Gordon Menzies
Journal of Economics, Theology and Religion, vol. 5, no. 1 (2025): 45-61
Abstract
This paper critiques constrained optimization as the dominant framework in contemporary economics by revealing its implicit theological flaw: the assumption that constraints are inherently bad. The author traces the development of Homo Economicus from Mill through Robbins to Becker, examining how economic modeling treats the removal of constraints as universally beneficial, reflecting a “divine pretension” at odds with Christian theology. Through theological analysis, the paper demonstrates that limitations—including finitude, suffering, and natural constraints—can be constitutive of human flourishing rather than merely instrumental. The author proposes ways Christian economists might work within and beyond constrained optimization frameworks while remaining theologically grounded.
Keywords
economics, theology, constrained optimization, finitude, human flourishing
Publication history
First view: 23 April 2025
Published: 20 May 2025
1. Introduction
As any standard economics textbook will testify, contemporary economics speaks in the language of mathematical modelling (Varian 1992; Mas-Colell et al. 1995). Within the Anglo-American tradition which has dominated the field since World War II, this specifically means constrained optimization—the mathematical framework that undergirds much modern economic modelling.
The flexibility of this framework is often untapped: almost any human behavior or ethical framework could in principle be reformulated as preference satisfaction subject to constraints (Sen 1977). One could maximize the pleasure of God (cf. Hebrews 11:6), pursue objective ethical goods in the Aristotelian tradition of eudaimonia (Oslington 2023), pursue freedom conceived as capabilities (Sen 2014; Nussbaum 2011), or seek to form virtuous habits through normative meta-preferences. While textbook economics often focusses on individual welfare maximization, this is an unnecessary failure of creativity. Christians, of all thinkers, should be open to richer accounts of what is pursued in life, and this has indeed been modelled as maximization (Menzies and Hay 2012).
That said, the very flexibility of constrained optimization masks a deep flaw that should give Christian modelers pause: the framework struggles to accommodate the theological insight that constraints hardwired into creation, or gifted providentially through suffering, can themselves can be good (O’Donovan 1993).[1] This flaw reveals a divine pretension at the heart of economic modelling—the implicit assumption that the ideal human life would be one without limits.
For the most part, this is a normative pretension. Constrained optimization is a positive modelling strategy precisely because people in fact face all sorts of immovable constraints—genes, raw intelligence and time, just to name a few. Positive economics describes how people respond to constraints more often than how people remove constraints.[2] However, the mathematics is clear enough that if constraints can be removed within a simple optimization problem the agent is never worse off. As it is sometimes put, one is never worse off with more choices. It is this observation that sets economics in normative tension with theology.
This paper examines this tension through three tasks. First, we trace the biography of Homo Economicus to understand how constrained optimization became the dominant framework in contemporary economics. Second, we explore how Christian scholars might work constructively within this framework while remaining theologically grounded. Finally, we ask whether the vision of unconstrained maximization implicit in economic models is theologically sound.
2. The biography of Homo Economicus
Homo Economicus is a representative agent. Christians have representative agents too, namely Adam and Christ (e.g., Romans 5:12ff.; 1 Corinthians 15:20ff.). These are accessed through experience—that is to say our experience of human nature and our experience of the Holy Spirit—and they are displayed in biblical history.
Economic representative agents are like, and unlike, Christian ones (Menzies 2008). They are some kind of assertion about human nature, like their biblical counterparts. But unlike Adam and Christ, they are not grounded in history. Instead, Homo Economicus is abstract and operates in a frozen slice of time.
However, as an idea he does have a birthday, an adolescence and a coming of age.
Homo Economicus is 189 years old. John Stuart Mill invented him in 1836 and described him as being motivated by a desire for wealth, held back only by laziness and impatience (Mill 1836). He emerged out of a milieu where the conception of wellbeing was closely related to happiness (Bentham 1968; Paley 1775) so wealth, leisure and immediacy were thought to contribute to happiness in a measurable way. This tradition of utilitarianism has continued, albeit in various forms, to this day (Singer 1991).
Homo Economicus then came into adolescence. Lionel Robbins rejected Mill’s definition which applied to a particular area of life (money making) for what he called an ‘analytic definition’ which has potentially a much greater range of applications. Robbins famously said that an economist studies the disposal of scarce means to achieve competing ends (Robbins 1935).
We might give an example from the labor market.
Robbins says humans desire various ends. We might say that people enter or leave the labor market following the dictates of their desire for goods and leisure. He then says that the time and means of achieving these ends are limited and capable of alternative application. We might say there are only so many hours in the day. Robbins says that ends have different importance. We might say that we value work and leisure in different ways. Robbins says that the economist studies the disposal of scarce means to achieve competing ends. We conclude that the task is to allocate our time to get the right amount of leisure and wage income in order to buy the goods that we want.
Finally, Homo Economicus came of age with the so-called Chicago school. They mathematized Robbins and applied his model to all so-called ‘rational action’. Gary Becker conceived of economics as a consistent modelling application of: maximizing behavior, market equilibrium and stable preferences (Becker 1976).
Homo Economicus has changed as he has grown up, and some would distinguish him from later rational-action models like Becker’s. For my purposes I take economics for individual-level modelling to mean constrained optimization for problems deemed interesting in the Anglo-American tradition, and I use Homo Economicus interchangeably with rational-action models.[3]
Why should we focus on the Anglo-American tradition?
Subjectively, I have worked in the Australian Treasury and the central bank, and studied at Oxford. All these places have been heavily influenced by this tradition.
Objectively, between 1969 and 2022 70% of Nobel laureates in economics were American or British. That is to say, 61% were American and 9% were British (Statistica 2022).
Constrained optimization always has four elements. Firstly, there is the thing being maximized. Then there are the choice variables which aid in the maximization. The letters ‘s.t’ before the constraint stand for ‘such that’ (or equivalently ‘subject to’) and, finally, there is a constraint. The simplest example I can think of is choosing apples and oranges to maximize happiness subject to an income constraint.
Max A,O Utility(A,O) s. t. $ = Pa∙A + Po∙O (1)
Homo Economicus has enjoyed being an adult, and he has widened his circle of influence considerably. Calculus provides a powerful modelling language, and turns up in the most surprising places. Becker’s Treatise on the Family was a work that won him the Nobel Prize (Becker 1981), and virtually the whole book is written in terms of calculus.
When Homo Economicus is the input into empirical models we can estimate these models. They can allow us to do ceteris paribus (all other things equal) experiments which are impossible in the real world. For example, when I used to work at the Reserve Bank of Australia, I could take an empirical model of the economy and raise interest rates 10% to see what would happen. Clearly, the governor of the Reserve Bank would not be pleased if I actually raised interest rates 10%!
Models are very useful in the application of economics, but there can be unintended consequences of using them. Either directly, through their educative value, or, via the policy affects, they can form character (Menzies et al. 2019). Also, being empirically focused means that we can make the mistake that the only things that are valuable is what is calculable. This is the classic ‘neoliberal’ mindset, and helps explain the disturbing result that people trained in economics seem to be less pro-social, even after controlling for adverse selection into their training (Bauman and Rose 2011; Frey and Oberholzer-Gee 1997).
At least in economics, models tend to be a reduction of reality, like going from a 3D statue and converting it to 2D shadow. One could imagine a shadow of David casting a shadow in a ‘true’ representative way when the sun is low on the horizon, or casting a distorted one around midday. Models are like this. A good model is one that is a close approximation in almost every case, but these are hard to come by.
A tolerably good model provides a good ‘selfishness audit’ for public policy. If you want to work out whether a government initiative or program is going to be robust, you can always ask the question: Would it be robust if everybody in the system was a selfish version of Homo Economicus. Gary Becker gave a good interview on his career, and makes this point (Becker 2010).
As flagged in the introduction, Homo Economicus can also be represented as a Prudence-only form of virtue ethics (McCloskey 2006) or reframed as a part of a Natural Law model. If it feels strange to talk of Homo Economicus as ‘virtuous’; we can alter the concepts slightly so that this makes more sense. We can stop talking about the acquisition of wealth for its own sake, and recognize that everybody needs resources to look after themselves and their families. Furthermore, laziness and impatience can be moral faults, but on the other hand there is a prudent use of one’s efforts and a prudent degree of waiting. On the topic of Natural Law, Paul Oslington is working on models of action and evaluation where the agent is rational, but in a different sense to Becker. Among other things it is focused on The Good as the telos of action (Oslington 2023).
But for some questions Homo Economicus seems to caste a very distorted shadow.
For a Christian, it is not very promising that there are no supernatural beings. In this empty cosmos neither God nor Satan influence the agents. Furthermore, there is no acknowledgement of the change that Christian conversion can bring. The changed motivation referred to in Ephesians 4:28—that of being motivated to work hard in order to be generous—cannot be modelled. Finally, there is no reference to gender.
Here are four examples of how Homo Economicus has been used in mainstream literature, with decreasing plausibility.
The first example is the maximization of utility by choosing apples and oranges subject to an income constraint and to the prices at the supermarket. This is the sort of use that can be found in any basic economics textbook (Mankiw 1998).
The second example is maximizing utility by choosing the hours supplied to the labor market and the hours spent on leisure, subject to a weekly time constraint. The agent also faces a constraint of the wage rate and the prices of goods that she wants to buy from her wage income (Becker 1965).
The next example is the maximization of utility by choosing the number of children subject to a 20-year fecundity time constraint, the female wage and the price of goods. The so-called leisure variable is now broadly conceived to include home-making and preparing for the arrival of children (Becker 1981).
Finally, and most controversially, we will change the meanings of the labor supply problem and refer to the supply of hours to religious activities. Here we imagine we are ‘maximizing meaning’ by choosing the time spent in Christian activities subject to an twelve-hour Sunday time constraint, the supposed return on time spent at church, and the so-called price of spiritual goods (Iannoccone 1998).
If you agree in declining plausibility for the examples, you may have accepted Emil Brunner’s theology that there is a failure of social sciences to describe reality the closer you get to the Personkern—the personal center of reality (Brunner 1946, 383).[4] He associated the personal center of reality with God or human persons. The failure consists not just of complexity, but of sin, since Brunner believed that reason unloosed from God’s word is unable to know true human existence (Brunner 1937, 542). So, it is not surprising that as we move from mere objects like apples and oranges, through to labor markets, through to having children, through to religious activity, we are more and more making ourselves open to Brunner’s error.[5]
Brunner’s story is plausible in this case because both utilitarianism and rational choice (the two ingredients of economic man considered above) have run into serious criticisms.
The original justification for maximizing a function of apples and oranges is that both apples and oranges are thought of as a source of happiness. Jeremy Bentham thought that he could build a moral theory based on maximizing the net happiness of all people added together and this is called utilitarianism (Bentham 1968). The so-called cardinal utility is comparable across people, which makes it feasible to maximize this in an ethical system.
As it happens, John Stuart Mill rejected cardinal utility as a comprehensive theory (Mill 1969 [1863]), and Christians have some reasons to as well. To take a cue from Brunner, under cardinal utility, God and creation distinctions become invisible, such as those between mere objects, people, intimates and God, the super-person (recall Brunner’s Personkern). All of these ‘things’ (for that is what they become) are instruments to a homogenous experience of pleasure or pain.
The response of many economists was to accept that utilitarianism was unworkable as a moral theory and to switch to ordinal utility (Hicks 1956). This is the idea that utility is not measurable and cannot be compared across persons, but that consistent rankings of individuals can be converted into a number which, for arguments sake, can be called utility, even though it is only useful as a rank. This is a nice solution for economists who wanted to keep the idea of utility but unfortunately it destroys the goal of creating an objective morality.
Admittedly, utilitarianism as a moral theory casts an enduring shadow across economics over the 20th century. Indeed, within the ‘happiness literature’ (Layard, 2005) ordinal utility has returned, Phoenix-like, as people feel more confident in measuring and comparing subjective states of well-being and making them a target of policy. Happiness surveys are widely discussed, such as a recent claim that one third of New Zealanders are more at least 9/10 happy (Reily 2022).
Why is it significant for Christians that utilitarianism appears to have such an unstable foundation?
In his book After Virtue MacIntyre suggests that utilitarianism was an attempt to make ethical appeals rational for the Enlightenment project (MacIntyre 2013). Ethics was the science of taking humans-as-they-are to humans-as-they-ought-to-be. In other words, ethics was the science of helping us fulfil our human nature. In this way of thinking ethical statements count as facts, and there is a ‘distance’ to consider between the is and the ought. But ethical discourse now, according to MacIntyre, tends to ground ethics in people as they are. All the distances that are left are relative ones, and the moral vision of a virtuous person is hard to articulate clearly.[6]
One either has to accept the happiness surveys as literal aggregate cardinal utility, or admit that objective moral statements fail in the Enlightenment project. In the absence of cardinal utility, preference-based ordinal utility is not comparable across people so “rational action”, is about self-determined preferences. Philosophically, the driving force that remains is the Will. So, ethics within economics becomes a form of voluntarism (Nietzsche 1973; Schopenhauer 1819).
It is not surprising that these ethical systems have run into difficulties. Christians have good reasons to reject utilitarianism or preference satisfaction as comprehensive ethical systems.
Crucially, utilitarians always deal with penultimate (i.e. immanent) goods, rather than ultimate (i.e. transcendent) goods. Fundamentally without a high view of what it means to be human as a creation of God, or a solid future upon which to fix hope—an ontological or eschatological transcendence—ethics doesn’t make much sense. Utilitarianism and preference satisfaction don’t provide either (O’Donovan 1993). Happiness is a poor, though pleasant, substitute. As any observant traveler through life will know, happiness is not the only good in life, and pain is not always bad. And as for human preferences, the human will is warped as a cursory reading of history or one’s own heart will testify.
Where have we landed with Homo Economicus? The so-called rational action models can deliver a model for any human action describable by constrained optimization. If the situation is one where his shortcomings are irrelevant, he may be an acceptable approximation. Furthermore, any policy maker wanting to see how robust their policy is, can always imagine a society totally inhabited by him. Perhaps for these reasons, as Homo Economicus has matured these models have been taken up by many social sciences.
Therefore, this both allows and requires Christians who want to use these models to do so in a theologically careful way.
3. Working with the model
There are a few examples of Christians using Homo Economicus in a redeemed way—that is, with explicit Christian presuppositions.
To go right back to the beginning—indeed before the birth of homo economicus—it is worth reflecting on the tradition of theological utilitarianism which began with John Gay (1669-1745) and reached its high-water mark with William Paley (1743-1805), before being eclipsed by its secular successor. Gay first made the suggestion that discovering the will of God could be helped by using happiness as a signal, and this was developed further by Paley and others (Cole 1991).
Theological utilitarianism differed from later versions in at least two key respects. First, the principle of utility or expedience was not part of the definition of the good, but rather an epistemic criterion for discerning the will of God. Second, the happiness in mind was everlasting happiness, sitting within a framework of final judgment—the theistic sanction was thus an eschatological bedrock of the theory (Cole 1988).
Applications of the model since then bear the stamp of the developments in homo economicus, notably the emergence of constrained optimization which is absent in Paley’s theological utilitarianism. A recent attempt, modelling generosity and conversion(Menzies and Hay 2012), is motivated by evidence of generosity of US Christians. It is an attempt to overcome secular narratives with a theologically richer anthropology.
The theology is rudimentary. Conversion matters; God can influence humans, and, people exhibit a wide range of moral capabilities delivered by culture and upbringing.
The motivating example is that religious people in the US are more generous in terms of volunteering financial giving and civic engagement, compared with their secular friends. In a large survey conducted in 2010 those in the top quintile of religious people gave roughly three times as much, as a proportion of their income, and offered approximately twice as much civic engagement in hours as those in the bottom quintile (Putnam and Campbell 2010).
This problem is framed as the splitting of an income pie, where the pie is the income above one’s needs. According to a so-called ‘John Wesley’ ethic one should give away what one does not need (White, 1988). The model is designed to model how more mature Christians might give away more. The recipients of this income pie P are either the self, with a pronumeral s, or neighbors, with a pronumeral n.
Mathematically, we create a measure of mixed motives which is a weighted average of generous and selfish behavior. The Mixed Motive Valuation function (MMV) refers to the psychological reality inspired by Romans 7 and the experience of internal conflict:
And if I do what I do not want to do I agree the law [God’s pattern for human flourishing] is good. … Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. … Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord! (Romans 7:16-25).
If the MMV has an exponential parameter a then the standard mathematical solution is that the money given away is a share a and the money kept is the share [1—a]. McIntyre’s “distance” between the ideal and actual is [1—a], because the ideal (recalling that this is excess) is to give away 100%.
MMV = na s1-a n = a P, s = (1-a) P (2)
How can we use this model?
The paper models a rise in giving attributed to conversion. Furthermore, the difference between being converted and not being converted across groups can be meaningfully discussed. It is worth noting, however, that whilst conversion should always make one more generous compared with what would otherwise be the case, comparing believers and unbelievers is more difficult. The reason is that becoming a Christian may involve adverse selection. That is, if it is true that people with more difficult lives are more likely to be converted, because they recognize their need, then the Christian community will end up with a lower level of generosity when cohorts of these people are converted.
The model of Menzies and Hay allows for a better description of generosity, and compares it with so-called gift exchange. For the economist, gift exchange is a transactional arrangement whereby I have to give something to you because we have tacit agreement to trade with each other, or we want to ‘signal virtue’ in a mercenary way. This is a conceptual world without a good model of relationships, and without commitment that goes beyond utilitarian cost-benefit analysis (Sen 1977). Furthermore, it is also a world lacking any nuance about justice or moral obligations. The transfers from the Japanese government to the Korean victims of sexual slavery in World War II cannot be interpreted as meeting the requirements of justice—they must be interpreted as delayed payment for prostitution services or a ‘virtue signal’ (Folbre and Nelson 2000).[7]
Returning to interpersonal gift-giving for relational reasons, true generosity is when I give to fulfil a dimension of relationship, and a gift from you increases my sense of abundance. I give to others out of this abundance. Importantly, I would give something to you even if you didn’t give anything to me.
I conclude this section with a brief reflection on Christian Hedonism. This is the well‑known counter to the Kantian notion that anything done for reward is ruled out as ethically good (Kant 1991 [1797]). Its popular advocates include John Piper (1986) and C. S. Lewis (in his sermon The Weight of Glory, 1942). Its more scholarly form is found in Jonathan Edwards’ A Dissertation Concerning The End For Which God Created The World (Edwards 1755).
We recall that utilitarian ethical theory received significant criticism because the notion of commensurable pleasure was thought to be wanting. Perhaps it failed because it had the wrong net pleasure, but Christian Hedonism has the right net pleasure?
The difference between Christian hedonism and theological utilitarianism is that in the former the joy of doing God’s will really is the telos—it is not primarily a tool for discovering God’s will.
There is some plausibility about Christian hedonism from scriptures that affirm the ‘fungibility’ or commensurability of parts of life. For example, in Mark 8:36 the disciples are asked to compare on some kind of scale of ‘profit’ the world and soul which certainly sounds like a cost benefit analysis. In Luke 16:1-9 behaviors of shrewdness (fraud really!) are balanced against the worth of souls; and, in Philippians 3:14 a ‘goal-ishness’ about life is affirmed that counts the rest of life as rubbish.
There is much more Christian plausibility in this route than a moral theory grounded in the pursuit of mere sensory pleasure (without wishing to denigrate either the body or pleasure). The key question is really what the status of God’s created order has in Christian Hedonism. Does it have ‘authority’ (O’Donovan 1993) to restrict us above and beyond our loves, even if they were perfectly orientated towards God. If one loved (the right kind of) pleasure enough, do duties vanish? Apparently Augustine thought so, since in his exegesis of 1 John 4:4-12 he enjoined us to love God, and do whatever we want (Browne 1888).
All that said, constrained optimization could be used more often by Christian economists who want to be true to theology, but who also want to speak the language of their peers. It is a natural area of collaboration between theologians and economists, and it might be thought to be poetically just to recover this idea from secular people who have made pleasure the Good, and who had no sense of an afterlife.
4. Rejecting the model
In the preceding paragraphs I have sought to work with the current theory constructively, which is what I have done professionally as a modeler for over three decades. Nevertheless, I always have a sense of hesitancy—that there is much more to life than these models can deliver, and that sometimes what they deliver is misleading.
That is, it may be intellectually defensible and fruitful to reject the use of models because they are operating too close to the aforementioned Personkern. I am not alone in this, nor is this instinct confined to Christians. There are plenty of secular critics of homo economicus who, while not appealing to theology, are discovering shortcomings consistent with Brunner’s critique (Sen 1977).
Furthermore, those who are too uncritical of homo economicus may be contributing to the widespread (mis)use of market language and metaphor in social life since the 1980s, which has come to be known as neoliberalism. In the neoliberal world, we all have a ‘brand’ that we are ‘marketing’ as we ‘compete’ with others (in our careers, on social media or on a dating site) and our relational engagements are seen as trades that must pass a ‘cost benefit analysis’ to be worthwhile. Cost benefit analysis is the source of our ‘values.’
Becker himself was not a neoliberal because he distinguished very deliberately between market thinking and love within families (Becker 1981). But his intellectual inheritors were not so inclined. Over time, a conception of marriage as a ‘bargain’ with an outside threat point of divorce or ‘separate spheres’ (the couple coexisting without love) became common in the Economics of the Family (Menzies and Hay 2007).
Culturally, the encroachment of the neoliberal mindset to family relationships has been disastrous. For a consistent neo-liberal, marriage is a monopoly in need of deregulation, and the sexual revolution, far from being an exclusively Left-wing search for liberation, is a Right-wing ‘liberalization’ program (Menzies 2020, ch. 4). The ever-present threat to leave a relationship via easy divorce ensures a ‘competitive’ environment that that can keep errant partners ‘on their toes’ (Economist 2011).
All these criticisms pertain to the misapplication of economics far beyond the business world—a case of over-reach. But is our discipline always adequate within the business world?
The GFC appears to be an example where this is the case (Menzies 2017). Banking and Finance is not a far-fetched application of economics—it is at the heart of capitalism. If economic principles are going to work anywhere, they should work there. The conclusion of Menzies et al. was that the ethical language of consequentialism is completely inadequate for notions of trustworthiness, because one very good definition of trustworthiness is that a person will act well when the morally prescribed action doesn’t pass a cost benefit analysis (Menzies et al. 2019).
All these provide makeshift reasons for rejecting the model, but a lot depends on how it is applied. There is arguably another, more fundamental, limitation of economic modelling, wherever it is applied, at least when it is conceived of as constrained optimization. It concerns the conception of The Good for homo economicus.
Let us consider the role of constraints in constrained optimization. For example, consider the task of maximizing a function.
[see PDF file]
Figure 1: Constraints can never be good
Suppose that this function of x (along the bottom axes) must be maximized subject to a restriction on the values that x can take. As we enlarge the set of values that x can take one of two things will happen: either the enlargement will allow us to increase the value of the function to be maximized, or, we will already be at the maximum so an enlarged set of x makes no difference. Either way, one can never be made worse off relaxing a constraint and sometimes one is definitely better off.
As noted earlier, positive economics describes how people respond to constraints more often than how people remove constraints (though the latter is modelled sometimes when people act to maximize income). The point made here is that if constraints within a simple optimization problem can be removed the agent is never worse off.
To wish for the removal of all constraints is to wish to be like God, at least in power. Thus, economics has an uncomfortable picture of the ideal human life: this is a life without limit, a divine pretension.
It is true that Game theory might seem to point in a different direction. It has established that self-imposed constraints can enhance individual welfare by enabling trust and cooperation. Contracts, covenants, and credible commitments allow parties to overcome prisoner’s dilemmas and coordination failures. Furthermore, when individuals face imperfect information, submitting to the constraints imposed by better-informed authorities can improve outcomes. Markets themselves function better with appropriate institutional constraints that address externalities, public goods, moral hazard, and adverse selection.
However, these strategic benefits of constraints differ fundamentally from the theological perspective that constraints can be inherently good as part of God’s created order. The economic view still sees constraints as instrumental—useful only insofar as they improve the value of the objective function. The theological view suggests that certain constraints are constitutive of human flourishing.
This is unpacked in theology in many ways.
The discussion by Thomas Aquinas in the Summa on humility is useful to see what is wrong with divine pretension (Aquinas 1912-36 [1274]). He asks if humility is a virtue, and his answer indicates that the divine pretension is bad because it is based on the nature of our existence, rather than on consequences.
I quote: “humility may be done sometimes well, for instance when a man, considering his own failings, assumes the lowest place according to his mode. Thus Abraham said to the Lord, ‘I will speak to my lord whereas I am dust and ashes.’ On this way humility is a virtue.”[8] The key phrase here is “according to his mode” which indicates that the person who wishes infinite power—even to do good—is nonetheless going beyond their station.
Closest to the notion of station is the notion of finitude. According to the doctrine of Creation we are finite by design. Naturally, finitude is not to be confused with sin. We are finite in space, time, knowledge energy and perspective and there is nothing morally wrong with this. What is wrong is a rejection of finitude, which was indeed part of the Fall (Kapic 2022).
One Christian remedy for finitude, according to Kapic, involves a recognition that we participate in two bodies. Our own body may be a source of frustration and limitation, but through our participation in the universal church we can rejoice that many good things are happening through our second ‘body’. If this sounds counterintuitive, a moment’s reflection will show it to be a not unnatural implication of the church being the body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12:12-30).
Furthermore, Kapic thinks that God is not efficient. That is, God takes time for his other purposes, like building communion with his children. Finally, he suggests we embrace finitude by cultivating: rhythms, vulnerability, lament and gratitude and the Sabbath. The latter is presented by Wolterstorff as subversion and a sign of true Christian radicalism (Wolterstorff 1983, ch. 7). It might also be added that a sabbath in some form is a good recipe for mental health.
Remarkably, finitude has also been an outworking of divine love. According to the doctrine of Redemption the most significant gift imaginable is the divine constraint of the incarnation. The apostle Paul acknowledges this in the Christ-hymn (Phill 2:7) “[Christ] made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness”. Also, under the category of redemption, suffering-as-constraint is spoken of positively in our lives. It trains us (Hebrews 12:5-11), it identifies us with Christ (1 Peter 4: 13), it displays God’s creativity and his power (Romans 8:28, 2 Corinthians 12:7-10), and it refines our faith (1 Peter 1:6-8 and James 1:2-4).
Christians are not alone in embracing finitude and constraints as good things. The rejection of both arguably has negative effects for both economics and culture.
Within economics, the surprising attachment to growth at all costs, and the distaste for distinguishing between needs and wants may suggest that the limit of the Earth is hard to accept (Hay 1989).
For culture more generally, the recent Effective Altruism movement (Singer 2009) is a misunderstanding of what it means to be human, although a very admirable one. In Singer’s famous thought experiment there is moral equivalence between buying an item of clothing and refraining from rescuing a drowning child when it would wreck that item, so long as the cost of the clothing could have saved a child’s life anywhere in the world by a medical intervention.
I have used the information from the movement to find cost-effective ways of giving internationally, and so I want to register my gratitude to all the people involved, including Singer himself. However, as a moral framework, Effective Altruism seems to abstract from our surroundings entirely, and to disrespect our God-given finitude.
There can even be a sinister side to focusing too far away, though strictly speaking this would not be true of Effective Altruism. In C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters, the junior devil is encouraged to bring the malice of the patient into his close circle, and have his benevolence expended far away.
Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence, as well as some malice, in your patient’s soul. The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary (Lewis 1943, ch. 6).
The reason this is different to Effective Altruism is that its whole point is that the impact on the ‘remote circumference’ is far from imaginary. Nevertheless, there can be something very uncomfortable about relating close-range to others when it exposes one’s own sin, and I think that is a danger for the movement if virtue at the far side of the world crowds out what might be available close at hand.
Limits are everywhere, and Kapic thinks they should be enjoyed. Not everyone agrees. Regarding our most personal of all limits, our body, Abigail Favale cautions against escaping our nature in The Genesis of Gender:
Freedom no longer means being free to live in harmony with our nature, to fulfill our inherent potential; freedom is simply the pursuit of unfettered choice, endlessly pushing past limits and norms. This leads to another consequence: the denigration of the body, because the body itself is a limit (Favale 2022, 83).
5. Conclusion
As we examined the biography of Homo Economicus we came to see that economic stories about individuals are usually understood mathematically within the Anglo‑American mainstream as constrained optimization problems. Over time these ‘rational action’ models have gained very wide application, not just in economics but in other social sciences.
Economics in this form—reductionist and mathematised—is going to be with us for a while, and there are times when the analysis is concerned with matters far from Brunner’s Personkern, such as, for example, quantifying people’s spending patterns after an interest rate cut. In order to connect with our contemporaries, and because the models are sometimes accurate, it seems to me that wholesale rejection is not wise.
Second, we explored the option of Christian scholars using these models but allowing theology to speak within them. That doesn’t mean removing all references to happiness or preferences, but these considerations cannot be ultimate in any ethical theory. Happiness is not always good, nor pain always bad. And the anchor of ethical facts, necessary for moral realism, lies in God’s created order rather than the preferences of finite and sinful creatures.
Finally, we saw that “maximizing” is not the only storytelling device for much of what matters in life. Indeed, the notion of a life without limit—maximizing by removing all constraints—is not a valid conception for human flourishing. It is rather a divine pretension.
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Notes
[1] While the mathematical structure of constrained optimization suggests that removing constraints always weakens or leaves unchanged the value of the objective function, this insight breaks down in the presence of strategic interactions. Constraints in these richer models can be good, but only in instrumental terms.
[2] Some constraints are chosen optimally, such as when a worker expands the budget constraint by giving up leisure. But there is no escaping some constraint somewhere – in this example, all this happens within a constraint of time.
[3] I am grateful to Paul Oslington and Masao Ogaki for useful discussions. Rational-action (e.g. Becker 1976) and utilitarianism moral theory (e.g. Bentham 1968 or Singer 1991) are conceptually distinct and some Theorists (following Robbins 1935) have separated them. Profit maximization is an instance of rational action without utilitarianism and both Paley (1775) and Bentham (1968) held to utilitarianism without rational action. But over my time as a mainstream researcher, I noticed most of my central bank colleagues ran them together—thereby conflating happiness and preference satisfaction—because they are disinterested in philosophy. This confusion is understandable because as Sen (1977) pointed out ‘preference’ in ‘preference satisfaction’ equivocates over ‘happiness’ and ‘chosen’. The conflation continues in the relatively new economics of happiness (Layard 2005) where material well-being is tied to a commensurable sort of ‘happiness.’
[4] “The nearer anything lies to that center of existence [Personkern] in which we are concerned with its totality—that is our relation to God, and our personal existence—the greater the disruption of rational knowledge through sin. The further that something lies from this centre, the less the impact of this disrupting factor, with a corresponding reduction in the difference between the knowledge of the believer and the unbeliever.”
[5] As flagged above, these examples could be rescued to some degree by changing what is maximized. For example, a Christian would find it more amenable to model genuine religious activity as motivated by maximizing the perceived joy of God. But in the above examples I have focused on what the literature has, in fact, used as the maximand.
[6] Christian moral philosophers often follow their secular contemporaries in appealing to Aristotle to provide such a vision. This strikes me as an odd practice—with the example of a perfect person (Jesus) on show, why he would not be a resource for a Christian virtue ethic is hard to fathom. This would not of course be a matter of straightforward example, because of his unique identity and mission, but it does seem to be a worthy matter of consideration.
[7] I do not think Folbre and Nelson would rule out a component of virtue signaling, and nor would I, but that is different to completely rejecting a meaningful notion of justice.
[8] Summa II.ii.q 161, article 1 “Whether humility is a virtue?,” reply to objection 1.David Hollenbach (2012; 1986). He explores this notion of participation in a more elaborated way, tying it to the framework of different kind of justice (commutative, distributive and contributive). For the purpose of this article, however, further elaboration is not necessary.
