Roman Catholic Social Teaching Research Articles

Visions of the Common Good: Engelhardt’s Engagement with Catholic Social Teaching

AbstractIn this paper, I confront Engelhardt’s views—conceptualized as a cohesive moral perspective grounded in a combination of secular and Christian moral requirements—on two fronts. First, I critique his view of the moral demands of justice within a secular pluralistic society by showing how Thomistic natural law theory provides a content-full theory of human flourishing that is rationally articulable and defensible as a canonical vision of the good, even if it is not universally recognized as such. Second, I defend the principles of Roman Catholic social teaching (RCST) against Engelhardt’s objection that it constitutes a watered-down version of the Christian moral vision which opens the door to intolerable moral compromises. While I acknowledge that Engelhardt’s criticism of RCST is well-grounded in certain abusive compromises that have been made by some Catholic healthcare institutions, I contend that such abuses are not endemic to RCST and avoidance of them is practically feasible in contemporary secular pluralistic societies. My primary aim is to show how continued dialogue between Engelhardtian libertarians and more communitarian-inclined RCST proponents may constructively yield a vision of healthcare allocation that ensures succor for the least advantaged within an authentically Christian social ethic.

Subsidiarity in Private Law?

This is the first English language paper seriously to examine the meaning of subsidiarity from the perspective of private law, in which it might be used to understand legal rules, or the interaction of different kinds of claim. Since there are so few relevant sources in English, this article casts a wide net for consensus. It offers six propositions about what it means to designate a rule or relationship (between legal regimes, say) as one of subsidiarity. These are formulated by reference, principally, to thinking about subsidiarity outwith private law; and, secondarily, to (i) miscellaneous literature about subsidiarity, (ii) the general French private law literature about subsidiarity, and (iii) what little can be gleaned from relevant unjust enrichment discourse in English. The state of play in that discourse is summarised, before the choice of Roman Catholic social teaching, European Union law, and European human rights law as settings to examine for their conceptions of subsidiarity is explained, and subsidiarity in each of these contexts is sketched out. Succeeding sections then outline each proposition, and clarify how it may be derived from the sources. The paper concludes by reflecting guardedly on the potential of subsidiarity in private law, as a way to model the interrelation of private law claims and doctrines.

Modern Catholic Social Teaching: Commentaries and Interpretations

With an equal emphasis on every word in the title - and with a distinctly American perspective - Himes and his distinguished associate editors and contributors have assembled the most thorough and authoritative assessment of modern Roman Catholic social teaching to date, likely to remain the touchstone volume for decades. This culmination of many years of effort by twenty stellar scholars has produced a reference work for anyone interested in understanding or studying the key documents that comprise the central corpus of Catholic social teaching. In addition to interrogations of the major documents, this volume provides an understanding of the biblical and philosophical foundations of Catholic social teaching, addresses the doctrinal issues that arise in such a context, and explores the social thought leading up to the "modern" era, generally accepted as beginning in 1891 with the publication of Pope Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum. Finally, there is a review of how Catholic social teaching has been received in the United States, and an informed look at the short-comings and questions that future generations must address. By any standard, Modern Catholic Social Teaching is a remarkable work - intellectually rigorous and deeply faithful, it provides accessible and thought-provoking insights into the heart of a belief tradition that every Catholic will find invaluable.

On the relationship between Catholicism and Marxism

This article contains a previously unpublished essay of personal reflections on the relationship between Catholicism and Marxism. The essay includes a critique of the social teaching encyclicals written by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and Pope John Paul II in the 1980s. We will see how John Paul II subtly incorporated some of the key ideas of the liberation theologians into the official body of Roman Catholic social teaching after 1986. This article should help younger researchers who might be interested in but are struggling with Catholic social teaching and/or Marxism in either theoretical and/or practical realms. This is especially important given that some Marxist authors within critical accounting are near or past retirement age and there is a real risk that the understandings of Marxist theory which they had will be lost to the discipline. We also look at some potential research topic areas which a developing country-based researcher could profitably explore using a Marxist perspective with a special focus on Fiji Islands, Indonesia and Singapore.

Laudato Si' and Integral Ecology: A Reconceptualization of Sustainability

This study analyzes sustainability concepts through the lens of Roman Catholic Social Teaching (CST) with a special emphasis on Laudato Si’. CST expands the focus of sustainability to include social justice through its emphasis on human dignity, the common good, and caritas. In CST, justice is understood as structural, while environmental obligations are connected to integral human development and peace. In Laudato Si’, Pope Francis calls on us to counter prevailing unjust systems with a structural reordering of multiple ecologies: environmental, economic, social, cultural, and daily life. Based on this reordering, he developed the notion of integral ecology, and we show how it encompasses a set of existing sustainability ideas in CST and, more importantly, how it changes the focus and scope of sustainability. Unfortunately, and despite supposed good intentions, some institutions misrepresent and use the term “sustainability” to justify systems that result in “un-sustainable” consequences. We thus show how Laudato Si’ offers an antidote to such unsustainable practices by reconceptualizing the sustainability construct through the notion of integral ecology.

Laudato Si’ and Integral Ecology: A Reconceptualization of Sustainability

This study analyzes sustainability concepts through the lens of Roman Catholic Social Teaching (CST) with a special emphasis on Laudato Si’. CST expands the focus of sustainability to include social justice through its emphasis on human dignity, the common good, and caritas. In CST, justice is understood as structural while environmental obligations are connected to integral human development and peace. In Laudato Si’, Pope Francis calls on us to counter prevailing unjust systems with a structural reordering of multiple ecologies: environmental, economic, social, cultural, and daily life. Based on this reordering, he developed the notion of integral ecology, and we show how it encompasses a set of existing sustainability ideas in CST and, more importantly, how it changes the focus and scope of sustainability. Unfortunately, and despite supposed good intentions, some institutions misrepresent and use the term “sustainability” to justify systems that result in “un sustainable” consequences. We thus show how Laudato Si’ offers an antidote to such unsustainable practices by reconceptualizing the sustainability construct through the notion of integral ecology.

Political Life under God: Some Questions for Gilbert Meilaender

How do Christian beliefs about human nature and destiny set possibilities for and limits to our political aspirations and goals? Specifically, what is the proper relation between a theology of creation and soteriology in Christian political ethics? This article considers these questions through an interpretation of the development of Gilbert Meilaender’s political thought. It concludes with some questions about that development as it stands, as well as from the standpoint of salient themes in Roman Catholic social teaching.

U.S. Roman Catholic Archdioceses “At Will” Employment Patterns and Roman Catholic Social Teaching

Theology of the workplace root cause analysis of employment practices by Roman Catholic archdioceses and dioceses in the United States indicates a systematic and near universal domestic policy comm...

Joining in the Dance: Catholic Social Teaching and Ecology

AbstractThis paper charts the emergence of environmental themes in Roman Catholic Social Teaching (CST). I argue that not only has this strand not been adequately acknowledged, but also that the theological basis for these ideas are rooted in core Roman Catholic teachings on creation, Christology and anthropology. In other words, concern for environmental issues is not an optional extra for Christian practice, but expresses in a fundamental way deep incarnation and human image-bearing as responsible stewardship. I argue that a particular concern with issues of social justice shapes the way environmental problems are addressed, so terms such as human ecology, ecological conversion, solidarity, the common good and world peace all take up ecological threads that are then woven into the account. While Pope John Paul II arguably laid the foundation for the theological bases for these ideas, Pope Benedict XVI applies these ideas more explicitly to current concerns. Yet while the former gave witness to the power of contemplation of the natural world, the latter is more concerned with distortions in philosophical reasoning in the Western world, including dangers he perceived in naturalism and pantheism. Both pontiffs show a lack of specific understanding of ecological systems and tend to idealise both nature in terms of harmonious relationships and humans in terms of mastery.

A Mounting East-West Tension: Buddhist-Christian Dialogue on Human Rights, Social Justice, and a Global Ethic (review)

Reviewed by: A Mounting East-West Tension: Buddhist-Christian Dialogue on Human Rights, Social Justice, and a Global Ethic John D'Arcy May A Mounting East-West Tension: Buddhist-Christian Dialogue on Human Rights, Social Justice, and a Global Ethic. By Keith Soko. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2009. 253 pp. That there is tension between Western notions of universally valid rights and so-called "Asian values" is undeniable, but this problem is usually discussed in political contexts. It is relatively rare to find a detailed study of religious approaches to justice in traditions as radically diverse as Buddhism (here treated generically) and Christianity (focusing on the evolution of Roman Catholic social teaching). That the study foregrounds the human relationship to the natural environment and the emergence of an ecological ethic makes it all the more valuable. The author makes clear from the beginning that he intends to examine recent developments and current thinking in both traditions, "not a historical or scriptural analysis per se" (p. 14). While he is aware that neither tradition uses the terminology of human rights in its traditional literature, [End Page 167] he wishes to discern the intentionality of traditional language to see whether it converges with what is now subsumed under the modern term "human rights." While looking for ways to include ecological justice in this perspective, he also assures us: "I will not be arguing for the rights of other living beings" (p. 15). Within these parameters, Soko sets out to discuss the concept of human rights itself, its possible equivalents in Buddhist thought, its emergence in the relatively recent development of Catholic social teaching, and the prospects for its expansion to embrace ecological justice. He concludes by endorsing recent attempts to formulate a global ethic. In setting out the evolution of human rights as a development of liberal modernity, culminating in the UN Declaration and Covenants, Soko rightly points out that such documents are deliberately couched in the religiously neutral language of secular humanism (though it is known that the committee that drafted the declaration was religiously diverse and discussed the contributions of different religions intensively). In presenting human rights as rational, the UN made use of a secularized version of the natural law tradition, which in previous ages was regarded as deriving from divine law. The commonly accepted understanding of human rights thus achieved the appearance of universality at the price of seeming to favor the individualism of Western liberal thought. In discussing Roman Catholic resistance to human rights, Soko points out how the modern tendency to derive rights from the consent of individuals in a social contract, rather than from nature, had the effect of pitting the individual against society (or, perhaps more properly, the state; see pp. 119-123). The more fundamental issue, however, is the ultimate grounding of human rights in a viewpoint that, even if not theistic, is in some sense "religious" or "transcendent." Giving priority to rights in the abstract disturbs the complementarity of rights and duties and needs to be corrected by concepts such as human dignity and respect, even reverence, for the person. Though he tends to assign duties predominantly to "Eastern" and rights to "Western" thinking, Soko modifies this oversimplification by warning that "the disparity between rights and duties is not such a clear-cut contrast as is often assumed, but is rather a more fluid symbiotic relationship that is severed artificially by a Western, modern, secular approach" (p. 48). He also observes that the Hebrew prophetic idea of justice for the poor (sedaqah) comes from a source that is markedly different from Greco-Roman culture (p. 56). A brief excursus into the Hindu concept of dharma with its connotations of not-harming (ahi&1E43ā) and being true to reality (satya, hence Gandhi's svadharma, "the dharma which is inherent in every being," Raimon Panikkar, p. 63) confirms his conviction, which is also the central thesis of the book, that "the language of human rights can express the intent of many religions" (p. 66). The real interest of this line of argument becomes apparent when Soko turns his attention to Buddhism, noting that, while it is anything but one monolithic tradition and has never...

Trade union strategy in Sydney's construction union: a Roman Catholic perspective

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to document key elements of union strategy at Sydney (Lidcombe) branch of Australia's Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) in an attempt to document and critique its branch level strategy in the year immediately after the removal of the Howard‐Costello Government.Design/methodology/approachA case study approach is used in analysing data obtained from internal CFMEU documents and correspondence; interviews with the New South Wales State Secretary of the CFMEU Andrew Ferguson, union organisers, one former organiser who worked for a number of years at Western Sydney but is now with a white‐collar union in the education sector, and construction workers; CFMEU official publications; news media stories and a series of building site visits. The authors use a theory framework of Roman Catholic social teaching to frame the discussions and analyze the case study findings.FindingsIn focus groups with construction workers, the authors find one challenging external constraint for the CFMEU: reaching out to and meeting effectively the needs of younger workers especially those from families hostile to unionism. However, younger workers seem to hold a mix of individualistic and collectivist philosophies. The final case shows the CFMEU organiser Tulloch to be adaptable and flexible in the heat of industrial disputation. Finally, the fact that building workers brought the asbestos issue to CFMEU's attention in the final case study shows union willingness to pursue issues not initiated by the union.Originality/valueThe paper documents the fact that the CFMEU has the ability and potential to rebuild its influence on building sites in Sydney and win further favourable outcomes for exploited and vulnerable workers within its sphere of influence. Through the theoretical framework, the authors point that as it does so it will assist in bringing to fruition the Roman Catholic social teaching that presents strong trade unions as a valid form of collective voice for workers and a way for collective and individual labour to retain in practice the dignity that God has already clothed them with.

“Ye shall know them by their fruits”

PurposeThis paper aims to report the continental European jurisprudence origins and Roman Catholic social teaching parallels of post‐World War II Japanese industrial relations practices. It focuses on the modes of social relation in the Japanese legal employment ecology of the post‐World War II enterprise and is designed to aid understanding of Japanese management theory and practice. An additional purpose of the paper is to facilitate development of evaluative criteria for authentic adoption of Japanese management practices to other national settings.Design/methodology/approachThe approach used is an analysis of Japanese sources using industrial relations theory to explore the “working rules” governing post‐World War II Japanese employment relations. This method, grounded in a source‐comparative method, results in the derivation of comparative employment ecology models of the USA, German, and Japanese enterprise. Against this background, the potential evangelization of the American workplace is discussed in reference to Roman Catholic social teaching.FindingsSuccess in deploying Japanese management modes of production is contingent upon adaptive appropriation of their modes of social relations within the enterprise. Insofar as the latter derive from and/or reflect continental European jurisprudence and Roman Catholic social teaching, their deployment in other nations – such as the USA – becomes, first, easier to comprehend in principle (not being subject to Japanese concepts), and, second, a potentially potent form of workplace evangelization reflecting continental European industrial relations norms.Originality/valueAuthentic deployment of the Japanese management employment ecology is a form of “evangelization” of the US workplace. Furthermore, it asserts that this constitutes a potential evangelization toward continental European sensibility regarding employment rules, closely related to Roman Catholic social teaching.

Recognizing Religion in a Secular Society: Essays in Pluralism, Religion, and Public Policy (review)

Reviewed by: Recognizing Religion in a Secular Society: Essays in Pluralism, Religion, and Public Policy William Closson James (bio) Douglas Farrow , editor. Recognizing Religion in a Secular Society: Essays in Pluralism, Religion, and Public Policy McGill-Queen's University Press. xx, 201. $24.95 Arising out of a McGill University conference in October 2002, these nine essays propose to examine the role and place of religion in a contemporary secular democracy. Their actual subtext, as the late Claude Ryan states in the foreword, is that liberalism 'is a thinly veiled way of curtailing the freedom of expression of religious believers.' Religion, to judge from the [End Page 173] Muslim, Jewish, and Christian backgrounds of most of the essayists, and largely confirmed by their words, tends to mean traditional Western monotheism. H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr identifies a 'profound moral rupture' separating 'traditional Christians, Jews, Muslims, and others who recognize that the universe has deep meaning and purpose from those who prefer to act as if there is no God and as if religious differences were merely matters of culture rather than matters of truth.' Engelhardt narrowly and normatively defines 'traditional Christians' as 'those who endorse the moral commitments of the Christianity of the first millennium and the seven initial councils.' No mention is made in these pages of Sikhs, Buddhists, Confucians, or Hindus, let alone (except slightingly) Wiccans. Douglas Farrow asks, 'If the state offers same-sex "marriage," does it not reject the judgment of the major religions about the nature of marriage and adopt that of certain fringe religions?' Whatever these 'fringe religions' might be, most contributors here share a conviction about what kind of religion is central. What Tom Faulkner has elsewhere termed the 'vague public theism' of the Canadian Charter's acknowledgment of 'the supremacy of God' becomes for Farrow and other essayists a rallying call to a defence of moral principles. With Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov, they share the concern that if there is no God, then everything is lawful. From a Muslim perspective El Hasan bin Talal rather minimally assumes that religion 'plays a determining role in developing and promoting an ethical perspective and code of conduct.' For him, religion has such a degree of relevance to good governance, human solidarity, and the moral and purposeful nature of human life that it must be 'a key component in any attempt to sustain our civilizations.' For Rabbi David Novak, one of several essayists using a detailed analysis of political theory, members of any democracy based on a social contract have prior rights conferred upon their traditional communities by a transcendent source. These 'earlier social commitments,' Novak argues, especially those based on religion and the family, 'are not overcome ... in the social contract.' Traditional faith communities, then, have a role to play in the defence of human rights, especially in protecting minorities from the tyranny of the majority. Similarly, Jean Bethke Elshtain believes that 'human dignity needs a guarantee,' asking rhetorically, 'Do rights require God?' Showing how Roman Catholic social teaching is grounded in the view that every person is sacred, she suggests, referring to Michael Ignatieff, that there is no secular basis for such a view. Iain T. Benson, who along with Farrow and Novak publicly opposed Canada's same-sex marriage bill prior to its passage, argues that secular cannot mean non-religious because 'everyone has "belief" or "faith" in something, be it atheistic, agnostic or religious.' Accordingly, he objects that 'the sexual dogma of same-sex advocates' trumps 'parents with [End Page 174] religious convictions about their children's education.' The persistent topic in Recognizing Religion emerges as traditional religion and the traditional family, especially as same-sex marriage became its touchstone prior to the passage of Bill c-38 in July 2005. (Farrow is coeditor of another 2004 McGill-Queen's volume entitled Divorcing Marriage: Unveiling the Dangers in Canada's New Social Experiment.) Though the topic remains life-cycle events and the family, Margaret Somerville is more balanced than her co-contributors in her focus on euthanasia and reproductive technologies. She points out that 'democracy is morally and ethically neutral.' Although religious or spiritual beliefs should not be excluded from deliberations, we cannot...

The Democratic Virtues, our Common Life and the Common School: Trust in Democracy: Anabaptists, Italian Americans, and Solidarity

Consider two phrases in Professor Marie Failinger's charge to those of us discussing Jeffrey Stout's Democracy and Tradition,1 October 28, 2005, at Hamline University: (i) would we construct a democratic sociality holding each other responsible for ethical life that would warrant trust in democracy?... and, (ii) How do the religious traditions help us reflect on this issue? My reflection, probably sectarian, refers more to where we come from than to what we choose. The reference here is to three communities, none of which is primarily concerned with real democratic sociality. But none of them is radically withdrawn; all three of them contribute to the civil community, if only in the way that my late friend and teacher John Howard Yoder meant when he said in our conversations that, for all their separation, the Mennonites of Northern Indiana were as concerned as anybody else with getting the potholes filled. The three communities I am thinking of are (a) the community of believers formed in the tradition of the Radical Reformation, the Anabaptists; (b) the community of Italian-American immigrants who formed their children in a communal virtue they named rispetto-the virtue that trains a person to be a member in a family; and then radiates out-so that rispetto is practiced in ethnic community, in civil community, nation, and world; and (c) the community contemplated in modem Roman Catholic social teaching on solidarity, which is, among other things, the virtue that trains members of the community to seek the common good, the good that is common.

Roman Catholic Social Teaching and Religious Hospital Identity in a Post-Christian Age

Roman Catholic Social Teaching and Religious Hospital Identity in a Post-Christian Age Get access H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine Correspondence: H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., Ph.D., M.D., Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy, Baylor College of Medicine, One Baylor Plaza, Houston, Texas 77030, U.S.A. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Christian bioethics: Non-Ecumenical Studies in Medical Morality, Volume 6, Issue 3, 2000, Pages 295–300, https://doi.org/10.1076/chbi.6.3.295.6888 Published: 01 January 2000

Managed Care, Catholic Vision, and the Claims of Justice

There are numerous challenges posed to Roman Catholic health care institutions by recent developments in health care delivery. Some are practical, involving the acceptable limits of accommodation to and collaboration with secular networks of health care delivery. Others, quite often implicated in the first set, are explicitly theological. What does it mean to be a distinctively Roman Catholic health care institution? What are the nature and the scope of Roman Catholic institutional identity? More broadly, what is the moral relevance of themes in Roman Catholic social teaching to the provision of health care? This issue of Christian Bioethics addresses these questions with a spirited exchange among its authors. They offer noticeably different perspectives on the general cogency of Roman Catholic social teaching and different strategic recommendations for Roman Catholic institutions to maintain, or recover, their distinctive presence in health care delivery.

Managed Care, Catholic Vision, and the Claims of Justice

There are numerous challenges posed to Roman Catholic health care institutions by recent developments in health care delivery. Some are practical, involving the acceptable limits of accommodation to and collaboration with secular networks of health care delivery. Others, quite often implicated in the first set, are explicitly theological. What does it mean to be a distinctively Roman Catholic health care institution? What are the nature and the scope of Roman Catholic institutional identity? More broadly, what is the moral relevance of themes in Roman Catholic social teaching to the provision of health care? This issue of Christian Bioethics addresses these questions with a spirited exchange among its authors. They offer noticeably different perspectives on the general cogency of Roman Catholic social teaching and different strategic recommendations for Roman Catholic institutions to maintain, or recover, their distinctive presence in health care delivery.

Roman Catholic Social Teaching and Religious Hospital Identity in a Post-Christian Age

Roman Catholic Social Teaching and Religious Hospital Identity in a Post-Christian Age

Immigration Justice: Beyond Liberal Egalitarian and Communitarian Perspectives

Immigration law resides within a complex web of interconnected political, cultural, and economic realities. Politically the world is organized around nation states, which exercise the legal authority to control their borders. Multiple factors push people into emigrating from their country of origin or pull people toward immigrating to particular countries. Given historic migration patterns and the fluidity of national borders, cultures transcend these boundaries, creating demand for transnational mobility. The global economy coupled with disparate economic opportunities between nations spurs immigration. War, civil unrest, and natural disasters also contribute to the international movement of peoples. In this article, I explore the foundations of a socially just immigration regime. Part one provides an overview of the push–pull factors influencing the decision of individuals and families to migrate. Part two places these decisions within the context of United States immigration law, exploring both the statutory and con-stitutional restrictions on entry into the United States. Part three examines the difficulties inherent in attempts to develop a coherent and just immigration policy out of liberal political theory or the communitarian response. In Part four, I place the immigration justice issue within the framework of Roman Catholic social teaching, concluding that such a framework provides a secure basis for constructing a just immigration jurisprudence. Finally, Part five briefly reflects on the justness of current United States immigration law in light of the theory developed in Part four.

Corporate Decisionmaking and the Moral Rights of Employees: Participatory Management and Natural Law

Participatory management--the philosophy of involving employees in corporate decisionmaking--arguably is the most important industrial relations phenomenon of the last three decades. It has been endorsed by such disparate figures as President Bill Clinton and Pope John Paul II. Thousands of U.S. firms have adopted one form of employee involvement or another. Insofar as the academic literature on participatory management is concerned with normative questions, it is dominated by calls for some form or another of government-mandated employee participation in corporate decisionmaking. Normative analyses of participatory management by pro-mandate scholars have developed two justifications for government intervention: One sounds in the language of economics, typically arguing that participatory management is an efficient system of organizing production that is nevertheless being thwarted by various market failures requiring governmental correction. I have explored this argument elsewhere, concluding that government-mandated employee involvement cannot be justified on economic grounds [Stephen M. Bainbridge, Privately Ordered Participatory Management: An Organizational Failures Analysis, Del. J. Corp. L. (forthcoming 1998)]. In this Article, I evaluate the other set of pro-mandate arguments; namely, the claim that employees have a right to participate in corporate governance. On close examination, much of the normative literature on employee participation amounts to little more than talk, i.e., political rhetoric dressed up in legal and/or moral rights terminology. For ideologically motivated proponents of employee participation, this is a useful debating tactic because our culture's fixation with individual rights imbues any rights-based claim with an air of legitimacy and incontrovertibility. Using rights-based terminology to phrase the question, however, often impedes or even precludes meaningful analysis. The task before us is thus two-fold. First, we must subject the claim that employees have a right to participate in corporate governance to a rigorous process of specification and assessment. Second, we must ask whether this right--as so specified--merits codification into positive law. I have two principal foils in this article. The first is Roman Catholic social teaching on work and capitalism, which offers the most fully realized statement of natural law principles applicable to the problem at hand. The second is a body of literature to which I will refer as secular humanist. This literature consists mainly of rights talk drawing on precepts of humanistic psychology. Although scholars approaching the problem from this angle thus are not working within a natural law paradigm, their work deserves examination both because it has certain superficial similarities with Catholic social teaching and because it represents the other dominant theory upon which rights-based claims are made in support of government-mandated participatory management. Although both the relevant Catholic social teachings and secular humanist arguments are complex and nuanced, both fairly can be said to emphasize two basic claims. First, participation is asserted to be an essential mechanism for full development of human personality. Self-realization and self-actualization are the conceptual engines driving this claim. Second, participation is posited to be an essential feature of human dignity. I have identified three basic ways in which participation might be related to human dignity: Participation may promote trust between employers and employees. Participation promotes workplace democracy. Participation rights protect employees from opportunistic conduct by employers. I argue only the latter theory rises to the level of plausibility, and it cannot justify government-mandated employee participation.