Economic Action, Happiness and Personalized Self-Interest

Abstract

This chapter shows how, according to Rosmini, any economic satisfaction or ‘utility’ is always enlightened or obscured by the personal faculties of reasoning and freedom, which include the former in a wider framework constituted by ‘human desire or capacity.’ Eventually, this can be explained by the predominance of the personal principle that governs human beings and integrates the subjective faculties, without them losing their nature, to the personal faculties, which results in the economic action being a type of complex action both natural and personal. The chapter describes how economic goods, which are primarily subjective and relative, turn into objective and moral goods through the dynamics of contentment or happiness. Rosmini maintains that the central problem of the economy is not technical or political but ethical. In fact, it is in the personal spirit where valuation and economic action originate because the presence or absence of internal happiness or contentment is the driving force behind the different types of valuations, dispositions or uses of goods.