Of
what may we be sure?
Modern economics teaches us that the human person is best understood as homo oeconomicus, a rational, calculating, creature that always seeks to maximize their utility subject only to budget constraints.
Might there be other ways to understand the human person, an anthropology of the person that would lead to a different way of conceptualizing economics and economic behavior?
Offered for your consideration:
Possible
foundations for an understanding of economic behavior (and human behavior in
general)
I.
Original Sin
By yielding to the
tempter, Adam and Eve committed a personal sin, but this sin affected the
human nature that they would then transmit in a fallen state.
It is a sin which will be transmitted by propagation to all mankind, that is,
by the transmission of a human nature deprived of original holiness and
justice. And that is why original sin is call “sin” only in an analogical
sense: it is a sin “contracted” and not “committed” – a state and not an act.
Although it is proper
to each individual, original sin does not have the character of a personal
fault in any of Adam’s descendants. It is a deprivation of original
holiness and justice, but human nature has not been totally corrupted: it is
wounded in the natural powers proper to it; subject to ignorance, suffering,
and the dominion of death; and inclined to sin – an inclination to evil that is
call “concupiscence.”[1]
II. Bernard Lonergan’s Desire
to Know
Deep within us all,
emergent when the noise of other appetites is stilled, there is a drive to
know, to understand, to see why, to discover the reason, to find the cause, to
explain. Just what is wanted, has many names. In what precisely it
consists, is a matter of dispute. But the fact of inquiry is beyond all
doubt. It can absorb a man. It can keep him for hours, day after
day, year after year, in the narrow prison of his study or his
laboratory. It can send him on dangerous voyages of exploration. It
can withdraw him from other interests, other pursuits, other pleasures, other
achievements. It can fill his waking thoughts, hide from him the world of
ordinary affairs, invade the very fabric of his dreams. It can demand
endless sacrifices that are made without regret though there is only the hope,
never a certain promise, of success. What better symbol could one find
for this obscure, exigent, imperious drive, than a man, naked, running
excitedly crying, “I’ve got it”?[2]
III. Saint John Paul II’s Work as
Vocation
Through work man must
earn his daily bread and contribute to the continual advance of science and
technology and, above all, to elevating unceasingly the cultural and moral
level of the society within which he lives in community with those who belong
to the same family. And work means any activity by man, whether manual or
intellectual, whatever its nature or circumstances; it means any human activity
that can and must be recognized as work, in the midst of all the many
activities of which man is capable and to which he is predisposed by his very
nature, by virtue of humanity itself. Man is made to be in the visible universe
an image and likeness of God himself, and he is placed in it in order to subdue
the earth. From the beginning therefore he is called to work. Work is one of
the characteristics that distinguish man from the rest of creatures, whose
activity for sustaining their lives cannot be called work. Only man is capable
of work, and only man works, at the same time by work occupying his existence
on earth. Thus work bears a particular mark of man and of humanity, the mark of
a person operating within a community of persons. And this mark decides its
interior characteristics; in a sense it constitutes its very nature.[3]
IV. Thorstein Veblen’s Instinct
Like other animals,
man is an agent that acts in response to stimuli afforded by the environment in
which he lives. Like other species, he is a creature of habit and propensity.
But in a higher degree than other species, man mentally digests the content of
the habits under whose guidance he acts, and appreciates the trend of these
habits and propensities. He is in an eminent sense an intelligent agent. By
selective necessity he is endowed with a proclivity for purposeful action. He
is possessed of a discriminating sense of purpose, by force of which all
futility of life or of action is distasteful to him.[4]
V. Adam Smith’s Propensity
This division of
labour, from which so many advantages are derived, is not originally the effect
of any human wisdom, which foresees and intends that general opulence to which
it gives occasion. It is the necessary, though very slow and gradual, consequence
of a certain propensity in human nature which has in view no such extensive
utility; the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.
Whether this
propensity be one of those original principles in human nature, of which no
further account can be given; or whether, as seems more probable, it be the
necessary consequence of the faculties of reason and speech, it belongs not to
our present subject to enquire. It is common to all men, and to be found
in no other race of animals, which seem to know neither this nor any species of
contracts.[5]
VI. Abram Maslow’s Hierarchy
These basic goals are
related to each other, being arranged in a hierarchy of prepotency. This means
that the most prepotent goal will monopolize consciousness and will tend of
itself to organize the recruitment of the various capacities of the organism.
The less prepotent needs are minimized, even forgotten or denied. But when a
need is fairly well satisfied, the next prepotent ('higher') need emerges, in
turn to dominate the conscious life and to serve as the center of organization
of behavior, since gratified needs are not active motivators.
Thus man is a
perpetually wanting animal.[6] (Maslow, 1943
394-5)
VII. St. Augustine of
Hippo
Our hearts are restless until they rest
in you.
[1] Catechism of the
Catholic Church, Libreria Editrice Vaticana ed. (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press,
1994), 404-5.
[3] John Paul II,
"Laborenm Exercens: On Human Work," in Catholic Social Thought:
The Documentary Heritage, ed. David J. O'Brien and Thomas A. Shannon
(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1992), 352, Apostolic Blessing.
[4] Thorstein Veblen,
"The Instinct of Workmanship and the Irksomeness of Labor," American
Journal of Sociology 4, no. 2 (1898): 188-9.
[5] Adam Smith, An
Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Cannan ed.
(New York: The Modern Library, 1937), 13.
[6] Abram Maslow, “A
Theory of Human Motivation”, Psychological Review, 50, no. 4, (1943). pp. 394-5.
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