cycle of negative phase is a catastrophic cycle, which persists while depleting, descending as it turns. A cycle that does not persist is extinction, the decay of the relation’s movement toward the terminal rest in which value is no longer generated or returned. The question of persistence is prior to the question of phase, since a cycle that does not persist has no phase; the gravest condition of a relation is therefore not the negative phase but the failure of persistence, and the catastrophic cycle, for all its depletion, is a living relation in a way that extinction is not.

13.2 The flourishing spiral

The flourishing spiral is the regime of the good cycle. Its value is generated and returned, its recyclability sustains the cycle above the threshold of decay, its return distribution is, relative to the coupling, approximately symmetric, and the unfolding of each party is sustained rather than foreclosed. Across its turns it accumulates a positive phase: the parties’ cognition of the good deepens, their practice enriches, and they develop, through the shared life, into more than they were. The flourishing spiral is the regime the normative specification of §8.5 describes, and it is, by the argument to follow, necessarily a just regime: the symmetry of its return distribution is the condition of its positive phase, and a relation whose return is severely skewed cannot sustain the ascent of all its parties, since the party consigned to the tail is depleted rather than developed by the turning.

13.3 The catastrophic cycle

The catastrophic cycle is the regime of the bad cycle that nonetheless persists. Its movement is sustained, its form is intact, and it may score well on aggregate satisfaction; but it accumulates a negative phase, depleting its parties, or one of them, turn upon turn. This is the regime in which the orthogonal instruments of §10 do their characteristic work, for it is the regime a satisfaction measure cannot distinguish from the flourishing spiral, both persisting and both capable of a high mean, while the skew of return and the concentration of foreclosed undertakings distinguish them, the catastrophic cycle exhibiting the skew and the foreclosure that the flourishing spiral does not. The catastrophic cycle is the marriage that endures and depletes, the form maintained while one party, or both, is consumed in the maintaining; and it is the regime in which the injustice of a relation is most consequential, since its persistence prolongs the extraction that its intact form conceals.

13.4 Extinction

Extinction is the regime in which the cycle ceases to turn. Value is no longer generated, circulated, or returned; the parties no longer revise their sense of one another; practice halts; and the relation decays toward the terminal rest in which it is a relation no longer. Extinction is not a benign equilibrium, a relation at peaceful rest, but the cessation of the activity by which the relation existed (§6.2). It is the gravest regime in the order of existence, since it is the end of the relation as such, though it is not the gravest in the order of justice, since a catastrophic cycle may inflict, in its persistence, a depletion that an extinction would have ended. The relation between extinction and the catastrophic cycle is, in this respect, genuinely tragic: the persistence that distinguishes the catastrophic cycle from extinction is also the persistence of its extraction, and the cessation that would end the extraction is also the end of the relation.

13.5 Bifurcation between the regimes

The passage of a relation between these regimes need not be gradual. As the conditions of a relation drift, its slowly varying parameters in the sense of §4.5, its behaviour may change smoothly through a range and then, at a critical value, change in kind: a flourishing spiral may, as its recyclability declines past a threshold, lose the persistence of its ascent and tip into a catastrophic cycle or toward extinction; a catastrophic cycle may, as its depletion exhausts the conditions of its persistence, tip into extinction; and a relation near a threshold may be carried across it by a small further change in its sustaining conditions. This is the dynamical content of an observation common to the experience of relations, that their decline is often not gradual but punctuated, a long apparent stability followed by a rapid passage into a different regime. The language of bifurcation renders this: the difference between regimes is a difference in kind, and a relation may be carried from one to another by a change in degree that crosses a critical value, so that a small neglect, compounded, may tip a relation across a threshold from which its return is not symmetric to its approach.

13.6 Justice as the internal condition of the good cycle

The section closes by establishing the thesis toward which the regimes have been arranged: that justice is not an external constraint upon the flourishing spiral but the internal condition of its persistence with positive phase.

Justice is the internal condition of the flourishing spiral. The flourishing spiral, the persisting cycle of positive phase, is necessarily just, and the catastrophic cycle is the form that injustice takes in a persisting relation. A cycle whose return distribution is severely skewed cannot accumulate a positive phase for all its parties, since the party consigned to the low-return tail is depleted, not developed, by the turning; its phase, for that party, is negative, and the cycle is for that party catastrophic however it appears in the aggregate. A positive phase for all the parties therefore requires a return distribution that is not severely skewed, which is to say it requires the condition of justice. Justice is, accordingly, not a constraint added to the flourishing of a relation from outside it, but the internal condition under which a cycle can ascend for all its parties rather than for some at the cost of others. This is the dynamical form of the prior paper’s thesis that justice constitutes rather than constrains eudaimonia, and the skew of the return distribution (§10.3.3) is its statistical signature: a relation is a flourishing spiral only if its return is, relative to its coupling, approximately symmetric, and a severely skewed return is the signature of a catastrophic cycle wearing, in the aggregate, the appearance of a spiral.

The three regimes, so arranged, gather the results of the paper into a single dynamical picture. A relation lives by the persistence of its cycle and flourishes by the positive phase of its turning, and it flourishes for all its parties only if its turning is just. The instruments of evaluation proxy these features, the recyclability proxying persistence, the skew proxying the justice on which the positive phase depends, and the satisfaction measures proxying an aggregate that conceals the distinction the skew reveals; and the moments of the cycle cultivate them, the practice forming the habits that sustain the turning, the reflection guarding against the forged appearance of a spiral, and the re-cognition carrying the phase of each turn into the next. The paper now concludes, in the plural conclusions its method requires.

14. A Longitudinal Case: One Shared Life through the Cycle

The machinery the paper has developed is abstract, and a foundational treatment is strengthened by an extended case in which the abstractions are seen to operate together on a single shared life across its course. This section supplies such a case. The couple is constructed and anonymous, a composite and not a record, and the numbers, where they appear, are stipulated and illustrative under the operational concession (§2.3); the case claims no empirical authority and serves only to display the machinery in concerted operation. The two parties are called A and B throughout. The case is organised by the seasons of a shared life, and within each season the moments of the cycle and the frameworks drawn upon are traced, so that the reader may see the matrix of §7 instantiated in a particular life and the regimes of §13 approached and, at the last, chosen between.

14.1 Courtship: the first turns of the cycle

In the first season the cycle turns quickly and its turns are small. A and B, meeting, begin to cognise what a shared life between them might be: at first in the lived and largely unsymbolised register of the phenomenological framework (§8.3), the felt sense that there is something here, an apprehension preceding its articulation; then, as the season advances, in the normative register, as each begins to apprehend what they would value in a life shared with the other, and whether the other’s unfolding and their own can be sustained together. The practice of this season is light, the cultivation of small recurrences, a way of spending time, a rhythm of contact, the first habits of attention, and the virtue-theoretic framework (§9.1) is already in operation, though the dispositions it forms are as yet shallow, the hexis not yet set. Evaluation is continuous and almost wholly basal (§5), each appraising, beneath reflection, whether the relation is rising; explicit evaluation is rare and informal. The recyclability of value (§10.3.1) is high, since in this season contributions are met by regenerating responses readily, and the cycle turns with a positive phase, each turn returning to the parties a deepened cognition of the good of the relation. The holonomy of the season is strongly positive: the parties end it developed by it, knowing more of what they value and of one another, the spiral ascending.

14.2 The forming of a joined life: marriage and its re-cognition

The passage to a joined life is a re-cognition of unusual depth (§12.1). The cognition of the good is reconceived under altered conditions, the relation now formally and practically joined, the couple’s goods now deeply coupled in the sense of §10.3.2, so that much of the value each generates is now owed back through the relation. The practice of this season is the formation of the household and its manner, the habitus of §9.1, and it is here that the cultivation-not-legislation constraint (§9.2) first bears weight: as the couple forms the recurring practices of a joined life, the division of its sustaining labour, the rhythms of its days, the question arises, at first unremarked, whether these practices are jointly authored and revisable or are settling, by the gradual mechanism of habituation (§9.1), into a regime one administers and the other keeps. In the case as constructed, the season is one of high mean satisfaction: both parties report contentment, the relation is manifestly persisting, and an explicit evaluation by the instruments of §10.2 would record a flourishing relation.

Beneath the high mean, however, a skew is beginning to form. B has assumed the larger share of the sustaining labour, and the value this labour generates returns disproportionately to A, whose own undertakings proceed while B’s are increasingly deferred. The skew of the return distribution (§10.3.3) is, in this season, slight, and it is concealed by the high mean satisfaction and by the season’s genuine warmth; the basal appraisal of both parties registers the relation as good, B not yet having symbolised the accumulating deferral of B’s own unfolding. This is the season in which the divergence between the genuine and the forged spiral (§13.6) originates, unremarked, in a distribution whose skew is not yet large enough to disturb the felt warmth that conceals it.

14.3 The middle years: the bifurcation approached

In the middle years the slight skew, compounded turn upon turn, grows. The mechanism is the one the paper has described: each turn of the cycle returns to A a developed cognition and an accomplished undertaking, and to B a deferred undertaking and a labour unreturned, and the re-cognition that closes each turn (§12.2) carries this asymmetry forward, so that the cognition of the good with which each successive turn begins is, for A, enriched, and for B, narrowed. The holonomy of the cycle has become, in the terms of §13.6, positive for A and negative for B: the same cycle that develops A depletes B, and the relation is, for B, already a catastrophic cycle (§13.3) wearing, in the aggregate, the appearance of a flourishing spiral.

This is the season in which the orthogonal measures of the paper do their work. The mean satisfaction remains moderately high, raised by A’s contentment and by B’s still-only-partially-symbolised appraisal; an evaluation by satisfaction alone would not register the developing injustice. The skew of the return distribution, by contrast, is now pronounced, B’s normalised return having fallen well below the baseline the deep coupling sets (§10.4), and the concentration of foreclosed undertakings in B (§10.5) is marked. The two orthogonal signatures coincide on B, identifying B as the party consigned to the low-return tail and the party whose unfolding the relation forecloses, the two faces of the single injustice the paper has described. The relation is approaching a bifurcation (§13.5): the slight skew, compounded, has brought it near a threshold at which its regime may change in kind.

14.4 The turning point: reflection and the choice of regime

The bifurcation is reached at a moment of reflection (§11). In the case as constructed, B’s appraisal at last symbolises what the basal register has long registered: that B’s undertakings have been systematically foreclosed and B’s labour systematically unreturned, that the relation has been, for B, a catastrophic cycle. This symbolisation is the work of reflection in its sharpest form, the reading of the relation’s measured and felt satisfaction against the skew and the foreclosure the satisfaction concealed (§11.1), and the reassertion of the question of justice that the high mean had suppressed (§11.2). The relation now stands at the bifurcation, and the paper’s three regimes (§13) are the three paths from it.

The first path is the continuation of the catastrophic cycle: the skew is acknowledged and not corrected, B’s symbolised grievance is met by A’s reassertion of the existing distribution, perhaps by the legislation of the existing habits as the rule of the relation (§9.2), and the cycle persists in its depleting form, B now depleted knowingly rather than unawares. The second path is extinction (§13.4): the skew is acknowledged and found uncorrectable, and the cycle ceases to turn, the relation decaying toward the terminal rest in which it is a relation no longer. The third path is the restoration of a flourishing spiral: the skew is acknowledged and corrected, the sustaining labour redistributed, B’s foreclosed undertakings reopened, the coupling-based return restored toward symmetry, and the cycle resumes a turning that ascends for both. The third path is the just one, not because it preserves the relation, which the first also does, nor because it ends the extraction, which the second also does, but because it restores the condition under which the cycle can ascend for both parties rather than for one at the cost of the other (§13.6). The case does not stipulate which path is taken, since the paper has argued that the good of a shared life is unguaranteeable (§12.3) and no machinery determines the choice; it displays the bifurcation and the three regimes between which the reflection of this season must choose.

14.5 What the case displays

The case displays the machinery of the paper in concerted operation: the cycle turning through its moments and seasons (§6), the frameworks drawn upon at each moment (§7), the basal and explicit registers of appraisal (§5), the divergence of the mean from the distribution and the consequent divergence of the genuine from the forged spiral (§10.3.3, §13.6), the compounding of holonomy across turns (§12.2), the coincidence of the skew of return with the foreclosure of unfolding as two signatures of one injustice (§10.5), and the bifurcation at which a relation’s regime is chosen. It displays, above all, the paper’s central practical claim: that a relation may be, for one of its parties, a catastrophic cycle while presenting to measurement and even to the parties’ own unreflective appraisal as a flourishing one, and that the work of reflection is to read the satisfaction against the distribution it conceals, so that the injustice may be symbolised and the bifurcation reached at which it may, though it need not, be corrected. The case is constructed and proves nothing; it shows what the paper’s machinery, applied to a shared life, makes visible, and it is offered as the concrete display of an apparatus whose general statement the preceding sections supply.

15. The Cross-Cultural Variation of Flourishing and Its Practice

The account developed so far has proceeded at a level of generality that abstracts from the cultural particularity of the shared lives it concerns, and this abstraction, useful for the statement of structure, conceals a variation that a foundational treatment must address. The conception of flourishing, the practices through which a shared life is cultivated, the standards by which it is evaluated, and the very methods by which it is studied vary across cultures, and the variation is not noise around a universal mean but a systematic difference in what flourishing is taken to be and how it is pursued. This section addresses three strands of this variation: the cross-cultural variation in the conception of happiness and flourishing, the variation across scholarly traditions in the method by which flourishing is studied, and the variation across cultures in the practices of marriage and family. It then locates the variation within the lifecycle, treating each moment of the cycle as the site of a culturally specific cognition and practice. Before the strands are taken up, the basis on which cultures are selected and compared is stated, so that the comparison proceeds by a method rather than by an unexamined choice of cases. The section draws throughout on the operational concession and on the framework of symmetry-broken phases (§2.2), of which the cultural variation is a further and consequential instance.

15.1 The basis of the comparison: method and case selection

A comparison across cultures requires a principled basis for the selection of the cultures compared and for the dimensions along which they are compared, on pain of mistaking an arbitrary choice of cases for a representative sample of human variation. The comparative method in the social sciences supplies two complementary logics of case selection, both descending from Mill’s methods of agreement and difference (Mill 1843) and systematised for social inquiry by Przeworski and Teune (1970). The most-similar-systems design selects cases alike in most respects and differing in the variable of interest, so that a difference in outcome may be attributed to that variable; the most-different-systems design selects cases differing in most respects, so that a shared outcome may be attributed to the few factors they hold in common (Lijphart 1971). The two designs are the principal means of managing the comparison of a small number of complex cases.

The cultures to be compared are located on an empirically derived map of cultural variation, so that their selection may be assessed for coverage and representativeness rather than asserted. The most developed such map is the one derived by Inglehart and Welzel from the World Values Survey, which resolves cross-national variation into two principal dimensions, a dimension from traditional to secular-rational values and a dimension from survival to self-expression values, and which locates national cultures in clusters shaped by their religious and historical heritage, among them the Protestant European, the Catholic European, the English-speaking, the Confucian or East Asian, the Latin American, the Orthodox, the South Asian, and the African-Islamic (Inglehart and Welzel 2005). Comparable coordinate systems are supplied by Hofstede’s dimensions of national culture, of which the individualism-collectivism dimension is the one most pertinent here (Hofstede 2001), and by Schwartz’s cultural value orientations (Schwartz 2006). These maps make the selection of cases assessable: a selection covers the variation well to the extent that it spans the principal clusters, and a case represents its cluster to the extent that it is typical of it.

The present treatment selects its cases on this basis, and states the selection openly. Four cultures are taken as the cases of detailed analysis, China, Japan, Continental Europe, and the United States, and the selection is a combination of the two comparative designs. China and Japan are two cases within the East Asian, broadly Confucian cluster, alike in their interdependent heritage and differing in its present configuration, and Continental Europe and the United States are two cases within the Western cluster, alike in their independent heritage and differing in their institutional and methodological traditions; the within-cluster pairs constitute most-similar comparisons, and the between-cluster contrast of the Western with the East Asian pair constitutes a most-different comparison. The selection is, deliberately, weighted toward the cultures the present writer is best placed to treat with care, and it is for that reason a selection of cases for detailed analysis and not a claim to global coverage. Its limitation is therefore stated plainly: the four cases span the principal axis of individualism and interdependence but do not span the full cultural map, and several major clusters, the South Asian, the African-Islamic, the Latin American, and the Orthodox, enter the treatment only as points of contrast and not as cases of detailed analysis. Where they bear on the argument they are noted, in particular the South Asian institution of arranged marriage and the joint family, the Latin American combination of collectivism with an actively expressed positive emotionality that differs from the East Asian emotional balance, and the Islamic configuration of kinship obligation; but the detailed analysis remains that of the four core cases, and the conclusions are offered with the representativeness this selection affords and no more.

15.2 The cross-cultural variation in the conception of flourishing

The conception of happiness itself varies across cultures, and the principal axis of variation is the one between an independent and an interdependent construal of the self and its flourishing. In the cultural-psychological tradition, the European-American model of the self is independent, defined in terms of individual attributes, autonomy, and the pursuit of personal goals, while the East Asian model is interdependent, defined in terms of social relationships and the adjustment of the self to a relational whole (Markus and Kitayama 1991). Happiness is construed accordingly. In North American contexts, happiness tends to be defined in terms of personal achievement, and individuals are motivated to maximise positive affect and to seek happiness through autonomous agency; in East Asian contexts, happiness tends to be defined in terms of interpersonal connectedness and the balance of the self with others (Uchida, Norasakkunkit and Kitayama 2004). The difference extends to the structure of emotional experience: where the North American construal seeks to maximise positive over negative affect, the East Asian construal tends toward a dialectical balance in which positive and negative affect are held together rather than the former maximised, and in which happiness is understood as fraught with potential social consequence rather than as an unalloyed good to be pursued (Uchida and Kitayama 2009). The interdependent construal has been developed into a distinct conception of interdependent happiness, predicated on interpersonal harmony, quiescence, and ordinariness rather than on personal high arousal (Hitokoto and Uchida 2015).

This variation bears directly on the conception of flourishing the present series has developed, and the bearing is instructive rather than merely cautionary. The series has construed flourishing as the unfolding of each party’s own dynamics, sustained within a shared life whose value circulates and returns; the conception is neither purely independent, since the unfolding is sustained within and returns to a relation, nor purely interdependent, since it is the unfolding of each that is at issue and not the submersion of each in a relational whole. The conception occupies, deliberately, a position between the independent and interdependent construals, and the cross-cultural evidence locates it: it is a conception for which the relation is the medium of each party’s development and the development is genuinely of each, which is neither the autonomous self-development of the independent model nor the relational adjustment of the interdependent one, but a structure in which the two are made compatible by the requirement that the relation return to each what each gives. The cultural variation is, in the terms of §2.2, a set of symmetry-broken phases of the cognition of flourishing, the independent and interdependent construals being two such phases, and the series’ conception an attempt to articulate a structure of which both are partial determinations.

15.3 The comparative variation in the method of study

A second variation, less often remarked in connection with the first but consequential for a foundational treatment, is the variation across scholarly traditions in the method by which flourishing and the shared life are studied. The methodological division between an explanatory, quantitative, positivist social science and an interpretive, qualitative, hermeneutic one is itself culturally and geographically patterned, and the pattern bears on the framework-divide of §2.2.

The interpretive tradition originates in the nineteenth-century German distinction between the natural and the human sciences, the Naturwissenschaften and the Geisteswissenschaften, and in the corresponding distinction between explanation, Erklären, the method of the natural sciences, and understanding, Verstehen, the method of the human sciences, drawn by Droysen and Dilthey and developed by Weber (Dilthey 1883; Weber 1904). On this tradition, the social world is constituted by the meanings its participants give it, and its study requires the interpretive recovery of those meanings, the production of what Geertz called thick description, which penetrates the webs of significance within which human action is intelligible rather than reducing action to observable behaviour (Geertz 1973). The positivist tradition, by contrast, holds that the social world is continuous with the natural, that it is to be studied by the observation and measurement of behaviour and the discovery of regularities, and that what cannot be brought to measurement cannot be known. The two traditions are unevenly distributed: the interpretive and hermeneutic tradition has been more central to Continental European social thought, while the positivist and quantitative tradition has been more dominant in American social science, a difference of scholarly culture that patterns how flourishing is studied on either side.

This methodological variation is, for the present paper, the framework-divide of §2.2 appearing at the level of scholarly culture rather than of the individual investigator. The positivist framework and the phenomenological-hermeneutic framework, which the paper has treated as symmetry-broken phases of the study of flourishing, are not merely options available to any investigator but traditions institutionalised in different scholarly cultures, the one measuring what can be measured and the other interpreting what is meant. The recognition has a consequence for the paper’s method. The polyphonic refusal to subordinate one framework to another (§2.2) is, read in this light, a refusal to subordinate one scholarly culture’s method to another’s, and the operational concession, which admits the structured measure while denying it the status of the real, is a way of drawing on the positivist tradition’s instruments without adopting its claim that what those instruments measure exhausts what flourishing is. The paper’s stance toward the methodological divide is the stance the cultural variation recommends: that the explanatory and the interpretive methods are partial determinations of the study of a flourishing that neither exhausts, and that a foundational treatment must draw on both without resolving their difference by the victory of one.

15.4 The cross-cultural variation in the practices of marriage and family

A third variation concerns the practices of marriage and family through which a shared life is cultivated, and it is the variation most directly pertinent to a praxis of intimate flourishing. The conception of what a marriage is, what a family is, and what the parties owe one another varies across cultures along several axes, of which three are salient.

The first axis concerns the meaning and basis of marriage. A long sociological account traces, in the Euro-American context, a transition from the institutional marriage, founded on social obligation and the fulfilment of prescribed roles, through the companionate marriage of the mid-twentieth century, founded on the personal ties of affection and companionship, to the individualised marriage of the present, founded on personal choice and the self-development of the partners (Cherlin 2004). The transition is held to have weakened the social norms that once defined the partners’ behaviour, a process termed the deinstitutionalisation of marriage, though its extent varies by social class and the institution retains, especially among the more educated, a central place (Cherlin 2020). The individualised marriage, in which the partners actively select one another, negotiate their commitment, and pursue self-development within the relation, is the form the European sociology of intimacy has described as the normal chaos of love and the transformation of intimacy (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1995; Giddens 1992).

The second axis concerns the relation of the couple to the wider family. In the more individualist Euro-American contexts, the married couple tends to be the primary unit, relatively detached from the extended family; in the more collectivist East and Southeast Asian contexts, the couple is embedded in an extended family to which it owes ongoing obligations, and the marriage is as much a relation between families as between individuals. The obligation of adult children to their parents, filial piety, is a central organising norm of the East Asian family, and recent work distinguishes a reciprocal filial piety, founded on affection and a lasting positive bond, from an authoritarian filial piety, founded on obedience to social obligation, the former proving more nearly universal across cultures and the latter more culturally specific (Yeh et al. 2013). The intergenerational solidarity of families, the structure of obligation and support across generations, is itself a subject of formal comparative study (Bengtson and Roberts 1991), and the autonomy-relatedness relation, on which the independent and interdependent construals divide, has been argued to admit a synthesis in which autonomy and relatedness are not opposed but jointly developed, a model of particular relevance to families in modernising societies (Kağıtçıbaşı 2005).

The third axis concerns the direction and pace of change. The family systems of East Asia have been described as at a crossroads, meeting Western individualism, modernity, and changing gender roles against a background of persisting traditional obligation, so that the contemporary East Asian family combines elements of the interdependent and the independent models in a configuration unlike either (Ji 2015). The variation is therefore not static, a fixed map of cultural difference, but dynamic, a set of trajectories of change that differ in direction and pace across cultures. These variations are summarised in Table 5.

Table 5. Axes of cross-cultural variation in the conception and practice of marriage and family.

Axis	Individualist pole (Euro-American)	Interdependent pole (East Asian)	Sources
Basis of marriage	Individualised: personal choice, self-development; deinstitutionalised	Institutional and relational: obligation, family alliance, prescribed roles	Cherlin (2004, 2020)
Couple and wider family	Couple as primary unit, detached from extended family	Couple embedded in extended family with ongoing obligation	Ji (2015); Bengtson & Roberts (1991)
Intergenerational norm	Weak filial obligation; support voluntary	Filial piety, reciprocal and authoritarian; support obligatory	Yeh et al. (2013); Kağıtçıbaşı (2005)
Conception of intimacy	Transformation of intimacy; the normal chaos of love	Harmony, ordinariness, interdependent happiness	Giddens (1992); Beck & Beck-Gernsheim (1995); Hitokoto & Uchida (2015)

15.5 The cultural variation across the moments of the cycle

The variations surveyed above are not external to the lifecycle but enter at each of its moments, and the foundational value of the account is increased by tracing how each moment is culturally inflected. The lifecycle furnishes a structure within which the cultural variation can be organised, and the organisation shows the variation to be systematic rather than diffuse.

At the moment of cognition, the cultural variation is the variation in what flourishing is taken to consist in. The independent construal cognises the flourishing of a shared life as the mutual support of two self-developing individuals; the interdependent construal cognises it as the achievement of relational harmony and the fulfilment of relational obligation; and the conception of this series, the just unfolding of each within a returning cycle, cognises it as a structure of which both are partial. The cultural variation at this moment is a variation in the normative specification of §8.5, and a foundational treatment must hold that the specification, though it aims at a structure, is realised in culturally specific forms.

At the moment of practice, the cultural variation is the variation in the habits, household forms, and family obligations through which a shared life is cultivated. The individualised marriage is practised through the negotiation of commitment and the mutual support of self-development; the interdependent family is practised through the fulfilment of filial and relational obligation and the maintenance of harmony; and the family manner cultivated, the habitus of §9.1, differs accordingly, the one forming dispositions of autonomous partnership, the other dispositions of relational embeddedness. The cultivation-not-legislation constraint of §9.2 takes a culturally specific form: what counts as the legislation of a habit, and what as its cultivation, depends on the cultural understanding of the family’s authority, so that a practice that is cultivation in one cultural context may be experienced as legislation in another.

At the moment of evaluation, the cultural variation is the variation in the standards by which a shared life is judged to be going well, and it bears on the measurement of §10. The instruments surveyed there were developed largely within the independent, Euro-American construal, and they measure largely what that construal counts as flourishing, the individual’s satisfaction and self-development; applied across cultures, they may systematically mismeasure the flourishing of interdependent shared lives, registering as deficient a relational harmony that the interdependent construal counts as flourishing, or registering as flourishing an autonomous self-development that the interdependent construal counts as a failure of relational obligation. The operational concession bears with particular force here: the structured measure is a proxy not only for an unsymbolised value but for a culturally specific construal of that value, and its cross-cultural application requires a caution beyond the one the concession already imposes.

At the moments of reflection and re-cognition, the cultural variation is the variation in how a shared life revises its sense of itself and transmits what it has learned. The transmission of a family manner across generations, the habitus inherited and revised, is more central to the interdependent family, in which the marriage is embedded in a lineage, than to the individualised marriage, in which the couple is relatively detached; and the re-cognition that closes a turn of the cycle is, in the interdependent context, a re-cognition conducted with reference to the extended family and its continuity, where in the individualist context it is conducted more nearly between the partners alone. The holonomy of the cycle, the phase accumulated across its turns, is in the one case the development of a lineage and in the other the development of a partnership, and the difference is a difference in the unit across which the flourishing is reckoned. Table 6 summarises the cultural inflection of the moments of the cycle.

Table 6. The cultural inflection of the moments of the lifecycle: how each moment differs under the independent and interdependent construals.

Moment	Independent construal	Interdependent construal
Cognition	Flourishing as mutual support of two self-developing individuals	Flourishing as relational harmony and fulfilment of obligation
Practice	Negotiation of commitment; cultivation of autonomous partnership	Fulfilment of filial and relational obligation; embeddedness
Evaluation	Individual satisfaction and self-development; existing instruments fit	Relational harmony; existing instruments may misregister
Reflection	Conducted between the partners; standard is the partnership	Conducted with reference to the extended family and lineage
Re-cognition	Holonomy as development of a partnership	Holonomy as development of a lineage

15.6 The standing of the cross-cultural account

The cross-cultural variation does not refute the structural account but locates it, and the relation between the two requires statement. The account of the lifecycle, of the moments and their dynamics, of the cycle’s persistence and phase, and of justice as the internal condition of the good cycle, is offered as a structure, and the cultural variation is the variation in the determinate forms the structure assumes. The independent and interdependent construals are two such forms, two symmetry-broken phases of the cognition and practice of a shared flourishing, and the series’ conception, the just unfolding of each within a returning cycle, is offered not as a third culture’s construal set beside them but as an attempt to articulate the structure of which the cultural construals are partial determinations. The attempt is itself culturally situated, written from a particular location and formed by particular traditions, and it claims neither a view from nowhere nor a neutrality among cultures, which would be the metalanguage the series denies. It claims only to articulate, from its situation, a structure that the cultural variation instances, and to hold its own articulation open to the correction that the encounter with each cultural form supplies. The justice condition, in particular, is offered across the cultural variation: that the value a party generates return to that party, and that no party be reduced to the sustaining fuel of a relation that returns to it nothing, is a condition a shared life may fail in any culture, by the culturally specific means each culture affords, and the skew of the return distribution (§10.3.3) is a proxy for an injustice that the independent and the interdependent family are each, in their own forms, capable of.

16. The Foundational Role of the Paper in the Series

This paper is the programmatic and foundational text of the part of the series concerned with the praxis of flourishing, and the present section makes that role explicit, since a foundation is of use only if what it founds is stated. The section sets out the instruments the paper supplies to the subsequent papers, the questions it leaves open for them, and the interfaces at which they will connect to it. It is written for the reader of the series as a whole, and it may be passed over by the reader of this paper alone, for whom the preceding sections are complete in themselves.

16.1 The instruments the paper supplies

The paper supplies to the subsequent papers a set of instruments, each developed here in its general form and available there for application to particular cases.

The first is the lifecycle of a shared flourishing as a real cycle (§6): the articulation of a shared life into the moments of cognition, practice, evaluation, reflection, and re-cognition, the thesis that the cycle is a self-sustaining movement whose persistence conditions the relation’s existence, and the dynamical vocabulary of persistence, phase, and bifurcation in which the cycle’s regimes are described. A subsequent paper concerned with any particular practice of a shared life may locate that practice within the cycle, asking at which moment it falls and how it bears on the cycle’s persistence and phase.

The second is the operational concession (§2.3): the methodological licence to adopt, where a practice must assess, a structured proxy for a value that is not symbolised, in the explicit awareness that the proxy is not the value. Every subsequent paper that assesses anything inherits this concession, and inherits with it the discipline of marking what is proxy and what is real, so that the series’ results are read throughout as operationally warranted and not as measurements of the unsymbolised value.

The third is the skew of the return distribution as a structured proxy for injustice (§10.3.3): the thesis that the injustice of a relation’s value cycle has a statistical signature in the skewness of the distribution of returned value relative to a coupling-based baseline, and the associated apparatus of expected recyclability, coupling-based baseline, and the branching-process model of return. A subsequent paper concerned with the justice of any particular cycle of value, intimate or economic, may bring this measure to bear, asking whether the cycle returns to its generators or consigns one of them to the low-return tail.

The fourth is the distinction between the genuine and the forged cycle (§11.1, §13.6): the thesis that a cycle may persist and present a high aggregate satisfaction while being, in its phase and its distribution, a catastrophic cycle wearing the appearance of a flourishing spiral, and that the orthogonal measures of skew and foreclosure distinguish the two. A subsequent paper concerned with any cycle that presents itself as good may apply this test, asking whether the appearance is borne out by the distribution beneath it.

The fifth is the cognitive and computational basis of appraisal (§5): the account of appraisal as continuous inference upon a partially observable state, conducted in unsymbolised value, with its decision-theoretic and free-energy formalisations. A subsequent paper concerned with how a relation registers its own state, or with how a practice is sustained or fails, may draw on this basis.

16.2 The questions the paper leaves open

The paper leaves open, for the subsequent papers and for other work, a set of questions it has posed without resolving. The branching-process model of return (§10.3.4) is advanced in its form and not validated; the assignment of value to the acts of a shared life, on which any estimation of return depends, is identified as a substantial empirical problem and not solved; the formalisation of the lifecycle as a dynamical system is offered as a structural analogy under the standing qualification that the system’s own law is reconfigured by what it generates; and the proxies for the unfolding of each party (§10.5) are acknowledged to reach least adequately the value that lies nearest the unsymbolised. These open questions are the paper’s bequest to the work that follows, and their statement is part of the foundation, since a foundation that concealed its incompleteness would be the false ground the series has throughout refused.

16.3 The interface to the study of particular cycles

The subsequent papers of this part of the series apply the instruments to particular cycles of value, and the present paper prepares their interface. A study of a particular cycle, on the apparatus developed here, proceeds by identifying the cycle’s generators and their coupling, the value generated and its circulation, the distribution of return and its skew, and the cycle’s persistence and phase; and it asks, of the cycle, whether it is a flourishing spiral, a catastrophic cycle, or a movement toward extinction, and whether its appearance of good is genuine or forged.

One such study is anticipated closely enough to be named. A consumption cycle, in which a good is desired, acquired, and enjoyed, and the desire renewed, may present every appearance of a flourishing cycle: the parties are satisfied, the cycle persists, and the satisfaction is real. The apparatus developed here permits the question whether such a cycle is a genuine flourishing spiral or a forged one, by directing attention past the satisfaction of the parties to the distribution of return across the whole network that sustains the cycle, including those whose labour produces the good consumed and who may be consigned, unseen by the satisfied parties, to the low-return tail. The skew of the return distribution, taken across the whole sustaining network and not only across the visible parties, is the instrument by which a consumption cycle that is internally satisfying may be found to be externally extractive, its internal holonomy positive and its full holonomy, reckoned across all whom it draws upon, negative. The study of such a cycle, as a case in which the genuine and the forged are distinguished by the apparatus of this paper, is the work of a subsequent paper, for which the present paper is the foundation, and to which it hands the instruments here developed.

17. Limitations, Objections, and Replies

A foundational treatment is strengthened by gathering, and meeting directly, the objections its apparatus invites, rather than leaving them dispersed among the cautions of the several sections. This section states the principal objections to the paper’s approach and the replies the paper offers, in the awareness that the replies dissolve some objections and only mitigate others, and that the latter mark the genuine limitations the paper bears.

17.1 That the skew criterion misjudges a legitimate division of labour

The first objection holds that the skew of the return distribution will misjudge as exploitation a division of labour that is in fact legitimate. Parties to a shared life may, the objection runs, justly specialise, one bearing more of the sustaining labour and the other more of some other contribution, and a measure that reads asymmetric return as injustice will condemn a specialisation the parties have freely and fairly chosen.

The reply turns on the coupling-based baseline (§10.3.2). The criterion does not read asymmetric contribution as injustice, nor asymmetric return as such; it reads as injustice the systematic shortfall of one party’s return below the baseline that the coupling and the generation set. A legitimate specialisation, in which one party bears more sustaining labour and is returned to in proportion, through the relation’s circulation, to the value that labour generates, produces no skew, since the return tracks the generation; the normalised return of both parties is near unity, and the distribution is symmetric. The skew arises only when the value a party generates does not return to that party, which is not the mark of specialisation but of extraction. The objection conflates an asymmetric division of tasks, which the criterion does not condemn, with an asymmetric return on a symmetric generation, which it does. The reply, however, concedes a residual difficulty: the baseline itself depends on the assignment of value to contributions (§10.4), and a culture or a couple that systematically undervalues the sustaining labour in that assignment will set a baseline that conceals the extraction, reading a genuine shortfall as proportionate. The criterion is only as just as the valuation that feeds it, and the valuation is the contestable step the concession marks.

17.2 That modelling a relation as a value network reifies intimacy

The second objection holds that to model a shared life as a network of value generation and return is to reify intimacy, to reduce a relation of love to an economic exchange, and that the reduction falsifies the very thing it claims to illuminate.

The reply distinguishes the model from a metaphysics. The paper does not claim that a relation is a value network, nor that love is exchange; it claims that the network is a structured proxy (§2.3), an operational instrument that makes one feature of a relation, the distribution of its returns, assessable, and that this feature, though it is not the relation, is a feature a relation has and one whose maldistribution is an injustice the parties have reason to detect. The value at issue is, throughout, the transversal and largely unsymbolised value of the prior papers (§5), not a monetary or exchangeable quantity, and the paper has insisted that the structured proxy does not reach it. The reduction the objection fears is exactly the reduction the operational concession refuses: to mistake the proxy for the relation, the measured return for the love, is the cardinal error the paper has named (§11.3), and the paper commits it no more than a cartographer, mapping a country’s rivers, claims that the country is its rivers. The model illuminates a feature against the background of a relation it does not claim to exhaust, and the warmth, the meaning, and the unsymbolised texture of the shared life, which the model does not capture, are precisely what the paper’s Envoi and its insistence on the matter of the field return to.

17.3 That the operational concession immunises the paper against criticism

The third objection holds that the operational concession is too convenient: by declaring in advance that its measures are proxies that do not reach the real value, the paper immunises itself against every criticism, since any objection to a measure can be met by the reply that the measure was never claimed to be more than a proxy. The concession, on this objection, is not a discipline but an evasion.

The reply grants the danger and specifies the discipline that averts it. A concession that licensed any measure whatever, on the ground that all are merely proxies, would indeed be an evasion; the paper’s concession does not. It requires of a proxy that it be operationally warranted, that it make some genuine feature assessable, that its results be read as evidence and not as measurement, and that it never be possessed as the truth of the relation (§11.3); and it holds the proxy answerable to the basal appraisal it proxies, so that a measure systematically at odds with the parties’ considered appraisal is thereby impugned. The concession is, in this respect, a standard the measures must meet and not a blanket exemption: it constrains how a measure may be used, and the constraint is violable, as the cardinal error of possessing the measure as truth shows. The objection would hold against a concession that exempted measures from criticism; it does not hold against one that, as here, specifies the limited use under which alone a measure is admitted and marks the misuse that breaks it.

17.4 That to speak of justice in intimacy is a category mistake

The fourth objection holds that justice is a category proper to the public and political sphere, to the distribution of goods among strangers under institutions, and that to import it into intimacy is a category mistake, since intimate relations are governed by love and care, which transcend and even oppose the calculative posture of justice.

The reply is that the opposition between love and justice is itself the ideology under which intimate injustice is concealed, and that the ethics of care, properly understood, requires rather than opposes the justice of care’s distribution (§3.2). The labour of sustaining a shared life is labour; its systematic extraction from one party is an injustice whether or not the relation is loving, and indeed a loving relation is precisely the site at which such extraction is most effectively concealed, since the language of love supplies the ideology under which the sustaining labour is figured as freely given and its under-return as natural (§10.3.3). To hold that justice has no place in intimacy is not to protect intimacy from a calculative intrusion but to remove from the exploited party the one vocabulary in which their exploitation could be named. The paper’s claim is not that intimacy should be calculative, but that the refusal to assess the justice of an intimate relation’s distribution is the condition under which its injustice is sustained, and that a love worthy of the name does not require, and is not damaged by, the justice of its returns. The reply, however, concedes a limit: the assessment of justice is an instrument to be drawn upon when injustice is suspected, not a posture to be maintained continuously, and a relation conducted as a perpetual audit of its returns would have made the measure the truth of the relation, committing the cardinal error in a new form. Justice is the internal condition of the good cycle (§13.6), not the continuous activity of the parties within it.

17.5 The residual limitations

The replies dissolve the objections that rest on misunderstanding, the conflation of asymmetric return with asymmetric task, the mistaking of the model for a metaphysics, the reading of the concession as exemption, and the opposition of love to justice. They leave standing a set of genuine limitations, which the paper records as its own. The valuation of contributions, on which the whole quantitative apparatus rests, is an operational stipulation that no measurement discharges, and a biased valuation yields a biased assessment (§17.1). The network model is unvalidated and its estimation an unsolved empirical problem (Appendix B.2). The dynamical model is a structural analogy under the standing qualification that the relation’s law is reconfigured by what it generates. The proxies for the unfolding of each party reach least adequately the value that lies nearest the unsymbolised. And the whole apparatus is offered for the central case of the dyad and its coupled network, with the cross-cultural variation (§15) locating but not exhausting the forms the apparatus must take across the range of human shared lives. These are the limitations a foundational treatment bequeaths to the work it founds, and their statement is not a weakening of the foundation but a part of it, since a foundation that concealed its limits would be the false ground the series has throughout refused.

18. Conclusions at the Boundaries of the Frameworks

The paper terminates as the prior papers of the series have, not in a single conclusion that would gather the frameworks into a possessed whole, but in plural conclusions, each stated from within a framework to the boundary of what that framework establishes. The plurality is required by the method: a flourishing that no single framework possesses cannot be concluded in the terms of any one, and the dialogue among the frameworks, each speaking to its boundary, is the only form a conclusion may take without installing one framework as the metalanguage the series denies.

18.1 From positivism

Positivism establishes that flourishing has measurable indicators, that these can be brought to validated and comparable instruments, and that the structured measures so obtained are a public and accumulable gain over private appraisal. It establishes the recyclability, the skew of return, and the rates of accomplished and foreclosed undertaking as structured proxies that make visible what aggregate satisfaction conceals. Positivism does not establish that its measures reach the value they proxy, which is unsymbolised and beyond their structuring; it cannot distinguish, from a satisfaction score alone, a flourishing spiral from a forged one; and it reaches its boundary at the point where the structured proxy must be read against the value it does not contain, which it consigns to reflection and to the basal appraisal it cannot replace.

18.2 From evidentialism

Evidentialism establishes that belief about flourishing, and the practice founded on it, ought to be proportioned to evidence and revised as evidence revises, and that this proportioning operates not only in the explicit weighing of studies but in the continuous belief updating that underlies all appraisal. It establishes the supported practices a cultivation may draw upon, and the form of the hypothesis test by which the justice of a value cycle might be assessed. Evidentialism does not establish what the singular shared life requires beyond the average its evidence reports, and it is mute where the value at issue cannot be brought to evidence at all; it reaches its boundary at the unsymbolised appraisal that is its own deep form and yet exceeds any evidence it can marshal.

18.3 From normative theory

Normative theory establishes that flourishing is the substantive freedom of each party to unfold what that party has reason to value, that this unfolding is plural and not aggregate, and that a just flourishing requires the return of value to its generators and the foreclosure of no party’s unfolding. It establishes the normative specification against which the paper’s evaluation is conducted. Normative theory does not establish that its specification is realised in a given life, which is a matter of practice and assessment under actual conditions; and it does not reach the lived and unsymbolised meaning in which the specification has its concrete sense for a particular couple, which it consigns to the phenomenological.

18.4 From virtue ethics

Virtue ethics establishes that flourishing is activity in accordance with cultivated excellence, that such excellence is formed by habituation in the concrete fabric of a shared life, and that the cultivation of disposition, and not the legislation of it, is the just form of this formation. It establishes the connection between the cognition of flourishing and its practice that the other frameworks leave implicit. Virtue ethics does not establish a procedure for the formation of the right dispositions, since a procedure applied from outside the joint practice would be the legislation it forbids; it reaches its boundary at the point where the cultivation of a shared disposition must proceed without a rule, in the unguaranteeable practice the prior paper described.

18.5 From phenomenology

Phenomenology establishes that flourishing is lived and interpreted before it is measured, that its givenness in the felt quality and the apprehended meaning of a shared life is the matter to which every measure is answerable, and that the basal appraisal in which a relation is continuously evaluated is conducted in this lived and unsymbolised register. It establishes the limit against which the structured measures are to be read. Phenomenology does not establish anything public, comparable, or accumulable, since what it describes resists exactly the structuring that would make it so; it reaches its boundary at the point where the lived meaning of a shared life must be communicated, assessed, or accumulated, which it consigns to the structured proxies it cannot itself supply.

18.6 From the cognitive and dynamical account

The cognitive and dynamical account establishes that appraisal is, at its basis, a continuous inference upon a partially observable state, conducted in unsymbolised value; that the relation is maintained by the persistence of this appraisal and the practice taken upon it, so that the cessation of the cycle is the relation’s extinction; and that the cycle’s regime is fixed by its persistence and the sign of its phase, with justice as the internal condition of a positive phase for all parties. It establishes the lifecycle as a real cycle and the three regimes as its possible fates. The account does not establish a fixed model of the cycle, since the value function of the relational decision process is itself revised by the cycle, in the manner the prior paper analysed as the absence of a fixed meta-value-grammar; it reaches its boundary at the reflexive reconfiguration that no fixed model captures, and consigns the matter, as the prior paper did, to the open question of a formalism whose own ground is not fixed.

18.7 The absence of a single conclusion

These conclusions do not sum. Each framework, developed to its boundary, establishes what it establishes and consigns to another what it cannot reach: positivism consigns the unsymbolised remainder to phenomenology and reflection, normative theory consigns the lived meaning to phenomenology and the realisation to practice, virtue ethics consigns the formation without a rule to the unguaranteeable practice, phenomenology consigns the public and comparable to the structured proxy, and the dynamical account consigns the reflexive remainder to the open formal question. The flourishing of a shared life is the object none of them possesses and all of them partially determine, and the operational concession governs the whole: where the paper assessed, it assessed a structured proxy for a value it did not reach, and it bore the incompleteness rather than concealing it.

The absence of a single conclusion as the adequate conclusion. There is no single conclusion that gathers the frameworks into a possessed account of flourishing, not for want of one but because flourishing is not possessed by any framework and is in production across them. The plural conclusions are partial and mutually irreducible of necessity, and their dialogue, each framework speaking to its boundary and consigning what it cannot reach, is itself the polyphonic and unconcluded form that a just eudaimonia, cultivated and not constructed, assessed in proxy and not possessed, sustained as an open spiral and not secured as a state, requires of any account faithful to it. That the paper does not conclude in a single account is its fidelity to an object that is cultivated, processual, and unguaranteeable: the account, like the flourishing it treats, is sustained as an open movement and not secured as a possessed result.

The flourishing of a shared life is, in the end, neither measured nor possessed but lived, cultivated, and continually reappraised, in a cycle whose persistence is its life, whose phase is its rising or its decline, and whose justice is the condition of its rising for both. The frameworks illuminate it severally and from their boundaries; the cycle turns; and the good of a shared life is generated, where it is generated, in the turning, and not in any account of it, this one included.

Envoi

This paper has treated a shared flourishing as a cycle to be sustained, a fabric to be tended, and a turning to be appraised in a value that no measure reaches. It has spoken of recyclability and skew, of belief and bifurcation, of habit and household, because a practice requires what is operable, and it has conceded throughout that these are proxies for a good that is lived before it is assessed and that exceeds every assessment of it.

What the assessments leave out is the whole of the matter, and it returns at the close as it returned in the prior paper: a meal shared across years that no satisfaction scale records the worth of, a way of keeping a room that is the form a love has taken, a silence between two people that is full rather than empty and that no instrument can read. These are the matter of the field, and they are the observations through which, beneath all reflection, each appraises continually how things stand between them. The cycle of a shared life turns in them, and turns well when it turns justly, returning to each what each has given, foreclosing the unfolding of neither, and rising, turn upon turn, into more than the two were.

A good so cultivated is not secured and then possessed. It is generated in the turning, and a relation flourishes by continuing to turn, justly, and ceases when the turning ceases. There is no state of it to be reached and kept; there is only the tending, the appraising, the reflecting, and the turning again, across the seasons of a shared life, from its beginning, through whatever it becomes, into its later years.

For the forest girl,
that our turning, turned together, may rise;
that what returns to her be no less than she gives;
and that the good of our shared life be generated, and generated again,
in every turning of its years.

愿我如星君如月，夜夜流光相皎洁。

Acknowledgements

This paper, on the flourishing of a shared life, was written for the one with whom the author hopes to share it. To her, the forest girl, who loves to travel and to be among wild and growing things, and who is pure of heart, and lovely, and kind, this work is dedicated, as the prior papers of the series have been. It is a paper about how two people might flourish together, justly and across the long course of a shared life, and it was written in the wish that the life the author hopes to share with her may be such a flourishing: that their cycle, turned together, may rise rather than merely repeat or decline; that what each gives the other may return to them both; and that the good of their shared life may be generated, and generated again, in every turning of its years. The theory is offered to others for whatever it is worth to them; the wish that animates it is for her, and for the happiness, lasting and lifelong, that the author hopes they will make together.

愿得一心人，白头不相离；岁岁长相见，年年共此时。

This is a working draft, circulated for discussion and not for citation. Its principal constructive proposals, the lifecycle as a real cycle whose persistence conditions the relation, the operational concession, and the skewness of the return distribution as a structured proxy for injustice, are advanced under the operational concession the paper states, as instruments warranted by their use and not as measurements of the value they serve.

Appendix A. Notation and Key Concepts

Because the paper introduces a number of constructs and, in its formal appendix, a number of symbols, this section gathers them for reference. The first table lists the principal symbols of the formal appendix; the second gathers the key concepts the paper introduces, with the section in which each is developed.

Table A1. Principal symbols of the formal appendix.

Symbol	Meaning
s, S	Hidden state of the relation, and its space
o, O	Observation (the lived fabric), and its space
a, A	Action (practice), and its space
b	Belief: a distribution over hidden states
Rₜ(s,a)	Reward at turn t; non-stationary, rewritten at re-cognition
Φ	Re-cognition operator: R₍ₜ₊₁₎ = Φ(Rₜ, τₜ)
F	Variational free energy
W = (wᵢⱼ)	Coupling matrix: fraction of value propagating j → i
ρ(W)	Spectral radius of W; governs persistence
R = (I−W)⁻¹ − I	Resolvent: total return matrix; Rᵢᵢ is recyclability
v	Perron vector: stationary value profile; sets the baseline
rᵢ, r̂ᵢ	Actual and coupling-based-baseline return to generator i
θᵢ = rᵢ/r̂ᵢ	Normalised return to generator i
g	Sample skewness of {θᵢ}: the injustice statistic
x	Intensity of the relation’s living activity
r(x), μ	Regeneration rate and loss rate
x*	Interior fixed point (threshold or living attractor)
φ_A, φ_B	Per-turn holonomy (phase) accruing to each party
σ	Skew of the return distribution; σ_c = −1/κ is critical

Table A2. Key concepts introduced or employed by the paper.

Concept	Statement	Section
Lifecycle as a real cycle	The shared life as a self-sustaining cyclic movement whose persistence conditions the relation’s existence	§6
Operational concession	The deliberate adoption, where assessment is required, of a structured proxy known not to reach the unsymbolised value	§2.3
Basal vs explicit evaluation	Continuous unconscious appraisal (inference on a hidden state) vs deliberate instrumented measurement	§5.4
Expected recyclability	The probability that a contribution is met by a regenerating response; proxies the cycle’s life	§10.3.1
Coupling-based baseline	The return the coupling structure alone would assign (the Perron-vector profile)	§10.3.2
Skew of return (injustice fingerprint)	The skewness of normalised return: a structured proxy for exploitation, orthogonal to the mean	§10.3.3
Foreclosure of unfolding	The concentration in one party of undertakings abandoned on account of the relation	§10.5
Three regimes	Flourishing spiral, catastrophic cycle, extinction, fixed by persistence and phase	§13
Justice as internal condition	Justice is the internal condition of the flourishing spiral, not a constraint upon it	§13.6
Genuine vs forged spiral	A persisting, high-satisfaction cycle may be catastrophic beneath the aggregate	§11.1
Cultivation vs legislation (养而不宰)	Cultivation guides the habit-forming dynamics; legislation possesses it	§9.2
Preservation of betrayability	A habit is cultivated insofar as its continuance remains a renewed joint choice	§9.3

Appendix B. Formal Sketches

This appendix records, in compressed form, the formal apparatus to which the main text points. The sketches are not validated models, and they are offered under the operational concession that governs the paper: each is a structured proxy whose use is operational, and none reaches the unsymbolised value it proxies. Three cautions, stated at the close, apply to all of them.

B.1 Appraisal as inference on a partially observable process

The basal appraisal of §5 is formalised as a partially observable Markov decision process whose reward function is non-stationary, and the non-stationarity is shown to be the decision-theoretic form of the absence of a fixed meta-value-grammar.

The process. Let s ∈ S be the hidden state of the relation, not directly observable; let o ∈ O be the observation, the lived sensory and habitual fabric, related to the state by an observation model P(o | s); let a ∈ A be the action, the practice. The state evolves by a transition model P(s′ | s, a). The agent does not access s but maintains a belief b ∈ Δ(S), a distribution over states, and updates it on each observation by the Bayes filter

b′(s′) = [ P(o | s′) · Σ_s P(s′ | s, a) b(s) ] / [ Σ_{s′} P(o | s′) · Σ_s P(s′ | s, a) b(s) ],

choosing actions on the belief b rather than on the inaccessible s. The belief is the formal correlate of the parties’ superposed, non-definite sense of the relation’s state (§5.2), and its updating is the basal evaluation that runs through every moment of the cycle (§6.1).

The non-stationary reward, and the absence of a meta-grammar. A standard process maximises the expected discounted sum of a fixed reward R(s,a), representing the good to be secured. The relational process has no fixed reward: what the parties are to secure, the good of the relation, is itself reconceived at the moment of re-cognition (§12). Formally, the reward is indexed by the turn t of the cycle, Rₜ(s,a), and the re-cognition that closes turn t produces the reward R₍ₜ₊₁₎ of the next turn as a functional of the turn’s trajectory,

R₍ₜ₊₁₎ = Φ(Rₜ, τₜ),

where τₜ is the trajectory of beliefs, actions, and observations over turn t and Φ is the re-cognition operator. The process thus optimises an objective that its own running rewrites. There is no fixed terminal reward toward which the whole converges, and no meta-reward R* governing the sequence {Rₜ} from outside, since Φ is itself reconfigured by the trajectories it processes; this is the decision-theoretic form of the thesis that there is no fixed meta-value-grammar (§5.2), the value function occupying the place that the prior paper kept empty.

Active inference and the imperative to keep inferring. On the free-energy formalisation (§5.3), the agent does not maximise reward but minimises variational free energy, an upper bound on the surprise of its observations. Writing q(s) for the agent’s recognition density over states and p(o,s) for its generative model, the free energy is

F = E_{q(s)}[ log q(s) − log p(o, s) ] = D_KL( q(s) ‖ p(s | o) ) − log p(o),

minimised over q by perception, which closes the inference gap D_KL( q(s) ‖ p(s | o) ), and over a, through p(o), by action, which makes observations conform to expectation. The agent maintains itself, holds itself away from the dispersed states that would dissolve it, exactly by continuing to minimise F, that is, by continuing to infer and to act. The cessation of this activity is, formally, the agent’s ceasing to resist the growth of free energy, equivalently the dispersion of its states toward the high-entropy distribution that is its dissolution. Transposed to the relation, the continued minimisation of free energy is the continued appraisal and practice by which the relation maintains itself (§6.2), and its cessation is the decay toward the terminal rest the paper names extinction (§13.4). The imperative to keep inferring is, on this formalisation, the imperative to keep the relation in existence, written as the minimisation of a free-energy functional.

B.2 The justice of the value cycle: a spectral formalisation

The assessment of justice in §10.3 is formalised here through the propagation of value on the relational network and the spectral analysis of the propagation operator, in a manner that connects the present account to the branching-process formalisation of generative recursion developed elsewhere in the author’s work.

The network and the propagation operator. Let the relation be represented by a finite directed weighted graph on the set of generators N = {1, …, n}, the parties and the coupled others. The coupling is encoded in a non-negative matrix W = (wᵢⱼ), where wᵢⱼ ≥ 0 is the fraction of value present at node j that propagates, in one step of circulation, to node i. The column sums satisfy Σ_i wᵢⱼ ≤ 1 for every j, the deficit 1 − Σ_i wᵢⱼ being the fraction of value at j that leaves the network at that step, lost to neither party. A unit of value generated at node j and circulating for one step yields the vector W eⱼ, where eⱼ is the jth standard basis vector; circulating for k steps yields Wᵏ eⱼ. Because W is sub-stochastic and non-negative, its spectral radius satisfies ρ(W) ≤ 1, and when value leaves the network at some node the inequality is strict, ρ(W) < 1, which guarantees that the Neumann series below converges.

Total return and recyclability. The total value that returns to each generator, accumulated over all steps of circulation, is given by the resolvent

R = Σ_{k=1}^∞ Wᵏ = (I − W)⁻¹ − I,

which converges precisely when ρ(W) < 1. The entry Rᵢⱼ is the total value returning to i from a unit generated at j, and the diagonal entry Rᵢᵢ is the total value returning to the generator i itself, the quantity §10.3.1 called recyclability. The spectral radius ρ(W) is the formal correlate of the threshold of §10.3.1: as ρ(W) → 1, the resolvent diverges and the cycle of value sustains and amplifies itself, while a small ρ(W) corresponds to a cycle in which value is rapidly lost, winding down toward the extinction of §13.4. The persistence of the cycle is thus governed by the leading eigenvalue of the propagation operator.

The Perron vector and the coupling-based baseline. When W is irreducible, the Perron–Frobenius theorem guarantees a unique positive eigenvalue ρ(W) of largest modulus, with a positive right eigenvector v, the Perron vector, satisfying Wv = ρ(W) v. The Perron vector gives the stationary relative distribution of value across the network under repeated circulation: it is the profile of value-holding the network tends toward, independent of where value is generated. The Perron vector furnishes the coupling-based baseline of §10.3.2: the baseline expected return r̂ᵢ to generator i is the return that the coupling structure alone, through its stationary profile vᵢ, would assign to i. A relation whose returns track the Perron vector is one whose distribution of value is governed by the coupling and by nothing else; departures from it are the object of the justice assessment.

Concentration and the spectral signature of domination. The shape of the Perron vector is itself a structural datum. A Perron vector close to uniform describes a network in which value circulates broadly and returns are distributed across the generators; a Perron vector concentrated on one node describes a network in which value accumulates at that node under circulation, the structural form of a relation organised around the enrichment of one party. The concentration of the Perron vector, measured for instance by its participation ratio (Σ_i vᵢ)² / Σ_i vᵢ² normalised by n, is accordingly a spectral signature of the network’s tendency toward domination, prior to and independent of the actual returns: a relation may be structurally disposed toward the concentration of value by its coupling alone, and the Perron vector reveals this disposition. This is the point of contact with the analysis of background-independence and concentrated control developed in the author’s formal work, where the concentration of the Perron vector distinguishes a democratic from a dominated generative structure.

The skew statistic and its test. Let rᵢ be the actual return to generator i over the period of assessment, estimated from the value circulating in the relation, and let r̂ᵢ = c vᵢ be the coupling-based baseline, c a normalising constant. Define the normalised return θᵢ = rᵢ / r̂ᵢ, so that θᵢ = 1 is the return the coupling alone would assign. The justice of the cycle is assessed through the distribution of {θᵢ}, and specifically through its sample skewness

g = [ (1/n) Σ_i (θᵢ − θ̄)³ ] / [ (1/n) Σ_i (θᵢ − θ̄)² ]^{3/2}.

The null hypothesis of an unbiased cycle is that the θᵢ are exchangeable about their mean, so that the population skewness is zero and no generator is systematically favoured or disfavoured beyond the coupling. The alternative is a significant negative skew, g < 0 with the lower tail occupied by a distinguished generator, characteristically the bearer of the sustaining labour. Under the null, the sampling distribution of g may be obtained by permutation, since exchangeability makes all assignments of the observed returns to the generators equally likely; the test rejects when the observed g falls below the permutation quantile. The power of the test increases with n, with the magnitude of the under-return, and with the precision of the estimated returns, and is limited in the intimate case by the smallness of n, which is why the measure is most informative when the coupled network, including family and the wider sustaining chain, is taken into account rather than the dyad alone.

Standing of the formalisation. The formalisation requires assumptions not discharged here: that the propagation is adequately linear and one-step Markov, so that W and its powers capture the circulation; that W is estimable, which requires the assignment of value to acts and its tracing through the network, the substantial empirical problem of §10.3.4; and that W is approximately stationary over the period of assessment. Under these assumptions the justice of a relation’s value cycle is, in principle, a testable hypothesis about the skewness of normalised return against a Perron-vector baseline, and the persistence of the cycle is governed by the spectral radius of the propagation operator. The formalisation is offered as the form such an assessment would take, under the operational concession, and not as a validated instrument.

B.3 The three regimes: a minimal dynamical model

The regimes of §13 are formalised here in a minimal dynamical model, offered as a structural analogy under the standing qualification (§4) that the law of a relation is itself reconfigured by what it generates, so that no fixed system captures it in full.

State variables and dynamics. Let the state of the relation be summarised by a scalar x ≥ 0, the intensity of the relation’s living activity, the rate at which value is generated, circulated, and returned. Let the dynamics be

ẋ = x ( r(x) − μ ),

where r(x) is the per-unit regeneration of activity, the recyclability of §10.3.1 expressed as a rate, and μ > 0 is the rate of loss, the attrition the relation suffers absent regeneration. The factor x encodes that activity regenerates only where activity is present, so that x = 0, the cessation of all relational activity, is always a fixed point.

Fixed points and the existence of the living regimes. The fixed points are x = 0 and any x* > 0 with r(x*) = μ. Suppose r is increasing then saturating, r(0) = r₀ and r(x) → r_∞ as x → ∞, with r₀ < r_∞, capturing that a relation with more living activity regenerates value more readily, up to saturation. Then:

• if r_∞ < μ, the only fixed point is x = 0, which is stable: every relation decays to extinction, since loss exceeds regeneration at every level of activity;
• if r₀ < μ < r_∞, there is an interior fixed point x* > 0; the linearisation ∂x[ x(r(x)−μ) ]|{x*} = x* r′(x*) > 0 shows x* is unstable and x = 0 stable when r is increasing through μ from below, giving a threshold (an Allee-type effect): relations beginning above x* sustain themselves and those below it decay to extinction;
• if r₀ > μ, the fixed point x = 0 is unstable and an interior stable x* exists at the saturating branch: the relation sustains a living regime from any positive start.

The persistence of the cycle (§6.2) is thus the condition r₀ > μ or a start above the threshold x*; its failure is the decay to the fixed point x = 0, which is extinction (§13.4).

Phase, and the flourishing versus catastrophic regimes. Persistence fixes whether the relation lives; a second variable fixes the phase it accumulates. Let φ be the per-turn holonomy, reckoned per party, and in the two-party case let φ_A, φ_B be the phases accruing to A and B. These are governed by the distribution of return: writing σ for the skew of the return distribution (§10.3.3), with σ = 0 symmetric and σ < 0 skewed against B,

φ_A = α(x*)(1 + κσ), φ_B = α(x*)(1 − κσ),

for positive constants α, κ, so that a symmetric return (σ = 0) gives both parties the same positive phase, while a skew against B (σ < 0) raises φ_A and lowers φ_B. The flourishing spiral (§13.2) is the persisting regime with φ_A, φ_B > 0; the catastrophic cycle (§13.3) is the persisting regime with some φᵢ < 0, which by the above occurs when the skew is severe enough that κ|σ| > 1, driving φ_B negative while the relation persists and φ_A, and hence a satisfaction aggregate weighted toward A, remains positive. This is the formal form of the central claim (§13.6): a positive phase for all parties requires κ|σ| < 1, that is, a return not severely skewed, so that justice (small σ) is the internal condition of the flourishing spiral.

Bifurcation. The passage between regimes is a bifurcation in the parameters (μ, σ). As μ rises past r_∞, or as a relation near the threshold x* is perturbed below it, the living regime loses stability and the relation decays to extinction: this is a saddle-node bifurcation in x, the interior fixed point and the basin of the living regime annihilating as the parameter crosses its critical value, which is the dynamical form of the punctuated collapse the main text describes (§13.5). As σ falls past the critical skew σ_c = −1/κ, the phase φ_B crosses zero and the relation passes, while persisting, from the flourishing to the catastrophic regime: this is a transcritical crossing in the phase variable, the relation’s regime changing in kind at a threshold of skew reached, often, by the gradual compounding of a slight initial asymmetry, exactly as in the longitudinal case of §14. The two bifurcations, in μ and in σ, are the two ways a relation changes regime: the failure of persistence and the reversal of phase, the first governing the passage to extinction and the second the passage between the flourishing and the catastrophic cycle.

B.4 Three cautions

Three cautions apply to all of the foregoing. First, the structured quantities, the belief, the return distribution, the holonomy, are proxies for a value that is unsymbolised and that they do not reach; their use is operational, and their results are evidence and not measurement. Second, each model depends on assumptions not discharged here, the observation and transition models of the decision process, the propagation probabilities of the branching process, the parameters of the dynamical system; the sketches indicate the form a model would take and do not supply a validated one. Third, the unfolding of each party’s own dynamics, which lies nearest the unsymbolised value, is the quantity these models least adequately capture, and its proxies, the rates of accomplished and foreclosed undertaking, are the most provisional of the structured quantities the paper employs. The formal apparatus is offered for what it makes visible, under these cautions, and not as a representation of the value it serves.

中文

亲密关系的哲学与正义论 · 第十一篇

一种正义的幸福：共享生活的日常织体与繁荣的实践

论习惯与家庭的培育、各方在一片共同场域之内的展开，以及一种由正义所构成的繁荣

【工作草稿】

万宏 — 工作草稿，不供引用或传播

君子之道，造端乎夫婦；及其至也，察乎天地。
君子之道，发端于夫妇之间的关系；及其至极，则可察见于天地之中。

君子素其位而行。
君子从其所处的位置出发而行。

一种善的生活不是先被确保、然后被生活；它是每一方、也是双方的展开，是一种被共同照管之生活的展开。

——《中庸》第十二章与第十四章；以及作者本人的一句话。

献给她，与我一同造出了那个无人能读懂的最初之名的人；在她的眼中，我第一次看见自己”被看见在看”。
结发为夫妻，恩爱两不疑。
献给我最爱的人。

摘要

本文是关于亲密关系的哲学与正义论之系列的第十一篇，它展开前篇在抽象层面确立其诸条件的那种善关系的经验性实践。前篇主张：善关系的实践是一片场域的培育、而非一个结构的建构；这片场域的质料是共享生活的日常感官与习惯织体；以及一片善的场域满足两个条件，即幸福（eudaimonic）的条件与正义（just）的条件，其中正义构成而非仅仅约束幸福。在此基础上，本文追问：一种共享生活事实上是如何在其历程中被认知、被实践、被评估、被维系的。它把那一历程当作一个循环，并把该循环当作其首要对象：认知、实践、评估、反思与重新认知的复现，横贯一段关系的时间，从它的开端、经过它的婚姻，进入它的晚年。该循环被表明是动力学意义上的一个真实循环，不是诸阶段的线性序列，而是一种自我维系的运动，其持存乃是关系存在的条件，以致循环的停止不是一段处于静止的关系，而是一段被熄灭的关系。

繁荣的认知与实践有五个框架被加以区分：实证主义的、证据主义的、规范的、德性论的与现象学的；它们不被当作关于一个可度量对象的相互竞争的诸理论，而被当作——在前篇的意义上——某个无任何单一框架能占有之对象的对称性破缺之相。诸框架是循环在与各自相宜的诸时刻所汲取的资源，而本文的进行方式是依次遍历循环的诸时刻，把相宜的框架引入每一时刻。整体的一个认知与计算基础被首先确立：评价（appraisal），在它成为一种显式的度量之前，是对一段关系之部分可观测状态的、连续而大体无意识的推断，在一种未被符号化的价值中进行，并被形式化为一个决策过程的信念更新——该过程的目标本身被其自身的运行所修订，这正是前篇”不存在固定的元价值语法”这一论题的决策论形式。在对这一推断的自由能（free-energy）解读上，那维系一段关系的持续评价，乃是它借以把自身保持于存在之中的活动，而评价的停止乃是它走向熄灭的开端。

本文通篇贯彻三项承诺。第一项是一个操作性让步（operational concession）：一种实践要求可被评估之物，因此本文在它必须评估之处，把自身限制于被结构化为一个可评估代理（proxy）的价值，并明确意识到该代理不是前篇所主张的那种横贯诸声部、不可化约为符号化的价值。这是本系列第一次有意采用一种不完整的价值，而它是对前一结果的诚实了结、而非对它的放弃。第二项承诺涉及对正义的评估：一段关系的回返价值之分布，相对于由诸方之耦合所设定的一条基线来看，被表明容许一个统计学签名，即该分布的偏度（skewness），凭借它，在一段看似令人满意的关系之内对一方的剥削便变得可见——在总量性的满意度度量将其遮蔽之处。在该让步之下，一段关系之价值循环的正义被呈现为一个关于回返分布相对一条耦合基线之对称性的可检验假说，被建模为关系网络上的一个分支过程（branching process）。第三项承诺涉及作为整体的循环：循环累积一个相位，在前篇之和乐（holonomy）的意义上，而其regime由两个独立问题所固定——它是否持存，以及若它持存，它累积何种符号的相位。三个regime随之而来：一个持存的正相循环的繁荣螺旋、一个持存的负相循环的灾难性循环，以及一个停止转动之循环的熄灭，而它们之间的过渡被理解为一次分岔（bifurcation）。正义被表明是繁荣螺旋的内在条件、而非对它的约束，因为一段回返分布被严重偏斜的关系，无法为那被发配到其低回返之尾的一方累积一个正相。

与”没有任何单一框架占有整体”这一论题相一致，本文终结于的不是一个综合，而是诸复数的结论，每一个都被陈述至其框架的边界，而它通篇主张：一种共享生活的繁荣是被培育而非被建构的，是在代理中被评估而非被占有的，是作为一个敞开的螺旋被维系而非作为一个状态被确保的。

目录

1. 引言
2. 背景与方法
3. 福祉的哲学与正义论
4. 动力学词汇的复述
5. 评价的认知与计算基础
6. 作为真实循环的生命周期
7. 诸框架横贯诸时刻：一张分析矩阵
8. 认知：一种共享生活的繁荣在于什么
9. 实践：习惯与家庭的培育
10. 评估：对一种共享生活的评价及其代价
11. 反思：对评估的再审查
12. 重新认知：一轮的闭合与重启
13. 善的循环、灾难性的循环与被熄灭的循环
14. 一个纵向个案：一种共享生活穿越循环
15. 繁荣及其实践的跨文化变异
16. 本文在系列中的奠基性角色
17. 局限、反驳与回应
18. 在诸框架边界处的结论

• 终曲
• 致谢
• 附录A. 记号与关键概念
• 附录B. 形式速写

1. 引言

本文是关于亲密关系的哲学与正义论之系列的第十一篇，它承接前篇所推迟的经验性任务。前篇确立：善关系的实践是一片场域的培育、而非一个结构的建构；这片场域的质料是共享生活的日常感官与习惯织体；以及一片善的场域满足两个条件，即幸福的条件与正义的条件，其中正义构成而非仅仅约束幸福。它在抽象层面把这些确立为诸条件，并把”一种共享生活在习惯、家庭与共同生活之品质这一更经验性的声部中事实上是如何被培育、被评估、被维系的”这一问题推迟给随后的一篇。本文承接那个问题。

问题是：繁荣如何在一种共享生活的历程中被认识、被实践、被评估、被重新构想。共享生活的历程在此被当作一个循环，而循环被当作首要对象：认知、实践、评估、反思以及随之而来的重新认知的复现，横贯一段关系的时间，从它的开端、经过它的婚姻与晚年。该循环不是诸阶段一次性完成的线性序列。它的诸时刻相互渗透、相互反馈，而其中之一——评估——贯穿所有其余时刻，作为一道不间断的潜流，而非占据一个单一的站点。而且，循环是关系存在的条件。一段关系，若其中价值不再被生成与回返、诸方不再修订其对彼此的感受、实践停止，便是一段其循环已停止的关系；而一段其循环已停止的关系不会在一个稳态中持存，而是衰败。循环的持续转动是关系存续的条件，而其转动的品格——它是向上螺旋、亏损地重复、还是逐渐停转——乃是一种繁荣的生活、一种缓慢灾难的生活、与纽带之熄灭三者之间的区别。

繁荣被认识与被评估所凭借的诸框架，在本文中被当作循环所汲取的资源、而非首要对象。实证主义、证据主义、规范理论、德性伦理学与现象学，各自提供一种繁荣的认识论与一种繁荣的实践，而每一个都在循环中与它相宜的诸时刻被汲取；但没有一个支配作为整体的循环，而单一支配框架之缺席，如前几篇所确立，不是一个缺陷，而是一个无任何单一框架能占有之对象的条件。诸框架是——在前篇的意义上——繁荣之认知与实践的对称性破缺之相；循环是横贯它们的运动。

本文贯彻三项承诺。第一项是一个操作性让步。本文是一种实践，而一种实践要求可操作与可评估之物；因此它在它必须评估之处，把自身限制于被结构化为一个可评估代理的价值，并意识到该结构化代理不是前几篇所主张的那种横贯诸声部、不可化约为符号化的价值。这是本系列第一次有意选择一种不完整的价值，而该选择是对前一结果的诚实了结、而非对它的放弃：既然真实的价值不能在不占据那被划杠的大他者之位的情况下被兑现，那么在评估为必需之处，诚实的进路便是承认所评估者是一个代理，并为它的不完整性承担责任。第二项承诺涉及对正义的评估：一段关系的回返之分布被表明容许一个统计学签名，即相对于诸方之耦合的回返价值之分布的偏度，凭借它，一个看似令人满意之循环之内的剥削便变得可见。第三项涉及作为整体的循环：循环累积一个相位，在前篇之和乐的意义上，而该相位的符号区分善的循环与坏的循环，而循环的持存则把二者与熄灭相区别。

本文是本系列中关注繁荣之实践的那一部分的纲领性与奠基性文本，它以一个奠基所要求的篇幅与细节层级被写就，期望随后的诸篇汲取它所发展的诸工具、而非重新推导它们。它的范围相应地宽广：它把其构想置于福祉的哲学与正义论之内，发展生命周期的认知与动力学装置，通过若干框架处理循环的每一时刻，发展对正义的定量评估并综览既有的度量工具，追踪繁荣及其实践的跨文化变异，在一个扩展的个案上展示该装置，并迎击其进路所招致的诸反驳。

本文如下进行。它综览诸框架并陈述其方法（§2），把其构想置于福祉的哲学与正义论之内（§3）。它复述将要使用的动力学系统词汇（§4）；确立评价的认知与计算基础，在其中评估被表明在它是一种显式度量之前是一种连续而大体无意识的推断（§5）；并把生命周期指定为一个其持存制约着关系存续的真实循环（§6）。它在一张分析矩阵中陈列每一框架在每一时刻、于其认识论层与其实践层两者中的贡献（§7），随后依次处理循环的诸时刻——认知（§8）、实践（§9）、评估（§10）、反思（§11）与重新认知（§12），每一时刻都作为若干框架为其本分任务而被汲取之处。它考虑作为整体的循环，在其繁荣、灾难与熄灭三个regime中（§13）；在一个扩展的纵向个案上展示整个装置（§14）；追踪繁荣以及婚姻与家庭之实践的跨文化变异（§15）；陈述它在系列中的奠基性角色及其遗赠给随后诸篇的工具（§16）；迎击其进路所招致的诸反驳（§17）；并以诸复数的结论作结（§18）。一个形式附录汇集记号与关键概念（附录A），并发展正文所使用的谱的、决策论的与动力学的诸形式化（附录B）。

2. 背景与方法

本节综览本文所汲取的诸框架，陈述它们彼此之间的关系，并申明本文之诸评估据以作出的方法论让步。诸框架被综览，不是作为本文从中选取的竞争者，而是作为一种共享生活之循环在与各自相宜之诸时刻所汲取的资源。依各自所携带的繁荣之认识论，五个框架被加以区分。

2.1 繁荣之认知与实践的五个框架

实证主义，在本文所使用的意义上，是这样的立场：繁荣是一个可观测、可度量的事实之事，通过其诸指标可通达，并可由量化加以处理。它在福祉研究中的发展形式是主观福祉（subjective well-being）的传统，其中福祉被操作化为生活满意度连同正向情感超过负向情感的平衡，并由经过验证的工具加以度量（Diener 1985）。承载这些度量的享乐主义传统汇集于 Kahneman、Diener 与 Schwarz（1999），其工具包括正负向情感量表（Watson、Clark 与 Tellegen 1988）与生活质量量表（WHOQOL 1998）。在主观度量之旁，立着生活质量的客观指标、一种生活的可度量条件，以及任何此类度量据以就其信度与效度被评估的心理测量学装置。实证主义的承诺是：凡不能被带至度量者（无论何等间接），都不能是严格意义上的知识之事。

证据主义，作为一种实践认识论，是这样的立场：一个信念，以及奠基于它的实践，应当与证据相称，并随证据的修订而修订。在繁荣研究中，它的发展形式是循证实践（evidence-based practice），其中一项干预由”它产生其所声称之效果”的受控证据之分量所担保。证据主义并不等同于实证主义，尽管二者结盟：实证主义关注繁荣是什么，一个可观测的事实，而证据主义关注关于繁荣的信念应当如何被形成与更新，即通过与证据相称。这一区别对本文要紧，因为证据主义在其更深的形式上，是信念修订本身的认识论，因而触及显式权衡研究之下、本文定位于一切评价之基础处的那种信念之连续更新（§5）。

规范理论是这样的立场：繁荣不被”实然”所穷尽，而涉及”应当被珍视者”：一种善的生活由有理由认其为可贵的诸目的所构成，而不仅由所报告的满意或所观测的条件所构成。它最发展的当代形式，也是与本系列最相和谐的形式，是能力进路（capabilities approach），其中一种生活的尺度是一个人去成为与去做其有理由珍视者的实质自由——是诸能力（capabilities）、而非仅仅是已达成的诸功能（functionings）（Sen 1999；Nussbaum 2011）。该进路在对一种”易受境遇所伤”的亚里士多德式繁荣构想的复兴中有其先例（Nussbaum 2001）。能力进路与本系列相和谐，因为它的核心观念——去展开一个人有理由珍视者的实质自由——与前几篇所发展的”繁荣即各方自身动力学之展开”的构想密切结盟。

德性伦理学是这样的立场：繁荣，即古典意义上的 eudaimonia，是一种生活依照品格之卓越的活动，而这样的卓越通过习惯化（habituation）被获得。在亚里士多德那里，诸德性是品格的状态，由相应行动的反复施行所形成，直到它们成为一种被定锚的禀性、一种 hexis；eudaimonia 于是是灵魂依照这些已获得之卓越、于一段完整生活之上的活动（亚里士多德，《尼各马可伦理学》）。对这一构想的当代复兴——以对抗现代将伦理化约为规则——在很大程度上归功于 MacIntyre（1981），而其向”被承认之依赖之诸德性”的延伸归功于 MacIntyre（1999）。儒家的自我修养传统提供了一个平行的论述，其中人通过持续的修养、礼的践行以及家庭及其礼仪的整饬而被形成，善的生活是一种被达成并被维持的修养、而非一种一次性确保的状态（Tu 1985）。这一传统的古典源头包括《论语》与中庸之道（《中庸》）。两个传统都把繁荣定位于通过习惯形成禀性，并因此都以其他框架所不及的方式把繁荣之认知与其实践相连，这正是德性伦理学是循环之实践时刻所本分的框架之缘由（§9）。

现象学与诠释学共同命名这样的立场：繁荣在它被度量之前是被生活、被理解的：它首先被给予为一种生活的被感受之品质与被领会之意义，而这种被给予性不是对一个可度量事实的有缺陷之近似，而是事质本身，任何度量都须对之负责。现象学传统提供前几篇所汲取的、对经验之被生活的与互主体的织体的论述；对知觉与被生活之身体的论述归功于 Merleau-Ponty（1945），而对”将被生活之世界化约为其可度量指标”的诊断归功于 Husserl（1936）；诠释学传统提供对”理解作为一个不能为某种乌有之地的视角而被走出之循环之内的意义解释”的论述。与实证主义的承诺相对，这一框架主张：将繁荣化约为其可度量指标，恰恰丢弃了繁荣之所是，而对一种共享生活的理解更近于对一个文本的解释、而非对一个仪器的读取。这种理解的结构，作为一个不能为某种乌有之地的视角而被走出之循环，由 Gadamer（1960）所发展。

2.2 作为对称性破缺之相的诸框架

这五个框架不是关于一个可度量对象的五个候选理论，证据最终将在其间裁决。它们是——在前篇赋予该词的意义上——繁荣之认知与实践的五个相：每一个都是繁荣之理解在某一特定学科与某一特定任务之条件下所采取的确定形式，而无一是其余者乃其局部视角的那个未分割的结构。实证主义者度量可被度量者，对不可度量者保持沉默；现象学者描述被生活者，抗拒其向度量的化约；规范理论者指定应当被珍视者，却不能担保其实现；德性论者描述禀性的形成，却不能为品格立法；证据主义者使信念与证据相称，却在证据不能触及之处缄默。每一个都在其自身的破缺之相中说出别者所不能说者，而每一个都在另一者发言之处沉默。

因此它们之间的关系，不是一个由某一框架的胜利、亦不是由它们折衷地组合为一个单一超级框架（那将是本系列已论证其不存在的元语言）所能解决的关系。它是一种复调对一个无任何单一声部能占有之真理的关系，而循环的重负是在与各自相宜之时刻汲取每一个，而不把其余者从属于它。这是前篇的方法论继承，从理论诸篇的诸学科被移置到实践这一篇的诸框架，而它是一项辩证唯物主义的、而非相对主义的承诺：诸框架是对一个真实且在生产中之繁荣的、各自从其位置出发的局部规定，而非那么些个不可通约、其间没有事实的语言游戏。

2.3 操作性让步

一种实践要求可操作与可评估之物。一种共享生活的培育通过可被采取与可被修订的诸行动而进行，而其修订要求对”培育是否趋向善”作出某种评估。但前几篇确立：一段关系中所争之价值横贯三个声部、涌现于它们的耦合动力学，且不被任何符号化所穷尽；并确立：把这样一种价值固定于一个确定的、可占有的结构、把它兑现，乃是定锚的操作，以及对那被划杠的大他者之位的占据。因此，在任何对繁荣的实践性与评估性处理之核心，都有一种张力：评估要求价值被结构化为一种可评估的形式，而真实的价值恰恰抗拒那种结构化。

本文以一个它公开陈述并通篇承担的让步来迎接这一张力。在它必须评估之处，它把自身限制于被结构化为一个可评估代理的价值，并主张该代理不是前几篇所确立为不可化约的那种价值。该结构化代理是一件实践的工具，由其操作性使用所担保，而它不是、也不能是对真实价值的表象。这是本系列第一次有意采用一种不完整的价值、而非将其诊断为一种失败，而这一采用是对前一结果的诚实了结、而非对它的逆转。既然真实价值不能在不占据大他者之位的情况下被兑现，那么在一种实践必须评估之处，诚实的进路便不是声称该评估触及真实价值（那将正是那种占据），而是承认所评估者是一个代理，按它在操作上之所值来使用它，并为它的不完整性承担责任。该让步支配着本文所作的每一次评估，而最有后果地，是支配着§10对正义的定量评估，其结果应被读作在操作上有效、而非读作对一段关系之真实价值的度量。

该让步也固定了实证主义框架所提供的那种显式的、被仪器化的评价的地位。该评价并不因此被贬低。相反，它对一种实践不可或缺，因为一种没有评估的实践不能被修订；而它所产出的结构化代理，在其操作限度之内，是一种真实的收获：公共的、可比较的、可累积的——以未被结构化的评价所不能的方式。该让步不是一项反对度量的裁决，而是对其地位的一种指定：度量是对一个它不能触及之价值的、在操作上有担保的代理，应被如此使用，而不被误认为价值本身。本文现在转向循环及其诸regime将据以被描述的词汇。

3. 福祉的哲学与正义论

本文关于一种正义之幸福的构想，立于一个奠基性处理必须使之显明的两个哲学谱系之中：福祉的哲学，它追问一种善的生活在于什么；以及正义论，它追问在共享一种生活者之间何者为应得。本节把该构想置于两者各自之内，不是为了从它们推导出它（因为它是在前几篇的独立根据上被发展的），而是为了把它定位，标明它的赞同与背离，并把这些文献所作的诸区分提供给后文的论证。

3.1 福祉的哲学

福祉的哲学区分关于”什么使一种生活过得好”的三族理论，这一划分以其经典形式归功于 Parfit（1984）。享乐主义理论主张福祉在于快乐超过痛苦、正向超过负向经验的平衡；善的生活是最快乐的生活，而该传统经由古典功利主义者与 Sidgwick（1907）传下。欲望满足理论主张福祉在于一个人之诸欲望的满足，无论该满足是否被体验为愉快；善的生活是一个人所想要者得以达成的生活，而该理论有把一个人的善奠基于该人自身之珍视、而非奠基于一个外在标准的优点。客观清单理论主张某些事物对一个人是善的，无论它们是否被欲望或被觉得愉快，即存在一个善的多元体——知识、友谊、成就、德性之类——其拥有使一种生活更好，独立于该人对它们的态度；善的生活是被清单上诸项目所配备的生活。

本系列的构想与这三者处于一种确定的关系。它不是享乐主义的：本文已详尽论证，一种生活的被感受之满意是一个伪造的繁荣也能满足的结构化代理（§11.3），而一段关系可以产生高的正向情感平衡，却在其回返之分布上是不正义的、因而绝非一种幸福。它不是一种简单的欲望满足理论：本文已主张所争之价值不被诸方碰巧想要者所穷尽，因为一方可能由于习惯于一个被贬损的位置而不再想要其展开之被封闭已置于其够不着之处者，以致对其如今被贬损之诸欲望的满足，与其繁荣之被封闭相容。该构想最接近一种客观清单理论，因为它主张各方自身动力学之展开、以及维系它之循环的正义，对诸方是善的，无论它们是否被感受或被欲望；但它在两个方面有别于标准的客观清单理论。它提供的不是一个善的清单，而是一个结构——一个回返之循环的敞开螺旋——在其中一种特定共享生活的诸善被生成、而非被预先枚举；而它把这一结构的客观性奠基于的不是一个强加于诸方的外在标准，而是前几篇所推导的生成与回返之动力学，以致对诸方为善者，是它们自身的生成活动、在被正义地维系时所产生者。在福祉哲学的词汇中，该构想是一种客观清单理论，其唯一项目是一个结构而非一个内容，其客观性是一个生成过程的客观性、而非一个被强加之标准的客观性。

3.2 正义论

本系列所主张为构成幸福之条件的那个正义之条件，与当代诸主要正义论处于一种关系之中，而这一关系既照亮本文的正义条件是什么，也照亮它添加了什么。归功于罗尔斯的、占主导的现代分配正义论，关注基本善（primary goods）——任何理性的人被假定都想要的诸善，其中不仅有收入与机会，也有自尊的社会基础——的公平分配，并以”假若这些原则是从无知之幕背后被选择则会支配这一分配的原则”来评估一种社会安排（Rawls 1971）。本文的正义条件在形式上是分配性的，因为它关注一段关系之诸方之间回返价值的分配，而回返分布的偏度（§10.2）是关系之内分配不正义的一个度量；在罗尔斯的基本善中纳入自尊的社会基础尤为切题，因为那被发配到低回返之尾的一方，被剥夺的不仅是回返价值，还有”被回返”所维系的那种自尊。

第二个传统，关系性平等主义（relational egalitarianism），主张正义所关切的首先不是诸善的分配，而是人们所处之诸关系的品格，即正义当人们作为平等者相互关联时（而非当诸善依某一模式被分配时）成立，而平等的要点是支配、剥削与从属之诸关系的废除（Anderson 1999）。本文的正义条件在这方面是关系性的，一如它是分配性的：它所指认的不正义是一方被化约为一段关系的维系性燃料，是共享生活之内一种剥削与从属的关系，而回返之偏斜是这样一种关系、而非仅仅一种不平等分配的签名。这两种解释——分配的与关系的——对本文是一个条件的两个面相，回返之分布乃是诸方之关系性地位的可度量痕迹。

第三个传统提供了通往承认（recognition）的联系。由弗雷泽（Fraser）与霍耐特（Honneth）参与的再分配与承认之争论，关注不正义根本上是不是分配不当（maldistribution）之事——以再分配诸善加以补救——抑或是误认（misrecognition）之事——未给予一个人或群体应得的地位——以承认加以补救（Fraser 与 Honneth 2003）。本文的论述整合二者：价值向其生成者之回返，同时既是一种再分配——价值向那生产它的一方的回流——又是一种承认——对那一方作为一个其贡献被欠以回返之生成者、而非一个价值可被取走而无须承认之来源的认可。回返之偏斜度量一种分配不当；展开之封闭（§10.3）度量一种误认，即未给予一方”其自身发展要紧者”的地位；而本文主张这二者是单一不正义的两副面孔，一如再分配—承认之争论在其更整合的诸解决中已逐渐主张的那样。

第四个传统，关怀伦理学（ethics of care），是与本文主题最近的一个，也是本文最直接地加以形式化其洞见的一个。关怀传统，兴起于吉利根（Gilligan）对一种导向责任与关系、而非导向抽象权利之道德声音的指认（Gilligan 1982），并由海尔德（Held）等人发展为一种政治与哲学伦理学（Held 2006），主张：被依赖者借以被维系的那种关怀在道德上居于中心，且被系统性地低估，而一种正义的社会生活论述必须把关怀之劳动当作劳动来计算、而非把它抹去为自然的或自由给予的。基塔伊（Kittay）对依赖及其所要求之劳动的分析尤为切题，因为它恰恰指认了那种本文的偏斜度量被构造来探测其低回返的维系性劳动（Kittay 1999）。本文可以被读作：为亲密关系这一核心个案，提供了关怀传统之核心主张的一个形式化——即维系一种共享生活的劳动是劳动，它生成价值，而它的系统性低回返是一种带有可度量签名的不正义。关怀伦理学提供道德洞见；回返分布的偏斜提供对其违犯的一个结构化代理。

3.3 本文构想之定位

本文关于一种正义之幸福的构想，总括而言，是一种福祉的客观清单理论，其唯一项目是一个正义地回返之循环的结构，连结于一种正义论，后者在其度量上是分配性的、在其内容上是关系性的、整合了再分配与承认、并形式化了关怀伦理学。该构想不是从这些立场拼装而成，而是在独立的根据上被发展的，而它与它们的关系是一种汇合（convergence）、而非一种推导：前几篇关于生成性正义、向创造者之回返、以及各方之展开的论述，循其自身的路径，抵达了一个被福祉的哲学与正义论从其各自方向所照亮的构想。这一汇合本身是某种论证，因为一个被独立地抵达、又被发现汇集了若干既有传统之洞见的构想，有理由被认为表述了诸传统各自所趋近之物；但本文把其构想立于前述的推导，并把这一汇合作为佐证、而非作为根据来提供。

图1. 作为一个循环的、共享之繁荣的生命周期。 五个时刻——认知（繁荣是什么）、实践（习惯、家庭）、评估（评价、度量）、反思（再审查）、重新认知（被修订的感受）——被排布于一个环上，并相互转入。在中枢处坐着评价（信念更新），由微弱的辐条连向每一时刻：评估，作为对关系状态之一个信念的连续而大体无意识的更新，在它成为一种显式度量之前便贯穿每一时刻。三支箭头从环向外通往三个regime——繁荣螺旋（正相）、灾难性循环（负相）与熄灭（循环停转）。循环的持存是关系存续的条件；它绕一轮所累积之相位的符号区分繁荣螺旋与灾难性循环，而循环的停转即熄灭。

4. 动力学词汇的复述

本文以动力学系统的词汇描述共享之繁荣的生命周期，而其中心术语在此以一种足够其所受用途的形式被回顾。这一复述简短而非技术性，并且它承载前篇详尽确立的那个限定（此处所回顾之诸观念的标准处理是 Strogatz 1994 与 Hirsch、Smale 与 Devaney 2013）：关系仅作为一个结构性类比被一个动力学系统所建模，而该类比受制于那里所指认的极限，即支配一段关系的法则本身被关系所生成者所重构，以致没有固定的系统能完整地捕捉它。该词汇被使用，是为了它所使之可见者，而非作为”一段关系是一个标准类型之系统”的主张。

4.1 状态、演化与轨迹

一个动力学系统由一个状态空间——系统可占据的诸构型——连同一个把每一状态在时间上带至其后继的演化规则所指定。系统的历史是穿越状态空间的一条轨迹，即状态在规则之下演化时所描出的路径。对一段关系，状态空间是一种共享生活可占据之诸构型的空间，而轨迹是关系的历史；演化规则是关系自身的动力学，它如前篇所坚持，不是固定的，而是被关系的产物所重构，这一限定在下文通篇被保留备用。

4.2 不动点、稳定性与衰败

一个不动点是演化规则把它带至其自身的状态，是系统一旦抵达便驻留其上的构型。一个不动点是稳定的，若从其附近开始的轨迹被吸向它；是不稳定的，若它们被驱离。一条失去维系其运动之能量或输入的轨迹，逐渐停转地趋向一个不动点并在那里归于静止。对一段关系，切题的不动点是关系之运动已停止的状态，其中价值不再被生成、交换或回返，而诸方不再修订其对彼此的感受。这一终极静止不是一个良性的平衡，而是关系作为一个活的过程之停止，本文名之为熄灭（§13）。一段不被维系的关系朝它衰败。

4.3 吸引子与极限环

一个吸引子是一组状态，状态空间某一区域的诸轨迹被吸向它，并此后驻留其上。一个不动点是最简单的吸引子。一个极限环（limit cycle）是另一种吸引子：一条闭合的轨迹、状态空间中的一个环路，邻近的轨迹被吸向它，而系统随后沿它无限期地循环。一个极限环是一种自我维系的振荡，一种通过一次又一次地穿越一个状态之循环回返、而非在一个点上归于静止来维系自身的运动。它与本文的关联是直接的：一段活的关系被建模的，不是一个不动点（那将是它的停止），而是一种被维系的循环运动，即认知、实践、评估、反思与重新认知的生命周期，它通过其持续转动维系关系。这一循环运动的持存、而非任何静止状态的达成，乃是一段活的关系的标志。

4.4 绕一个循环所累积的相位

一个绕一个循环返回到其状态空间中之起始构型的系统，不必在每一方面都不变地返回。一个沿循环被携带的量，可能在返回到起始构型时不与其初值重合，而那一差异——绕环路所累积的相位——就是前几篇所系于其上的和乐。一个和乐消失的循环把一切返回到它开始之处，是一种绕行而不上升的纯粹重复。一个正和乐的循环带着一个增益返回到起始构型，是一种在返回时上升的螺旋。一个负和乐的循环带着一个亏损返回，是一种在转动时耗竭的盘绕。善的循环与坏的循环之间的区别——贯穿本系列所发展——就是这一被累积之相位的符号，而它在此被带入共享之繁荣的生命周期：同样的五个时刻可以以一种上升的方式、以一种仅仅重复的方式、或以一种耗竭的方式被遍历，而其区别在于那一轮的和乐、而非所遍历之诸时刻的同一性。

4.5 分岔

一个动力学系统的定性行为可能依赖于诸参数，即系统据以演化的缓慢变动之条件。当一个参数被变动时，系统的行为可能在一个区间内平滑地变化，然后在一个临界值处发生种类上的变化：一个稳定的不动点可能失去其稳定性，一个极限环可能出现或消失，一个吸引子可能分裂。这样一种在临界参数值处的定性变化是一次分岔。其关联在于：一段关系的regime——它是维系一个繁荣螺旋、安顿于一个耗竭的循环、还是衰败向熄灭——可能不随其条件渐变，而可能在一个阈值处发生种类上的转移，维系性条件中一个微小的进一步变化把关系越过一个临界值、带入一个定性上不同的regime。分岔的语言是本文据以描述一段关系从一个regime向另一个之过渡的语言（§13），而它捕捉了”或多或少之福祉”这种渐变语言所不捕捉的一个特征，即一段被维系之关系与一段正在崩塌之关系的区别，可以是一个由程度上的微小变化所抵达的种类上的区别。

5. 评价的认知与计算基础

在评估是一种显式度量之前，它是一种连续而大体无意识的推断。共享一种生活的诸方，大多并不以审慎的程序评估其关系；他们在不断地、在反思之下评价它，在一个寻常日子的织体中登记彼此之间的好坏、关系是趋向温暖还是趋向疏远、共享的生活是在上升还是在下降。本节确立：评价在其基础处是对一个部分可观测状态的、在一种未被符号化之价值中进行的推断；§10那种显式的、被仪器化的评估是铺设于这一基础性推断之上的一个结构化代理；而最好地呈现该基础过程的框架是信念更新（belief updating）的框架，它是证据主义触及显式权衡研究之下、对一个不可观测状态之信念的连续修订。

5.1 作为一个生物学过程的评价

对一个情境的评价，首先是一个生物学事件、而非一次审议。情绪心理学中评价理论（appraisal theory）的传统主张：情绪从对一个情境相对于一个存在者之关切的评价中产生，而这一评价在它的任何部分变得可供反思之前，便经过快速的、多层级的、大体自动的诸检核（Lazarus 1991；Scherer、Schorr 与 Johnstone 2001）。情绪与认知不是可分离的官能、而是一个评价过程的诸面相，由 Pessoa（2008）所论证，而情绪评价的被建构的与推断的性格由 Barrett（2017）所论证。共享生活中一个时刻的被感受之品质——一次交流之后不请自来的安适或不安——是这样一次评价的登记，是一次已在觉知之下被完成、并作为一种感受被递交给意识的评价。这一过程的神经科学把它定位于前额叶及相关回路对当下知觉与先在期望的快速整合，以及对当前状态之一个评价的发出——决策随后奠基于该评价之上。关键地，该过程在主体并不、也不能完全清晰表述的诸量上运作：评价在一种价值中进行，该价值在被符号化之前、且常常永不被符号化，便被感受并被据以行动。基础性评价恰恰在前几篇主张为真实者的那种未被符号化之价值中进行。

这一过程的一个成分值得强调，因为它奠基了通往场域之质料的联系。内感受（interoception），即对身体内部状况的感知，越来越被理解为它本身是一个推断过程，其中被感受的身体状态是大脑对其内部信号之诸原因的最佳估计，而情绪是对这一估计在情境中的一次读取（Seth 2013）。一段关系处境如何的被感受之感——那作为一种共享生活之最初且最恒常之评价的身体安适或不安——在这一论述上是一种内感受推断，而其数据在很大程度上正是前篇指认为场域之质料的感官与习惯织体：那些饭食、房间、节律、接触，在被思想表述之前便已在身体中被登记。对一段关系的评价，在其基础处，是身体对共享生活之织体的连续推断。

5.2 作为对一个部分可观测状态之推断的评价

这一基础性评价的形式结构由部分可观测下的决策框架所呈现。一个不能直接观测其世界之真实状态、而只能通过部分而带噪声之观测来观测它的行动者，必须维持一个信念——一个在诸可能状态上的概率分布——并随观测之到来更新这一信念；它随后在该信念、而非在那不可获得的真实状态上选择其诸行动。这就是被形式化为部分可观测马尔可夫决策过程（POMDP）的结构，其中一个隐藏状态演化，行动者接收依赖于它的诸观测，行动者维持并更新一个在隐藏状态上的信念，而行动者选择诸行动以在时间上获取价值（Kaelbling、Littman 与 Cassandra 1998）。在不确定性下为价值而学习行动的一般框架由 Sutton 与 Barto（2018）所陈列。

这一结构以一种富有启发的精确性映射到对一段关系的评价之上，而该映射把前几篇的诸承诺带入决策的词汇。

作为对一个隐藏状态之推断的、对一段关系的评价。 对一段关系的基础性评价具有”对一个部分可观测状态的推断”之结构。关系的真实状态是隐藏的、不可直接观测的，与”一段关系的真实价值横贯诸声部、不被任何观测所穷尽”这一前述结果相一致。被观测者是共享生活的日常感官与习惯织体、即场域之质料，它依赖于隐藏状态而不完全揭示它。每一方维持一个信念——不是一个确定的裁断，而是一个分布——在关系的状态之上，与”关系价值是被叠加的而非确定的”这一前述论述相一致。信念随织体被生活而被更新，而行动（即实践）在信念之上被采取。因此评价是一种推断，在一种未被符号化之价值中进行，作用于一个无任何观测能完整揭示之状态。

该映射有一个把本节连向前篇之形式两难的后果。一个这种类型的标准过程以一个固定的价值函数、对”行动者所要获取者”的一个固定指定来运作。对一段关系的评价并非如此。诸方所要获取者——关系之善——本身在生命周期中、在重新认知的时刻被重新构想（§12）；价值函数被它所支配的过程所重写。这就是前几篇的反身性重构，而它在此重现为这一非标准特征：关系性决策过程的价值函数不是固定的，而是被循环所修订，这正是”不存在固定的元价值语法”这一论题的决策论形式。

5.3 自我维系与持续推断之命令

对这一推断性论述的一个发展，把评价绑定于关系的存续。在对适应性系统之运作的自由能论述上，一个有机体维系自身、把自身保持于会使它消解之失序状态之外，恰恰是通过持续地最小化其期望与其感官状态之间的差异，也就是说通过持续地推断并行动以使其诸推断为真（Friston 2010）。这一原则的过程论发展——其中知觉与行动共同最小化期望惊异（expected surprise）——由 Friston 等（2017）所给出。知觉、行动与有机体自身存在之维系，在这一论述上，是一个过程：停止推断、停止在推断之上行动，就是停止维系那构成系统的边界，因而消解。

被移置到关系，这一论述提供了本文将以动力学术语发展之一个论题（§13）的深层形式。对一段关系的持续评价——每一方对其状态之信念的不间断更新以及在其上采取的行动——不是关系的一个可选伴随物，而是关系借以维系自身的活动。一段诸方停止评价、停止更新其对彼此之感受、停止在该感受上行动的关系，是一段已停止施行其借以把自身保持于存在中之活动的关系，而它消解向§4.2的终极静止。在这一论述上，持续推断之命令，是把关系保持于存在中之命令；评价之停止是熄灭之开端。

5.4 评估的两个声部

前述确立了一个支配本文对评估之处理的区别。一段关系在两个声部中被评估。第一个是本节所描述的基础性、连续、大体无意识的推断：一种在未被符号化之价值中、作用于一个隐藏状态、通过共享生活之被生活织体而进行的评价，它贯穿循环的每一时刻而不占据其中任何一个。这是评价在其首要而弥漫之形式中的样态，而它在前几篇所辩护的真实价值中进行。第二个是实证主义框架所提供、§10所发展的那种显式的、被仪器化的、结构化的评价：一种在特定关节被进行的审慎度量，其中关系的某一面相被带至一种结构化且可评估的形式。

两个声部之间的关系，就是操作性让步所命名的那一关系（§2.3）。显式评价是铺设于基础性推断之上的一个结构化代理：它取诸方持续维持的那个未被符号化之信念，并把它的某一结构化面相呈现为一种可被度量、比较与累积的形式。该代理在操作上是有价值的，因为基础性推断恰恰由于其未被符号化，是私人的、不可传达的、不可问责的，而结构化度量是公共的、可核查的。而该代理是不完整的，因为该结构化恰恰丢弃了真实评价于其中进行的那个未被符号化之余数。显式地评价一段关系，就是为了操作性使用而符号化一个本性上未被符号化的信念，而公共性上的收获以真实之物上的亏损偿付。本文§10对显式评价的处理通篇在这一理解之下进行：它所讨论的度量是对一个它们不触及之基础性评价的结构化代理，而证据主义——它是基础性信念更新本身的认识论——是基础性推断及其结构化代理两者都应据以被理解的框架。

6. 作为真实循环的生命周期

本节指定本文取为首要的对象。共享之繁荣的生命周期是一个循环，在§4所回顾的动力学意义上：一种通过其持续转动维系关系的、被维系的循环运动，而非诸阶段一劳永逸地一次性完成的线性序列。本节就此循环确立三件事：它不是线性的，而是一种其诸时刻相互渗透、相互反馈的运动；它的持存是关系存在的条件，以致循环的停止即关系的熄灭；以及它横贯一段关系的时间、通过从一个开端、经过一场婚姻、进入晚年的诸嵌套重复而转动。

6.1 循环的诸时刻及其非线性

循环被表述为五个时刻：认知，即对”这一种共享生活的繁荣在于什么”的领会；实践，即据以追求它的培育与行动；评估，即对关系处境如何的评价；反思，即对那一评价以及对框定它之认知的再审查；以及重新认知，即一轮进一步之循环据以开始的被修订之领会。这些是时刻而非阶段。一个阶段被完成并被抛在身后；一个时刻是一种运动的反复出现之面相，该运动总是在某种程度上同时从事于它们全体。诸方不是先完成其对善的认知、然后实践、然后评估、然后反思、然后重新开始。他们在一种仍在形成中的认知上实践；他们如§5所确立，在实践之时连续地评估；他们的反思在途中修订其实践；而他们的认知不待一轮循环之完成便被重新构想。诸时刻相互渗透、相互反馈，而向五个的表述是一个分析装置，用以依次处理一种事实上并不依次进行之运动的诸面相。

一个时刻尤其拒绝被定位。评估，作为§5那基础而连续的评价，不是循环的一个站点，而是一道贯穿其全部时刻的潜流：诸方在认知关系之善之时、在实践之时、在反思之时、在重新构想之时，都在评价关系的状态。把评估当作一个独立时刻的处理（§10），涉及它的显式而被仪器化之形式，即在特定关节被进行的审慎度量；基础性评估、那不间断的信念更新，弥漫于整体。在这方面，循环是一种带着对其自身状态之连续监测的运动，其方式如同一个通过永不停止估计自身处境来维系自身的系统。

6.2 作为关系之条件的循环之持存

本节的核心主张涉及循环之转动是为了什么。问题不在于循环是对一段无论如何都会存在之关系的一个有用描述。循环之转动是关系借以存在的活动，而它之停止是关系之终结。

循环之持存是关系存在的条件。 一段关系是由其循环之持续转动所维系的一个活的过程，而非一个一旦达成便自行持存的状态。价值的持续生成、它的流通与回返、对关系状态之不间断的评价、以及在该评价上所采取的实践，乃是关系借以把自身保持于存在中的活动，其方式如同一个仅在它持续推断并行动之久才存在的自我维系系统（§5.3）。一段这一活动停止的关系不会在一个寂静却完好的状况中持存；它衰败向那种价值不再被生成或回返、诸方不再修订其对彼此之感受的终极静止。因此循环的停止不是一段处于静止的关系，而是一段被熄灭的关系。处于一段活的关系之中，就是从事于其循环之持续转动；停止转动，就是任关系流失。

这一主张把本论述与任何”把关系性福祉当作一个有待达成、此后被占有之状态”的处理相区别。不存在一种已达成之繁荣的状态，能在没有循环之持续活动的情况下、一旦被确保便维系自身，正如不存在一段活的关系之不动点而它不是它的停止（§4.2）。一种共享生活的善不被存储；它在转动中一次又一次地被生成，而一段停止生成它的关系不是持有其所曾有者，而是失去它。其对实践的蕴含贯穿本文被发展：一种共享生活的工作不是一个状况的达成，而是一种运动的维系，而最有后果的失败不是未能抵达一个状态，而是转动的停止。

6.3 横贯一段关系之时间的循环

循环转动，而一段关系是它的许多轮，嵌套并累积。一次单一的交流可能是一个小的轮，在一个下午之内被认知、被实践、被评价、被反思、被重新构想。一段关系的一个季节是一个更大的轮，而从求爱到一种安顿之生活、从一种安顿之生活经过其诸考验、进入晚年的过渡，是本文所考虑的最大的轮。这些轮是嵌套的：小的轮组成季节，而季节组成一种共享生活的弧。一段关系可能抵达的那场婚姻不是循环的终结，而是其诸条件的一次变换，此后同样的诸时刻在被改变的境遇下复现——善的认知被多年的共享实践所修订，实践安顿入§9的诸习惯与家庭，评估被一段长久的历史所充实，反思被加深，而重新认知承载前诸轮所累积者向前。

横贯诸轮的这一累积是生命周期的和乐（§4.4）。一轮据以结束的重新认知，不与它据以开始的认知同一；那一差异，累积于一轮之上，是该轮所获得之相位，而累积于许多轮之上，则是一种共享生活的长久上升或长久下降。一段其诸轮累积一个正相的关系，横贯其历史而上升，其善的认知加深，其实践丰富，其诸方通过其共享生活发展为比其曾是者更多。一段其诸轮累积一个负相的关系，横贯其历史而下降，无论其形式何等完好，一轮接一轮地耗竭其诸方。而一段其循环停止转动的关系，既不上升也不下降，而是终结。这三种可能——上升的螺旋、下降的循环与停止——是本文在§13、于它已遍历一个单一之轮的诸时刻之后、作为整体加以处理的三个regime。本文现在在循环的第一个时刻——对”一种共享生活的繁荣在于什么”的认知——进入循环。

7. 诸框架横贯诸时刻：一张分析矩阵

§2.1的诸框架在循环中与各自相宜的诸时刻被汲取，而本文对诸时刻的处理（§8至§12）以散文发展这一汲取。由于五个框架对五个时刻的关系不易在发展它的诸节中被一览，本节把它陈列于一张矩阵中，该矩阵充当随后处理的一张地图，并以紧凑的形式陈述这一奠基性主张：每一框架在每一时刻贡献一种独特的认识论与一种独特的实践。该矩阵区分两个层，因为每一框架在每一时刻，既以一种特有方式认知该时刻的对象（其认识论层），又以一种特有方式引导该时刻的行动（其实践层）。两个层呈现于两张表，第一张为认识论，第二张为实践。

该矩阵应被读作一个分析装置、而非一种划分。诸时刻相互渗透（§6.1），而诸框架不被排他地分派给诸时刻，而是每一个在每一时刻都可用，在某些时刻更居中心、在另一些时刻更居边缘；诸条目记录每一框架在每一时刻的特有贡献，即散文在其最有后果处所发展的那一贡献。一个单元格记录一个给定框架在一个给定时刻如何承担该时刻的任务，而沿一列追踪单一框架的读者将发现其独特立场横贯诸时刻被维持，而横一行追踪单一时刻的读者将发现该时刻所汲取之诸框架的复调。

表1. 认识论层：每一框架如何认知循环每一时刻的对象。

框架	认知	实践	评估	反思	重新认知
实证主义	繁荣作为一个可度量的事实之事	诸实践作为带可度量效果的干预	由经验证之工具进行的度量	度量须对照其诸极限被读取	被度量之诸基线的修订
证据主义	关于善的信念与证据相称	被支持的实践，由受控证据所担保	在被生活织体之证据上的信念更新	随证据修订而对信念的再相称	承载被更新之信念向前
规范	繁荣作为各方去展开之实质自由	实践作为能力之实现	对照正义之繁荣的指定加以评估	该指定是否被满足，以及以谁为代价	鉴于该轮对善的再指定
德性论	繁荣作为依照被培育之卓越的活动	习惯化；hexis 与家庭风范之形成	被形成之诸禀性的状态	诸禀性是卓越还是其反面	被承载向前、被加深或被收窄之禀性
现象学	繁荣作为在被度量之前被生活与被解释者	对共享生活之注意力的培育	厚描述；被感受与被意指之品质	度量所丢弃之被生活意义	被重启的、未被符号化之领会

表2. 实践层：每一框架如何引导循环每一时刻的行动。

框架	认知	实践	评估	反思	重新认知
实证主义	为共享生活指定可度量的目标	采用有既定效果的实践	施测诸工具；计算诸代理	不把度量占有为真理	把目标重置于新的基线
证据主义	与证据相称地形成关于善的信念	在其诸极限之内运用被支持的实践	在被生活之证据上更新信念	修订信念；抗拒对度量的过度自信	在被修订之信念上开始该轮
规范	指定这一种共享生活应当珍视什么	为各方展开之能力留出空间	对照指定检验回返与展开	重申正义之问题	为下一轮再指定善
德性论	辨明这一种共享生活所要求之诸卓越	培育、而非为之立法诸禀性（§9.4）	读取被形成之诸禀性	防范习惯硬化为规则	把被培育之禀性带入该轮
现象学	关注这两人之善的被生活之感	培育注意力之品质	厚描述；拒绝度量的最后定论	把问题归还于未被符号化之声部	为下一轮重启领会

两张表共同以紧凑的形式陈述本文所发展的奠基性结构：一种共享之繁荣的认知与实践在五个时刻被进行，每一时刻汲取五个框架，而每一框架在每一时刻既贡献一种认知该时刻对象之方式，又贡献一种引导其行动之方式。随后诸节的散文在每一单元格最有后果处发展该矩阵的诸单元格——认知时刻处的规范与德性论（§8），实践时刻处的德性论与证据（§9），评估时刻处最充分的实证主义（§10），以及反思与重新认知诸时刻处对未被符号化者与正义者的重申（§11、§12）。该矩阵不替代那一发展，因为唯有散文能陈述诸框架之间的张力与每一条目所要求的诸限定；它提供该发展据以被读取的地图，并提供这一保证：对诸时刻的处理，尽管它在每一时刻凸显最有后果之框架，却立于本节所陈列的框架与时刻之完整矩阵。

8. 认知：一种共享生活的繁荣在于什么

循环在认知的时刻被进入，即对”这一种共享生活的繁荣在于什么”的领会。这一时刻的任务不是对一种已被定义之繁荣的度量（那属于评估），而是对”于这两人、在这一生活中，何者应算作繁荣”的在先领会：一切随后之实践与评估据以进行的框定。这一时刻汲取三个框架——规范的、德性论的与现象学的——而每一个都向认知贡献一个独特的成分；该时刻以陈述一种正义之繁荣的规范指定作结，本文后文的评估将立于该指定之上。

8.1 规范成分：繁荣作为各方之展开

规范框架提供这样的认知：繁荣不是所报告的满意、亦不是所拥有的条件，而是各方去展开其有理由珍视者的实质自由。能力进路是这一认知的发展形式：一种生活的尺度是真正对一个人敞开的诸存在与诸作为的范围，即诸能力，而不仅是所达成的诸功能或所持有的诸资源（Sen 1999；Nussbaum 2011）。被移置到共享生活，该认知是：关系的繁荣是各方去展开该方自身动力学的实质自由，是各方发展为各自有此潜质成为者，被共享生活所维系、而非所封闭。

这一认知固定了其他成分与后文评估所依赖的两件事。它固定繁荣是复数的而非总量的：它是各方之展开，而非一个双方都贡献于、其中其各别发展被合并的单一关系满意度之量。一种共享生活若产出了一个大的、被不均地分配的满意之和——一方被发展而另一方被封闭——便没有繁荣；展开是各方的、各别地，否则它便不是该认知所指定的繁荣。而它固定繁荣是一种自由而非一个状态：它是各方发展之敞开、展开之能力，而非一个被达成的特定状况，这在认知层面保全了”繁荣不是一个有待存储之状态，而是一个有待维系之运动”这一论题。

能力进路在一个能力与一个功能之间所作的区别，直接关涉对一种共享之繁荣的认知，值得引出。一个功能是一个被达成的存在或作为；一个能力是去达成它的实质自由，无论它事实上是否被达成。这一区别要紧，因为一种共享生活可能产出被达成的诸功能——一个被喂养、被居住、被占用的一方——却封闭它们作为其外壳之能力，即该方去本可以以别样方式作为与成为的实质自由。一段其中一方的诸功能被供给、但其中该方没有真正自由去追求其有理由珍视之发展的关系，供给了功能而封闭了能力，而它在这一认知上没有维系该方的繁荣。这一要点防范对一种共享生活的一种特有误读，其中对一个舒适状况的供给被当作那被供给者的繁荣；规范框架所提供的认知是：繁荣是去展开之自由，而一种封闭该自由的舒适，是一种封闭的标志、而非一种繁荣的标志。该认知也固定了后文评估因此必须尝试者，即不仅评估各方拥有与作为什么，而且评估各方在共享生活之内真正自由去成为什么，这是评估被要求去代理之诸物中最苛求的一个，也是其诸代理最不充分地触及的一个（§10.5）。

8.2 德性论成分：繁荣作为依照被培育之卓越的活动

德性论框架提供规范框架所隐含的一个认知：一方之动力学的展开不是一种自发的扩张，而是一种依照被培育之诸卓越的活动，而共享生活在其培育的诸主要场所之列。在亚里士多德式论述中，eudaimonia 是一种生活依照品格之卓越的活动，而这样的卓越由习惯化所获得，即相应行动的反复施行直到它们安顿入一种禀性（亚里士多德，《尼各马可伦理学》）。在儒家论述中，人通过持续的自我修养被形成，其中大部分在家庭的整饬与其日常仪节的践行中被进行（Tu 1985）。把人构想为在关系中被构成、把自主（autonomy）本身构想为被发展而非被预设，与心理学中的自我决定（self-determination）传统相和谐（Ryan 与 Deci 2000）。这些传统所提供的认知是：一种共享生活的繁荣不仅是各方去展开之自由，而且是各方依照共享生活所培育之诸卓越的活动，以致关系不仅是各方据以发展的条件，而是该发展的一个主要媒介。

这一成分把繁荣之认知连向其实践，因而为实践之时刻作准备（§9）。由于一种生活据以繁荣的诸卓越由习惯化所培育，对”繁荣在于什么”的认知已然指向习惯之形成与一种共同生活之整饬，作为追求它的手段。在这方面，德性论的认知是”繁荣必须被实践入存在”的认知，而它预先禁止任何把善的生活构想为一个能以”通过禀性之长期培育”以外的方式被确保之状况的构想。

德性论成分进一步提供一个单取规范框架可能错过的认知：在一种共享生活中诸卓越被联合地培育，而其中一些是关系的卓越、而非仅是各方各别的卓越。一种善的共享生活所要求的耐心、专注、慷慨与正义，是由共享生活本身之实践在诸方中形成的禀性，每一方被关系习惯化入关系所需之品格，并在被如此习惯化之中被发展；而此外，还有属于这一对的诸卓越——一种相互关注的方式、一种冲突后修复的风范、一种朝向世界的共同姿态——它们是关系的禀性，由其实践所培育、为任一方单独所不拥有。对这样一种友爱的古典处理——一种其中各方为对方之故而意愿对方之善、其中诸友是彼此繁荣之条件的关系——是亚里士多德的（《尼各马可伦理学》第八、九卷）。因此”繁荣是依照被培育之卓越的活动”这一认知，对一种共享生活，承载这一识认：关系是诸方发展的一个主要媒介、并是其自身诸卓越的承载者，而去认知一种共享生活的繁荣，就是去认知该生活所要培育的、各方与这一对的诸卓越。这一识认正是实践之时刻将要承接者，在”对这些卓越的培育必须引导、而非为关系之习惯形成动力学立法”这一约束之下（§9）。

8.3 现象学成分：繁荣作为被生活与被意指者

现象学框架提供这样的认知：繁荣，在它是任何可评估者之前，是被生活与被理解的：被给予为一种共享生活之被感受之品质与被领会之意义，而首先不是被给予为关于它的一个事实。这一成分既是对其他两个的一种添加，也是对它们的一种校正。它主张：对诸能力的规范指定与对被培育之卓越的德性论论述，无论何等正义，在它们被指向一种特定共享生活之被生活织体之前仍是抽象的，而唯有在那一织体中，这两人的繁荣才有其具体之义。对”对一对给定伴侣而言繁荣在于什么”的认知，最终是从其内部对其共享生活的一次解释，是对”其繁荣意指什么”的一种诠释学领会，而非把一个来自外部的一般指定应用于他们。

现象学成分也提供这样的认知：在这一时刻被领会者在很大程度上是未被符号化的。对”于这两人而言一种善的共享生活会是什么”的被感受之感，先于并超出其表述；对繁荣的认知，在其根处，是§5那基础性领会，在一种尚未被带至言辞之价值中进行。这把认知之时刻连向对评价的论述，并使该时刻免于”去认知繁荣就是去表述它的一个定义”这一臆断。在这一时刻去认知繁荣，首先是在被生活的、大体未被符号化之声部中领会这一种共享生活之善会是什么，而仅次要地才是表述它。

8.4 诸框架的协奏与张力

三个成分被一同汲取，而它们并不完美地一致。规范框架把繁荣指定为各方之展开，抽象地、对任何一对伴侣；德性论框架把它定位于通过共享习惯对卓越的培育；现象学框架把它指向一种特定生活之被生活的、未被符号化之意义，并抗拒其抽象指定。这一张力是富有成效的，而不应由某一成分的支配来解决。没有现象学指向的规范指定是空的，是一个尚未被指向任何现实生活的一般论述；没有规范指定的现象学领会是哑的，是一种尚未被表述为任何能引导实践或被评估之物的被感受之感；而二者若无德性论成分，则脱离了唯有通过它一种繁荣才被带入存在的那种习惯化而漂浮。对繁荣的认知，当三者被一同持守时，是充分的：规范者指定应当被珍视者，现象学者把它指向这一生活之被生活意义，而德性论者把它绑定于据以追求它的培育。

8.5 一种正义之繁荣的规范指定

认知之时刻以陈述——供本文后文评估之用——其认知所趋向的一种正义之繁荣的指定作结。该指定把这一时刻的认知与前篇的诸结果汇集起来。

一种正义之繁荣的规范指定。 一种共享生活，当其价值循环联合地满足以下各项时，正义地繁荣。共享生活中所生成的价值流通并回返于那些生成它者，没有任何一方被化约为一个价值从中被榨取而无回返的来源。各方自身动力学的展开被维系，没有任一方的发展为另一方之故或为关系之故而被封闭。而循环作为一个活的、敞开之运动被维系，其价值既不被定锚为一个被占有之状况、亦不被兑现入一个被闭合之账户，而是在转动中重新被生成。第一项是正义之条件，承载自前篇关于生成性正义与向创造者之回返的论述。第二项是幸福之条件，即各方之展开。第三项是循环之生命的条件，即它作为一个敞开螺旋、而非一个被闭合之重复的维系。一种满足幸福条件却未满足正义条件的繁荣，不是一种被减损的繁荣，而是如前篇所确立，根本不是任何幸福——一方的发展由另一方之被封闭所购得。因此这三个条件不是一份有待相互权衡的愿望清单，而是对一个单一之物——一种正义之幸福——的联合指定，而它们提供本文后文评估据以被进行的规范基础。

这一指定是认知之时刻的产物，而它是评估之时刻将要求的标准。它被规范地陈述，作为应当被珍视者，而尚未作为任何被度量者；从这一规范指定到一种操作性评估的过渡——连同那一过渡所要求的全部让步——是§10的工作。循环现在转向一种被如此指定之繁荣被追求的时刻：实践之时刻。

9. 实践：习惯与家庭的培育

循环转向实践，即据以追求一种在其规范指定中被认知之繁荣的培育与行动。这一时刻的任务是对共享生活的形成，使§8.5的正义之幸福被生成，而承载自前篇的支配性约束是：这一形成是一种培育、而非一种建构——一段关系的共享语法不能从一个占有之位置被立法，而只能被照管入一种敞开，在其中它持续地被联合重构。这一时刻汲取三个框架——德性论的、证据的与现象学的——而该时刻围绕”培育一种禀性与不为它立法”之间的张力被组织。

9.1 德性论成分：繁荣作为习惯化

德性论框架是实践之时刻所本分的框架，因为唯有它主张繁荣通过禀性之由习惯而形成被带入存在。在亚里士多德式论述中，一种生活据以繁荣的诸卓越由习惯化所获得：人通过做正义之事而成为正义的、通过做节制之事而成为节制的，直到禀性被安顿入一种 hexis、一种相应行动从中无须挣扎便流出的稳定品格状态（亚里士多德，《尼各马可伦理学》）。在这一论述上，一种共享之繁荣的实践，是把两方各别地与一同地习惯化入其共享生活据以为善的诸禀性：通过反复实践形成那些构成一种善的共享生活的、被定锚的关注、回应与关怀之方式。

这一习惯化的质料，是前篇指认为场域之质料的那种日常感官与习惯织体。一种共享生活的一个习惯，在具体实践的复现中被形成：一起进餐的一种方式、迎接与告别的一种风范、对共用房间的一种整饬、对彼此关注的一种节律。这些复现是社会学意义上的 habitus（惯习）——由一种生活形式所灌输的、生成该生活形式之诸实践并再生产它的、持久的禀性（Bourdieu 1990）；而它们是家庭风范，即横贯一种共享生活、并在时日中横贯诸代被传递的习俗与姿态。一种共享之繁荣的培育在这一织体中被进行：不在为关系表述诸原则，而在通过复现形成那些被承载于日子之具体织体中的诸禀性。

一个禀性从一个复现中形成所经由的机制值得使之显明，因为它支配着一种共享生活之培育所能与所不能做者。一个被重复的实践变得更容易，然后变得被期待，然后成为共享生活之所是的一部分，直到最终它被不加审议地施行并被觉得自然，禀性已安顿入那个它从中不请自来地流出的 hexis。这正是何以一种共享之繁荣的质料是小的与复现的、而非大的与单一的：不是宏大的决心、而是被重复的实践形成一个禀性，不是对”两人将如何生活”的宣告、而是对它的日常生活安顿入他们逐渐拥有的家庭风范。一对伴侣不是通过决心去专注而变得相互专注；他们是通过专注——在其日子的具体复现中——而变得专注，直到专注成为他们据以行动之禀性。因此一种共享之繁荣的培育在诸复现上运作：它照管日常织体，使那些值得安顿入诸禀性的实践正是事实上复现者，而它如此做，知道复现者将在时日中成为诸方之所是。这也正是何以一种共享生活的腐化如此常常是渐进而不被察觉的——一个小的不善或一个小的疏忽，复现着，由同一机制安顿入一个禀性，直到关系获得了一种无人曾决心要的、而各方不加审议地施行的品格。禀性之由习惯化而形成，对所形成之禀性是中性的，而一种共享之繁荣的培育，是对诸复现的照管，使所形成之诸禀性是§8.2的诸卓越、而非它们的反面。

9.2 约束：培育而不立法

一种共享禀性的形成立于一个把培育与其腐化相区别的约束之下。前篇确立：从一个被声称为外在于关系的位置去占有并修改一段关系的生成性结构，是符号声部中的剥削，是把一种被联合生成之生成性据为一个单一立法者的挪用，该立法者由此把对方从共享生活的一个共同作者贬为一个被它支配的对象。应用于习惯之形成，这产生这一约束：对一种共享禀性的培育必须引导关系自身的动力学而不为其诸产生式立法：它必须照管诸善的习惯据以联合地形成与重新形成的条件，而不得把一个固定的习惯作为对方被要求遵守的规则强加。

培育引导习惯之形成；立法占有它。 对一种共享习惯的培育，是对一个禀性据以形成、并在双方之联合实践中持续重新形成自身之诸条件的照管；它引导关系自身的习惯形成动力学而不固定其产物。对一个习惯的立法，是一方从一个被声称为外在的位置，把一个固定的禀性作为对方被要求遵守的规则之强加；它占有关系的习惯形成动力学并固定其产物。二者之区别，一如一片场域之培育区别于一个语法之建构，一如前篇关于符号正义之论述中引导区别于占有。一个被培育之习惯保持被联合地撰写、并对联合的重新形成敞开，而它所形成之禀性是双方的禀性；一个被立法之习惯是立法者所固定之禀性，而它的强加把对方贬为它的对象。一种共享禀性的形成，当它培育时是正义的，当它立法时是不正义的，而其区别不在习惯的内容，而在习惯形成动力学是被引导还是被占有。

这是实践之时刻的核心张力，而它不容许任何用以解决它的一般程序，因为一个用以形成正确习惯、从联合实践之外被应用的程序，本身将是一种立法。这一张力以前篇之实践的方式、减除性地被管理：通过对诸善的习惯据以产生之诸条件的培育、而非诸习惯本身的强加，通过对对方重新形成一个共享习惯之能力的保全、而非对它的固定，以及通过那个反复的问题——共享生活的一个习惯是否仍被联合地撰写、抑或已硬化为一个一方遵守而另一方强加的规则。一种家庭风范，当它保持为双方共同且可修订之姿态时，被善加培育，而当它凝固为一个一方施行而另一方遵从之regime时，被恶加培育。

9.3 一种”培育而不立法”的操作性词汇

该约束被陈述为一个原则，而一个奠基性处理欠随后诸篇一种操作性词汇，使该原则可被应用，因为一个不能被切实用于一种共享生活之复现实践的原则，对一种实践用处甚微。本小节在操作性让步之下提供这样一种词汇：它所引入的术语是一种实践之进行的操作性工具，而非对该实践所服务之未被符号化价值的度量。

第一件工具是一组信号，凭借它们，从培育向立法的漂移可在它硬化之前被识别。这一漂移由习惯化之机制（§9.1）而渐进，因此最常不被察觉；这些信号是它可被捕捉所凭的标记。一个共享习惯正漂移向立法，当一方对它的修订逐渐被另一方当作一种僭越而非一种贡献时；当为一个实践所提供的辩护不再是对方能权衡的一个理由、而成为对”事情就是这么做的”的诉诸时；当一方对一个实践的偏离被以纠正而非以探询相迎时；当共享生活的诸实践逐渐被一方以规则、期望与义务的语言、而非以联合偏好的语言来描述时；以及当”一个实践是否仍适合双方”这一问题被以”它就是那个实践”相答、仿佛它之被确立就是它之延续的一个理由时。这些信号是操作性的、可被推翻的，而其中无一是决定性的；它们的累积是这一操作性标志：一个习惯正从一种共同姿态硬化为一条被施行之规则，而培育已开始立法。

第二件工具是一套减除性操作，即一个正在立法之实践据以被归还向培育的诸操作。这套操作是减除性的，因为该约束禁止那种加性补救——一个更好规则的强加——那将是一种进一步的立法；培育所能做的，是移除立法据以运作之诸条件、而非强加一个被纠正的实践。诸减除性操作包括：对一个被硬化之实践的悬置，即把它有意地搁置一个季节，以便诸方可发现它是被联合地想要、还是仅仅被确立；对一个被封闭之问题的重启，即把一个被定锚之实践有意地归还为一个敞开的联合偏好之地位；对规则之语言的撤回，即把一个实践从义务有意地重新描述为偏好；以及对对方修订之地位的恢复，即由那个已逐渐施行一个实践之一方，对如此施行之权威的有意让渡。这些操作不强加一个正义的实践；它们移除一个不正义的实践据以被维持之诸条件，并把关系的习惯形成动力学归还于那个一个正义的实践可能、但不必从中产生的联合撰写。

第三件工具是对可被辜负性（betrayability）的保全，前篇把它指认为一段尚未封闭自身之关系的标志。一个共享习惯保全可被辜负性，当它的延续保持取决于双方持续的联合意愿，以致任一方原则上都可拒绝它，而它的延续因此是一个被重新作出的联合选择、而非一个被定锚之事实。一个已失去可被辜负性的习惯，是一个其延续不再依赖于被意愿、仅凭其确立而持存、并将违逆一个已逐渐拒绝它之一方的意愿而持存的习惯；而这样一个习惯，无论其内容何等良性，已成为一种立法，因为它独立于联合意愿而约束。对可被辜负性的保全，是”培育而不立法”约束在个别习惯层面的操作性形式：一个实践，就其保持可被辜负、其延续保持为一个被重新作出之联合选择、而不硬化为一个不被意愿便约束之事实而言，是被培育的、而非被立法的。因此，横贯一种共享生活之诸习惯对可被辜负性的维持，是一种正义实践的核心操作性任务，而上述诸信号与诸减除性操作是其维持的诸工具。

这三件工具——漂移之诸信号、诸减除性操作与对可被辜负性的保全——组成一种操作性词汇，”培育而不立法”约束可在其中被应用于一种共享生活的复现实践。它们作为本文所陈述之一个原则的操作性形式被提供给随后诸篇，而它们如本文一切操作性装置一样，立于这一让步之下：它们是一种实践的工具、而非对该实践所服务之价值的度量。

9.4 证据成分：被支持的实践及其极限

证据框架向实践之时刻贡献循证实践的资源：关于”哪些实践在平均上、在被研究之诸人群中有助于一种共享生活之维持与加深”的受控发现之体。这样的发现是一种真实的资源。某些关注、冲突后修复、对一种共享生活之劳动之正义分工的实践，在证据上有助于其繁荣，这对实践是一种真实的收获；这种维系性劳动中的许多是情感劳动、并被系统性地不承认为劳动，由 Hochschild（1983）与 Folbre（2001）所论证；而以”每一段关系都是单一的”为由对它置之不理，将是为一种频繁出错的私人直觉而丢弃一种公共且可累积之知识。

证据成分承载操作性让步所已准备的一个极限。证据通过确立一个实践在一个被研究之人群中产生一个被度量之效果来支持它；因此它在结构化代理与平均的声部中发言。它不能确立这一种共享生活之培育在其单一性与其未被符号化织体中所要求者，而它不能触及关系之善最终在其中所在的那种未被符号化之价值。因此证据成分是一种有待汲取之资源、而非一个充分的引导：它提供培育可运用的被支持之实践，而对”这一种共享生活要求什么”的规定，仍是§5那联合且大体未被符号化之评价之事，证据对它是一个输入、而非一个替代。

9.5 现象学成分：注意力之培育

现象学框架向实践贡献注意力之培育：把一种对对方与对共享生活之关注的品质，作为它本身的一个习惯加以形成。一种共享之繁荣的实践，不仅是诸行动禀性的形成，而是一个关注之禀性的形成，即一种对对方之状态、共享生活之织体、以及一段关系据以上升或下降之诸微小更改的、被定锚的知觉之准备。这是§5那基础性评价的实践对应物：既然关系由对其状态之连续评价所维系，那么对那一评价之品质的培育、对共享生活之一种精细而不间断之关注的形成，便在其繁荣的诸主要实践之列。而且，注意力之培育是最不可被同化于立法的实践，因为注意力不能被作为一个规则强加、而只能被作为一个禀性形成，因此它是”培育而不立法”约束最近乎自动之处的实践。

9.6 诸框架的协奏

三个成分组成一种共享之繁荣的实践。德性论框架提供其形式，即在共享生活之具体织体中禀性之由习惯化而形成。证据框架提供培育可汲取的被支持之实践，在”它们是诸代理与诸平均、而非这一生活之单一要求”的极限之内。现象学框架提供注意力之培育，即精细而不停地评价共享生活之禀性。而整体立于这一约束之下：禀性之形成是一种培育、而非一种立法，是对关系自身习惯形成动力学的一种引导、而非对它的占有。被如此组成的实践生成那种其流通被循环之下一时刻所评估的价值；循环现在转向评估之时刻，在那里问题是：一种被如此培育之共享生活如何被评估，以及以何种代价于评估所不能触及之价值。

10. 评估：对一种共享生活的评价及其代价

循环转向评估在其显式形式中的样态。§5那基础性评价连续地贯穿每一时刻；当下的时刻是在特定关节被进行的、审慎而被仪器化的评估，其中关系的某一面相被带至一种结构化且可评估的形式。这是操作性让步（§2.3）最有后果的时刻，也是实证主义框架最直接被汲取的时刻，尽管，如将显现，每一框架都有其自身的评价实践，而诸框架对”评估是什么”并不一致。本节先陈列若干评价实践，然后作为其主要贡献，发展对一段关系之价值循环之正义的定量评估。

10.1 若干评价实践

评估不是一种实践，而是若干种，取自若干框架，每一种在一个不同的声部中评估一个不同的面相。

生物学的评价是§5.1那连续的内感受与情感评价：在反思之下对关系处境如何的被感受之登记。它是最弥漫的评价，是在最近于真实者之价值中进行的评价，而它同时是最不可传达、最不可问责的，因为它未被符号化。它是其他诸评价所结构化的基础，而非它们的竞争者。

决策论的评价是§5.2那信念更新：在被生活织体之证据上、对每一方在关系状态上之分布的修订。它是概率声部、而非裁断声部中的评价，而它承载这一识认：被评估之状态是隐藏的，因此评估不可化约地不确定。

心理学的评价是评价理论及其工具的结构化自陈：通过诸方对其自身诸评价的报告对关系的评估，一如对关系满意度的度量。它通过把基础性评价结构化为可报告之形式而使它部分可传达。

实证主义的评价是真正的度量：由经验证之工具、产出可比较且可累积之诸量来对关系的评估。它的工具众多，而它们度量不同之物。生活满意度与情感量表度量主观福祉；生活质量工具度量一种生活的诸条件；关系满意度与调适量表度量诸方对关系的评估；幸福（eudaimonic）与自我决定工具度量被报告的成长、自主与一种展开之生活之感。代表性工具分别是：生活满意度与情感量表（Diener 1985；Watson、Clark 与 Tellegen 1988）、生活质量评估（WHOQOL 1998）、双人调适量表（Spanier 1976）、心理福祉量表（Ryff 1989），以及奠基于自我决定理论的度量（Ryan 与 Deci 2000；Deci 与 Ryan 1985）；这一度量中的幸福转向由 Seligman（2011）所代表。每一个都是一个结构化代理，就其信度与其同其他度量之相关被验证，而每一个在其操作限度之内是一种真实的收获：公共的、横贯诸关系与横贯时间可比较的、可累积入一个发现之体的。实证主义的评价是显式评估的发展形式，而本文既不贬低它，亦不把它误认为对它所代理之真实价值的评价。

现象学的评价是对共享生活的厚描述与诠释学评估：对一段关系处境如何的、以叙事而非数字进行的、密切的解释性刻画，对关系之被生活意义而非对一个可比较度量负责。它是抗拒实证主义评价所要求之结构化的评价，理由是该结构化丢弃了有待被评估者，而它之于实证主义评价，犹如对一个文本的解释之于对其词数的清点。

这五种实践对”评估是什么”并不一致，而这一分歧不应由某一者的胜利来解决。它们是评价之诸相，在§2.2的意义上：实证主义者度量、对它不能结构化者保持沉默；现象学者解释、抗拒度量；决策论者量化不确定性、心理学者结构化自陈；生物学评价把它们全体奠基于一个无一者触及之价值。一段关系被评估得好，当诸实践被一同汲取、无一被误认为整体时，而最尤其是当诸结构化度量被读作诸代理、而非读作对真实者之评价时。

10.2 显式评价的诸工具：一份综览

对繁荣与对诸关系的实证主义评价，在过去半个世纪中产出了一个可观的、经过验证之工具之体，而一种会显式地评估自身的共享生活之培育汲取它们。本小节综览诸主要工具，古典的与当代的，然后把它们定位于本文的框架之内，以便使二者皆精确：它们所提供者，以及由于它们的构造、它们所不能触及者。

10.2.1 诸主要工具及其所度量者

诸工具依其所瞄准之构念（construct）而划分。第一族在享乐主义传统中度量主观福祉，该传统把福祉解释为生活满意度连同正向超过负向情感的平衡。生活满意度量表（Satisfaction with Life Scale）以五个题项评估认知的、评价性的成分（Diener 1985）；正负向情感量表（PANAS）以二十个题项评估情感成分（Watson、Clark 与 Tellegen 1988）；而该传统汇集于 Kahneman、Diener 与 Schwarz（1999）。第二族度量幸福福祉，它把福祉解释为人之诸潜能的实现、而非感受的平衡。Ryff 的心理福祉量表（Scales of Psychological Well-Being）在六个维度——自主、环境掌控、个人成长、与他人的正向关系、生活目的与自我接纳——以十八、四十二与八十四题项的诸形式将之操作化（Ryff 1989；Ryff 与 Keyes 1995）；自我决定理论提供奠基于对自主、胜任与关联三种基本需要之满足的度量（Ryan 与 Deci 2000；Deci 与 Ryan 1985）；而 PERMA 框架在正向情绪之上添加投入、关系、意义与成就（Seligman 2011）。第三族通过客观与混合指标度量生活质量，其中世界卫生组织的、涵盖躯体、心理、社会与环境领域的生活质量评估具有代表性（WHOQOL 1998）。第四族对本文居于中心，度量关系质量：双人调适量表（Dyadic Adjustment Scale）以横跨共识、满意、凝聚与情感表达的三十二题项评估一对伴侣之关系的质量（Spanier 1976），而关系评估量表（Relationship Assessment Scale）提供一个简短的、七题项的、单维的全局关系满意度度量（Hendrick 1988）。

当代工作把这一度量从个体与伴侣延伸到人群与全球，从一个单一指数延伸到多维的成套量表。国家与国际的工具如今在整个社会之层级评估福祉。《世界幸福报告》（World Happiness Report）以一个单一的生活评价问题——坎特里尔阶梯（Cantril ladder），受访者在其上把其生活置于最坏（0）与最好（10）可能之间——为一百四十多个国家排名，取自盖洛普世界民调、在一个三年窗口上平均（WHR 2026）。经合组织的美好生活指数（Better Life Index）横跨十一个维度——其中有住房、收入、工作、社区、教育、环境、健康、生活满意、安全与工作生活平衡——评估福祉，取自二十四个指标、在用户指派的权重下聚合（OECD BLI）。而全球繁荣研究（Global Flourishing Study），一个横跨二十二个国家、逾二十万参与者的纵向面板，横跨六个领域——快乐与生活满意、躯体与心理健康、意义与目的、品格与德性、亲密社会关系，以及财务与物质稳定——度量繁荣（VanderWeele 等 2025；VanderWeele 2017）。这些工具概括于表3。

表3. 福祉、生活质量与关系质量之定量度量的诸主要工具。

工具	传统	它度量什么	来源
生活满意度量表	享乐主义 SWB	认知的生活满意；5题项，7点	Diener (1985)
PANAS	享乐主义 SWB	正向与负向情感；20题项	Watson 等 (1988)
Ryff 量表 (PWB)	幸福	正向功能的六个维度；18–84题项	Ryff (1989); Ryff & Keyes (1995)
自我决定度量	幸福	自主、胜任、关联之需要满足	Ryan & Deci (2000)
PERMA	幸福	正向情绪、投入、关系、意义、成就	Seligman (2011)
WHOQOL	生活质量	躯体、心理、社会、环境领域	WHOQOL (1998)
双人调适量表	关系	共识、满意、凝聚、情感；32题项	Spanier (1976)
关系评估量表	关系	全局关系满意；7题项，单维	Hendrick (1988)
世界幸福报告	宏观/国家	单一生活评价（坎特里尔阶梯）；国家平均	WHR (2026)
经合组织美好生活指数	宏观/国家	十一维度，24指标，用户加权	OECD BLI
全球繁荣研究	幸福/宏观	含品格、意义、关系的六领域；纵向	VanderWeele 等 (2025)

10.2.2 本文框架之内的诸工具

这一综览使对”既有工具向一种共享之繁荣之评估所提供者与所不提供者”的一个精确陈述成为可能。被定位于本文的框架之内，每一工具代理§8.5规范指定的某一成分，而这一定位揭示一个系统性缺口。享乐主义工具代理一种生活的被感受之品质，即幸福条件的一个面相，而它们在总量或平均之层级代理它，那恰恰是回返之分配不当不可见的层级（§10.3.3）。幸福工具代理各方诸潜能的展开，因而最接近各方之展开的幸福条件，但它们度量孤立中之个体的功能，而不评估一方的展开是否由另一方的被封闭所购得。关系工具代理诸方对关系的满意，又是在每一方之报告的层级，而一段关系可以在它们上得分良好却不正义地分配其诸回返，因为一个被偏爱之一方的高满意与一个被习惯化之一方的被调整之满意一同产出一个不起眼的总量。宏观工具在诸人群之层级代理福祉，根本不被指向一段特定共享生活的内部正义。

这一系统性缺口是正义之条件。综览中没有任何工具度量一方所生成的价值是否回返于该方，亦不度量是否有一方被发配到§10.3.3的低回返之尾；诸工具度量满意、功能与条件，各自在一方或总量之层级，而诸方之间相对其耦合的回返之分配，不在它们所瞄准之诸构念之列。这不是诸工具在其自身诸传统之内的一个缺陷，而是那些传统的一个边界，而它正是本文对正义之定量评估（§10.3）所指向的边界。表4把诸工具定位于框架之内，依每一工具所代理的正义之幸福之成分、以及每一工具被主要汲取于循环之哪一时刻，而它在其末列记录：正义之条件是无任何既有工具之族所提供的那一个。

表4. 被定位于本文框架之内的诸工具：每一工具所代理之正义之幸福之成分、每一工具被汲取于循环之时刻，以及它是否登记正义之条件。

族	所代理之正义之幸福之成分	循环时刻	是否登记正义？
享乐主义 SWB	生活的被感受之品质，在总量或平均	评估	否；平均遮蔽偏斜
幸福	各方诸潜能的展开，在孤立中	认知、评估	部分地；错过被另一方之封闭
关系质量	各方对关系的满意	评估、反思	否；总量遮蔽分配不当
生活质量	一种生活的客观条件	实践、评估	否；不被指向回返
宏观/国家	人群层级的福祉	（非关系内部的）	否；不被指向一段特定关系
回返之偏斜 （本文）	正义：相对耦合对各方之回返	评估、反思	是；这是它的对象

两张表共同陈述本文之定量评估、对照既有工具之背景的贡献。既有工具，古典的与当代的，度量满意、功能、条件及其人群总量，而它们以本文不匹敌、也不试图匹敌的效度与可累积性如此做。它们所不度量者——由于它们所瞄准之诸构念的构造——是一段关系诸方之间回返的分配，因而是前篇所主张为构成幸福之条件的正义之条件。回返分布的偏斜被作为对正是这一缺口的结构化代理而提供：不是既有工具的一个替代，而是一个与它们正交的添加，被指向综览所表明无任何既有工具之族登记的那一个正义之幸福之成分。

10.3 对正义的定量评估

本文现在作为这一时刻的主要贡献，发展一个被指向§8.5规范指定中之正义条件的定量评估。正义之条件是：共享生活中所生成的价值流通并回返于那些生成它者，没有任何一方被化约为一个价值从中被榨取而无回返之来源。对这一条件的评估容许一个结构化代理，它使一个满意度度量所不能使之可见者变得可见，即那种构成”一段看似令人满意之关系之内的剥削”的、系统性的回返分配不当。该评估通篇在操作性让步之下被提供：它是对一段关系之价值循环之正义的一个结构化代理，在操作上有价值、而非对关系之真实价值的度量。

10.3.1 期望可再循环性

第一个量是关系中价值的期望可再循环性（expected recyclability）：一个由一方生成之价值在关系之内被一个反过来再生成价值之回应所迎接、而非被吸收而无回返的概率。对一种共享生活的一个贡献——一次关怀的行动、一份关注的努力、关系维系性劳动的一块——可能以三种方式之一被迎接。它可能被一个其本身生成价值的回应所迎接——一次认可、一次回报、一次加深——以致该贡献使循环的一轮进一步之转动启动；这是可再循环的情形。它可能被一个既不再生成、也不耗竭的回应所迎接——一次中性的吸收，其中贡献被接收而无进一步随之；这是有损的情形。或者它可能被一个耗竭的回应所迎接——一个贡献被接收并被以一次退缩或一次对更多的索求相答，以致给予之行动使给予者比之前更少；这是榨取的情形。期望可再循环性是关系所特有的、一个贡献落入第一种情形而非第二或第三种的概率。

如此被定义，可再循环性是循环之生命这一条件所本分的代理。一个循环维系自身，当它一轮接一轮地再生成之价值至少平衡它向中性吸收与榨取性回应所亏损之价值时；而它是否如此做，由可再循环性所支配。存在一个阈值：在一个临界可再循环性之上，诸贡献再生成得快于它们被亏损，而价值之循环是自我维系或增长的；在它之下，诸贡献被亏损得快于它们再生成，而循环逐渐停转，其维系性劳动迎接日益减少之回应，直到诸方停止贡献、关系衰败向§13的熄灭。这一条件在其现象学中可被识别。一段高可再循环性的关系，是给予觉得有生成性的关系，是一份所作之努力被一个使进一步努力值得作出之回应所迎接的关系；一段低可再循环性的关系，是给予觉得徒劳的关系，是诸贡献消失入一个接收而不再生成之伴侣的关系，是给予者在时日中贡献更少、因为诸贡献毫无回返的关系。可再循环性降至其阈值之下，是一段关系逐渐衰停的定量形式，而它须与诸方之间回返的分配不当相区别——如随后诸量所要求——后者一段总量可再循环性充足之关系仍可能呈现。

10.3.2 相对一条耦合基线的回返

第二个量涉及诸方之间回返的分配，对照一条由关系之耦合所设定的基线被评估。该量所形式化的直觉是：正义之回返的程度不是固定的，而依赖于诸方被耦合得有多深。耦合，在此，是诸方之诸善被绑定在一起的程度、惠及一方者亦惠及另一方与关系所生成者被共同持有而非被分摊的程度。在一段松散耦合的关系中——比如一种便利之联合——诸方之诸善大体分立，而一方的一个贡献可能正义地在关系之外、向贡献者的分立之善产出其回返之大部；通过关系欠回者甚少，因为被共同投注者甚少。在一段深度耦合的关系中——一种完全联合之共享生活——诸方之诸善被绑定在一起，而一方的一个贡献被投入一个共同储备，回返被欠从其中通过关系回到其生成者；被欠回者甚多，因为被共同投注者甚多。因此耦合设定一条基线期望回返：一方所生成之价值中，鉴于耦合之深度、应当在关系之内流通并回返于该方、而非在别处被吸收的那一份。

这条基线正是使对回返的评估成为一个规范而非仅仅描述之事者。观察到一方的诸贡献向该方回返甚少，尚不是发现一个不正义，因为在一段松散耦合的关系中所欠回返甚少。不正义是实际回返低于耦合所设定之基线的短缺：一方，在一段深度耦合的关系中，已把一种共享生活共同投注、其诸贡献因此应当通过关系回返于该方，但其实际回返系统性地落于该基线之下，是一个价值被从其身上、在那本应将之回返的耦合之深度之下被榨取的一方。这是亲密之内剥削的特有结构，而它对一个不以耦合设定基线之评估是不可见的：被低回返之深度耦合一方给予了最多、被欠以最多，而恰恰是耦合之深度，在无基线下被读取，能被弄得看起来像自由给予之慷慨、而非被不正义地保留之价值。该评估把对各方的实际回返对照耦合基线相比较，并把一个系统性短缺读作榨取。

10.3.3 作为不正义之统计学指纹的偏度

第三个量是该评估的主要工具。考虑横贯诸方与横贯时间的、回返价值相对生成价值的分布。在一段正义的关系中，这一分布，相对耦合基线，是近似对称的：回返在诸生成者之间与其生成成比例地被分配，而没有生成者被系统性地发配到低回返之尾。在一段剥削性的关系中，分布被偏斜：价值不成比例地回返于一方，而另一方——特有地是承担关系维系性劳动之较大份额的一方——生成被系统性地低回返、并被发配到分布之尾的价值。

回返分布的偏度作为不正义之统计学指纹。 一段关系之价值循环的不正义，在回返价值相对耦合基线之分布的偏度中有一个统计学签名。一个正义的循环把价值与其生成、与耦合成比例地回返于其诸生成者，产出一个关于基线近似对称的分布。一个剥削性的循环把价值不成比例地回返于一方、并把另一方系统性地发配到低回返之尾，产出一个偏离被低回返一方的分布。因此回返分布的偏度是对循环之不正义的一个结构化代理，而它使一个总量性满意度度量所遮蔽之分配不当变得可见：一段关系可以呈现高的平均满意而其回返分布被严重偏斜，那高的平均是被过度回返一方的满意、而偏斜是另一方被剥削的签名。偏度在操作性让步之下被读作对不正义的一个代理、而非对它的度量；一个对称的分布对正义是必要而非充分的，而一个被偏斜的分布是剥削的证据、而非与剥削同一。

偏度度量有这一方法论优点：与诸满意度度量正交，因而探测它们系统性地错过者。一个总量或平均的关系满意度量被被过度回返一方的满意抬高，而对其下之分配不当不敏感；一段关系可以在平均满意上得分良好，恰恰因为它所偏爱之一方满意良好，而它所剥削之一方被发配到尾。偏度读取分布之形状而非其平均，因而探测平均所遮蔽之分配不当。这是前篇”一种由另一方之被封闭所购得的满意绝非幸福”这一论题、在对一段关系之评估中的形式对应物：平均满意高，而关系仍然不正义，而该不正义在偏斜中可读。

一方逐渐占据低回返之尾所经由的机制值得使之具体，因为它是该度量被设计来探测的复现结构。一段关系分配——除别的之外——其维系性劳动：关注之工作、关怀之工作、维持家庭与关系本身之工作，即没有它则共享生活不延续的情感与生殖劳动。对这种劳动之不承认为劳动、以及它之不被补偿的榨取，由 Hochschild（1983）所记录、并在关怀经济学中由 Folbre（2001）所分析。这种劳动生成价值，其中许多，因为它所维系的共享生活是关系之整个繁荣的媒介。当这种劳动被一方不成比例地承担、而它所生成之价值不成比例地回返于另一方时，维系性劳动的承担者是被发配到尾的一方：她生成关系之价值的一大份额、而接收其回返的一小份额，而那一差距是她之被剥削的度量。这一结构由于被其自身的意识形态所遮蔽而更为持久，在该意识形态中维系性劳动被描绘为自由给予的、为承担它者所天然的、或根本不是劳动，以致它的低回返被读作不是榨取、而是事物之秩序。偏度度量被构造来使这一结构对照那一遮蔽变得可读：它不问劳动之承担者是否报告满意（她可能报告，因被习惯化为不期待回返），而问她所生成之价值是否回返于她，而在剥削的情形中，它不回返。

一个对照使对平均的正交性变得鲜明。考虑两段在一个平均满意度量上得分相同的关系。在第一段中，双方都贡献于维系性劳动，各方所生成之价值与耦合成比例地回返于各方，而回返分布是近似对称的；那共享的平均满意是双方都享有之繁荣的标志。在第二段中，一方承担几乎全部维系性劳动并接收很少回返，而另一方接收关系之价值的大部、承担其代价的很少；被过度回返之一方高度满意，被低回返之一方报告一个被压低但未缺席的满意，因已把其期望调整到其位置，而二者之平均，由构造，等于第一段关系之平均。平均满意不区分这些关系；偏度区分它们。第一段有一个对称的回返分布，第二段有一个被严重偏斜的，而第二段之偏斜是一种被相等之平均所遮蔽之剥削的签名。该度量恰恰在此赢得其位置：它在一个满意度调查会一同排名的两段关系中，看见一种双方共享之繁荣与一种一方从另一方榨取之繁荣之间的区别。

10.3.4 一个用于检验的模型，与一个假说

偏度度量预设一个模型，因为一个回返之分布不能在没有一个”回返如何被生成”之模型——观测到之分布对照它被比较——的情况下就其偏度被评估。本文指明所要求之模型的形式而不声称已验证它，与该让步相一致。关系被表示为一个网络，其诸节点是诸生成者——两方与诸被耦合之他者（特有地是家庭），关系也流通其价值——而其诸边携带诸耦合，即价值据以从一个生成者传播向另一个的、加权之通道。在一个节点处生成之价值不停留在那里；它沿诸边传播，一部分回返于其原点，一部分传给被耦合之他者，一部分完全从网络丢失。该传播被建模为这一网络上的一个分支过程，以前一系列对生成性递归之形式化的方式：这种传播——其中诸节点处之诸量在诸后继处生成诸量、而最终回返之概率是所关切之对象——的数学，是分支过程的古典理论（Harris 1963）；一个节点处之价值在期望上与边权成比例地在诸邻接节点处生成价值，每一这样的产物又反过来生成进一步的价值，而对一个生成者的期望回返，是在价值可传播并回返所经之全部路径上累积的、源于该生成者之节点的价值找到回到它之路的概率。关系的耦合两次进入：作为网络的拓扑（哪些生成者被联于哪些）与作为诸边上的权重（联得有多强）；而它们一同为每一生成者固定§10.3.2的耦合基线，即假若传播是无偏的（既不偏爱、亦不亏待任何生成者超出诸耦合本身所规定者）耦合结构会产出的期望回返。

在这样一个模型上，一个假说检验变得可陈述，而其诸项可被精确给出。设一个生成者的归一化回返为其实际期望回返除以其耦合基线，以致一的值是单凭耦合会产出的回返，一以上的值是一个被偏爱超出其耦合之生成者，一以下的值是一个被亏待低于其耦合之生成者。零假设是回返无偏：归一化回返在期望上横贯诸生成者相等，以致归一化回返的分布关于其中心对称，而没有生成者被系统性地偏爱或亏待超出耦合。备择假设是回返被系统性地偏置：某个生成者——特有地是维系性劳动之承担者——有一个其期望显著低于其余者的归一化回返，以致分布显著地偏离该生成者。检验统计量是观测到之归一化回返分布的偏度，而检验问：一个观测到之偏斜是落于与无偏传播之零假设相容的范围之内，还是大到足以拒绝它而支持系统性榨取。本文推进这一检验的形式、而非一个被验证之工具。该模型要求此处未被了结之诸假设：关于传播概率、关于分支之独立性、关于诸耦合在估计期内之平稳性；对一段现实关系中诸回返的估计——对诸关怀行动赋值并把它通过网络追踪——是一个本文不解决的可观经验问题；而该结果，若被获得，将是在让步之下对不正义的一个结构化代理，是榨取的证据、而非对它的度量。其贡献是形式：一段关系之价值循环的正义，原则上、在让步之下，是一个关于”回返分布相对一条耦合基线之偏度”的可检验假说，而非一个唯有印象可被施于其上之事。

10.4 回返之操作化，与一个工作示例

对正义的评估要求”价值之回返”这一抽象观念被操作化为一个原则上可被估计之量；本小节陈列这一操作化并在一个有意简单的示例上图示它，通篇在操作性让步之下。

操作化分四步进行。第一，各方在一个时期上的诸贡献被识别：各方贡献于共享生活的离散的生成行动、维系性劳动之诸块、被关怀之诸场合。第二，向每一贡献被赋予一个值，以一个共同单位，代理它为共享生活所生成之价值；这一赋值是最可争议之步，而该让步在此最严格地适用，因为一个关怀行动之价值恰恰是该代理不能触及的未被符号化之量，而该赋值是一个操作性的规定、而非一个度量。第三，对每一方，回返被识别：共享生活中所生成之价值中，回返于该方者（无论直接地、还是通过关系之流通）的那一部分。第四，对各方的回返被§10.3.2的耦合基线——无偏传播下耦合结构会产出之回返——归一化，以给出偏度评估据以被进行的归一化回返。

一个带规定数值的工作示例展示诸量在运作中；那些数值是图示性的、不承载任何经验主张。考虑一段两方 A 与 B 的深度耦合关系，在一个时期上共享生活以共同单位生成价值 100。设 B 承担维系性劳动之较大份额、生成此价值之 60，而 A 生成 40。在一个正义的循环中，鉴于耦合之深度，对各方的回返会近似地与生成成比例：B 会接收近 60 之回返而 A 近 40，二者之归一化回返皆近 1，而归一化回返之分布近似对称。设反之关系不成比例地把价值回返于 A：所生成之 100 中，A 接收 65 之回返而 B 接收 35 之回返。则对 A 之归一化回返为 65/40 ≈ 1.6，对 B 为 35/60 ≈ 0.58。归一化回返之分布如今被偏斜：A 坐在基线 1 之远上方，而 B 在其远下方、在低回返之尾。归一化回返分布的偏度，对 B 为负，是§10.3.3的统计学指纹，而它在此可读，尽管关系之平均满意可能高，因为 A、被过度回返之一方，可能报告极大的满足，而 B、被习惯化为承担维系性劳动而得很少回返，可能报告一个仅中度被压低的满意，以致二者之平均不起眼而偏斜严重。该示例展示评估所计算之诸量；它不展示它们能在一段现实关系中被轻易地估计，那如§10.3.4所陈述，仍是一个本文不解决的可观经验问题。

10.5 对各方之展开的评价

正义之条件容许刚发展之结构化代理。幸福之条件，即各方自身动力学之展开，对结构化最为抗拒，因为它最近于该代理不能触及的未被符号化之价值，而本文记录其抗拒、而非克服它。两个代理尽管如此可用、并值得在让步之下陈述。

第一个是各方所意图之诸事业事实上被达成之比率：一方着手去成为与去做者中，该方在共享生活之内所达成者的比例。一方所意图之诸事业是该方有理由珍视并着手的诸项目、诸发展、诸成为，是该方自身动力学以具体形式之展开：一身工作、一门手艺、一段友谊、一门学业、一种该方意欲成长进入之生活方式。该代理在时日中追踪一方所达成而非放弃这些之比例。一种维系各方之展开的共享生活，是其中各方所意图之诸事业在时日中以一个不系统性下降之比率被达成的生活，关系为各方所着手之发展留出空间并有助于它；一种封闭一方之展开的共享生活，是其中该方所意图之诸事业被系统性地未达成的生活，该方所着手之发展停滞、然后不再被尝试。达成之比率是一个粗略的代理，因为并非每一所意图之事业都应当被达成、并非每一放弃都是一次封闭，但一方之比率的一个系统性下降，在一种共享生活之诸季节上被维持，是一种被封闭之展开的结构化签名。

第二个代理通过归因短缺而精炼第一个，而它是二者中更说明问题的。在一方所意图却未被达成之诸事业中，评估区分那些因对关系外在之原因而未被达成者——任何生活都遭受的诸项目之寻常损耗——与那些因共享生活封闭它们而未被达成者：一方因关系而搁置、推迟或放弃的诸事业，因为关系之诸要求未为它们留出空间，因为该方所承担之维系性劳动消耗了它们所要求之时间与精力，或因为该方之发展被双方默契地理解为那个将让步者。正是这一被归因之短缺、而非放弃之总比率，代理封闭。一方可能因与关系无关之原因而达成其所意图之诸事业中的很少，而关系不因此被指控；但一方系统性地因关系而放弃其诸事业、而另一方之诸事业进行，是一个其展开被关系为另一方之故而封闭的一方。一个系统性高的、因关系而被封闭之所意图诸事业的比例，集中于一方，是对该方之展开之封闭的代理，而它直接耦合于对正义的评估。其展开被关系所封闭之一方，特有地是被发配到§10.3.3之低回返之尾的一方，因为那个向其承担者回返很少价值的同一维系性劳动，正是消耗她自身诸事业本会要求之空间者；两个代理——回返之偏斜与被封闭诸事业之集中——是一个剥削的两个结构化签名，在回返价值之声部与被封闭之发展之声部中被读取。

作为一个耦合于回返之偏斜之代理的、展开之封闭。 一方之展开的封闭，在该方所意图之诸事业中因关系而被放弃者的比例中容许一个结构化代理，而这一代理耦合于回返分布的偏斜。其展开被关系所封闭之一方，特有地是价值被从其身上榨取而无回返的一方，以致被封闭诸事业在一方之集中与回返分布对同一方之偏斜，是单一不正义的两个签名，即该方被化约为一段对它既不回返价值、亦不回返展开之自由的关系之维系性燃料。诸代理在让步之下被读取，作为对一种它们提供证据而不度量之剥削的结构化签名，而它们把各方之展开的未被符号化之余数留于其触及之外。

10.6 诗性条件，与评估之极限

规范指定的第三个条件——循环作为一个活的、敞开之运动被维系、而非安顿入一个被闭合之重复——对结构化最不顺从，而本文仅记录一个代理会采取之方向。该条件是：关系的诸复现——它的诸习惯、它的诸共享符号、它的诸仪式——在每一遍历时持续累积一个不可化约之余数，即前篇的正和乐，而非掏空入一个毫无新意可返之重复。一个代理会评估：关系的诸复现是有生成性的——一个被再次遍历之共享实践是否产出一个不被其先前诸遍历所含者——还是已成为一个被无增益地遍历之被闭合重复。本文不发展对此的一个度量，并主张它至多是半定量的，因为一个不可化约之余数的累积接近那个无结构化能触及之未被符号化价值。诗性条件标志着这一极限，在它处对一种共享生活的评估越过结构化代理、归还于它从中被抽象出来的那种基础而未被符号化之评价。

10.7 整个评估之地位

本节所发展之评估，在其全部诸实践与诸代理中，立于操作性让步之下，而该让步应在本节闭合时被重申，因为循环之下一时刻——反思——恰恰系于它。本节的每一结构化度量——诸满意度量表、可再循环性、回返之偏斜、被达成诸事业之比率与归因——是对一个它不触及之价值的结构化代理，在操作上有价值且不完整。诸度量在基础性评价为私人之处是公共的、在它为单一之处是可比较的、在它为转瞬即逝之处是可累积的，而这些是担保诸度量之使用的真实收获。诸度量同时是对一个其对象未被符号化之评价的结构化符号化，而它们恰恰丢弃了关系之真实价值于其中所在的那个余数。使用它们，就是知情地接受这一交换、为它所带来之操作性收获；把它们误认为对真实价值之评价，是循环之下一时刻——反思——为校正而存在的那个错误。

11. 反思：对评估的再审查

循环转向反思，即对评估以及对框定它之认知的再审查。这一时刻的任务是把评估之结构化结果对照它们所代理而不触及之价值来持守，因而防止结构化度量被误认为对真实者之评价。这一时刻汲取规范与德性论框架，它们在此回来重申诸度量所不能容纳者，并汲取现象学框架，它重申结构化所丢弃之被生活意义。这是操作性让步被最严格地执行的时刻，也是防止§10之评估硬化为一个被占有之关于关系之真理的时刻。

11.1 诸度量之盲，与伪造的繁荣

反思的第一件工作是回想诸度量所不能登记者。一个满意度量表上的高分与一段不正义的关系相容，因为平均满意被一个被偏爱一方的满足所抬高、而对其下之分配不当不敏感（§10.3.3）；它与一段封闭一方之展开的关系相容，因为被封闭一方可能报告对一种它已被习惯化为不再期待更多之生活的满意；而它与一段其循环已安顿入一个毫无新意可返之被闭合重复的关系相容，因为熟悉者之舒适被登记为满意。简言之，一段关系可以得分良好而是一种伪造的繁荣：一种带有善之可度量标记而无其实在的满意，以前篇分析为伪造之和乐的方式，即那个佩戴着螺旋之外观的被闭合循环。

被度量之满意与伪造的繁荣相容。 一个高的被度量满意，对一种正义之幸福既非必要、亦非充分。它与不正义相容，因为一个总量度量对回返之偏斜不敏感；与一方之展开的封闭相容，因为一个被封闭一方可能报告对一个被减损期望的满足；与一个被闭合而耗竭之重复相容，因为熟悉被登记为满意。因此被度量之满意是一个伪造的繁荣也能满足的结构化代理，而反思的工作是把诸度量对照它们所不能登记之诸条件——回返之偏斜、展开之封闭与循环之闭合——来读取，因而把一个标志真实繁荣之被度量满意与一个标志伪造繁荣者相区别。

这是§10之诸正交工具赢得其位置之处。单凭满意度量不能把真实之繁荣与伪造者相区别，因为二者都在它上得分良好。回返之偏斜与被封闭诸事业之集中能区别它们，因为伪造之繁荣，无论其平均满意何等高，都呈现真实之繁荣所不呈现的偏斜与封闭。反思是满意度量被对照这些正交代理读取的时刻，而一个伴随着一个严重偏斜的高满意被识认为其所是，即一段不正义关系中被偏爱一方的满足。

11.2 正义之问题的回归

反思的第二件工作是重申正义之问题，那是诸总量度量结构性地压制者。一个以平均与总和进行的评估问关系有多令人满意，而不问其诸满意归于谁、以谁为代价。反思重申第二个问题。它把回返分布之偏斜读作”谁被发配到低回返之尾”的证据；它把被封闭诸事业之集中读作”关系封闭谁之展开”的证据；而它在这些签名重合之处，指认那个被化约为关系之维系性燃料的一方，即那个生成不回返之价值、其自身展开因一段对它两者皆不回返之共享生活而被搁置的一方。正义之问题是前篇所主张为构成幸福、而非附加于幸福之问题，而反思是它被切实用于评估之诸结果的时刻，以对抗诸总量度量压制它的倾向。

11.3 评估不可被占有为关系之真理

反思的第三件工作是最有后果的，而它是操作性让步最严格地承重之处。一段关系的结构化评估，一旦被进行，呈现一个常在的诱惑：被当作关系之真理、关于处境如何的权威论述，诸方自身之诸评价应对照它被纠正。屈从于这一诱惑，就是在评估之声部中犯下前篇指认为首要的那个错误。

评估不可被占有为关系之真理。 一段关系的结构化评估是一个在操作上有担保的代理，而它不可被占有为关系之真理。把度量当作真理、当作诸方自身之诸评价应对照它被纠正的权威论述，就是把评估安置于那被划杠之大他者之位：把一个结构化代理当作关系之真实价值据以被知的立足点，而那是本系列已确立其不存在的立足点。这一错误在评估之声部中重复前篇之首要错误——对一己之善的私人确定——如今作为一个度量所赋予之确定；而它是同一种对大他者之位的占据、同一种把一个敞开而未被符号化之评价定锚为一个被占有而被闭合之规定。评估之权威是操作性的、可被推翻的、对它所代理之基础性评价负责的；它是关系持续地评价自身的一件工具，而非一个从外部递交给关系的裁断。度量应被使用而不被信仰、被咨询而不被遵从、被持守为一个代理而永不被占有为真理。

这是操作性让步最深的切割。该让步为了一个度量的操作性收获、在”它是对一个它不触及之价值的代理”这一理解之下许可了该结构化度量。反思通过拒绝度量以真理之权威来执行该理解：评估一旦被占有为关系之真理，该让步便被打破，而那个作为一件工具被承认之代理便成为一种新的元语言、一个被安置于本系列保持为空之位的结构化偶像。那说一段关系为善之度量不是关系之为善，而那说它为恶之度量不是关系之为恶；二者都是诸代理，应在那无度量能作结之持续评价中被权衡。反思保持大他者之位为空、以对抗度量填充它之声称，因而把评估归还于其作为一种自我评价之工具的地位，那种自我评价最终保持未被符号化、未被作结。

11.4 反思作为循环之保障

反思的三件工作共同保障循环、以对抗其评价时刻的诸特有失败。把诸度量对照伪造之繁荣来读取，保障以对抗一个高分的自满；重申正义之问题，保障以对抗代价之被总量压制；而拒绝度量以真理之权威，保障以对抗一个结构化偶像被安置于真实者之位。在这方面，反思是循环保护自身免于其自身工具的时刻，而它通过被纠正且被警醒地归还于循环据以开始之认知，为重新认知之时刻作准备。已反思之关系不把其诸度量承载向前作为诸真理；它承载向前一个被修订且被重启之评价，其中诸度量已被权衡并被发现是诸代理，而”两人之间事情真正处境如何”之问题已被归还于它在其中被最终安顿、又永不被最终安顿的那个未被符号化之声部。循环现在转向重新认知，在其中这一被修订之评价成为一轮进一步之循环的认知。

12. 重新认知：一轮的闭合与重启

循环转向重新认知，即那个从反思中被带出之、被修订且被重启之评价成为一轮进一步据以开始之认知的时刻。这一时刻的任务最不像一个离散的操作、而最像一个过渡：它是把该轮所累积者承载向前进入下一轮之认知，而它是生命周期被看出是一个螺旋而非一个圆的那一点。这一时刻陈述起来简短，而在它就作为整体之循环所确立者上有后果。

12.1 重新认知不是向初始认知的回返

循环之一轮据以结束的认知，不是它据以开始的认知。该轮已经过实践、经过对实践所生成者之评估、经过那把评估对照它所不能触及之价值来读取的反思；而所涌现之认知承载那被累积之差异。诸方在一轮之闭合处认其繁荣在于者，已被该轮改变：在该轮上升处被加深，在它下降处被收窄，而在两种情形中都不与开启它之认知同一。重新认知就是这一被改变之认知，而生命周期因此不是一个返回到其起始点之圆，而是一个携带着该轮所累积之相位返回到起始构型之螺旋。

重新认知承载该轮之和乐。 循环之一轮据以闭合的认知，由该轮所累积之相位而有别于它据以开启的认知，而重新认知是把这一差异承载入下一轮。生命周期相应地是一个螺旋而非一个圆：它返回到认知之时刻，但返回到一个被该轮改变之认知，而横贯许多轮被累积之改变是一种共享生活之长久上升或长久下降。一个上升之轮返回一个被加深之善的认知，被该轮所生成者所丰富、被反思所发现者所纠正；一个下降之轮返回一个被收窄之认知，被该轮所耗竭者所贫化；而一个无上升或下降被遍历之轮返回不变之认知，即一个绕行而不上升之重复的被闭合圆。重新认知是该轮之相位被登记于下一轮之认知中的时刻，而生命周期之和乐通过它横贯一段关系之历史被累积。

12.2 横贯一段关系之时间的累积

每一轮之相位在下一轮之认知中的登记，是一种共享生活横贯其历史上升或下降所经由的机制。一段关系是许多嵌套之轮（§6.3），而闭合每一轮之重新认知设定下一轮之认知，以致诸相位复合：一段其诸轮各别上升之关系复合其上升，其善的认知一轮接一轮地加深，其实践丰富，其诸方通过共享生活发展为比其曾是者更多；一段其诸轮各别下降之关系复合其下降，无论其外在形式何等完好。从求爱、经过婚姻、进入晚年的过渡，在这一论述上，是其诸轮之诸相位的复合，而一种横贯其弧已繁荣之共享生活与一种横贯它已下降者之间的区别，是其许多轮被累积之和乐，在每一重新认知处被登记、并被承载入每一后继之认知。

这是生命周期与一段现实共享生活之时间的关系最具体之处。一段关系所抵达之婚姻，不是循环的完成，而是一次不寻常之深度的重新认知，一个善之认知在一种如今正式且实际地联合之生活的被改变条件下被重新构想之轮；而晚年是随它而来之诸轮的复合。繁荣之认知，横贯这一弧，从不固定、从不被最终达成，而在每一重新认知处依”前诸轮已使诸方与其共享生活成为什么”之光被重新构想。在这方面，一种共享生活之善不是循环所趋近之一个目的地，而是其转动之实质本身，在每一轮被生成并被重新构想，并横贯它们全体被累积，无论向好或向坏。

12.3 螺旋之敞开

螺旋不闭合。重新认知开启一轮进一步之循环，而不存在一个最终的重新认知、在它处善之认知被一劳永逸地固定、而循环在一个被完成之理解中归于静止。臆断这样一个最终重新认知，将是臆断一个已达成且被占有之繁荣的状态，即一个不再修订之认知的被闭合圆，而它，由§6.2之论证，不是关系的完成、而是它的停止。一种共享生活之善是不可担保的、过程性的，在前篇所确立之意义上，而其认知相应地是未完成的：在每一轮被重新构想、从不被占有为一个最终理解、并被承载向前进入一轮进一步之循环——只要关系活着，循环便持续开启它。因此重新认知不是循环之结论、而是它的更新，而生命周期，被作为整体考虑，是一个关系通过持续转动来维系之敞开螺旋。本文现在考虑这一整体，在其转动可采取之三个regime中。

13. 善的循环、灾难性的循环与被熄灭的循环

本文已遍历一个单一之轮的诸时刻。它现在考虑作为整体之循环，在其转动横贯一段关系之历史可采取之诸regime中。三个regime被加以区分，由两个问题之合取：循环是否持存，以及若它持存，它累积何种符号之相位。这两个问题不属于同一阶。第一个涉及关系之存在，第二个涉及其品格；而它们共同定义之诸regime是繁荣螺旋、灾难性循环与熄灭。

13.1 持存与相位作为两个问题

§4的动力学词汇区分一个循环系统的、关涉一段关系的两个特征。第一是系统是否全然维系其循环运动、抑或衰败向一个不动点之终极静止。第二，对一个确实维系其运动的系统，是它绕一轮所累积之相位——正的、消失的或负的。这些是独立的：一个循环可以以一个正相持存、以一个负相持存、或未能持存；而一段关系的三个regime是这一对问题的三个结果，第四种组合——一个带相位之不持存循环——是空的，因为一个不持存之循环不累积任何相位。

从两个问题得出三个regime。 一段关系的regime由两个独立问题所固定：其循环是否持存，以及若它持存，它绕一轮累积何种符号之相位。一个正相之持存循环是一个繁荣螺旋，它在转动时上升。一个负相之持存循环是一个灾难性循环，它在耗竭之时持存，在转动时下降。一个不持存之循环是熄灭，即关系之运动衰败向那种价值不再被生成或回返之终极静止。持存之问题先于相位之问题，因为一个不持存之循环没有相位；因此一段关系最严重之状况不是负相、而是持存之失败，而灾难性循环，尽管其耗竭，以熄灭所不是的方式是一段活的关系。

13.2 繁荣螺旋

繁荣螺旋是善之循环的regime。其价值被生成并被回返，其可再循环性把循环维系于衰败之阈值之上，其回返分布相对耦合近似对称，而各方之展开被维系、而非被封闭。横贯其诸轮它累积一个正相：诸方之善的认知加深，其实践丰富，而他们通过共享生活发展为比其曾是者更多。繁荣螺旋是§8.5之规范指定所描述的regime，而它，由随后之论证，必然是一个正义的regime：其回返分布之对称是其正相的条件，而一段其回返被严重偏斜之关系，无法维系其全部诸方之上升，因为那被发配到尾的一方被转动所耗竭、而非所发展。

13.3 灾难性循环

灾难性循环是那个仍然持存之坏循环的regime。其运动被维系，其形式完好，而它可能在总量满意上得分良好；但它累积一个负相，一轮接一轮地耗竭其诸方、或其中之一。这是§10之诸正交工具做其特有工作的regime，因为它是一个满意度量不能与繁荣螺旋相区别的regime——二者都持存、都能有一个高的平均——而回返之偏斜与被封闭诸事业之集中区别它们，灾难性循环呈现繁荣螺旋所不呈现的偏斜与封闭。灾难性循环是那段持续且耗竭之婚姻，是形式被维持、而一方或双方在维持中被消耗；而它是一段关系之不正义最有后果的regime，因为其持存延长了被其完好形式所遮蔽之榨取。

13.4 熄灭

熄灭是循环停止转动的regime。价值不再被生成、流通或回返；诸方不再修订其对彼此之感受；实践停止；而关系衰败向那种它不再是一段关系之终极静止。熄灭不是一个良性的平衡、一段处于平和静止之关系，而是关系据以存在之活动之停止（§6.2）。它是存在之秩序中最严重之regime，因为它是关系本身之终结，尽管它不是正义之秩序中最严重者，因为一个灾难性循环可能在其持存中施加一个熄灭本会终结之耗竭。在这方面，熄灭与灾难性循环之间的关系是真正悲剧性的：那把灾难性循环与熄灭相区别之持存，也是其榨取之持存，而那本会终结榨取之停止，也是关系之终结。

13.5 诸regime之间的分岔

一段关系在这些regime之间的过渡不必是渐进的。当一段关系之诸条件漂移——其缓慢变动之诸参数，在§4.5的意义上——其行为可能在一个区间内平滑地变化，然后在一个临界值处发生种类上的变化：一个繁荣螺旋可能，随其可再循环性降至一个阈值以下，失去其上升之持存而倾入一个灾难性循环或向熄灭；一个灾难性循环可能，随其耗竭耗尽其持存之诸条件，倾入熄灭；而一段近于一个阈值之关系可能被其维系性条件中一个微小的进一步变化越过它。这是一个对关系之经验而言常见之观察的动力学内容，即它们的衰落常常不是渐进而是被间断的，一段长久的表观稳定之后是一次向一个不同regime的快速过渡。分岔的语言呈现这一点：诸regime之间的区别是一个种类上的区别，而一段关系可被一个越过一个临界值的程度变化从一个带到另一个，以致一个小的疏忽，被复合，可能把一段关系越过一个阈值，从它其回返不与其趋近对称。

13.6 正义作为善之循环的内在条件

本节以确立诸regime据以被排布所趋向的论题作结：正义不是对繁荣螺旋的一个外在约束，而是其以正相持存的内在条件。

正义是繁荣螺旋的内在条件。 繁荣螺旋，即正相之持存循环，必然是正义的，而灾难性循环是不正义在一段持存关系中所采取之形式。一个其回返分布被严重偏斜之循环，无法为其全部诸方累积一个正相，因为那被发配到低回返之尾的一方被转动所耗竭、而非所发展；其相位，对该方，是负的，而该循环对该方是灾难性的，无论它在总量中如何显现。因此一个对全部诸方的正相，要求一个不被严重偏斜之回返分布，也就是说要求正义之条件。因此正义不是一个从外部添加于一段关系之繁荣的约束，而是一个循环能为其全部诸方上升、而非为某些方以其他方为代价上升所凭之内在条件。这是前篇”正义构成而非约束幸福”这一论题的动力学形式，而回返分布之偏斜（§10.3.3）是其统计学签名：一段关系只在其回返相对其耦合近似对称时才是一个繁荣螺旋，而一个被严重偏斜之回返是一个在总量中佩戴着螺旋之外观的灾难性循环的签名。

被如此排布的三个regime，把本文之诸结果汇集为一幅单一的动力学图景。一段关系凭其循环之持存而活、凭其转动之正相而繁荣，而它仅在其转动是正义的时才为其全部诸方繁荣。评估之诸工具代理这些特征——可再循环性代理持存，偏斜代理正相所依赖之正义，而诸满意度量代理一个遮蔽偏斜所揭示之区别的总量；而循环之诸时刻培育它们——实践形成维系转动之诸习惯，反思防范一个螺旋之伪造外观，而重新认知把每一轮之相位承载入下一轮。本文现在以其方法所要求之诸复数结论作结。

14. 一个纵向个案：一种共享生活穿越循环

本文所发展之机制是抽象的，而一个奠基性处理由一个扩展个案——其中诸抽象被看出在一种单一共享生活横贯其历程中一同运作——所加强。本节提供这样一个个案。这对伴侣是被构造的、匿名的，是一个复合而非一个记录，而其中数值（在它们出现处）在操作性让步之下（§2.3）是规定的、图示性的；该个案不声称任何经验权威，仅用以展示该机制在协奏运作中。两方通篇被称为 A 与 B。该个案按一种共享生活的诸季节被组织，而在每一季节之内，循环的诸时刻与所汲取之诸框架被追踪，以便读者可看见§7之矩阵在一种特定生活中被实例化、并看见§13之诸regime被趋近、并在最后被在其间作出选择。

14.1 求爱：循环的最初几轮

在第一个季节中，循环转动得快而其诸轮小。A 与 B，相遇，开始认知他们之间的一种共享生活可能是什么：起初在现象学框架（§8.3）那被生活的、大体未被符号化之声部中，那”这里有某种东西”的被感受之感、一个先于其表述之领会；然后，随季节推进，在规范声部中，随各方开始领会”他们在一种与对方共享之生活中会珍视什么、对方之展开与他们自己之展开能否被一同维系”。这一季节的实践是轻的，对诸小复现的培育——一种共度时间的方式、一种接触之节律、最初的关注之诸习惯——而德性论框架（§9.1）已在运作，尽管它所形成之诸禀性尚浅，hexis 尚未被定锚。评估是连续而几乎全然基础性的（§5），各方在反思之下评价关系是否在上升；显式评价稀少而非正式。价值的可再循环性（§10.3.1）高，因为在这一季节诸贡献容易被诸再生成之回应所迎接，而循环以一个正相转动，每一轮向诸方返回一个被加深之关系之善的认知。这一季节的和乐强烈地为正：诸方在它之末被它所发展，更知其所珍视者与对方，螺旋上升。

14.2 一种联合之生活的形成：婚姻及其重新认知

向一种联合之生活的过渡，是一次不寻常之深度的重新认知（§12.1）。善之认知在被改变条件下被重新构想，关系如今正式且实际地联合，这对伴侣之诸善如今在§10.3.2的意义上被深度耦合，以致各方所生成之价值的许多如今被欠回通过关系。这一季节的实践是家庭及其风范的形成，§9.1的 habitus，而正是在此”培育而不立法”约束（§9.2）第一次承重：当这对伴侣形成一种联合之生活的复现实践——其维系性劳动的分工、其日子的诸节律——时，那个起初不被察觉之问题产生了，即这些实践是被联合地撰写且可修订的、还是正由习惯化之渐进机制（§9.1）安顿入一个一方施行而另一方遵守之regime。在被构造之个案中，这一季节是高平均满意的：双方都报告满足，关系显然在持存，而一次由§10.2之诸工具进行的显式评价会记录一段繁荣的关系。

然而，在高平均之下，一个偏斜正开始形成。B 已担当维系性劳动之较大份额，而这种劳动所生成之价值不成比例地回返于 A，A 自身之诸事业进行而 B 之诸事业日益被推迟。回返分布之偏斜（§10.3.3），在这一季节，轻微，而它被高平均满意与季节之真切温暖所遮蔽；双方之基础性评价把关系登记为善的，B 尚未符号化对 B 自身展开之累积的推迟。这是真实之螺旋与伪造之螺旋之间的分歧（§13.6）起源的季节，不被察觉地、在一个其偏斜尚未大到足以扰动那遮蔽它之被感受温暖的分布中。

14.3 中间诸年：分岔被趋近

在中间诸年中，那轻微之偏斜，一轮接一轮地被复合，增长。其机制是本文已描述者：循环之每一轮向 A 返回一个被发展之认知与一个被达成之事业，向 B 返回一个被推迟之事业与一个未被回返之劳动，而闭合每一轮之重新认知（§12.2）把这一不对称承载向前，以致每一后继之轮据以开始之善的认知，对 A，被丰富，对 B，被收窄。循环之和乐已变得，在§13.6的术语中，对 A 为正而对 B 为负：那个发展 A 之同一循环耗竭 B，而关系，对 B，已是一个佩戴着繁荣螺旋之外观、在总量中的灾难性循环（§13.3）。

这是本文之诸正交度量做其工作的季节。平均满意保持中度偏高，被 A 之满足与 B 之仍仅部分被符号化之评价所抬高；一次单凭满意之评价不会登记那发展中之不正义。回返分布之偏斜，相比之下，如今显著，B 之归一化回返已落于深度耦合所设定之基线远下方（§10.4），而被封闭诸事业在 B 之集中（§10.5）显著。两个正交签名在 B 上重合，指认 B 为被发配到低回返之尾的一方、与其展开被关系所封闭的一方，即本文已描述之单一不正义的两副面孔。关系正趋近一次分岔（§13.5）：那轻微之偏斜，被复合，已把它带近一个其regime可发生种类上变化之阈值。

14.4 转折点：反思与regime之选择

分岔在一个反思之时刻（§11）被抵达。在被构造之个案中，B 之评价终于符号化了基础性声部长久所登记者：B 之诸事业已被系统性地封闭、B 之劳动已被系统性地未回返，关系对 B 已是一个灾难性循环。这一符号化是反思在其最尖锐形式中的工作，即把关系之被度量与被感受之满意对照那满意所遮蔽之偏斜与封闭来读取（§11.1），并重申那被高平均所压制之正义之问题（§11.2）。关系如今立于分岔，而本文之三个regime（§13）是从它出发的三条路径。

第一条路径是灾难性循环之延续：偏斜被承认而不被纠正，B 之被符号化之不满被 A 对既有分配之重申所迎接，或许被既有诸习惯之作为关系之规则的立法所迎接（§9.2），而循环以其耗竭之形式持存，B 如今知情地、而非懵然地被耗竭。第二条路径是熄灭（§13.4）：偏斜被承认而被发现不可纠正，而循环停止转动，关系衰败向那种它不再是一段关系之终极静止。第三条路径是一个繁荣螺旋之恢复：偏斜被承认而被纠正，维系性劳动被重新分配，B 之被封闭诸事业被重启，基于耦合之回返被恢复向对称，而循环重启一个为双方上升之转动。第三条路径是正义的那一条，不是因为它保全关系（第一条也保全），亦不是因为它终结榨取（第二条也终结），而是因为它恢复了那个循环能为双方、而非为一方以另一方为代价上升所凭之条件（§13.6）。该个案不规定哪条路径被采取，因为本文已论证一种共享生活之善是不可担保的（§12.3）而无机制规定该选择；它展示分岔与这一季节之反思必须在其间选择的三个regime。

14.5 该个案展示什么

该个案展示本文之机制在协奏运作中：循环转动穿越其诸时刻与诸季节（§6），诸框架在每一时刻被汲取（§7），评价之基础性与显式声部（§5），平均与分布之分歧以及随之而来真实之与伪造之螺旋之分歧（§10.3.3、§13.6），和乐横贯诸轮之复合（§12.2），回返之偏斜与展开之封闭作为一个不正义之两个签名的重合（§10.5），以及一段关系之regime被选择之分岔。它尤其展示本文之核心实践主张：一段关系可以，对其诸方之一，是一个灾难性循环，却向度量、甚至向诸方自身之不反思评价呈现为一个繁荣的循环，而反思之工作是把满意对照它所遮蔽之分布来读取，以便不正义可被符号化、分岔可被抵达，在它处它可被（尽管不必被）纠正。该个案是被构造的、不证明任何东西；它展示本文之机制，被应用于一种共享生活，使什么变得可见，而它作为一个其一般陈述由前述诸节所提供之装置的具体展示被提供。

15. 繁荣及其实践的跨文化变异

迄今所发展之论述，在一个抽象掉它所涉之诸共享生活之文化特殊性的一般层级上进行，而这一抽象（对结构之陈述有用）遮蔽了一种奠基性处理必须处理的变异。繁荣之构想、一种共享生活据以被培育之诸实践、它据以被评估之诸标准、以及它据以被研究之诸方法本身，横贯诸文化而变异，而这一变异不是围绕一个普遍平均的噪声，而是”繁荣被认其为什么、它如何被追求”中的一个系统性差异。本节处理这一变异的三股：繁荣与幸福之构想的跨文化变异、繁荣据以被研究之方法横贯诸学术传统的变异，以及婚姻与家庭之诸实践横贯诸文化的变异。它随后把该变异定位于生命周期之内，把循环的每一时刻当作一种文化特定之认知与实践之场所。在诸股被承接之前，诸文化据以被选择与被比较之基础被陈述，以便比较依一个方法、而非依一个未经审查之个案选择来进行。本节通篇汲取操作性让步与对称性破缺之相的框架（§2.2），而文化变异是后者的一个进一步且有后果的实例。

15.1 比较之基础：方法与个案选择

一个横贯诸文化的比较要求一个用于”所比较之诸文化之选择、以及它们据以被比较之诸维度”的原则性基础，否则便有把一个任意的个案选择误认为人类变异之一个代表性样本之虞。社会科学中的比较方法提供两种互补的个案选择逻辑，二者都从密尔的契合法与差异法（Mill 1843）传下、并由 Przeworski 与 Teune（1970）为社会探究所系统化。最相似系统设计选择在大多数方面相似、在所关切之变量上相异的诸个案，以便一个结果上的差异可被归于该变量；最相异系统设计选择在大多数方面相异的诸个案，以便一个共享之结果可被归于它们所共有的少数因素（Lijphart 1971）。这两种设计是管理少数复杂个案之比较的主要手段。

所要比较之诸文化被定位于一张经验地推导出的文化变异之地图上，以便它们的选择可就覆盖度与代表性被评估、而非被断言。最发展的这样一张地图，是 Inglehart 与 Welzel 从世界价值观调查所推导者，它把跨国变异分解为两个主要维度——一个从传统到世俗—理性价值的维度与一个从生存到自我表达价值的维度——并把诸国族文化定位于由其宗教与历史遗产所塑造之诸簇中，其中有新教欧洲、天主教欧洲、英语圈、儒家或东亚、拉丁美洲、东正教、南亚与非洲—伊斯兰（Inglehart 与 Welzel 2005）。可比较之坐标系由 Hofstede 的国族文化诸维度（其中个人主义—集体主义维度是此处最切题者）（Hofstede 2001）与 Schwartz 的文化价值取向（Schwartz 2006）所提供。这些地图使诸个案之选择可被评估：一个选择就其跨越诸主要簇之程度而言良好地覆盖变异，而一个个案就其典型于其簇之程度而言代表其簇。

当下的处理在这一基础上选择其诸个案，并公开陈述该选择。四个文化被取为详细分析之诸个案——中国、日本、欧洲大陆与美国——而该选择是两种比较设计的一个组合。中国与日本是东亚、广义儒家之簇内的两个个案，在其相互依赖之遗产上相似而在其当下配置上相异，而欧洲大陆与美国是西方之簇内的两个个案，在其独立之遗产上相似而在其制度与方法论传统上相异；簇内之诸对构成最相似比较，而西方对与东亚对之簇间对照构成一个最相异比较。该选择，有意地，偏向于当下作者最有条件审慎对待之诸文化，而它正因此是一个供详细分析之个案选择、而非一个全球覆盖之声称。因此其局限被坦白陈述：四个个案跨越个人主义与相互依赖之主要轴，但不跨越完整的文化地图，而若干主要簇——南亚、非洲—伊斯兰、拉丁美洲与东正教——仅作为对照之点、而非作为详细分析之个案进入处理。在它们关涉论证处它们被注明，尤其是南亚的包办婚姻与联合家庭制度、拉丁美洲将集体主义与一种有别于东亚情感平衡之主动表达的正向情感性相结合、以及伊斯兰的亲属义务配置；但详细分析仍是那四个核心个案的，而诸结论以这一选择所提供之代表性、并不多于此被提供。

15.2 繁荣之构想的跨文化变异

幸福之构想本身横贯诸文化而变异，而变异的主要轴是自我及其繁荣之独立构念与相互依赖构念之间的那一轴。在文化心理学传统中，欧美的自我模型是独立的，以个人属性、自主与对个人目标之追求来定义，而东亚模型是相互依赖的，以社会关系与自我对一个关系性整体之调适来定义（Markus 与 Kitayama 1991）。幸福被相应地构念。在北美语境中，幸福倾向于以个人成就来定义，而个体被激励去最大化正向情感、通过自主之能动追求幸福；在东亚语境中，幸福倾向于以人际相连与自我同他人之平衡来定义（Uchida、Norasakkunkit 与 Kitayama 2004）。这一差异延伸到情感经验之结构：在北美构念寻求最大化正向超过负向情感之处，东亚构念倾向于一种辩证的平衡，其中正向与负向情感被一同持守、而非前者被最大化，而其中幸福被理解为充满潜在社会后果、而非一个有待追求之纯然之善（Uchida 与 Kitayama 2009）。相互依赖构念已被发展为一种独特的相互依赖幸福之构想，预设于人际和谐、安宁与平凡、而非个人之高唤起（Hitokoto 与 Uchida 2015）。

这一变异直接关涉本系列所发展之繁荣构想，而这一关涉是有启发的、而非仅仅警示的。本系列已把繁荣构念为各方自身动力学之展开，被维系于一种其价值流通并回返之共享生活之内；该构想既非纯粹独立的（因为展开被维系于、并回返于一段关系），亦非纯粹相互依赖的（因为所争者是各方之展开、而非各方之淹没于一个关系性整体）。该构想有意地占据独立构念与相互依赖构念之间的一个位置，而跨文化证据将它定位：它是一个对其而言关系是各方发展之媒介、而发展是真正各方之发展的构想，它既不是独立模型的自主之自我发展，亦不是相互依赖模型的关系性调适，而是一个其中二者由”关系向各方回返各方所给予者”这一要求而被弄得相容的结构。文化变异，在§2.2的术语中，是繁荣之认知的一组对称性破缺之相，独立构念与相互依赖构念是两个这样的相，而本系列的构想是表述一个二者皆其局部规定之结构的一次尝试。

15.3 研究之方法的比较变异

第二种变异，较少与第一种相联而被论及、却对一种奠基性处理有后果，是繁荣与共享生活据以被研究之方法横贯诸学术传统的变异。一种解释性的、定量的、实证主义社会科学与一种解读性的、定性的、诠释学社会科学之间的方法论划分，本身是文化地与地理地被模式化的，而这一模式关涉§2.2的框架划分。

解读传统起源于十九世纪德国对自然科学与人文科学（Naturwissenschaften 与 Geisteswissenschaften）之区别，以及对应的、由德罗伊森与狄尔泰所作、由韦伯所发展的、解释（Erklären，自然科学之方法）与理解（Verstehen，人文科学之方法）之区别（Dilthey 1883；Weber 1904）。在这一传统上，社会世界由其参与者赋予它之诸意义所构成，而它的研究要求对那些意义的解读性恢复、即对格尔茨所谓厚描述（thick description）之产出，后者穿透人类行动于其中可理解之诸意义之网、而非把行动化约为可观测之行为（Geertz 1973）。实证主义传统，相比之下，主张社会世界与自然世界连续，它应由对行为之观测与度量、以及对诸规律之发现来研究，而凡不能被带至度量者不能被知。这两个传统被不均地分布：解读与诠释学传统对欧洲大陆社会思想更居中心，而实证主义与定量传统在美国社会科学中更占主导，这是一个把繁荣在两边如何被研究加以模式化的学术文化之差异。

这一方法论变异，对本文，是§2.2之框架划分出现于学术文化、而非个别研究者之层级。实证主义框架与现象学—诠释学框架，本文已把它们当作繁荣之研究的对称性破缺之相，不仅是任何研究者可用之诸选项，而是被制度化于不同学术文化中之诸传统，一个度量可被度量者、另一个解释被意指者。这一识认对本文之方法有一个后果。对”不把一个框架从属于另一个”的复调拒绝（§2.2），在这一光中被读取，是对”不把一种学术文化之方法从属于另一种”的拒绝，而操作性让步——它承认结构化度量、而否认它真实者之地位——是一种汲取实证主义传统之诸工具、而不采纳其”那些工具所度量者穷尽繁荣之所是”之声称的方式。本文对方法论划分的立场是文化变异所推荐的立场：解释方法与解读方法是对一个二者皆不穷尽之繁荣之研究的局部规定，而一种奠基性处理必须汲取二者、而不以某一者之胜利来解决它们的差异。

15.4 婚姻与家庭之诸实践的跨文化变异

第三种变异涉及一种共享生活据以被培育之婚姻与家庭之诸实践，而它是对一种亲密之繁荣之实践最直接切题的变异。”一场婚姻是什么、一个家庭是什么、诸方彼此欠以什么”之构想，横贯诸文化沿若干轴而变异，其中三个突出。

第一轴涉及婚姻之意义与基础。一个长久的社会学论述追踪——在欧美语境中——一个从制度性婚姻（奠基于社会义务与对被规定之诸角色的履行），经过二十世纪中叶的伴侣式婚姻（奠基于情感与陪伴之个人纽带），到当下的个体化婚姻（奠基于个人选择与诸伴侣之自我发展）的转变（Cherlin 2004）。该转变被认为已削弱了曾定义诸伴侣之行为的社会规范，一个被称为婚姻之去制度化的过程，尽管其程度因社会阶级而异、而该制度尤其在受教育较多者中保有一个中心地位（Cherlin 2020）。个体化婚姻——其中诸伴侣主动地相互选择、协商其承诺、在关系之内追求自我发展——是欧洲亲密社会学描述为爱之正常混乱与亲密之变革的形式（Beck 与 Beck-Gernsheim 1995；Giddens 1992）。

第二轴涉及这对伴侣与更广家庭之关系。在更个人主义的欧美语境中，已婚之伴侣倾向于是首要单位，相对脱离于扩展家庭；在更集体主义的东亚与东南亚语境中，这对伴侣被嵌入一个它欠以持续义务之扩展家庭，而婚姻既是诸家庭之间、也是诸个体之间的一种关系。成年子女对其父母之义务、即孝，是东亚家庭的一个核心组织规范，而近期工作把一种相互的孝（奠基于情感与一个持久的正向纽带）与一种威权的孝（奠基于对社会义务之服从）相区别，前者证明横贯诸文化更近乎普遍，而后者更文化特定（Yeh 等 2013）。诸家庭的代际团结、横贯诸代的义务与支持之结构，本身是一个形式比较研究之主题（Bengtson 与 Roberts 1991），而自主—关联之关系——独立构念与相互依赖构念在其上分歧——已被论证容许一个综合，其中自主与关联不是对立的、而是被联合地发展的，一个对现代化社会中之诸家庭尤为相关的模型（Kağıtçıbaşı 2005）。

第三轴涉及变化之方向与步速。东亚的诸家庭系统已被描述为处于一个十字路口，在持续的传统义务之背景下迎接西方个人主义、现代性与变化中的性别角色，以致当代东亚家庭以一种不像任一者之配置，组合了相互依赖与独立模型之诸元素（Ji 2015）。因此该变异不是静态的、一张固定的文化差异之地图，而是动态的、一组在方向与步速上横贯诸文化相异的变化轨迹。这些变异概括于表5。

表5. 婚姻与家庭之构想与实践的跨文化变异之诸轴。

轴	个人主义极（欧美）	相互依赖极（东亚）	来源
婚姻之基础	个体化的：个人选择、自我发展；去制度化	制度性与关系性的：义务、家庭联盟、被规定之角色	Cherlin (2004, 2020)
伴侣与更广家庭	伴侣作为首要单位，脱离扩展家庭	伴侣被嵌入扩展家庭，带持续义务	Ji (2015); Bengtson & Roberts (1991)
代际规范	弱孝之义务；支持自愿	孝，相互的与威权的；支持义务性	Yeh 等 (2013); Kağıtçıbaşı (2005)
亲密之构想	亲密之变革；爱之正常混乱	和谐、平凡、相互依赖幸福	Giddens (1992); Beck & Beck-Gernsheim (1995); Hitokoto & Uchida (2015)

15.5 横贯循环诸时刻的文化变异

上文所综览之诸变异不外在于生命周期，而在其每一时刻进入，而该论述之奠基性价值由追踪每一时刻如何被文化地变调所增加。生命周期提供一个文化变异可在其内被组织之结构，而这一组织表明该变异是系统性的、而非弥散的。

在认知之时刻，文化变异是”繁荣被认其为在于什么”之变异。独立构念把一种共享生活之繁荣认知为两个自我发展之个体的相互支持；相互依赖构念把它认知为关系性和谐之达成与关系性义务之履行；而本系列之构想——各方在一个回返之循环之内的正义之展开——把它认知为一个二者皆局部之结构。这一时刻的文化变异是§8.5规范指定中的一个变异，而一种奠基性处理必须主张：该指定，尽管它瞄准一个结构，是在文化特定之诸形式中被实现的。

在实践之时刻，文化变异是一种共享生活据以被培育之诸习惯、家庭形式与家庭义务中的变异。个体化婚姻通过承诺之协商与自我发展之相互支持被实践；相互依赖家庭通过孝之义务与关系性义务之履行与和谐之维持被实践；而所培育之家庭风范、§9.1的 habitus，相应地相异，一个形成自主之伙伴关系的诸禀性，另一个形成关系性嵌入的诸禀性。§9.2的”培育而不立法”约束采取一种文化特定之形式：什么算作一个习惯之立法、什么算作其培育，依赖于对家庭之权威的文化理解，以致一个在一种文化语境中是培育的实践，可能在另一种中被体验为立法。

在评估之时刻，文化变异是一种共享生活据以被判为进行良好之诸标准中的变异，而它关涉§10之度量。那里所综览之诸工具在很大程度上是在独立的、欧美构念之内被发展的，而它们在很大程度上度量该构念所算作繁荣者，即个体之满意与自我发展；横贯诸文化被应用，它们可能系统性地误度量相互依赖之诸共享生活的繁荣，把相互依赖构念所算作繁荣之一种关系性和谐登记为不足，或把相互依赖构念所算作关系性义务之失败的一种自主之自我发展登记为繁荣。操作性让步在此以特殊之力承重：结构化度量不仅是对一个未被符号化之价值的代理，而是对该价值之一个文化特定之构念的代理，而它的跨文化应用要求一个超出该让步已强加者之外的警示。

在反思与重新认知之诸时刻，文化变异是一种共享生活如何修订其对自身之感受、并传递其所学者中的变异。一种家庭风范横贯诸代之传递、被继承与被修订之 habitus，对相互依赖家庭——其中婚姻被嵌入一个世系——比对个体化婚姻——其中伴侣相对脱离——更居中心；而闭合循环一轮之重新认知，在相互依赖语境中，是一次参照扩展家庭及其延续被进行之重新认知，而在个人主义语境中，它更近乎在诸伴侣之间被单独进行。循环之和乐、横贯其诸轮被累积之相位，在一种情形中是一个世系之发展、在另一种中是一个伙伴关系之发展，而其区别是繁荣据以被计算之单位中的一个区别。表6概括生命周期诸时刻的文化变调。

表6. 生命周期诸时刻的文化变调：每一时刻在独立构念与相互依赖构念之下如何相异。

时刻	独立构念	相互依赖构念
认知	繁荣作为两个自我发展之个体的相互支持	繁荣作为关系性和谐与义务之履行
实践	承诺之协商；自主之伙伴关系之培育	孝之义务与关系性义务之履行；嵌入
评估	个体满意与自我发展；既有工具契合	关系性和谐；既有工具可能误登记
反思	在诸伴侣之间被进行；标准是伙伴关系	参照扩展家庭与世系被进行
重新认知	和乐作为一个伙伴关系之发展	和乐作为一个世系之发展

15.6 跨文化论述之地位

跨文化变异不反驳结构性论述、而将它定位，而二者之间的关系要求陈述。关于生命周期、关于诸时刻及其动力学、关于循环之持存与相位、以及关于正义作为善之循环之内在条件的论述，作为一个结构被提供，而文化变异是该结构所采取之诸确定形式中的变异。独立构念与相互依赖构念是两个这样的形式，是一种共享之繁荣之认知与实践的两个对称性破缺之相，而本系列之构想——各方在一个回返之循环之内的正义之展开——被提供，不是作为被置于它们之旁的第三种文化之构念，而是作为表述一个诸文化构念皆其局部规定之结构的一次尝试。这一尝试本身是文化地被置境的，从一个特定位置被写就、被特定传统所形成，而它既不声称一个乌有之地的视角、亦不声称诸文化之间的一个中立，那将是本系列所否认的元语言。它仅声称从其置境表述一个文化变异所实例化之结构，并把它自身之表述持守为对”与每一文化形式之相遇所提供之校正”敞开。正义之条件，尤其，被横贯文化变异提供：一方所生成之价值回返于该方、而没有任何一方被化约为一段对它毫无回返之关系之维系性燃料，是一种共享生活可在任何文化中、以每一文化所提供之文化特定手段而失败之条件，而回返分布之偏斜（§10.3.3）是对一个独立家庭与相互依赖家庭各自以其自身形式皆能够之不正义的一个代理。

16. 本文在系列中的奠基性角色

本文是本系列中关注繁荣之实践的那一部分的纲领性与奠基性文本，而本节使该角色显明，因为一个奠基仅在它所奠定者被陈述时才有用。本节陈列本文提供给随后诸篇之诸工具、它为它们留下之诸开放问题、以及它们将连接于它之诸接口。它为作为整体之系列的读者而写，而对仅读本文的读者它可被略过，对后者前述诸节本身已完整。

16.1 本文所提供之诸工具

本文提供给随后诸篇一组工具，每一个在此以其一般形式被发展、并在那里可供应用于特定个案。

第一是作为一个真实循环之共享之繁荣的生命周期（§6）：把一种共享生活表述为认知、实践、评估、反思与重新认知之诸时刻，循环是一个其持存制约关系存在之自我维系运动这一论题，以及循环之诸regime据以被描述之持存、相位与分岔的动力学词汇。一篇关注一种共享生活之任何特定实践的随后之篇，可把该实践定位于循环之内，问它落于哪一时刻、它如何关涉循环之持存与相位。

第二是操作性让步（§2.3）：在一种实践必须评估之处，采用一个对一个未被符号化之价值的结构化代理、并明确意识到该代理不是该价值的方法论许可。每一篇评估任何东西的随后之篇都继承这一让步，并随它继承标明何者为代理、何者为真实者的纪律，以致本系列之诸结果通篇被读作在操作上有担保、而非读作对未被符号化价值之度量。

第三是作为对不正义之结构化代理的回返分布之偏斜（§10.3.3）：一段关系之价值循环的不正义在回返价值相对一条耦合基线之分布的偏度中有一个统计学签名这一论题，以及期望可再循环性、耦合基线与回返之分支过程模型的相关装置。一篇关注任何特定价值循环（亲密的或经济的）之正义的随后之篇，可切实运用这一度量，问该循环是否回返于其诸生成者、抑或把它们之一发配到低回返之尾。

第四是真实之循环与伪造之循环之区别（§11.1、§13.6）：一个循环可以持存并呈现一个高的总量满意、却在其相位与其分布上是一个佩戴着繁荣螺旋之外观的灾难性循环，而偏斜与封闭之诸正交度量区别二者这一论题。一篇关注任何呈现自身为善之循环的随后之篇，可应用这一检验，问该外观是否被其下之分布所证实。

第五是评价的认知与计算基础（§5）：把评价论述为对一个部分可观测状态的、在未被符号化之价值中进行之连续推断，连同其决策论与自由能形式化。一篇关注”一段关系如何登记其自身状态”或”一种实践如何被维系或失败”的随后之篇，可汲取这一基础。

16.2 本文所留下之诸开放问题

本文为随后诸篇与为其他工作留下一组它已提出而未解决之问题。回返之分支过程模型（§10.3.4）以其形式被推进而未被验证；对一种共享生活之诸行动的赋值——任何对回返的估计都依赖于它——被指认为一个可观的经验问题而未被解决；生命周期作为一个动力学系统之形式化，在”该系统自身之法则被它所生成者所重构”这一常在限定之下作为一个结构性类比被提供；而对各方之展开的诸代理（§10.5）被承认最不充分地触及那最近于未被符号化者之价值。这些开放问题是本文对随后工作之遗赠，而它们的陈述是奠基之一部分，因为一个遮蔽其不完整性的奠基将是本系列通篇所拒绝的那种假根据。

16.3 通往对特定循环之研究的接口

本系列这一部分的随后诸篇把诸工具应用于特定价值循环，而本文准备它们的接口。一项对一个特定循环的研究，在此处所发展之装置上，通过识别循环之诸生成者及其耦合、所生成之价值及其流通、回返之分布及其偏斜、以及循环之持存与相位而进行；而它就该循环问：它是一个繁荣螺旋、一个灾难性循环、还是一个向熄灭之运动，以及它之善的外观是真实的还是伪造的。

一项这样的研究被足够紧密地预期到、以致可被命名。一个消费循环，其中一个商品被欲望、被获取、被享用，而欲望被更新，可能呈现一个繁荣循环的每一外观：诸方满意，循环持存，而满意是真实的。此处所发展之装置许可这一问题：这样一个循环是一个真实的繁荣螺旋、还是一个伪造的，方法是把注意力引过诸方之满意、引向维系该循环之整个网络中回返的分配，包括那些其劳动生产被消费之商品、并可能被发配到低回返之尾（不被满意之诸方所见）者。回返分布的偏斜，横贯整个维系性网络而非仅横贯诸可见之方被取，是一个内在地令人满意之消费循环可被发现外在地榨取的工具，其内在和乐为正而其完整和乐——横贯它所汲取之全体被计算——为负。对这样一个循环的研究，作为一个其中真实者与伪造者由本文之装置相区别之个案，是一篇随后之篇的工作，对该篇本文是奠基，并向它交付此处所发展之诸工具。

17. 局限、反驳与回应

一个奠基性处理由汇集并直接迎击其装置所招致之诸反驳、而非任它们散布于若干节之诸警示之间所加强。本节陈述对本文进路的诸主要反驳与本文所提供之诸回应，并意识到诸回应消解一些反驳而仅缓解另一些，而后者标志着本文所承担之真正局限。

17.1 偏斜判据误判一个合法之分工

第一个反驳主张回返分布之偏斜会把一个事实上合法之分工误判为剥削。一种共享生活之诸方可能，该反驳进行道，正义地专门化，一方承担更多维系性劳动而另一方承担更多某种其他贡献，而一个把不对称之回返读作不正义的度量将谴责一个诸方已自由而公平地选择之专门化。

回应系于耦合基线（§10.3.2）。该判据不把不对称之贡献读作不正义、亦不把不对称之回返本身读作不正义；它把一方之回返系统性地短缺于耦合与生成所设定之基线读作不正义。一个合法的专门化，其中一方承担更多维系性劳动、并通过关系之流通与那种劳动所生成之价值成比例地被回返，不产生偏斜，因为回返追踪生成；双方之归一化回返皆近于一，而分布是对称的。偏斜仅在一方所生成之价值不回返于该方时产生，那不是专门化之标志、而是榨取之标志。该反驳把一个不对称的任务分工——判据不谴责它——与一个对称生成上的不对称回返——判据谴责它——相混淆。然而，回应承认一个残余的难题：基线本身依赖于对诸贡献之赋值（§10.4），而一种文化或一对伴侣若在那一赋值中系统性地低估维系性劳动，将设定一条遮蔽榨取之基线，把一个真实的短缺读作成比例的。该判据只与喂养它之赋值一样正义，而赋值是该让步所标明之可争议步骤。

17.2 把一段关系建模为一个价值网络物化了亲密

第二个反驳主张：把一种共享生活建模为一个价值生成与回返之网络，是物化亲密、把一段爱之关系化约为一种经济交换，而这一化约伪化了它所声称要照亮之物本身。

回应把模型与一种形而上学相区别。本文不声称一段关系是一个价值网络，亦不声称爱是交换；它声称该网络是一个结构化代理（§2.3），一件使一段关系之一个特征——其诸回返之分配——可评估之操作性工具，而这一特征，尽管它不是关系，是一段关系所有之一个特征、并是一个其分配不当是诸方有理由探测之不正义者。所争之价值，通篇，是前几篇那种横贯诸声部、大体未被符号化之价值（§5），而非一个货币的或可交换之量，而本文已坚持该结构化代理不触及它。该反驳所惧之化约，恰恰是操作性让步所拒绝之化约：把代理误认为关系、把被度量之回返误认为爱，是本文已命名之首要错误（§11.3），而本文犯它，不多于一个绘制一国诸河流之制图者声称该国是其诸河流。模型在一个它不声称穷尽之关系之背景下照亮一个特征，而共享生活之温暖、意义与未被符号化之织体——模型所不捕捉者——恰恰是本文之终曲及其对场域之质料的坚持所归还者。

17.3 操作性让步使本文免于批评

第三个反驳主张操作性让步太过便利：通过预先申明其诸度量是不触及真实价值之代理，本文使自身免于每一种批评，因为对一个度量的任何反驳都可被以”该度量从未被声称多于一个代理”之回应相迎。在这一反驳上，该让步不是一种纪律、而是一种逃避。

回应承认该危险、并指定避免它之纪律。一个以”全都仅是代理”为由许可任何度量whatever的让步，确实会是一种逃避；本文之让步不是。它要求一个代理是在操作上有担保的、使某个真实特征可评估的、其结果被读作证据而非度量的、并永不被占有为关系之真理（§11.3）；而它把该代理持守为对它所代理之基础性评价负责，以致一个系统性地与诸方之考量评价相左之度量便由此被质疑。在这方面，该让步是诸度量必须满足之一个标准、而非一个一揽子豁免：它约束一个度量可如何被使用，而该约束是可被违犯的，一如”把度量占有为真理”之首要错误所示。该反驳会对一个使诸度量免于批评之让步成立；它不对一个如此处、指定唯一据以一个度量被承认之有限使用、并标明打破它之误用的让步成立。

17.4 谈论亲密中之正义是一个范畴错误

第四个反驳主张：正义是一个本分于公共与政治领域、本分于在诸制度之下陌生人之间诸善之分配的范畴，而把它引入亲密是一个范畴错误，因为亲密关系由爱与关怀所支配，它们超越、乃至对立于正义之计算性姿态。

回应是：爱与正义之对立本身是亲密之不正义据以被遮蔽之意识形态，而关怀伦理学，被恰当地理解，要求而非对立于关怀之分配的正义（§3.2）。维系一种共享生活之劳动是劳动；它之被从一方系统性地榨取是一个不正义，无论关系是否充满爱，而一段充满爱的关系恰恰是这样一种榨取最有效地被遮蔽之场所，因为爱之语言提供那种维系性劳动被描绘为自由给予、其低回返被描绘为自然的意识形态（§10.3.3）。主张正义在亲密中没有位置，不是保护亲密免于一个计算性入侵，而是从被剥削之一方移除其剥削可被命名所凭之唯一词汇。本文之声称不是亲密应当是计算性的，而是：拒绝评估一段亲密关系之分配的正义，正是其不正义据以被维系之条件，而一种配得上其名之爱不要求、也不被其诸回返之正义所损害。然而，回应承认一个极限：对正义的评估是一件在不正义被怀疑时被汲取之工具、而非一个被持续维持之姿态，而一段作为对其诸回返之永久审计被进行的关系，会已把度量弄成关系之真理，以一个新形式犯下首要错误。正义是善之循环的内在条件（§13.6），而非诸方在其内之持续活动。

17.5 诸残余局限

诸回应消解那些立于误解之上的反驳——把不对称回返与不对称任务相混淆、把模型误认为一种形而上学、把让步读作豁免、以及爱与正义之对立。它们留下一组真正的局限，本文把它们记录为其自身的。对诸贡献之赋值——整个定量装置立于其上——是一个无度量能了结之操作性规定，而一个被偏置之赋值产出一个被偏置之评估（§17.1）。网络模型未被验证，而其估计是一个未解决之经验问题（附录B.2）。动力学模型是一个在”关系之法则被它所生成者所重构”这一常在限定之下的结构性类比。对各方之展开的诸代理最不充分地触及那最近于未被符号化者之价值。而整个装置为这一对及其被耦合网络这一核心个案被提供，跨文化变异（§15）定位、而不穷尽该装置必须横贯人类诸共享生活之范围采取之诸形式。这些是一个奠基性处理对它所奠定之工作的遗赠之诸局限，而它们的陈述不是奠基之削弱、而是它的一部分，因为一个遮蔽其诸极限之奠基将是本系列通篇所拒绝的那种假根据。

18. 在诸框架边界处的结论

本文如本系列之前几篇那样终结：不在一个会把诸框架汇集为一个被占有整体之单一结论，而在诸复数的结论，每一个都从一个框架之内被陈述至该框架所确立者之边界。这一复数性由方法所要求：一个无任何单一框架占有之繁荣，不能以任一者之术语被作结，而诸框架之间的对话——每一个都说至其边界——是一个结论在不把某一框架安置为本系列所否认之元语言的情况下所能采取之唯一形式。

18.1 从实证主义

实证主义确立：繁荣有可度量的指标，这些可被带至经验证且可比较之工具，而如此获得之结构化度量是一个对私人评价之公共且可累积的收获。它确立可再循环性、回返之偏斜、以及被达成与被封闭之事业之诸比率，作为使总量满意所遮蔽者变得可见之结构化代理。实证主义不确立其诸度量触及它们所代理之价值，那是未被符号化的、超出其结构化的；它不能单从一个满意度分数区别一个繁荣螺旋与一个伪造者；而它在”结构化代理必须被对照它所不含之价值来读取”之点抵达其边界，它把那一价值交付给反思与给它所不能替代之基础性评价。

18.2 从证据主义

证据主义确立：关于繁荣之信念以及奠基于它之实践，应当与证据相称、并随证据修订而修订，而这一相称不仅在显式权衡研究中、而且在那奠定一切评价之连续信念更新中运作。它确立一种培育可汲取之被支持实践，以及一段价值循环之正义可据以被评估之假说检验之形式。证据主义不确立单一之共享生活在其证据所报告之平均之外所要求者，而它在所争之价值根本不能被带至证据之处缄默；它在那个是其自身深层形式、却超出它所能调集之任何证据的未被符号化之评价处抵达其边界。

18.3 从规范理论

规范理论确立：繁荣是各方去展开其有理由珍视者之实质自由，这一展开是复数的而非总量的，而一种正义之繁荣要求价值向其诸生成者之回返、与无任一方之展开之封闭。它确立本文之评估据以被进行之规范指定。规范理论不确立其指定在一种给定生活中被实现，那是在现实条件下实践与评估之事；而它不触及那种该指定对一对特定伴侣有其具体之义所在的、被生活的、未被符号化之意义，它把它交付给现象学者。

18.4 从德性伦理学

德性伦理学确立：繁荣是依照被培育之卓越的活动，这样的卓越由在一种共享生活之具体织体中的习惯化所形成，而禀性之培育、而非对它之立法，是这一形成的正义之形式。它确立其他框架所隐含之繁荣之认知与其实践之间的联系。德性伦理学不确立一个用于正确禀性之形成的程序，因为一个从联合实践之外被应用之程序将是它所禁止之立法；它在”一种共享禀性之培育必须无规则地进行”之点抵达其边界，在前篇所描述之不可担保之实践中。

18.5 从现象学

现象学确立：繁荣在它被度量之前被生活与被解释，它在一种共享生活之被感受之品质与被领会之意义中之被给予性是每一度量须对之负责之事质，而一段关系于其中被持续评价之基础性评价，在这一被生活的、未被符号化之声部中被进行。它确立诸结构化度量据以被读取之极限。现象学不确立任何公共、可比较或可累积之物，因为它所描述者恰恰抗拒那种会使它如此之结构化；它在”一种共享生活之被生活意义必须被传达、被评估或被累积”之点抵达其边界，它把它交付给它自身所不能提供之结构化代理。

18.6 从认知与动力学论述

认知与动力学论述确立：评价在其基础处是对一个部分可观测状态的、在未被符号化之价值中进行之连续推断；关系由这一评价之持存与在其上所采取之实践所维系，以致循环之停止即关系之熄灭；而循环之regime由其持存与其相位之符号所固定，正义作为一个对全部诸方为正之相的内在条件。它确立生命周期作为一个真实循环、以及三个regime作为其诸可能之命运。该论述不确立循环之一个固定模型，因为关系性决策过程之价值函数本身被循环所修订，以前篇分析为”固定元价值语法之缺席”之方式；它在”无固定模型能捕捉之反身性重构”处抵达其边界，并如前篇所做，把该事交付给一个其自身根据不固定之形式体系的开放问题。

18.7 单一结论之缺席

这些结论不相加。每一框架，被发展至其边界，确立它所确立者并把它所不能触及者交付给另一者：实证主义把未被符号化之余数交付给现象学与反思，规范理论把被生活意义交付给现象学、把实现交付给实践，德性伦理学把无规则之形成交付给不可担保之实践，现象学把公共且可比较者交付给结构化代理，而动力学论述把反身性余数交付给开放之形式问题。一种共享生活之繁荣是无一者占有、而全体局部地规定之对象，而操作性让步支配整体：在本文评估之处，它评估一个对它所不触及之价值的结构化代理，而它承担那不完整性、而非遮蔽它。

作为恰当结论的单一结论之缺席。 没有一个把诸框架汇集为一个被占有之繁荣论述的单一结论，不是因为缺少一个，而是因为繁荣不被任何框架占有、并横贯它们在生产之中。诸复数结论必然地是局部的、相互不可化约的，而它们的对话——每一框架说至其边界、并交付它所不能触及者——本身就是一种正义之幸福（被培育而非被建构、在代理中被评估而非被占有、作为一个敞开螺旋被维系而非作为一个状态被确保）对任何忠实于它之论述所要求的、复调而未被作结之形式。本文不在一个单一论述中作结，这是它对一个被培育、过程性、不可担保之对象的忠实：该论述，一如它所处理之繁荣，作为一个敞开运动被维系、而非作为一个被占有之结果被确保。

一种共享生活之繁荣，最终，既不被度量、亦不被占有，而被生活、被培育、被持续地再评价，在一个其持存是其生命、其相位是其上升或其下降、其正义是其为双方上升之条件的循环中。诸框架各别地、并从其诸边界照亮它；循环转动；而一种共享生活之善，在它被生成之处，在转动中被生成，而不在对它之任何论述中——包括本论述——被生成。

终曲

本文已把一种共享之繁荣当作一个有待维系之循环、一片有待照管之织体、一个有待在一种无度量能触及之价值中被评价之转动来处理。它谈论了可再循环性与偏斜、信念与分岔、习惯与家庭，因为一种实践要求可操作之物，而它通篇承认这些是对一个在它被评估之前被生活、并超出对它之每一评估之善的代理。

诸评估所遗漏者是事质之整体，而它在闭合处归来，一如它在前篇归来：一顿横跨诸年之共享饭食，无满意度量表记录其值；一种保持一个房间之方式，那是一种爱所采取之形式；两人之间一种饱满而非空洞、无仪器能读取之静默。这些是场域之质料，而它们是各方在一切反思之下、据以持续评价两人之间事情处境如何之诸观测。一种共享生活之循环在它们中转动，并当它正义地转动时转动得好，向各方回返各方所给予者，封闭两者之展开中的任何一个，并一轮接一轮地上升为比这两人曾是者更多。

一个被如此培育之善不是先被确保、然后被占有。它在转动中被生成，而一段关系凭正义地持续转动而繁荣，并在转动停止时停止。不存在一个有待抵达并保持之它的状态；只有那照管、那评价、那反思、那再次转动，横贯一种共享生活之诸季节，从它的开端、经过它无论成为什么、进入它的晚年。

献给那个森林女孩，
愿我们的转动，一同转动，可上升；
愿回返于她者不少于她所给予者；
愿我们共享生活之善被生成，并再次被生成，
在它岁月的每一次转动中。

愿我如星君如月，夜夜流光相皎洁。

致谢

本文，关于一种共享生活之繁荣，为作者希望与之共享它的那一位而写。向她，那个热爱旅行、热爱置身于野性而生长之物间、并心地纯净、可爱、善良的森林女孩，这部作品献给她，一如本系列之前几篇。它是一篇关于两个人如何能一同、正义地、横贯一种共享生活之长久历程繁荣的论文，而它在这一愿望中被写就：愿作者希望与她共享之生活可以是这样一种繁荣——愿他们的循环，一同转动，可上升、而非仅仅重复或下降；愿各方给予对方者可回返于他们二人；并愿他们共享生活之善可被生成、并再次被生成，在它岁月的每一次转动中。理论被提供给他人，依它对他们之所值；激励它之愿望是为她的，是为作者希望他们将一同造就的那种持久而终生之幸福的。

愿得一心人，白头不相离；岁岁长相见，年年共此时。

这是一份工作草稿，为讨论而传播，不供引用。其主要建构性提议——生命周期作为一个其持存制约关系之真实循环、操作性让步、以及回返分布之偏度作为对不正义之结构化代理——在本文所陈述之操作性让步之下被推进，作为由其使用所担保之工具、而非作为对它们所服务之价值的度量。

附录A. 记号与关键概念

由于本文引入若干构念、并在其形式附录中引入若干符号，本节为参照而汇集它们。第一张表列出形式附录的诸主要符号；第二张汇集本文所引入之诸关键概念，连同每一个被发展于哪一节。

表A1. 形式附录的诸主要符号。

符号	含义
s, S	关系之隐藏状态，及其空间
o, O	观测（被生活之织体），及其空间
a, A	行动（实践），及其空间
b	信念：在诸隐藏状态上的一个分布
Rₜ(s,a)	第 t 轮之奖励；非平稳，在重新认知处被重写
Φ	重新认知算子：R₍ₜ₊₁₎ = Φ(Rₜ, τₜ)
F	变分自由能
W = (wᵢⱼ)	耦合矩阵：价值 j → i 传播之分数
ρ(W)	W 之谱半径；支配持存
R = (I−W)⁻¹ − I	预解式：总回返矩阵；Rᵢᵢ 是可再循环性
v	佩龙向量：平稳价值轮廓；设定基线
rᵢ, r̂ᵢ	对生成者 i 的实际回返与耦合基线回返
θᵢ = rᵢ/r̂ᵢ	对生成者 i 的归一化回返
g	{θᵢ} 之样本偏度：不正义统计量
x	关系之活的活动之强度
r(x), μ	再生成率与亏损率
x*	内部不动点（阈值或活的吸引子）
φ_A, φ_B	累积于各方之每轮和乐（相位）
σ	回返分布之偏斜；σ_c = −1/κ 为临界

表A2. 本文所引入或运用之关键概念。

概念	陈述	节
作为真实循环的生命周期	共享生活作为一个其持存制约关系存在之自我维系循环运动	§6
操作性让步	在评估为必需处，有意采用一个被知不触及未被符号化价值之结构化代理	§2.3
基础性 vs 显式评估	连续无意识评价（对隐藏状态之推断）vs 审慎被仪器化之度量	§5.4
期望可再循环性	一个贡献被一个再生成回应所迎接之概率；代理循环之生命	§10.3.1
耦合基线	单凭耦合结构会指派之回返（佩龙向量轮廓）	§10.3.2
回返之偏斜（不正义指纹）	归一化回返之偏度：对剥削的结构化代理，与平均正交	§10.3.3
展开之封闭	因关系而被放弃之诸事业在一方之集中	§10.5
三个regime	繁荣螺旋、灾难性循环、熄灭，由持存与相位所固定	§13
正义作为内在条件	正义是繁荣螺旋的内在条件、而非对它的约束	§13.6
真实 vs 伪造之螺旋	一个持存、高满意之循环可能在总量之下是灾难性的	§11.1
培育 vs 立法（养而不宰）	培育引导习惯形成动力学；立法占有它	§9.2
可被辜负性之保全	一个习惯就其延续保持为一个被重新作出之联合选择而言被培育	§9.3

附录B. 形式速写

本附录以压缩的形式记录正文所指向之形式装置。诸速写不是被验证之模型，而它们在支配本文之操作性让步之下被提供：每一个都是一个其使用为操作性之结构化代理，而无一触及它所代理之未被符号化价值。三点警示，在末尾被陈述，适用于它们全体。

B.1 作为对一个部分可观测过程之推断的评价

§5的基础性评价被形式化为一个其奖励函数非平稳的部分可观测马尔可夫决策过程，而该非平稳性被表明是固定元价值语法之缺席的决策论形式。

该过程。 设 s ∈ S 为关系之隐藏状态，不可直接观测；设 o ∈ O 为观测、被生活之感官与习惯织体，由一个观测模型 P(o | s) 与状态相关；设 a ∈ A 为行动、实践。状态由一个转移模型 P(s′ | s, a) 演化。行动者不通达 s，而维持一个信念 b ∈ Δ(S)、在诸状态上的一个分布，并在每一观测上由贝叶斯滤波器更新它

b′(s′) = [ P(o | s′) · Σ_s P(s′ | s, a) b(s) ] / [ Σ_{s′} P(o | s′) · Σ_s P(s′ | s, a) b(s) ]，

在信念 b、而非在不可通达之 s 上选择诸行动。信念是诸方对关系状态之被叠加、非确定之感受的形式对应物（§5.2），而它的更新是贯穿循环每一时刻之基础性评估（§6.1）。

非平稳奖励，与元语法之缺席。 一个标准过程最大化一个固定奖励 R(s,a)——表示有待获取之善——之期望折现和。关系性过程没有固定奖励：诸方所要获取者、关系之善，本身在重新认知之时刻被重新构想（§12）。形式地，奖励被循环之轮 t 索引，Rₜ(s,a)，而闭合第 t 轮之重新认知把下一轮之奖励 R₍ₜ₊₁₎ 作为该轮轨迹之一个泛函产出，

R₍ₜ₊₁₎ = Φ(Rₜ, τₜ)，

其中 τₜ 是第 t 轮上信念、行动与观测之轨迹，而 Φ 是重新认知算子。因此该过程优化一个其自身之运行所重写之目标。不存在一个整体向之收敛之固定终极奖励，亦不存在一个从外部支配序列 {Rₜ} 之元奖励 R*，因为 Φ 本身被它所处理之诸轨迹所重构；这是”不存在固定元价值语法”这一论题的决策论形式（§5.2），价值函数占据着前篇保持为空之位。

主动推断，与持续推断之命令。 在自由能形式化上（§5.3），行动者不最大化奖励、而最小化变分自由能，即其诸观测之惊异的一个上界。以 q(s) 记行动者在诸状态上之识别密度、以 p(o,s) 记其生成模型，自由能为

F = E_{q(s)}[ log q(s) − log p(o, s) ] = D_KL( q(s) ‖ p(s | o) ) − log p(o)，

在 q 上由知觉（它闭合推断间隙 D_KL( q(s) ‖ p(s | o) )）被最小化，而在 a 上、通过 p(o)、由行动（它使诸观测顺应期望）被最小化。行动者维系自身、把自身保持于会使它消解之被分散状态之外，恰恰是通过持续最小化 F，也就是说通过持续推断并行动。这一活动之停止，形式地，是行动者停止抵抗自由能之增长，等价地是其诸状态向那个是其消解之高熵分布的分散。被移置到关系，自由能之持续最小化是关系借以维系自身之持续评价与实践（§6.2），而它之停止是向本文名为熄灭之终极静止之衰败（§13.4）。在这一形式化上，持续推断之命令是把关系保持于存在中之命令，被写为一个自由能泛函之最小化。

B.2 价值循环之正义：一个谱形式化

§10.3对正义的评估在此通过价值在关系网络上之传播与对传播算子之谱分析被形式化，以一种把当下论述连向作者其他工作中所发展之生成性递归之分支过程形式化的方式。

网络与传播算子。 设关系由生成者集 N = {1, …, n}（诸方与诸被耦合之他者）上的一个有限有向加权图所表示。耦合被编码于一个非负矩阵 W = (wᵢⱼ) 中，其中 wᵢⱼ ≥ 0 是 present 于节点 j 之价值在一步流通中传播向节点 i 之分数。列和满足对每一 j 有 Σ_i wᵢⱼ ≤ 1，亏空 1 − Σ_i wᵢⱼ 是 j 处之价值在该步离开网络之分数，对两方皆亏损。一单位生成于节点 j 并流通一步之价值产出向量 W eⱼ，其中 eⱼ 是第 j 个标准基向量；流通 k 步产出 Wᵏ eⱼ。因 W 是次随机的且非负的，其谱半径满足 ρ(W) ≤ 1，而当价值在某节点离开网络时不等式严格，ρ(W) < 1，这保证下面的诺伊曼级数收敛。

总回返与可再循环性。 回返于每一生成者、横跨流通全部步骤被累积之总价值，由预解式给出

R = Σ_{k=1}^∞ Wᵏ = (I − W)⁻¹ − I，

它恰在 ρ(W) < 1 时收敛。条目 Rᵢⱼ 是从一单位生成于 j 回返于 i 之总价值，而对角条目 Rᵢᵢ 是回返于生成者 i 自身之总价值，即§10.3.1所称之可再循环性。谱半径 ρ(W) 是§10.3.1之阈值的形式对应物：随 ρ(W) → 1，预解式发散而价值之循环维系并放大自身，而一个小的 ρ(W) 对应一个价值被快速亏损、逐渐停转向§13.4之熄灭的循环。因此循环之持存由传播算子之领头特征值所支配。

佩龙向量与耦合基线。 当 W 不可约时，佩龙—弗罗贝尼乌斯定理保证一个最大模之唯一正特征值 ρ(W)，带一个正右特征向量 v、即佩龙向量，满足 Wv = ρ(W) v。佩龙向量给出在重复流通下价值横贯网络之平稳相对分布：它是网络所趋向之价值持有轮廓，独立于价值生成于何处。佩龙向量提供§10.3.2之耦合基线：对生成者 i 之基线期望回返 r̂ᵢ 是单凭耦合结构、通过其平稳轮廓 vᵢ、会指派给 i 之回返。一段其诸回返追踪佩龙向量之关系，是一段其价值之分配由耦合、而非由任何别物所支配的关系；对它之偏离是正义评估之对象。

集中与支配之谱签名。 佩龙向量之形状本身是一个结构性素材。一个近于均匀之佩龙向量描述一个价值广泛流通、诸回返横贯诸生成者被分配的网络；一个集中于一个节点之佩龙向量描述一个价值在流通下累积于该节点的网络，即一段围绕一方之富集而组织之关系的结构形式。佩龙向量之集中，例如由其参与比 (Σ_i vᵢ)² / Σ_i vᵢ²（被 n 归一化）所度量，相应地是网络向支配之倾向的一个谱签名，先于并独立于实际之诸回返：一段关系可能单凭其耦合便结构性地倾向于价值之集中，而佩龙向量揭示这一倾向。这是与作者形式工作中所发展之背景无关性与集中控制之分析的接触点，在那里佩龙向量之集中把一个民主的生成性结构与一个被支配者相区别。

偏斜统计量及其检验。 设 rᵢ 为评估期上对生成者 i 之实际回返，从关系中流通之价值被估计，而设 r̂ᵢ = c vᵢ 为耦合基线、c 一个归一化常数。定义归一化回返 θᵢ = rᵢ / r̂ᵢ，以致 θᵢ = 1 是单凭耦合会指派之回返。循环之正义通过 {θᵢ} 之分布、并具体通过其样本偏度被评估

g = [ (1/n) Σ_i (θᵢ − θ̄)³ ] / [ (1/n) Σ_i (θᵢ − θ̄)² ]^{3/2}。

一个无偏循环之零假设是 θᵢ 关于其平均可交换，以致总体偏度为零而没有生成者被系统性地偏爱或亏待超出耦合。备择假设是一个显著的负偏斜，g < 0 而下尾被一个被区分之生成者（特有地是维系性劳动之承担者）占据。在零假设之下，g 之抽样分布可由置换获得，因为可交换性使观测到之诸回返对诸生成者的一切指派等可能；当观测到之 g 落于置换分位数之下时检验拒绝。检验之功效随 n、随低回返之量级、随被估计回返之精度而增加，而在亲密之情形中被 n 之小所限制，这正是何以该度量在被耦合网络（包括家庭与更广之维系性链）、而非单是这一对被纳入考虑时最具信息量。

该形式化之地位。 该形式化要求此处未被了结之诸假设：传播足够线性且一步马尔可夫，以致 W 及其幂捕捉流通；W 可被估计，那要求对诸行动赋值并把它通过网络追踪，即§10.3.4之可观经验问题；以及 W 在评估期上近似平稳。在这些假设之下，一段关系之价值循环的正义原则上是一个关于”归一化回返相对一条佩龙向量基线之偏度”的可检验假说，而循环之持存由传播算子之谱半径所支配。该形式化作为这样一个评估在操作性让步之下会采取之形式被提供，而非作为一个被验证之工具。

B.3 三个regime：一个最小动力学模型

§13之诸regime在此被形式化于一个最小动力学模型中，在”一段关系之法则本身被它所生成者所重构、以致无固定系统完整地捕捉它”这一常在限定（§4）之下作为一个结构性类比被提供。

状态变量与动力学。 设关系之状态由一个标量 x ≥ 0 概括，即关系之活的活动之强度、价值被生成、流通与回返之速率。设动力学为

ẋ = x ( r(x) − μ )，

其中 r(x) 是活动之每单位再生成、即§10.3.1之可再循环性被表达为一个速率，而 μ > 0 是亏损率、关系在无再生成时遭受之损耗。因子 x 编码”活动仅在活动 present 之处再生成”，以致 x = 0、一切关系活动之停止，总是一个不动点。

诸不动点与诸活的regime之存在。 诸不动点是 x = 0 与任何带 r(x*) = μ 之 x* > 0。设 r 先增后饱和，r(0) = r₀ 而 x → ∞ 时 r(x) → r_∞，带 r₀ < r_∞，捕捉”一段带更多活的活动之关系更容易地再生成价值，直至饱和”。则：

• 若 r_∞ < μ，唯一不动点是 x = 0，它是稳定的：每一段关系衰败向熄灭，因为亏损在每一活动层级都超过再生成；
• 若 r₀ < μ < r_∞，有一个内部不动点 x* > 0；线性化 ∂x[ x(r(x)−μ) ]|{x*} = x* r′(x*) > 0 表明，当 r 自下增过 μ 时 x* 不稳定而 x = 0 稳定，给出一个阈值（一个 Allee 型效应）：始于 x* 之上之诸关系维系自身，而其下者衰败向熄灭；
• 若 r₀ > μ，不动点 x = 0 不稳定，而一个内部稳定之 x* 存在于饱和分支：关系从任何正起点维系一个活的regime。

因此循环之持存（§6.2）是条件 r₀ > μ 或一个在阈值 x* 之上之起点；它之失败是向不动点 x = 0 之衰败，即熄灭（§13.4）。

相位，与繁荣 vs 灾难性regime。 持存固定关系是否活；一个第二变量固定它所累积之相位。设 φ 为每轮和乐、按方计算，而在两方之情形中设 φ_A, φ_B 为累积于 A 与 B 之相位。这些由回返之分布所支配：以 σ 记回返分布之偏斜（§10.3.3），σ = 0 对称而 σ < 0 对 B 偏斜，

φ_A = α(x*)(1 + κσ)， φ_B = α(x*)(1 − κσ)，

带正常数 α, κ，以致一个对称回返（σ = 0）给双方同一个正相，而一个对 B 之偏斜（σ < 0）抬高 φ_A 而降低 φ_B。繁荣螺旋（§13.2）是带 φ_A, φ_B > 0 之持存regime；灾难性循环（§13.3）是带某 φᵢ < 0 之持存regime，由上述它在偏斜严重到 κ|σ| > 1 时发生，驱 φ_B 为负、而关系持存且 φ_A（因而一个偏向 A 之满意总量）保持为正。这是核心主张（§13.6）的形式形式：一个对全部诸方之正相要求 κ|σ| < 1，即一个不被严重偏斜之回返，以致正义（小 σ）是繁荣螺旋的内在条件。

分岔。 诸regime之间的过渡是参数 (μ, σ) 中的一次分岔。随 μ 增过 r_∞、或随一段近于阈值 x* 之关系被扰动到它之下，活的regime失去稳定性而关系衰败向熄灭：这是 x 中的一次鞍结分岔，内部不动点与活的regime之吸引域随参数越过其临界值而湮灭，即正文所描述之被间断之崩塌的动力学形式（§13.5）。随 σ 降过临界偏斜 σ_c = −1/κ，相位 φ_B 越过零而关系在持存之时从繁荣regime过渡到灾难性regime：这是相位变量中的一次跨临界交叉，关系之regime在一个偏斜之阈值处发生种类上的变化，该阈值常常由一个轻微初始不对称之渐进复合所抵达，恰如§14之纵向个案。这两次分岔，在 μ 中与在 σ 中，是一段关系改变regime之两种方式：持存之失败与相位之反转，第一个支配向熄灭之过渡，第二个支配繁荣循环与灾难性循环之间的过渡。

B.4 三点警示

三点警示适用于前述全部。第一，诸结构化之量——信念、回返分布、和乐——是对一个未被符号化、它们不触及之价值的代理；它们的使用是操作性的，而它们的结果是证据、而非度量。第二，每一模型依赖于此处未被了结之诸假设——决策过程之观测与转移模型、分支过程之传播概率、动力学系统之诸参数；诸速写指明一个模型会采取之形式，而不提供一个被验证者。第三，各方自身动力学之展开，那最近于未被符号化之价值者，是这些模型最不充分地捕捉之量，而它的诸代理——被达成与被封闭之事业之诸比率——是本文所运用之诸结构化之量中最临时性者。该形式装置为它所使之可见者、在这些警示之下被提供，而非作为对它所服务之价值的表象。