UTILITY. — U., according to its very etymology, indicates that instrumental good which a subject perceives as a means of satisfying his needs or interests, or that good which is objectively a means for attaining an end. In economics it has acquired a more particular meaning, as a synonym for gain or profit.
St. Thomas, following Aristotle (Eth. Nic., I, c. 3), distinguishes good according to the threefold formal rationale of the honorable, the pleasurable, and the u.: the honorable is good in itself and for itself; it is the objective end perfecting man; the pleasurable is good in itself, insofar as it represents the repose of subjective desire upon attainment of the end; whereas the u. is not a good in itself, but insofar as it is a means for attaining the honorable and the pleasurable (Sum. Theol., 1ᵃ, q. 5, a. 6). The pursuit of the u. is proper to man, who can reach his ends only through the most rationally appropriate use of the means necessary for attaining them (ibid., 1ᵃ-2ᵃ, q. 16, a. 2). All particular goods may be regarded as means and therefore as useful in relation to the absolutely ultimate end, namely, happiness or beatitude; they are honorable and pleasurable insofar as they in themselves participate in some way in the rationale of the ultimate end and insofar as they are desired as means for attaining beatitude. Ethics may therefore be regarded as the science of the proper ordering of utilitarian activity toward the attainment of happiness. Whereas empiricism takes happiness as an expression of sensible pleasure and therefore makes ethics the empirical science of the greatest pleasure and the least pain (v. UTILITARIANISM), rationalism as a whole agrees in assigning to happiness the value of intellectual possession of the good in its entire universal rationale, and therefore in giving ethics the meaning of a philosophy which, in the light of rational principles, places utilitarian activity on the plane of the absoluteness of the honorable. Plato, while recognizing interested activity as the source of associated life and social organization through the division of labor (Resp., II, cap. 11), demands that reason transcend every particular interest and moderate utilitarian activity itself in favor of the polis: contempt for πρᾶξις in favor of θεωρία. Aristotle too affirms that ethics, as the science of the virtues in relation to perfect operation, directs utilitarian activity on the plane of objective honorableness and thus makes it an instrument of true human perfection: particular interest is not, however, to be destroyed (Polit., II, 4, 1262 b), since it is an expression of the natural desire for happiness, but is to be educated through the virtues so that the individual may rightly pursue particular interests (monastic ethics), familial interests (economic ethics), and civic interests (political ethics), and through practical life become capable of contemplative life.
Christianity, by positing God as the ultimate end and source of perfect beatitude, placed moral life essentially within the interiority of personal life, as an expression of an ever more perfect love for God; nevertheless, it has always recognized the value of practical life, as the proper use of earthly goods in the service of God, for one’s own good and that of one’s fellows (St. Augustine, De vera religione, chaps. 19-20, 46, 47). Some men may be called to the voluntary renunciation of material goods, but ordinarily men must sanctify themselves in the exercise of earthly utilitarian life (St. Thomas, Contra Gentes, III, chaps. 131-35). The formal and objective goodness of this practical activity (economic and political) must be provided, in the light of moral philosophy and theology, by the exercise of the moral virtues. There can therefore be no true u. that is not honorable, according to the Ciceronian dictum
« Maneat ergo quod turpe sit id nunquam esse utile » (De offic., III, 12). The subordination of utilitarian activity to ethics had not, however, prevented the ancients and St. Thomas from observing that the utilitarian process, both political and economic, presents within itself natural resistances which the moralist, the businessperson, and the politician cannot fail to take into account. This observation is already present in Plato (cf. L. Robin, Platon et la science sociale, in La pensée hellénique des origines à Epicure, Paris 1922, p. 229), but even more so in Aristotle and St. Thomas; nevertheless, they did not know how to raise the investigation of the utilitarian process to the level of an autonomous science.
It was Machiavelli who gave political utilitarian activity the meaning of an autonomous positive science; but, rejecting any subordination of it to ethics, he fell into complete moral relativism and the total subjection of every individual or people to the calculation of the political game. Against Machiavellianism, the “tacitism” of the seventeenth century sought only apparently to oppose itself; under the guise of a specious moralism, it attempted to conceal the utilitarian principle of raison d’état (cf. G. Toffanin, Machiavelli e il 'tacitismo', Padua 1921).
The theoretician of monarchical absolutism was Hobbes, who attempted to explain the submission of particular interests proper to the egoistic state of nature to the monarchical interest proper to the civil state through the social contract founded on fear. Economics too was removed from subordination to ethics and from the calculation of private initiative, in order to be subjected to the science of public u.: mercantilism thus arose (v.).
Individualism, both rationalistic and empiricist, imposed the liberation of citizens from the play of public interest: it showed how private initiative itself was a source of public well-being, and how utilitarian activity was fundamentally economic. Whereas rationalism elevated economics to an autonomous science according to evident natural laws discovered by reason (physiocracy), English empiricism, through Smith, sought to establish economics as an autonomous science, identified with morality itself and governed by deterministic natural laws inherent in private initiative itself, reconciling egoism and altruism within itself and thus giving rise to liberal economics. In contemporary philosophy, historicism, vitalism, pragmatism (v.) have made utilitarian activity an expression of individual or social spontaneity, without human reason being able to become its norm and without the will being able rightly to direct II.
Political science and economic science are true autonomous positive sciences of human u.; but they require subordination to moral and political philosophy, so that the human person, amid the historical contingencies of utilities, may realize his or her absolute individual and social human values.