The Business of Business is the Human Person: Lessons from the Catholic Social Tradition

Abstract

I describe an ethic for business adminis- tration 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. In the broad terms that most of us speak in most of the time, it is almost too easy to criticize business. Viewed in the abstract, as an instrument of commerce rather than as human persons making lives for themselves, business is an off-putting affair. Accord- ing to the ''shareholder-value model'' that dominates thinking about business in universities today and now sets the agenda for business in the wider culture, a business is a financial entity composed of resources, including employees who are ''human resources'' (capital costs, factors of production), to be used to maximize the wealth of its owners (Jensen and Meckling, 1976). This idea of business as an instru- ment of capital makes for a narrow and dismal idea of the human person who becomes a sort of slave - a wage-slave to be precise. Proclaimed today by stu- dents of economics and finance, this idea of business was anticipated and encapsulated years ago by Alfred P. Sloan, architect and executive of the General Motors Corporation, who opined that: ''The busi- ness of business is business.'' This cool pragmatism has been taken by many to be the cardinal virtue of business. ''It's nothing personal,'' we say, ''it's just business.'' Business has become the conscienceless idea of ''never mind.'' Never mind the plight of workers - they are their own contractors, free to come and go as they please. Never mind the com- mon good of society - that is for government to decide. And never mind ''corporate social responsi- bility'' - that's just a ''guilt trip'' to coerce regrets business cannot have. 1 Viewed in the abstract, as an instrument of economic interest, business is an ambivalent proposition at best. Certainly business is no ambivalence in the liter- ary imagination. In the caricature drawn by writers, business is the pretense that life is economics. Busi- ness is supposed to be a devil's bargain - wealth and amenity today for the soul in eternity. Its standard bearers are the likes of Charles Dickens' Scrooge (Dickens, 2005), a man estranged from love and life by a hard and flinty avarice, and Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt (Lewis, 1922), a man no less estranged from love and life by a soft and needy middle-class life- style. These figures of greed and vacuity are real. Today's Scrooges are the ''Barbarians at the Gate'' of Wall Street (Burrough and Helyar, 1990) and