Market and Happiness.
Do Economic Interactions Crowd Out Civic Virtues and Human Capabilities?

"Public happiness" (pubblica felicità) is one of the key issues of the Italian and Latin classicaleconomic tradition, that derives from Aristotle's works and civic humanism, where markets areconsidered an essential element of civil life involving mutual assistance, reciprocity and fraternity,and a general climate favourable to civil virtues.Today, however, communitarians and virtue ethics philosophers are instead critical toward ordinarymarket relations. They cherish a suggestion for society to protect itself and preserve higher humancapabilities from what is considered an invasion from market forces. On a similar line of thought,much of the economic and psychological literature on intrinsic motivation harbour deep doubtsabout the virtuous or ethical nature of market interactions and on the kind of ‘cooperation' resultingfrom market interactions. The reason for these criticism is in the instrumental nature of theextrinsic motivations that are the basis of ordinary market relations: in this literature (bothcommunitarians and intrinsic motivation theory) instrumental dealings are considered to beethically suspect: instrumental or means-ends rationality is bad, because only non-instrumentalaction is good. Since the market is inherently related to instrumental dealings, then one is led toconclude, in this approach, that market interactions are not fully moral. In other words, if onlyintrinsic motivations are truly moral, it follows that market economy cannot belong to the realm ofgenuine sociality and morality, and the market should be conceived to be separate from civil society. In particular, mutual benefit in the market comes to be read as unilateral egoism, and,conversely, mutual benefit in non-market interactions (i.e. in politics, civil society, family) is seenas the ‘authentic community', the place of human happiness.This opposition, between truly moral behaviour and ordinary market relations, finds to-day supportalso in some sectors of public opinion, particularly at the time of an economic and financial crisis.But, a cultural attitude of suspicion, adverse to market forces, may be dangerous: both theeconomic system and civil society depend on satisfying mutual needs through exchange. Is itpossible to imagine and describe market as a domain of interactions that can be at the same timemoral and mutually advantageous (instrumental)? In this approach, typical of both Aristotelian andPublic happiness traditions, the morality of actions does not require them to be the fruit ofintrinsic motivations. What such an approach leads to is to provide a different way of thinking aboutmarkets. Normal economic dealings are not necessarily the offspring of greed, competition or selfinterest.This conference will explore the many dimensions of this tension between market interactions andhuman capabilities, where such and similar views are subjected to close scrutiny and criticism.