Occasionally, someone thinks he (or she) has come up with a brilliant criticism of the Just Third Way of Economic Personalism by pointing out “binary economics” is not a good way of describing the ideas of Louis O. Kelso which form the primary economic theory of the Just Third Way. The critic takes a brief look and sees Kelso divided the factors of production into labor and capital instead of labor, land, and capital, and assumes it is the whole of Kelso’s thought, which is ultra-simplistic.
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| Louis O. Kelso |
In Kelso’s thought, the factors of production cannot be separated from the results of production as they are in the three mainstream schools of economics, Keynesian, Monetarist/Chicago, and Austrian. Of course, all three deny this separation, but tacitly admit it when they measure productivity . . . which is measured in output per labor hour. In positing two factors of production, Kelso wasn’t taking away a factor of production — land — but grouping non-human factors of production (land and technology) together and adding them to labor instead of isolating labor into a de facto single factor as the other schools of economics do.
All this is related to the purpose of economics in the first place, which is to support the dignity of the human person. This raises the question, What is “dignity”? As defined in the dictionary, dignity is the “quality or state of being worthy, honored, or esteemed.” From the standpoint of inalienable rights, dignity is the right of a person to be valued and respected for his own sake, and to be treated with justice. In Thomist philosophy, on which binary economics is based, every single human being, because he is a human being, is automatically a person, and therefore “worthy, honored, or esteemed.”
Respect for human dignity, an essential aspect of personalism, is not based on wealth, poverty, race, religion, sexual orientation, or other accidental characteristics. Rather, respect for human dignity is realized through recognition and protection of the sovereignty of each human person under the ultimate sovereignty of God, which means recognition and protection of each person’s fundamental rights and place in society.
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| Thomas Aquinas |
This we find in the Thomist philosophical framework, and explains why (in our opinion) Kelso eventually settled on binary to describe his economics, as binary is the first characteristic of Thomist personalism:
· Binary Character. All persons are distinct from things.
· Human Dignity. All persons have rights by nature and are individually sovereign under the highest sovereignty of God.
· Determinable Instead of Determinate Nature. All persons have determinable characteristics; all things have determinate characteristics.
· Self-Determination. All persons have free will.
· Political Animals. All persons associate by nature within a consciously structured social order.
Binary Character. Personalism assigns a unique character to human beings. Personalist thought therefore sees two types of relationships in society — relationships to other persons, and relationships to things.
Human beings as persons are both subjects and objects; we are both what acts (subject), and what is acted upon (object). Human beings are therefore somebodies instead of somethings, and we relate to one another by the interplay of rights and duties. A right is the power to do or not do some act or acts in relation to other persons, while a duty is the obligation to do or not do some act or acts in relation to other persons.
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| Mortimer J. dler |
Relations to things are not the same as they are to persons. Not being subjects, things have no rights, but persons as subjects have rights to and over things which define their relationships to other persons with respect to things.
Things, even artificial persons such as corporations and governments, are only objects, what is related by intention to a subject. Objects can only act (in the philosophical sense) through human agents, and not of their own volition.
Human Dignity. Because the human person is unique in creation, Thomist personalism divides reality into persons (which have dignity) and non-persons (which do not have dignity). Relations with persons therefore require a different ethical paradigm, an entirely different set of rules, than what governs mere objects. Principally, this means persons are entitled to justice, a rendering to each what each is due.
Traditional moral systems put great emphasis on the subject, that is, the moral agent which carries out an act. This is carried to an extreme in Stoicism, in which there is a complete separation of the human person as the object of virtue, from the same person as the subject of virtue. Ideally, the Stoic as object regards everything which happens to him, good or bad, with complete indifference. At the same time, the Stoic as subject is supposed to act virtuously in all relations with others.
Personalism, however, takes into consideration the transcendent character of human actions and human dignity as they relate to persons as both subject and object. This vests each human being in his capacity as either subject or object with an absolute character as a human person.
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| Norman G. Kurland |
Each human being is therefore not only required to act as a person (duty), but he is entitled to be treated as such (right). This implies there are moral absolutes which govern our relations with other persons, even in the so-called social sciences where norms have traditionally been considered arbitrary or merely expedient.
Determinable Instead of Determinate Nature. Where all things conform to their common nature with only minor variations, human nature is such that by free exercise of rights, human beings as persons make choices. As a result of conscious decisions, persons become virtuous or vicious, thus becoming more or less fully human.
Self-Determination. As persons, human beings are responsible for their own acts; we are all in that sense “self-made men.” This is because the human person is a rational animal who when educated properly can distinguish truth and falsehood as well as good and evil. Further, because the human person has a spiritual nature, the motivation to act virtuously or viciously is internal instead of being imposed externally.
Political Animals. Human persons are naturally members of society, neither isolated individuals nor indistinguishable members of the collective. We are beings who relate to others in a consciously structured manner as an essential aspect of what and who we are.
Taking these characteristics of Thomist personalist thought into consideration, a paradox presents itself. As a person, each human being belongs to himself as an independent and sovereign being under the highest sovereignty of God in a way a thing cannot.
At the same time, individual sovereignty and man’s political nature necessarily imply each person has the same dignity and status as all other persons. This allows for a giving of oneself to all other persons in society, which could not happen if each person did not possess himself as a sovereign being in the first place.
Consequently, while all persons have rights absolutely, no one may exercise rights without limits, for that would infringe on the sovereignty of everyone else. There must be a give-and-take in social life, which would not be possible if human beings were isolated individuals or indistinguishable members of the collective.
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