The Rational Public-Regarding Personality: A Theory of Community-Oriented Agency Beyond Egoism and Self-Sacrifice—From Dynamic Coordination of Human Functioning to the Formation of the Community Subject

The long-term viability of a community depends not only on institutional design but also on the kinds of persons who enter and sustain its institutions. An actor concerned only with immediate personal gain may pursue objectives through deception, predation, free riding, or cost externalization. An actor who lacks self-boundaries and continually sacrifices legitimate personal interests may instead fall into exhaustion, dependency, resentment, or exploitation. A simple choice between egoism and self-sacrifice is therefore insufficient as a durable personality foundation for shared life. Building on the Dynamic Coordination Theory of Happiness, the relational embeddedness of happiness, and the compatibility mechanism between self-regarding and public-regarding good, this paper introduces the concept of the Rational Public-Regarding Personality. It is defined as a relatively stable personality structure in which an individual acknowledges and protects legitimate self-regarding goods, recognizes others as subjects with life, dignity, freedom, and their own pursuit of happiness, uses reflective judgment to understand the relations between immediate and long-term interests, self-interest and others' interests, and local and common interests, and increasingly realizes personal development through pathways that reduce unnecessary harm, preserve reasonable boundaries, and create value for others and for shared conditions. The Rational Public-Regarding Personality differs both from narrow egoism and from unlimited self-sacrifice. Its core is not the maximization of benevolence, but the dynamic coordination of self-regard, prosocial concern, boundary-defense, and reflective regulation. The paper develops a six-stage model of personality formation: awareness of legitimate self-regarding goods, recognition of others as subjects, expansion of temporal and relational horizons, discovery of public-regarding pathways, behavior-feedback learning, and internalization of community identity. Personality is therefore not the result of a single moral choice; it emerges gradually through repeated practice, relational feedback, and social environments. The paper also argues that this personality cannot be separated from institutional conditions. Personality supplies internal motivation for cooperation; institutions alter the real costs and returns associated with cooperation, deception, predation, trustworthiness, and public-regarding action. Good institutions do more than constrain harm: they reduce the cost of sustained contribution, protect legitimate boundaries, and allow people who create shared value to survive over time. Stable community formation is therefore better understood as the co-evolution of personality, relationships, and institutions than as the product of moral education or institutional coercion alone. Community-based resource management across diverse cultural settings demonstrates that clear rules, monitoring mechanisms, and graduated sanctions enable sustainable stewardship of shared resources across generations (Ostrom, 1990). Cross-cultural field studies of community resource management—from Spanish irrigation systems to Japanese forests and Korean fisheries—show that communities developing clear rules, monitoring mechanisms, and graduated sanctions can sustainably manage shared resources across generations, while communities with stronger reciprocity norms are better able to design and maintain such institutions, confirming the co-evolutionary dynamic. The Rational Public-Regarding Personality is presented as the micro-level subject model of the Human Happiness Community, not as an idealized saint model. It permits the pursuit of wealth, success, family well-being, security, freedom, personal growth, competition, refusal, anger, and self-protection. Its decisive difference is that the subject no longer treats the destruction of others as a necessary condition of personal success, nor personal self-destruction as proof of goodness.