The myth of self-interest:

...To contribute to the development of a philosophy of the common good, however, is not the leader's task alone...

...especially clear when people act so as to confound the logic of self-interest...

...Catholic social teaching, in contrast, by its appeal to the values of participatory community, the common good, and the role of the state in promoting such values, offers a different set of arguments to assess the propriety of state activity in areas like welfare policy, education, or public support of the arts...

...And as a reference group that challenges individuals to replace self-interest with self-giving, the church enlarges the role that reasoned discourse is able to play in the life of the political body...

...The assumption behind the question was simple: Americans vote in their economic self-interest...

...Human rights in Catholic teaching are moral claims which ought to have legal standing because they are claims to goods which are necessary for the person to participate with dignity in the communal life of a society...

...Entry into civil society is necessary to control the worst excesses of this war of all against each...

...person will support...

...Indeed, Trent specifically condemned the opinion that all human works done "before justification" (Hobbes's "state of nature") are sinful, that is, purely self-interested...

...Thus the freedom of trade for which Smith strenuously argued in The Wealth of Nations is necessary for the achievement of human community, because through it sympathy among human beings is accomplished...

...Unlike Hobbes, a Catholic-inspired model of society will acknowledge a need not only to minimize and restrain the evil of self-interest but also the challenge to maximize the good of self-giving...

...But how one ' 'unpacks" that great religious symbol is crucial for the social ethic one endorses...

...Thus self-interest, pursued with a sufficiently deep understanding of what the self is and what its full range of interests embraces, serves the common good...

...Beneath these Counter-Reformation statements lies an important claim about the meaning of human existence...

...A multidimensional account of motivation in politics and economics points out the importance of cultivating a public philosophy...

...This is what distinguishes the Catholic tradition on human rights from the individualism of liberalism's appeal to rights...

...These two staples of Catholic social thought suggest that an abundance of human associations and groups should be allowed to flourish in a society so that persons will be able to find a wide array of institutions that give form to participatory community in the various realms of human existence...

...reverend Kenneth R. HIMES...

...The fact behind the question was that the inflation of the late seventies had hurt a great many people...

...Human rights, be they political, economic, or social, are statements about the conditions needed for participatory community to be realized...

...He undergirded that dark description by appeal to seventeenth-century physics...

...Liberalism and capitalism, with their emphasis on self-interest, are founded ultimately upon a theological anthropology quite different from that which grounds a model of political economy which stresses community...

...These studies on the effect of self-interest on voting are supported by other studies on self-interest and policy views...

...It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest,'' he wrote in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations...

...Within the school of "Christian realism" the Fall is used not only to explain but to justify political and economic arrangements premised on self-interest...

...Smith's treatise on economics can be read correctly only in conjunction with his theory of social ethics...

...The prevailing assumption of political and economic self-interest is an unreliable one if these recent studies are correct...

...Self-interest cannot foster substantive public debate or all such conversation would be merely a smoke screen for individual self-aggrandizement...

...In later drafts and in the final version a third question was put: How do people participate in the economy...

...We have no quibble with the second half of the conventional wisdom...

...Our lives are more complex than the "realists" propose and self-interest does not do justice to the feelings of loyalty, duty, and affection which we experience in social life...

...The task'of the public leader in a communitarian model entails the promotion of debate so that a people can be galvanized behind ideas...

...Put another way, this perspective on participation explains the increased attention given to rights-language in Catholic social theory...

...is associate professor of moral theology at Washington Theological Union in Silver Spring, Maryland...

...And so liberalism allows an agnosticism regarding the common good and is content with various competing forces each trying to attain its own narrowly construed vision of the good...

...O.F.M...

...With regard to the first motivational source, a person can identify with poor reference groups as readily as with good ones...

...This meaning of "liberalism" encompasses political philosophers as different as Robert Nozick and John Rawls...

...The term "liberalism" is , of course, not used here in the constricted partisan meaning which it has in contemporary American politics...

...The divergence between liberalism and communitar-ianism is based on which theological symbol one emphasizes, original sin or the Trinity, when discussing what has happened to the image and likeness of God in human nature...

...Ronald Reagan's assumption was and is the conventional wisdom in politics: voters are economically self-interested, and the state of the economy goes a long way toward determining the election results...

...that is not so much for love of our fellows, as for love of ourselves...

...The Reformation debates on grace and justification necessarily entailed some description of humanity "in the state of nature," that is, deprived of grace after the Fall...

...Because neither gave a central role to altruism in social life, neither saw a positive role for the state...

...And others, like Pierre Nicole, maintained that enlightened self-interest, through the exchange of services, produced an earthly society so just and equable that it is indistinguishable from the community of saints, save that it lacks the infusion of charity...

...That myth is rooted in a vision of human action which arises, we have argued, from a particular theological anthropology...

...Here we wish to take up the doctrine of original sin in the context of a Catholic political theology...

...For Calvin and Luther, law has two aspects: it serves to convict us of our sin and restrains the sinful self from destroying society...

...To ignore original sin is naive indeed, and the communitarian vision found in Catholic social teaching certainly does not do so...

...Thus, a fundamental characteristic of Catholic social theory is its stress on the necessity for persons to express their social nature through the institutions they create to order their lives...

...Anything else would be open to the charge of naivete, the worst failing of nonrealists...

...Life itself is but motion," and "when a thing is in motion, it will eternally be in motion, unless somewhat else stay it...

...The Formula of Concord (1576) held original sin to be "so profound a corruption of human nature as to leave nothing sound, nothing uncorrupt in the body or soul of man, or in his mental or bodily powers...

...Liberalism not only denigrates the import of a philosophy of the common good but legitimates self-interest politically while capitalism celebrates it economically...

...Put one way, this call for active participation offers a rationale for insistence on subsidiarity and pluralism in Catholic social teaching...

...3 A communitarian social theory yields a richer understanding of the reasons people act...

...As some Counter-Reformation Catholic theologians phrased the point, the human person, created in the image and likeness of God, might lose that likeness, consisting in original justice and holiness, but retained the image of God...

...Calling upon individuals to help finance programs from which they derive no clear and direct benefit is difficult for liberalism to justify as is demonstrated by the attacks upon the welfare state found in the writings of Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Robert Nozick...

...The use of public funds to promote artistic endeavors or to provide tuition assistance for those in private schools are examples of how the state may have a more positive role in society than liberalism admits in theory...

...By no means do we intend to suggest that a theological doctrine can determine or explain the political and economic history of a nation...

...One of the aims of a church which is truly catholic is the creation of moral communities that stretch our particular loyalties to more universal concerns...

...Thomas Aquinas, unlike Luther and Calvin, stressed three aspects of law...

...Such objections strike us as consistent with the creed of liberalism: it is not within the state's purview to promote the arts or education unless it is demonstrable that such activity is in the self-interest of citizens...

...Unless people are able to enter into the life of the group in a meaningful way there are reduced opportunities for self-donation...

...In Catholic theory rights-language is contextualized by the moral imperative of participatory community...

...The myth of self-interest as the sole or, at least, always dominant motive in human action remains a cornerstone of liberal social and economic theory...

...In 1619 the Synod of Doit, which set the main lines of Calvinist orthodoxy, taught that after the Fall the human being was left in "blindness of mind, horrible darkness, vanity, and perverseness of judgment...

...A century and a quarter after Leviathan, Adam Smith attempted to introduce the idea of the common good into the Hobbesian vision of society as barely controlled war...

...which has led a variety of political scientists to question how much economic self-interest influences voting...

...Membership in civil community allows each person to acquire and enjoy the secure possession of goods both physical ("gain") and intellectual ("glory...

...If the government has but a minimal role how can it subsidize museums, theater companies, art exhibits, or private education...

...There really are very few things in a democracy more powerful than an idea whose time has come...

...The difficulty with this position is that large numbers of individuals acknowledge no personal benefit from such state activity and even disavow any interest in supporting such institutions...

...This insight was echoed in the central point of Thomas Aquinas's theological vision, that at the core of human existence is a natural desire to see God...

...The church's political influence is not that of a voting bloc or religiously motivated interest group...

...It was Reinhold Niebuhr who quipped that original sin was the one empirically verifiable Christian tenet...

...In an article in Commonweal (January 15, 1988), David Carlin referred to Hobbesian anthropology as a secularized version of the Augustinian anthropology...

...Ergo, Reagan's question was a useful debate tactic...

...However much the Reformers differed among themselves on issues such as eucharistic theology and ecclesial polity, they agreed on the utter corruption of the human person as a result of the sin of Adam...

...We simply suggest that a particular theological position may be in accord with one political or economic theory and not with another...

...The addition of this third question highlights the centrality of participation for any communitarian social theory...

...Thus the denial of the possibility of altruism as a motive in human affairs was tacitly accepted even by those who rejected the social and political consequences which Hobbes drew from it...

...We do not claim to be able to construct a complete political and economic ethic reflective of the theological anthropology of the Catholic tradition...

...A communitarian vision permits a broader range of government activity since it can argue with consistency that the state may take a more active role in the life of a people...

...Because Catholics believe that the most important word we say about the human is grace, not sin, strategies for community must be given priority over concern for limiting or channeling self-interest...

...tWhen the aim of social organization emphasizes the promotion of the common good as much as the regulation of self-interest, a more positive theory of the state is possible...

...But this assumption is so often accepted as self-evident that even to question it seems bizarre...

...All one had to do, maintained Niebuhr, was observe one's neighbor...

...Although some glimmers of natural light remain by which humanity has some knowledge of God, natural things, and morality, human beings pollute this light and are incapable of using it correctly "even in things natural and civil...

...Adam lost "the holiness and justice in which he had been constituted" and "incurred the wrath and indignation of God" and "was changed in body and soul for the worse," the Council of Trent taught...

...On a range of issues both foreign and domestic, Kelman cites evidence that political ideology is a better predictor than self-interest of what policy a REVEREND MICHAEL J. HIMES is associate professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame...

...It is his own advantage, indeed, and not that of the society, which he has in view...

...Consequently, Catholic doctrine has insisted in opposition to the darker views of the Reformers that the human being, made in the image of God who is agape, remains in that image even after the Fall and so is capable, even if with great difficulty, of genuine other-directedness...

...But concerning the first half we have our doubts...

...For the great Protestant theologian and his followers, original sin was the religious symbol cited to explain self-interest in politics...

...By shaping the public philosophy of a people, the church helps to create the moral climate within which policy issues are framed and debated...

...In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith acknowledged that, to achieve that sympathy which the individual requires for his or her own good, one may even "humble the arrogance of his self-love, and bring it down to something which other men can go along with...

...Loyalty to such a group will permit a person to overcome economic self-interest if the group's interest is at stake...

...Why should the state encourage self-giving in social life when such behavior is either impossible, as with Hobbes, or unnecessary, as with Smith...

...As Harvard political scientist Steven Kelman reports, no such correlations appear in the recent empirical studies of social scientists...

...This is echoed in the Westminster Confession's declaration that fallen human beings are "dead in sin and wholly defiled in all the faculties and parts of soul and body," and have become "utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good, and wholly inclined to all evil...

...His advocacy of free trade was a moral stance, and his economic work was an outgrowth of his social ethics...

...Pundits agreed it was a clever and pointed way of evoking the dissatisfaction of voters with Jimmy Carter's administration...

...This is...

...But human beings are not utterly corrupted and "free will, weakened as it was in its powers and downward bent, was by no means extinguished in them...

...What is at stake is not only a series of prudential judgments concerning social and economic policy but an understanding of what it is to be human...

...We mentioned above two sources of motivation: identification with a given com-munity so that one's interests expand beyond self-interest narrowly construed, and a set of basic values which claim our devotion...

...Deeply ingrained in the Western Christian tradition is the Augustinian insight that, as creatures who exist solely to be the ' recipients of the divine self-gift, our hearts are restless until they rest in God...

...His concern was to resolve the problem of the common good within the Hobbesian framework which postulated self-interest as the sole human motivation...

...The "invisible hand" of the free marketplace is the mechanism of this transmutation of self-interest into the service of the common good...

...By its creedal and liturgical discourse the church provides a foundation for public morality so that political-moral choice can express one's self-understanding...

...But it is that theological anthropology which, in its secularized form, found eloquent voice in Thomas Hobbes...

...The anthropology which under-girds Hobbes's social ethics was Augustine read through lenses ground by the Reformers...

...This is to insure that even a well-meaning paternalism does not eviscerate the participation of people in the life of the community...

...each person requires for his or her well-being some sense of self-worth which comes from seeing the feelings of others in harmony with one's own...

...To be able to articulate an idea that resonates with a people's commitment to the common good is one of the most significant gifts a leader can bring to public life...

...Individuals have "reference groups" which provide a sense of belonging and identity...

...In the words of the economics pastoral, human dignity is "realized in community with others...

...These and similar deeply felt motives for action are generated, at least in part, by communal experience...

...All society therefore is either for gain, or for glory...

...Catholic doctrine acknowledged the tragic consequences of Adam's sin but insisted that the human being remained essentially intact after the Fall...

...Furthermore, it reinforces an individual's commitment to certain values by clarification of the connection between moral experience and deeply held convictions regarding the meaning and nature of God, creation, and human history...

...The economy is a powerful political issue...

...This original justice and holiness were lost as a result of original sin, but since they were accidental qualities, human nature remained essentially unimpaired...

...The role of government is simply to guarantee that the rules of competition are fair...

...In the same way, the presence of certain basic values may draw people away from self-interest if the value system adopted is,oriented toward self-giving...

...Political and economic institutions premised on the primacy of self-interest can never embody the theological vision of a good society in the Catholic tradition...

...Smith turned the problem into the solution: self-interest could be relied upon to check itself because of the common human desire for a correspondence of feeling with others or what he termed "sympathy...

...Original sin may have distorted this restlessness, it may have skewed the direction of this desire, but it has not undone God's creation: humanity remains human...

...The individual, radically turned in on himself or herself and closed to any possibility of agapic community, is locked into selfishness...

...What stays the motion of human life is the competing motion of another human life...

...and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man...

...For other-directedness to be encouraged, there must be occasions and places where such self-giving is evoked and endorsed...

...But the interests of the self are not only material...

...In this effort, he was one of many social ethicians in England, Scotland, and France who had sought to escape from the gloomy picture drawn by Hobbes...

...Nothing so effectively furthers sympathy, the ability to share others' perceptions of themselves and of oneself, as the need, Smith would say the drive, to "truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another...

...The Catholic vision of the person, which admits the resiliency of the image of a self-giving God in the human, offers a more adequate basis for social ethics than a univocal emphasis on original sin...

...nature has an aptitude for grace...

...Our skepticism is based on studies cited in a recent volume, The Power of Public Ideas edited by Robert Reich (Ballinger, 1987, $19.95, 272 pp...

...In other words, there is evidence that citizens vote not with an eye focused primarily on their own pocket but on the state of the economy as a whole...

...The secularized theological anthropology which underlies Hobbes's social ethic and which Smith accepted is classically Protestant...

...Political and economic systems always embody an understanding of the human...

...That is why Roman Catholic social thought has traditionally posited that humanity is social by nature...

...4 There is a vital role for voluntary associations such as the church in a communitarian model of society...

...If self-interest were uniquely powerful, then there should be clear and direct correlations between how a person votes and how his or her economic standing has changed between elections...

...Probably Hobbes's most often quoted statement is his characterization in Leviathan of life in the state of nature as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short...

...A communitarian model, on the other hand, suggests that a central task of society is to search for shared understanding of the social good, and for policy judgments to be made about good and bad choices according to some agreed-upon standards of right and wrong action...

...The religious community plays a vital educative role in the shaping of a person's core values through its rituals, narratives, and symbols...

...But the study of his own advantage naturally, or rather necessarily leads him to prefer that employment which is most advantageous to the society...

...If one were to develop a secularized theological anthropology of the Catholic view of original sin, what social ethic emerges...

...Why should this be so...

...Behind and below Hobbes's denial of that possibility lies a secularized doctrine of the effects of original sin...

...became wicked, rebellious, and obdurate in heart and will, and impure in all his affections...

...Extinguish this restlessness, this desire for the beatific vision, and what remains is no longer a human being...

...Because it is to the individual's advantage to enter into community with others, the basis of human community is not love but self-interest...

...Thus there is a connaturality between nature and grace...

...People must be called and allowed to participate in the life of the community so that they can contribute to the common good and thereby give expression to their social nature...

...If society is merely the controlled war of each against each, no common good exists, only a collection of competing individual goods, some of which may from time to time coincide...

...If self-interest is the irresistible or acceptable norm for social action, then little attention needs to be given to the role of a shared philosophy within a society...

...Hobbes and Smith took over the Reformers' minimalist view of the state: Hobbes because of the negative light in which he cast social life and Smith as a result of his conviction that the state hindered the eventual good to be achieved by self-interest...

...What we shall offer here are several comments on what a social ethic in accord with a Catholic theology of original sin might look like...

...Later in the sixteenth century, disputes about the sovereignty of grace and the status of human freedom led to the teaching that the original justice and holiness of Adam were '' accidental," not intrinsic to the human person as human...

...Some citizens may argue that such activities promote the well-being of each citizen and therefore it is correct for liberalism to use tax revenue for the sake of the arts or private education...

...In fact, that is partially true...

...We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages...

...On the matter of core values, it is the experience of community which is an originating source of these values...

...Some, like Bishop Cumberland, argued that self-interest is prevented from driving individuals to the universal civil war which Hobbes had described as the state of nature by the balanced design of the universe...

...While both knew of the Thomistic position neither developed his third dimension of law as a means to promote the common good...

...Every individual is continually exerting himself to find out the most advantageous employment for whatever capital he can command...

...A fundamental but often overlooked reason for the Catholic tradition's uneasiness with and criticism of liberalism is that Catholicism disagrees with that theological anthropology...

...In an earlier article (Commonweal, March 14, 1986) we discussed the import of the Trinity as a political symbol...

...Obviously this doctrine of total depravity as a result of the Fall has been much developed in the course of the four hundred years which separates us from the classical Protestantism of the sixteenth-century Reformers...

...Luther's description of the human being as "turned in on himself" expressed the conviction that the Fall had destroyed the capacity for genuine other-directedness...

...Others, like the Earl of Shaftesbury, traced that balance within the human being and claimed that self-interest, mighty power though it be, is counterpoised by other human passions...

...Correlations do appear, however, between voting behavior and how an individual perceives the economy in general...

...Furthermore, the bias is toward the grassroots when deciding at what level policymaking should occur in an organized group...

...Again, a number of studies mentioned by Kelman and another Harvard colleague, Gary Orren, have shown how factors other than self-interest determine political and economic activity...

...Within that communal experience two dimensions stand out: the experience of solidarity by which a person identifies with a group and the experience of a symbol system which offers an interpretive value framework...

...In a communitarian framework the church makes a contribution to the political life of a nation through the way it educates participants in the task of civic discourse...

...Smith had no doubt that human beings are motivated by self-interest...

...1 When the American bishops wrote their letter on economics, they asked two questions in the early draft of the pastoral: What does the economy do to people, and what does it do for people...

...In its traditional sense, liberalism refers to a perspective in political philosophy, especially within the English-speaking world, which abstracts the person from community, sets individual freedom and rights at odds with the community, and correspondingly stresses contractual theories of society...

...Self-interest is insufficient to explain public behavior...

...The equality of human beings inevitably generates competition which, fueled by greed, the desire for security, or the hope of glory, produces the natural state of human beings: "they are in that condition which is called Warre...

...This approach to political economy gives a central place to the influence of public ideas...

...The longing for agape is experienced in the call to be agapic, the call to give oneself away...

...But the form of that doctrine had been rejected by Roman Catholicism...

...This is an important goal, for we are always tempted to identify with more restrictive definitions of self that limit our concerns to family, neighborhood, nation, class, race, etc...

...A shared public philosophy forged through public debate is a vital social good...