Mary Hirschfeld, Assistant Professor of
Economics and Theology in the Department of the Humanities at Villanova University
A Brief Extract from the Keynote Address at the 2014 Lumen Christi Conference
Non-economists often falsely assume that homo economicus is somehow isomorphic with homo avidus, greedy man. The charge is unfair and confuses pursuit of the goods one desire with pursuit of narrow self-interest. Although the charge is unfair, it does capture some real reasons to be uneasy with the economic approach to the human person. The difficulty can best be seen by considering the alternative view of the human person we find in Catholic thought. The sketch that follows derives from Thomas Aquinas, whose thought is central to the Catholic approach.
Some Key Points about the Human Person in Catholic Social Thought
From the perspective of Aquinas, the first question to ask about the human person is in what sort of world does the human person find herself? And the answer is that we find ourselves in a world created by God. The God in question is transcendent – not some powerful guy with a beard off in some corner of the universe we haven’t quite managed to discover yet. This transcendent God is the one necessary being, who freely chose (and chooses) to create the universe, ex nihilo, out of nothing.[1] It is a creative act that reflects God’s essential infinite ultimate goodness. Thus the good that we find in this world is good that is reflective of God’s goodness which is the ultimate source of all good. And this gives us our first key point: We live in a world with an objective moral order – an objective order of the good.
A second key point follows immediately: The human person is built to desire and seek the good. Notice that like economists, Aquinas holds that human action is directed towards the desirable or the good. The difference lies in our disparate account of what that good actually is. In Catholic thought, since the ultimate good is God, our ultimate happiness lies in knowing and loving God. But this is only possible in our eternal lives. In the here and now, we seek a temporal reflection of the ultimate good we will know in God. We thus need to think about the relationship between the temporal good of the created world and the ultimate good to be found in God.
The short answer about how to relate the two ends of human life – the temporal good and the eternal good – is that they are related analogically. By that I mean that they are neither completely disparate, such that the joys of earthly life bear no relationship to the joys of heaven; but neither are they completely the same, such as we might imagine if we thought that heaven was just a ginormously large quantity of earthly goods. Rather, the earthly good reflects the good we hope to know as best a finite creation can reflect the infinite God. On this account, the goods we seek in this life are genuinely good – but largely because they are a foretaste of the joy that is to come. The analogy I like to use is to think of our feelings about our lovers and the love letters we have from them. If we are separated from our lovers, we treasure the letters we have from them. But we never mistake the letter for the lover. The world is God’s love letter to us! But an accumulation of letters would never get us to the joy of actually being with our lover. And that brings us to a crucial third key fact: Our desire for the infinite good can only be partially satiated in the temporal world; and then only by understanding that we are aiming to mirror the infinite good, not build a ladder to it. The distinction between a mirror and a ladder is important. Economists and Catholics share an idea that humans have a desire for the infinite good. The difference is in how the ‘infinite’ is conceived. Does it cash out as a desire for more? This is implicit in the view economists take of the matter. The rational choice model posits an array of bundles of goods that stretches out indefinitely, with our task being to attain the most desirable bundle given our constraints in time and income. If only we had more time or income, we could have more of the desirable goods, and thus get a better bundle. That probably sounds like the most ordinary thought in the world. But on the Catholic view, the reason it sounds so natural to us is because in the wake of the fall, idolatry is ubiquitous; and idolatry is essentially the mistake of projecting our desire for the infinite good onto finite goods, thinking in terms of accumulation (whether of material goods or a string of experiences) rather than perfection. But such an approach to the good can never work, because these temporal goods can never satisfy – no matter how many of them we might acquire.
So we need to think about how a finite universe can manifest the infinite unbounded transcendent good of God. There can be no one thing in a finite world that reflects God, so God created a universe with an array of qualitatively distinct creatures that each carry with them some essential aspect of God’s goodness. The appleness of the apple tells us one thing, the orangeness of the orange something else. But because God is also one, these diverse heterogeneous beings are ordered to one another, weaving together the dense set of relationships that make of this a coherent universe and not a random scattering of atoms. And here we have a fourth key point: We pursue the good in this life by respecting the diversity of goods, and ordering them well; life is a matter of art, not calculation (though calculation may play a valuable subordinate role). We don’t approach the infinite good by piling up a lot of finite goods or stringing together a lot of wonderful experiences; rather we approach it by reflecting the infinite good in a manner appropriate for finite goods. The painting of a tree best reflects the tree by judicious arrangement of paint, not by an accumulation of more paint. Both approaches – building a ladder to the infinite good or mirroring it entail picking the most “desirable” bundle – the difference is that on ladder view, it is a relaxation of the constraints of money or time that allow us to get to better choices; on the mirror view, the only thing that can move us to a better position is an improvement in our ability to judge or discern well what is to be done.
Because we are finite beings who reflect God somehow, our essential happiness lies in realizing or fulfilling our natures as fully as possible. The apple is as close to God as it can get when it achieves perfection as an apple. Just so, the essence of human happiness lies in the full exercise of our human nature. But with humans it is a bit more complicated. An animating principle of Catholic thought is that while creation as a whole mirrors or reflects God, human beings do so in a particular way. We are made in the imago dei. There are two approaches to understanding this (which I see as being ultimately closely connected). The first is that just as God’s triune nature is essentially relational, so too is human nature. Our highest excellence or happiness is found in relationship with others and especially with God. Here we have a fifth key point: the human person cannot be viewed as an essentially atomistic individual. We are not subsumed to the collective, but our lives as individuals would be radically incomplete, and, indeed, unintelligible apart from our relationships with others. One concrete consequence of this point is that when we think about the human person, we must also attend to the cultural milieu that he both informs and is informed by.
The second approach to the doctrine of the imago dei is that we are in the imago dei insofar as we are rational creatures, with both intellect and will. Unlike other created beings we are the “principles of our own actions”, i.e. we are able to discern the good and move ourselves towards it, with our ultimate fulfillment lying in the fullest expression of our capacity to know and to love – a fulfillment that occurs when our object of knowledge and love is the infinite truth and goodness that is God. In this life, we find our fulfillment by exercising our powers as fully as is possible in this life. Here we have a sixth key point: Human happiness in this life essentially consists in the perfection of human nature, which is the practice and cultivation of virtue. As John Paul II puts it in Centesimus Annus, human progress or advance is not an advance in having – it’s an advance in being, i.e. actualizing our potentials as fully as possible.
Virtue is the perfection of human nature, acquiring the ability to be human in an excellent way. In the classical tradition there are seven core virtues: the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity and the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. Here I want to focus just on the cardinal virtues. The virtues of fortitude and temperance perfect our passions, our fears and desires respectively, which we share with the animals. This perfection entails learning to fear and desire in accordance with the judgments of reason. Moderation is the key – it is not a question of fearing nothing, or always refraining from taking pleasure in the goods of the world, but rather learning to respond to adversity or to enjoy the goods of the world, in measured and appropriate ways. The virtue of justice perfects our will, specifically perfecting our relationship with others, with a central focus on rendering to others their due. Finally, the virtue of prudence, which is the master cardinal virtue, perfects our practical reasoning, allowing us to discern what is to be done in light of general principles and our particular circumstances, and to perform it. It is the virtue of prudence which helps us to make a coherent whole out of the disparate goods we seek in this life. A seventh key point: Prudence is the counterpart in CST to the rational choice model in economics, differing from rational choice in its conformity with key points 1, 3, 4, 5, and 6. Note that prudence guides us towards our happiness, but insofar as our happiness comprises all the virtues, including justice, it would be a mistake to associate prudence with narrow self-interest.
These virtues, like all virtues, are acquired through habituation. As anyone who has met a two-year-old can recognize, we come into this world with a mass of desires and fears that aren’t ordered to reason. If we take on the project of becoming virtuous, i.e. better versions of ourselves, we begin to try to master our desires and fears, ordering them to the discernments of reason. Some of us are incontinent – we aim at the virtuous, but our passions tend to win out. Others are continent – they struggle to do the virtuous thing, and they succeed. But their desires and fears aren’t fully on board. The truly virtuous person is the one whose desires and fears are in full accord with the judgment of reason. Since most people fall in the incontinent-continent range of the spectrum, we have an eighth key point: Most people have two sets of preferences, one based on their rational (prudential) judgments, the other based on their as-yet-un-mastered passions. A ninth key point immediately follows: As a corollary, there are two forms of reason that go hand-in-hand with the two sets of preferences. The rational preferences issue from the discernments of prudence, while a lower form of reason, which we share with animals, weighs the costs and benefits (measured largely in terms of pains and pleasures as judged by our untutored passions) of a given action and chooses accordingly. The rational choice model thus well accounts for the form of reason that is in service of our untutored passions; though it can also play a proper subordinate role in the pursuit of rationally formed desires.
One consequence of having desires and fears that aren’t ordered to reason is a tendency to desire material goods in a disordered way. Although the Christian tradition has always valued asceticism, it has also always recognized that most people are called to secular lives rather than lives of renunciation, and it recognizes material flourishing as a desirable feature of such secular lives. The key thing to note is that material goods are purely instrumental goods. They are goods insofar as they are ordered to life, and to life well-lived. This gives us a final key point: Insofar as material goods are instrumental goods, our desire for them should be measured by the ends the material goods are meant to serve. To use the classic example, medicine is an instrumental good. The amount you need of it is measured by the end of health. If it takes two aspirin to cure your headache, you want two aspirin, not four or ten. Just so for material goods taken as a whole. Depending on the ends, which are set by our practical judgment of how the exercise of virtue would work given our situation in life, we might need a few or we might need many goods. What we do not need nor should we rationally desire is an indefinite expansion of income. Virtuous desire for economic goods is properly bounded or satiable.
Of course, most people think they do want an indefinite expansion in their incomes. For some, there might be a genuine insufficiency of economic goods, i.e. a lack of the goods needed to support life, or life well-lived. But many desire an expansion of income beyond what is needed. There are many reasons for this widespread disorder. One of them is that to the extent that we allow the lower form of reason predominate, we focus on pursuing our untutored desires. Those untutored desires tend to pursue the good as a random string of ends, rather than as an ordering of the good as dictated by the exercise of genuine prudence. If we think of the good as an indefinite string of ends, we will naturally desire an indefinite expansion of income to pursue the never-ending succession of ends.
Two Distinct Views of the Human Person: Can they be Reconciled?
It should be clear by this juncture that Catholic thought and economics have substantially different conceptions of the human person. They share a belief that humans act in order to pursue happiness. They differ on the questions of whether the goods pursued are objective goods or subjective determinations; on the form of the good (finite perfection or an indefinite string of goods); on the nature of rationality (rational choice or prudential judgment); on the nature of our desire for material goods (insatiable or properly satiable); and on the status of the individual (atomistic individual though capable of concern for others or intrinsically social.)
An economist might look at these differences and make the following claim: Economists are in the business of describing human nature as is, using their models primarily to generate predictions about human behavior. Their enterprise is fairly successful in that light. They might further suggest that the outline of the human person I have given here is quite nice, but it belongs properly to the realm of the normative. It is a discussion of what humans ought to be. Indeed, they might suggest that this is the perfect division of labor. Economists busy themselves with descriptions of what is, while devotees of Catholic thought busy themselves with normative appeals to people about what they ought to do.
From the perspective of Catholic thought, this is partially true. Economists do indeed have valuable insight into how human beings actually behave. The problem lies in their deployment of their insights. One key objection is that economists’ description of human beings has a normative dimension. To tell students in an introductory economics course that the rational choice model is the model of human reason is to tell them that in order to be rational, they should model their decision making on the rational choice model. Indeed, I have never encountered any economic textbook in which teaching students to “think like economists” was not an explicit goal. But from the perspective of Catholic thought, while the rational choice model may issue in useful descriptions of human behavior, it ought not be prescribed as the way to behave rationally. Students should be encouraged to reflect on what should be rationally desired. More importantly, they should be warned away from the mistake of thinking of the good as an endless succession of “more”. Even if we allow that the rational choice model is meant to be nothing more than a formal claim about revealed preference which perhaps can accommodate the notion of perfection as I’ve outlined it, the language of rational choice and especially the ubiquitous emphasis on constrained maximization plays into the culture-wide tendency to pursue the good as “more” rather than as perfection.
And it is on this point that I think we can find the root of that naïve criticism I mentioned at the start of this piece. Why do so many non-economists falsely think that homo economicus is isomorphic with homo avidus? I think much of it has to do with homo economicus’ boundless desire for more. In a world where there is a widespread tendency to see the economic problem as a matter of optimization under constraint, there is a strong pressure to loosen those constraints. We all want higher incomes. We all think economic growth is a first order concern, even for countries that are already very well-off by any objective measure. But this strong emphasis on an indefinite and apparently limitless desire for more economic growth chafes against our deeper intuitions that human life is about more than material goods and services. We know deep down that we should yearn for human excellence and genuine human flourishing, even as we get caught up in the culture’s sense that the ‘bottom line’ is what is ultimately important. And thus many are made uncomfortable by the economic vision, even as they lead lives that are reasonably well-described by it.
Thus, the first and perhaps most important summary point: the practice of economics is not merely descriptive, and its normative dimension is problematic. What about the descriptive power of the model? In terms of the basic practice of trying to model human behavior so that one can predict human behavior, the Catholic view simply observes that individuals are motivated by both their sets of preferences. However well humans are described by models based on the sort of reason that best serves the pursuit of ones untutored passions, humans are even better described by models that take into account that humans sometimes act on the basis of the exercise of their higher reason. Over the last few decades, the discipline has begun moving in this direction. Through the work of behavioral economics especially, there is an increased appreciation for the fact that social norms matter for understanding human behavior. I am quite excited to see how the discipline will unfold as it moves to increasingly embrace the fact that there are two modes of human behavior, not just the one. This opens up interesting questions with respect to policy — how can one craft policies that take into account the reality that most people are guided by incentives, without inadvertently weakening their ability to be guided by their higher reason? There’s room for much fruitful exchange between economics and theology on this point. For example, theologians interested in virtue ethics should think more about how virtue and our responsiveness to incentives interact.
The discipline of economics would benefit from thinking about the limits of our own models. A greater appreciation for the normative dimension of any discussion of human behavior might help inoculate economics from some of the unfair criticisms it attracts. And insofar as economics remains the best way for understanding the aspects of human behavior that are incentive-driven, it would be good for economists to craft their message in a way that could be fully heard by those who need to hear it.
Mary Hirschfeld is Associate professor of economics and theology in the department of Humanities at Villanova University. She earned her Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 1989 and her Ph.D. in theology from the University of Notre Dame in 2013. She is a fellow of the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology, and serves on the Board for the Program of Catholic Social Thought at the Lumen Christi Institute. Her recent publications are on the boundary between economics and theology. Currently she is working on her book, Toward a Humane Economy: Aquinas and the Modern Economy, which develops an approach to economics rooted in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas.
[1] Ex nihilo does not refer to some big bang, though it’s congruent with the big bang. It is more deeply a claim that we all right here right now are being held in being by God who sustains us moment by moment, breath by breath.
