5. Economic Action, Happiness and Personalized Self-Interest

Actually, among economic goods defined in this way, Rosmini mentions “the produce of the earth, the crops, grapes, white mulberry leaves, sugar, coffee, flax, hemp, cattle and other products of agriculture and stockbreeding” as far as “they are suitable for satisfying needs and pleasures.” Under a second category he mentions “the technical work, by means of which raw materials are reshaped and become suitable for satisfying the same needs more efficiently or for satisfying new needs and obtain new pleasures and comforts. This increase of suitability means an increase of value and wealth.” Under a third category are “commercial transport which, by distributing the agricultural and manufacturing products in more appropriate places to be consumed, that is, by distributing them according to the needs and desires, makes them more suitable for satisfying both (…) This greater aptitude or easiness for satisfying needs and originate pleasures is a value or an added and created wealth.” Finally, there are “personal abilities which can satisfy a need, generate pleasure or be exchanged for things that are suitable as well or that can somehow generate satisfaction” (Rosmini 1978a, 16).

To illustrate his opinion, Rosmini addresses Cicero: “Cicero recognises that material benefits which do not content the human spirit are not good: Who do we take to be rich? In my opinion the person whose possessions are such that he is easily content with a free life in which he neither looks not longs for further desires. If we are content and consider the money we have sufficient, we are, without doubt, rich. It is the human spirit that must be called rich, not the strong-box; as long as I see you empty, I will not consider you rich, no matter how full the safe is” (Rosmini 1994b, 322, footnote 300).

“Of all the means a wise man can think of in order to obtain the effect he has set in his mind, he will clearly choose the simplest and easiest so that it gives him the desired effect with equal perfection. If the desired effect is what sets him to act and he desires nothing but that effect, he will not be interested in using other means but precisely that which is enough to attain the desired effect. He will choose, then, the minimum cause to produce it, the minimum quantity of action, the minimum means. This is what we call the ‘law of minimum means’” (Rosmini 1977b, n. 433).

“[Consequently,] the different principles of actions united in one individual operate in two ways: of themselves, according to the laws of their own nature, as moved by the supreme principle. If they act themselves without the intervention of the supreme principle, their acts are simply natural. But if they are moved by the supreme principle, their acts are called personal. Hence, in the human being, acts are natural and personal” (Rosmini 1991, n. 842).

This is possible, Rosmini argues, because the nature of the human person consists in such a sharing of the sensitive dimension in the intellectual dimension, of the natural in the personal, which enables “corporal sense, necessarily enclosed as it is in its own proper particular and material affections” (Rosmini 1994b, 255) to open up to its involvement with the objective world.

“To clarify the notion we must first say something about objective good, that is, every good in so far as it is perceived objectively or becomes an object of knowledge. As we have seen, the absolute notion of good consists in that which benefits the intrinsic order of being in every nature and to which all the forces of a given nature tend. The relative notion of good, on the other hand, consists in something desirable to another and as such the term and aim of the forces natural to this other nature, which move towards and tend to unite possessively with what is desirable. These notions provide us with knowledge of two kinds of good, the good of things in themselves and the good of things relative to other things. Both kinds of goods become objects of our intelligence, and thus objective (…) every good can be considered by us objectively” (Rosmini 1988a, n. 73–74).

“Mankind would have never reached the flourishing state by which it possesses so many suitable means to lead a content and honest life if (…) it had never tempered the bad habits and the corruption of its passions by igniting the light of truth in the spirits” (Rosmini 1887, 98). “Nothing is truly useful except for truth” (Rosmini 1977b, 124).

Indeed, the Roveretan believes that the Gospel’s commandment “you shall love your neighbor as yourself” implies the idea of giving priority to self-love as the natural basis of our love for our fellow men, who we shall love just for being “subjectively” the closest to us. In this sense, according to Rosmini, ethical valuation does not oppose individual interest but rather elevates and objectivizes it. See also, Rosmini (1988a, n. 226–227).

This thesis will gain importance, as we shall see, when studying the kind of influence that social and economic forces may exert on the individual.

However, though this is originally a moral problem, given that freedom is the one to make the wrong choice, it turns into a psychological-eudaimonological problem because, once self-deceit has started to operate, all the forces of passion begin to act.

“The passion for sumptuousness is itself as unlimited as other capacities; an individual can eat at a banquet fit for a king but still not be content precisely because in sumptuousness he seeks something other than sumptuousness” (Rosmini 1994b, 375).

“Cupidity for artificial wealth is more noticeably intellectual than the result of sensual gratification” (Rosmini 1994b, 370–371).

“Another kind of experience impels individuals to find their happiness in exterior good by means of the idea they form of wealth. (…) The practical reason can therefore deceive itself in two ways relative to the possession of external things. First, it begins by trusting in its power to find status in the possession of wealth considered as a kind of extension of the person’s own existence. This is an abstract idea, posited in a material, finite object. Then it hopes by means of wealth to obtain any pleasure it wants. Wealth, it seems, can secure for individuals the enjoyment of all their desires, and make them enjoy all pleasures simultaneously through the hope and assurance it gives them” (Rosmini 1994b, 369).

“This explains the origins of disgusting, twofold avarice – avarice whose end is money, as though money made human beings great, and avarice which sees in money the means for obtaining comfort and enjoyment (…) However, because it is really impossible for people to find in wealth either status or complete dominion over enjoyment, it is also impossible for them to find contentment and happiness. Human capacity, aggravated by this, grows; the heart attributes lack of fulfillment solely to the small quantity of wealth possessed and acquired. People press on to riches with greater cupidity which, as it increases, feeds like a starving wolf on all their desires. It is no surprise therefore to see in misers an increase in their longing and need for wealth as their riches grow. (…) Moreover, this capacity does not increase by arithmetical progression; like every capacity, it increases by geometrical progression, because what people gain in this way, unceasingly intensifies their previous capacity” (Rosmini 1994b, 369–370).

“Arts, sciences and projects of every kind are produced by human activity, which has its hidden origin and, as it were, its home in our spirit. Moreover, this activity returns with its effects to the spirit from which it sprang. In the last analysis, the products of human activity have no other natural tendency than to satisfy human desire” (Rosmini 1994a, 7).

From a metaphysical point of view, only the person is a reality in a proper sense; the rest of the living and material things are somehow incomplete realities whose end is to serve the person. Thus, addressing Kant in this point, Rosmini centers the sense of all moral action in the respect for the person as an end in itself: “The principle of moral virtue, simple stated, is: ‘Respect person as end; do not use person as a means for yourself’” (Rosmini 1994b, 12).

Rosmini has this view because only free and virtuous moral act transforms purely material needs and goods into true economic means and needs as it makes them suitable to perfect human personship: “The will is the power with which the intelligent subject works to become author of his own actions. Without the subject’s will, a long series of phenomena, of which he is not the cause, can take place in him, as though he were a spectator of what occurs; not everything that happens in us is done by us. If our will is not engaged in what is happening, other powers and forces work in us but without our active intervention. Only the will provides actions that we characterize as our own, and use to fulfill our human personality” (Rosmini 1988a, n. 90).

“La virt\( \grave{{\rm u}} \) \( \grave{{\rm e}} \) la suprema delle utilit\( \grave{{\rm a}} \)” (Rosmini 1978a, 25). However, in Rosmini’s opinion, the person’s virtuous freedom is attained only if one condition is met: that it is desired in itself and not as a pure means for the economy: “It won’t be difficult to show, as others have already done, that virtue is the mother of wealth and vice the mother of poverty. But we prefer, and it is more adequate in relation to the value of virtue, to demand from men that they consider virtue itself as an addition of all pleasures and that they prefer nothing over it, that they put it before everything, even if it were found in poverty.” OIP, p. 157. This seems to be other of Rosmini’s warnings for “the economic writers, always more concentrated on immediate utility than on the indirect one” (Rosmini 1923, 103).