Download Human Nature, Business Decisions

Human Nature, Business Decisions
and
Catholic Social Thought
Gerald Alonzo Smith
"It is basic ideas, not vested interests, which are ultimately dangerous for
good and evil"
[slightly revised, John Maynard Keynes, 1936]
"If the root of a tree is diseased, the fruit will be sparse"
[G.K.Chesterton]
"We live in an age wherein the economist has replaced the priest"
[Ivan Illich]
In Science and the Modern World Alfred North Whitehead wrote that to understand the
meaning of an age such as the modern world, the important thing to concentrate upon is
not the ideas that people are openly debating. More important by far are the
presuppositions that practically everybody with any influence takes for granted, premises
that are rarely defended or even articulated because they seem so obviously true. These
inherited and mostly unquestioned presuppositions constitute the cultural definition of
rationality, and are the beginning of reason. One such crucial presupposition is the basic
image of one’s self. Business managers, many of whom believe themselves pragmatic
and practical, exempt from any soft-headed intellectual concepts, are nonetheless
ultimately influenced by their view of what it means to be a human person, their
selfhood.
In Whose Justice? Which Rationality, Alaisdair MacIntyre claims that there are
historically only two foundational and dominant images of one’s self between which we
as individuals and as a society either must choose or, more likely, inherit without
questioning. Professor MacIntyre was not the first to make this observation. As
MacIntyre quickly admits, he is following in the path of such Church fathers as St.
Augustine in his City of God/City of Man dichotomous view of the world and the Greek
philosophers Aristotle and Plato who, in response to the Socratic question of what does it
mean to be a human person, responded that there was an examined life led by reason or
the unexamined life led by desires. Or, as Plato put it, in his famous allegory of the cave the life of truth and light or the life of delusions and shadows. Later in the thirteenth
century Thomas Aquinas attempted to show that the examined life of reason and virtue as
explored by the Greeks found its fulfillment in the Christian ideal, or more particularly, in
the person of Jesus Christ.
The modern Catholic business ethicist must attempt the same task for the coming 21stcentury industrial and commercial age that Thomas Aquinas attempted for 13th-century
medieval Europe, and revisit the question which is this Conference’s particular variant of
the the perennial Socratic question: "What does it mean to be a virtuous business man or
woman in our modern economic and industrial society"? Or we can rephrase this question
in another way to show the importance of the human intellect and will: "Do Christians in
general, and Christian business men and women in particular have the ability because of
their human consciousness and reasoning powers in conjunction with their free will to be
able to pursue the Truth, love the Good, and be the Best or are we humans basically only
sophisticated animals pursuing our desires?" Although we Catholics have large
disagreements concerning the question of how far we can go in making accommodation
to the modern world of economic capitalism, scientific industrialism and political
democracy and how much we can learn from such a world, we all agree that we are
pilgrims on a journey whose fundamental task is to reach some goal and, as such, it is our
responsibility to proceed intelligently and purposely on this pilgrimage, not tourists
whose goal is to maximize our pleasure on this vacation trip through life. We either view
ourselves as measured by some external standard that issues out of our creation by God,
or we are not so measured. In our modern age approaching the 21st century- the postmodern age following the Age of Enlightenment and modernism- it is necessary to
determine once again for our age the truth of this observation and to elucidate where
exists on the one side the examined life of Socrates/Plato/Aristotle and the City of God
by St. Augustine and the attempted fusion of these two by Thomas Aquinas in contrast to
the unexamined life and the City of Man.
Scientific Naturalist Social Theory
It is my hypothesis that on the one side we have the postmodern scientific naturalists who
to a great part dominate our universities and media. For an example of such thought,
Sherwin Nuland wrote in a recent book: "the human spirit is the generated product of our
innate biology, encompassing the molecular behavior of our cellular structure. Nothing
more need be sought. There is no need to invoke either a higher power or magic." Then
he continues to say that the brain’s interpretation of the body’s working is "the ultimate
process by which the human spirit has come into being. It is in the way we have made use
of our innate physiology and anatomy that we ourselves, the members of our own
species, are the real creators." The restructuring of our thought about human beings,
about our own selves, and our behavior along certain scientific naturalistic lines is a
threat to both persons and moral discourse about persons, for according to this widely
accepted scientific way of categorizing human beings and their behavior, human beings
are not moral agents with freedom and dignity and their behavior is not subject to rational
and moral appraisal. This is why basic philosophical errors in our cultural ways of
thinking about personhood can be so disastrous.
This is today’s City of Man view. And despite its sophisticated reasoning, this is today
unexamined view of what it means to be human. There are two basic world pictures here.
In the one view, the world is created by chance, basically chaotic and violent, an
accident, the basic origins of which are unknowable and which is bereft of any final
purpose. In such a world we humans basically are accidents of genetic inheritance or
"Sound and fury, signifying nothing." Since this is so, business ethics are merely rules of
convenience which are devised because of the necessity to bring some semblance of
order into an otherwise chaotic and violent world so that more of our desires will be
fulfilled. Basically this is an intellectual task. Kant’s categorical imperatives stand as the
culmination of this approach.
Catholic Social Thought
In the Catholic picture this world was created in love by God and is basically good,
purposeful, and non-violent. Although each individual is unique and different, which
difference has to be respected, there is a fundamental harmony in our existence and a
purpose which we must strive first to find and then to act upon. This does not deny the
power of evil and sinfulness; nonetheless, the world is basically good and human beings
have the knowledge and the ability to distinguish between good and evil. This task will
require the whole human being, both intellectual and action. Failure to recognize an error
in our account of, or assumptions about, the knowledge-yielding powers of the mind
could lead to systemic error in our philosophy of culture, and even to systemic distortion
in the development of our economic society, and eventually to the distorted development
of human beings. The task of the Catholic business ethicist is to explore what indeed is
constructive in fulfilling one’s own person and building up God’s world, as opposed to
what is destructive, sinful and evil. Of course, this is a major and difficult task, and it is
probable that there will be much overlap and similar conclusions as the more secular
business ethicist who is searching for the rules of convenience mentioned in the
preceding paragraph. Indeed, many times such secular ethicists have much to teach us
and put us to shame by their concern for the poor and their outstanding individual
humanity.
The Catholic answer of how to achieve, Truth, Goodness and Being is necessarily
ambiguous. We follow St. Paul in saying that we see through this glass darkly. This
means that we can see some of the truth or perhaps images of the Truth, but we are not
capable of knowing Truth itself. That is for God. We can achieve some of the good but
we are not Goodness herself. We can participate in Being, but we are not the fullness of
Being. We Catholics thus can err and have erred frequently on the side of Absolutism
thinking that we indeed are in the possession of the Truth and Goodness and all Being.
We can err on the side of relativism, believing that all is relative and that the concepts of
Truth, Goodness and Being, (in a word, Godliness) are all delusional concepts. This
relativism is the frequent error of our non-Catholic brethren though,as frequently
happens, it often manifests itself in the opposite extreme of absolutism.
Business men and women are at one forefront in this current challenge. They are the
leading laborers in this exiled garden of Eden wherein we are all under the curse of
Adam, namely, unless we labor we shall not survive. We cannot forget that, just as we
cannot forget whose garden it is and the essential loveliness, beauty, preciousness and
goodness of it all. One should not underestimate the challenge they face and the
importance of their task. Business men and women should not underestimate the
importance of what they do. In a modern interdependent global industrial society, this is
no small task. God so loved the world that He sent his only beloved Son to be an
inhabitant of this world, the son of a carpenter, indeed a carpenter himself for most of his
adult life. This Son who would show the way to perfection of what it meant to be a child
of God, that is, a human being. Business men and women can do no less than try to be cocreators of this way to salvation for this world. To do this successfully they too must
admire and love the world without reserve. Yet they cannot mistake this world for the
final world. They cannot think that they are ultimately measured by the amount of the
world’s wealth that they generate either for themselves, their companies or even for
society in general. It is the essence of Catholic social thought that we are able to
comprehend in some manner the truth and goodness of being human and it is not of this
world. It is the essence of Catholicism that we acknowledge the truth of Jesus Christ
when he says "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life." and this means something to us.
The Catholic business leader must choose between searching for God’s plan in this
Universe as outlined by Jesus Christ and the search for maximum power and wealth.
Greed is not O.K. There is one thing that Christ and all the saints have said with a sort of
savage monotony, that to be rich is to be in peculiar danger of being a moral wreck. It is
not so much greed that is at fault here, but the promotion of greed, the statement that
greed is O.K..
Appendix: Some Historical Notes
Business leaders make certain decisions, actions follow, and these have impact upon
people’s lives. Why do business people make such decisions in the first place? Practical
men, many of whom believe themselves pragmatic and practical, exempt from any softheaded intellectual concepts, are nonetheless ultimately influenced by their view of what
it means to be a human person, their selfhood. For example, the founder of modern
economic thought, Adam Smith wrote in an often-quoted sentence that we humans have
"the propensity to truck and barter"; so in a society dominated by economists, business
men and women may suppose that their goal in life is to truck and barter, to buy and sell,
to maximize profits. To put it simply, they measure their success in life by their ability to
"truck and barter". But where did Adam Smith get his notion that it is a sign of human
nature to "truck and barter"? Very likely he was influenced in this opinion by the spirit of
the Enlightenment in general with its emphasis on the secular study of man and by his
friend and mentor David Hume in particular who wrote in his major study, The Treatise
on Human Nature, that the reason of man has no other task than to satisfy the desires of
the individual and cannot pretend to any other task such as the task to determine what
does it mean to be a human or what is the goal of being human. If this is so, than all we
humans are, are sophisticated animals -- calculating what actions to do next to maximize
the fulfillment of desires. In hindsight, It is an easy intellectual leap using the market
principle of comparative advantage to show the importance of trucking and bartering as a
basic component of these actions. This was Adam Smith’s basic insight; that the market,
if left alone, would promote the maximum satisfaction of desires. However, the crucial
and important point to note here is that it is this Enlightenment vision of human selfhood
as described by David Hume which is the basic definition of what it means to be human
that many practical people unwittingly follow.