Competition and Cooperation in Economic and Christian Thought: Towards a Better Understanding
type: CreativeWork
description: Economists and Christian theologians/ethicists (hereafter “Christians”) have not typically communicated well, partly due to different orientations of their disciplines: economists generally regard their discipline as positive (explaining why things are as they are), whereas Christians see their discipline as normative (describing how things should be). I discuss one example of this distinction: the focus of economists on agents’ actions (assuming motives are given), contrasted with the focus of Christians on motives (though for whom actions are by no means a matter of indifference). Economists and Christians also use certain terms in different senses, having the effect of compounding these communication difficulties. Primarily, this thesis examines one such communication difficulty – the understandings of competition and cooperation (and related terms such as rivalry and altruism respectively). My argument is that economists generally use the terms in a structural sense: in particular that competition in its “perfect” form is the economic structure by which efficient exchange is best facilitated, and that cooperation results from that structural state. However, Christians generally use the terms in a psychological sense: competition is viewed primarily as rivalry, and cooperation as a deliberate act of the will to love one’s neighbour as oneself, or to go beyond self-love to altruistic self-sacrificial love of the other. I also examine how the terms are used in a number of other disciplines, particularly evolutionary biology, as a means of nuancing the understanding of this distinction. I explore the concept of cooperation in economics by examining how it is treated in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. In the case of the Christian concept of cooperation, I argue for the inclusion of acts which are mutually beneficial to both donor and recipient, as well as acts of self-sacrificial altruism (which latter is often argued to be the Christian ethical norm). I discuss riva…
abstract: Economists and Christian theologians/ethicists (hereafter “Christians”) have not typically communicated well, partly due to different orientations of their disciplines: economists generally regard their discipline as positive (explaining why things are as they are), whereas Christians see their discipline as normative (describing how things should be). I discuss one example of this distinction: the focus of economists on agents’ actions (assuming motives are given), contrasted with the focus of Christians on motives (though for whom actions are by no means a matter of indifference). Economists and Christians also use certain terms in different senses, having the effect of compounding these communication difficulties. Primarily, this thesis examines one such communication difficulty – the understandings of competition and cooperation (and related terms such as rivalry and altruism respectively). My argument is that economists generally use the terms in a structural sense: in particular that competition in its “perfect” form is the economic structure by which efficient exchange is best facilitated, and that cooperation results from that structural state. However, Christians generally use the terms in a psychological sense: competition is viewed primarily as rivalry, and cooperation as a deliberate act of the will to love one’s neighbour as oneself, or to go beyond self-love to altruistic self-sacrificial love of the other. I also examine how the terms are used in a number of other disciplines, particularly evolutionary biology, as a means of nuancing the understanding of this distinction. I explore the concept of cooperation in economics by examining how it is treated in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. In the case of the Christian concept of cooperation, I argue for the inclusion of acts which are mutually beneficial to both donor and recipient, as well as acts of self-sacrificial altruism (which latter is often argued to be the Christian ethical norm). I discuss riva…
author: White, Christopher John
language: en
keywords: Competition, cooperation, altruism, rivalry, rivalness, structural, psychological, Adam Smith, Frank Knight, William Temple
date published: 2016
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:07:40Z
provider: Australian Catholic University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Australian Catholic University

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/1885/112357