Flourishing as an ethical imperative

Like many of you, I caught CBC’s Ideas episode the other day, where philosopher Angie Hobbs spoke about the ancient Greek concept of eudaimonia—a term sometimes translated as happiness or welfare, but more richly understood as human flourishing.

In a world flooded by crisis, it may seem indulgent or impractical to contemplate the good life, but Hobbs argued that flourishing is not a luxury—it is a necessity, and an ethical anchor.

She described it as the fulfilment of our imaginative, intellectual, and emotional faculties; a life lived as a whole, in relationship to other whole lives; a way of being that depends not only on individual desire but on the structures that allow communities to breathe, to rest, to grow.

The crisis of compliance and the call to reimagine ethics

Across Canada, and especially in the structurally fragmented education systems of provinces like British Columbia, accessibility is frequently treated as a compliance burden—a checkbox to be ticked, a procedural risk to be managed, or an inconvenience to be negotiated down. The prevailing ethical frameworks in school systems lean heavily on duty-based logics (deontology) or outcome-oriented rationales (utilitarianism): a child receives support because it is mandated, or because supporting them serves the broader classroom. Neither of these frameworks meaningfully engages with the child as a being with a life, with relational dignity, and with the capacity to thrive.

In contrast, a flourishing-based ethic, drawn from feminist and ecological thought, reorients our moral gaze.

It affirms that the purpose of accessibility is not to avoid liability or maintain decorum, but to support the unfolding of full human aliveness in relation—to honour the lives of disabled children as inherently valuable, as worthy of joy, self-determination, and mutual recognition.

Just a Parent

Flourishing should replace compliance as the central ethical orientation for accessibility in public schools. By examining concrete, everyday failures of inclusion—failures that are common, legal, and devastating—we uncover the moral bankruptcy of a procedural ethics and articulate a new, life-affirming approach.

From austerity to aliveness: the moral cost of neoliberal pedagogy

Beginning in the era of Christy Clark, but echoing far beyond it, public education in British Columbia became a battleground for a quiet ideological shift—one that replaced the moral language of collective care with the cold logic of cost-efficiency.

Under this paradigm, the child who needs most becomes the first to lose; the support that enables participation becomes an expense to be rationed; and the school system forgets its most basic ethical purpose: to serve the public good by supporting the most vulnerable.

The flourishing ethic proposed here refuses that framework. It insists that public education must be designed not around scarcity or containment, but around aliveness, relational dignity, and the unapologetic prioritisation of need. It is not just a pedagogical vision—it is a political one.

Accessibility reduced to procedure: how schools misrecognize harm

When we examine the architecture of support in schools, we find a chilling pattern: the right to assistance exists, but the ethical reasoning underpinning its delivery is so impoverished that access becomes conditional, humiliating, or revocable.

Take, for example, the child who requires an Educational Assistant (EA) in order to participate safely in class—an accommodation recommended by a psychologist, a paediatrician, and a full IEP team. While technically “granted,” this support may be inconsistently assigned, shared with others, or removed due to staffing constraints. From a procedural standpoint, the file remains compliant. But from an ethical standpoint, the child is betrayed, and their need is rendered burdensome rather than honoured.

Or consider the child with an eating disorder, whose care team outlines a clear, medically necessary accommodation: permission to eat at her desk during class to stabilise her metabolic rhythms and emotional regulation. The school’s reply might be framed in neutral policy language—we don’t allow food in class, this sets a precedent, other students may be distracted. The rights of the child are placed in competition with the classroom’s imagined equilibrium. In this ethical model, flourishing is sacrificed to comfort; a child’s need is negotiated against the convenience of norms.

The problem is not the presence of rules. It is the absence of moral imagination, the refusal to recognise accessibility as a site of relational ethics, not just procedural execution. Rules, in the absence of relational care, become cruel. It’s likely a major seachange will need to take place in terms of leadership to accomplish accessibility goals.

An ethical shift rooted in relational dignity

Whereas deontological ethics demands that staff obey codified duties—and utilitarian ethics asks them to balance harms and benefits—a flourishing-based ethic begins with a different premise: that the goal of education is the full, relational, socially embedded thriving of all students, and that disabled students are not outliers but protagonists in that vision.

Drawing from the feminist-ecological work of Chris J. Cuomo, flourishing is not a private reward or a personal state of well-being—it is a co-constituted, context-sensitive condition, in which people (and systems) orient toward the possibility of shared thriving. In educational settings, this means that accessibility is not a disruption but a moral centrepiece, a signal of what the institution is ethically capable of imagining and sustaining.

Under this framework:

• A child with ADHD who blurts out an answer is not sent to a hallway chair to consider his poor choices, but supported with a communication strategy that affirms both his spontaneity and his need for connection.
• A student who requires recess to discharge energy is never held back as punishment for behaviour that emerged from unmet needs—because movement and play are part of learning, and punitive withdrawal severs the chance for regulation.
• A child who asks for help and is sent to the office for being “disruptive” is no longer pathologized but seen as courageous, as engaged in a process of co-regulation and trust-seeking.

In each of these scenes, the question becomes not was the protocol followed, but was the child’s dignity preserved, was her aliveness honoured, did she feel safe, seen, and supported?

A moral awakening

When we build systems that welcome need instead of punishing it—when we make space for the child who is hungry, the parent who is terrified, the family who stopped asking because every request brought consequences—need will rise to the surface. Not because it is multiplying, but because it is finally safe to be seen. What was once camouflaged by fear, flattened by compliance, or hidden behind politeness and rage will begin to emerge, hesitantly at first, then unmistakably, if we let it.

And what arrives will not only be need—it will be brilliance. It will be insight, tenderness, fierce protectiveness, creative strategies for survival, forms of intelligence shaped by constraint, and forms of joy shaped by refusal to disappear. This is not human capital. It is human presence. Flourishing ethics do not seek to extract value from the lives we once abandoned. They seek to make those lives livable, grievable, and interconnected.

To design for flourishing is to refuse the old logic—that people must prove their worth to receive care. It is to remember that public systems exist to support those who need most, not to reward those who comply best. And when we make room for those who have been pushed out, we do not merely get more productivity—we get a different world.

The cost-effective alternative to cruelty

And yes—if you’re wondering—it would be cheaper. Not because children cost less when they flourish, but because systems stop hemorrhaging resources when they are built around stability, dignity, and care. Crisis is expensive. Litigation is expensive. Attrition is expensive. Teacher burnout is expensive. Payouts and appeals and endless team meetings about a child no one knows how to support are expensive.

I heard someone say it costs $1 million a day to keep the Vancouver Downtown Eastside barely functioning—money distributed across 300 fragmented services, many of which serve to monitor or manage rather than meaningfully support. His conclusion was that we should pull the plug. Mine was that we should pull the threads—and reweave something worthy.

I do not believe in defending systems just because they exist. But I also believe that withholding care because it isn’t working fast enough is a euphemism for abandonment. If our public investments are producing fragmentation, burnout, and despair, the answer is not to spend less—it is to spend with vision.

What if that $1 million funded housing first, disability-led care, accessible schools, and staff who stayed long enough to be trusted? What if we measured success by lives that became liveable—not just by cost per unit or bed? What if we stopped equating visible need with failure, and started seeing need as the map to our moral priorities?

Flourishing is not a luxury model. It is the cost-effective alternative to cruelty.

Ethical collapse in the everyday

There is a quiet epidemic of ethical failure in schools, and it does not look like overt cruelty. It looks like denial wrapped in procedure, compliance performed with affectless precision, and the slow erosion of children’s belief that their needs will be met without punishment.

• A Grade 6 student who cannot eat breakfast at home due to anxiety is sent home for violating a no-snack rule—her teacher later says, “she needs to learn the rules apply to everyone.”
• A boy with high support needs is denied a 1:1 EA, then blamed for the disruption his unmet needs create—eventually shunted to a segregated program he never asked for.
• A child with a toileting accommodation is denied assistance due to staff shortages, and punished for accidents that result.

Each story becomes part of a larger mosaic—a system that cannot see flourishing because it has trained itself to see only infraction, risk, and cost. Under procedural ethics, the child’s suffering disappears beneath the paperwork. Under a flourishing ethic, the child’s experience becomes the moral centre of decision-making.

Flourishing as a design principle: implications for practice

To meaningfully implement flourishing as an ethical framework, schools must shift from a mindset of minimum sufficiency to one of relational responsibility. This requires changes in:

• Policy framing: Accessibility policies must describe what thriving looks like, not just what legal duty entails.
• Staff training: Educators and administrators must be supported to see accessibility as care, not charity, and to develop relational reflexes rather than procedural scripts.
• Accountability models: Schools should measure not just service delivery, but student joy, trust, regulation, and belonging.

Flourishing must be understood as both a moral aim and a pedagogical commitment: an ethic that holds disabled children as whole, complex people whose presence reshapes and enriches the learning community.

Toward an ethic that refuses abandonment

Every child who is made to eat alone in the hallway. Every child who raises a hand and is told they are interrupting. Every child who loses recess for failing to mask. Every child whose accommodation is treated as a problem to be solved, rather than a need to be met. These are not procedural failures alone—they are failures of ethical vision.

Flourishing offers a way forward—a framework that sees access not as allowance but as alignment, not as burden but as belonging. It invites us to build school systems capable of holding complexity, affirming difference, and sustaining joy. It calls us to raise our ethical standards beyond compliance, into the realm of shared, relational, and life-affirming presence.