Abstract
I describe an ethic for business administration based on the social tradition of the Catholic Church. I find that much current thinking about business falters for its conceit of truth. Abstractions such as the shareholder-value model contain truth – namely, that business is an economic enterprise to manage for the wealth of its owners. But, as in all abstractions, this truth comes at the expense of falsehood – namely, that persons are assets to deploy on behalf of owners. This last is “wrong” in both senses of the word – it is factually wrong in that persons are far more than business assets, they are supernatural beings, children of God; and it is morally wrong in that it is an injustice to treat them as the former when they are the latter. I draw upon the social tradition of the Catholic Church to recognize that the business of business is not business, but is instead the human person. Following Church teachings, I describe a person-centered ethic of business based upon eight social principles that both correct and enlarge the shareholder-centered ethic of much current business thinking. I discuss implications of this person-centered ethic for business administration.
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Notes
- 1.
Of this last, the Nobel Prize winning economist Friedman (1970) notoriously declared, “the only social responsibility of business is to shareholders.” To think otherwise is communism or is at least “taxation without representation.”
- 2.
- 3.
Because our being is beyond our powers of conception and reason, to know it we require a different knowledge, one that arises not from abstract reasoning, but from the trust and love of intimate personal relationships. This knowledge is connatural as opposed to rational. It is not of the mind alone but of the ensouled body as well. It originates not as a projection of abstract reasoning but as a bodily trust between mother and child. Thus, in “making a life” we come to a startling truth that we have “known all along” – that our business in the world rests not only upon the powers of reason given to us by God our Father, but also and more immediately upon the intimacy and trust we learned from our human mothers. The truth upon which all abstract truths are founded is personal and material. This is the truth of our mothers; an image of the first of all human truths, Jesus Christ. Our being in God is not abstract, but incarnate.
- 4.
According to John Paul II, “if economic life is absolutized [for example to focus narrowly upon shareholder wealth] (…) the reason is to be found not so much in the economic system itself as in the fact that the entire socio-cultural system, by ignoring the ethical and religious dimension, has been weakened, and ends by limiting itself to the production of goods and services alone” (CA 39, the expression in brackets is mine).
- 5.
Quoted by John C. Bogle in a commencement address to MBA graduates of the McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. (18 May 2007).
- 6.
This phrase and that of this section borrows from C.S. Lewis who penned a book of this title.
- 7.
For an exposition of play in the making of human society, see Huizinga (1950).
- 8.
I would like to thank Jane Dutton, section editor Muel Kaptein, and the two anonymous reviewers at the Journal of Business Ethics for their constructive and detailed comments.
- 9.
This article was originally published as ‘The Business of Business is the Human Person: Lessons from the Catholic Social Tradition’, Journal of Business Ethics, (2009) 85:93–101. Reproduced with authorization.
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Sandelands, L.E. (2015). The Business of Business Is the Human Person. In: Melé, D., Schlag, M. (eds) Humanism in Economics and Business. Issues in Business Ethics, vol 43. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9704-7_10
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