By J. Michael Stebbins J. Michael Stebbins is the director of the Arrupe
Program in Social Ethics for Business at the Woodstock Theological
Center at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and author of The Divine Initiative: Grace, World-Order
and Human Freedom in the Early Writings of Bernard Lonergan. The practice of business is generally carried out with little or no reference to
explicitly religious concerns. This is due less to any outright hostility toward religion
than to the fact that in most people's minds religious faith and the operation of a
business have little or nothing to do with each other. But even those who do sense that
there really is or ought to be a connection between religious faith and the world of
business often find it difficult to articulate effectively just what the connection is. This article is intended primarily for people who belong to the latter group -- people
who are already convinced that faith and business are interrelated and want to gain a
greater insight into the nature of that relationship. My own work has focused on the need
to elaborate a Christian (more specifically, a Catholic) view of the human person and the
world that could provide a framework for understanding how any human activity, including
business, has a role to play in carrying out God's creative and redemptive intention. This
article sketches some of the elements that need to be incorporated into any Christian
worldview capable of meeting the requirements of our times and examines the implications
for an understanding of what business is all about. The place to begin is the doctrine of creation. The universe is not here by accident.
We believe that God, in an outpouring of boundless wisdom and love, has brought all
creation into being and guides its continual unfolding. In a way that we can hardly begin
to understand, Christ is redeeming the entire created universe, drawing it toward a
consummation where all things will find their fulfillment. We human beings are caught up
in this process. Our own destiny, which lies beyond the limits of this life, is to be
united forever in a community whose members participate in the life that the Father, Son,
and Spirit share with one another. Together our minds and hearts will blaze with
divine understanding and love of God, each other, and everything God has created, down to
the last subatomic particle. This incandescent state of being, the messianic banquet, is
the only reality that can satisfy the deepest longing of our hearts. It is the goal which
God has given the entire human family; it is the whole purpose of human history and of
Christ's death and resurrection. The value of everything we decide and do has to be judged
in light of this paramount fact. When all is said and done, what really matters is the
effect our decisions and activities have on reaching this ultimate goal. This way of viewing the world heightens rather than diminishes the significance of what
we do in this life. The stakes here are enormous: it is in this life that each of us
chooses whether or not we are going to welcome the reign of God into our own hearts. It is
in this life that we begin to be transformed together into the kind of people who desire
union with God above all else, who love the universe as God loves it and who see in all
people the goodness God sees. To the extent that this transformation occurs, it reveals
itself in a growing spirit of joy and peace, a confident hope, and a spirit of
self-sacrificing love that takes other people's interests as seriously as our own. We do not come to God by ourselves. Each of us has heard God's word because believing
men and women have safeguarded, transmitted, and lived it faithfully down the centuries to
our own time. Our sensitivity and responsiveness to God's call are due in large measure to
the way we have been formed -- by our families and churches, our circles of friends, our
neighborhoods, our schools and businesses, and our cities, towns, and nations. These
relationships and institutions can be the primary channels through which grace works its
transformative effects in our lives. By the same token, they can block the life-giving
flow of grace by deadening our spiritual sensibilities with messages of fear,
hopelessness, self-centeredness, and hatred. We influence each other as we interact, for
good or ill. The key is to recognize that by our choices, actions, and habits of thinking
and feeling we affect our own and each other's eternal destiny. Will we cooperate
with what God is doing in the world, or will we become focal points of resistance to it? If we are going to be clear about what business is and how it should operate, we have
to do so in view of the overriding fact that our ultimate goal is union with God and with
one another. Our life here is a journey together toward that goal, and everything --
including business and the wealth it generates by the production of goods and services --
plays a role in helping or hindering us as we make our way along the path. In claiming
this, we are not talking about "pie in the sky." We are talking about the real
world, the world as it actually is. To think about human living without considering God's
intentions for us is to think about a world that simply does not exist. What could be more
unrealistic or unpragmatic? It would be extremely convenient if we could deduce from the ultimate goal everything
we needed to know about how to conduct our lives, but it goes without saying that things
are not that straightforward. The process that takes us from identifying our ultimate end,
which is literally unimaginable, to discovering practical ways of living that are likely
to help us reach the end is much more difficult. Finding the right way to live is not
primarily a matter of applying universal principles to particular situations. It is about
understanding concretely one's own life and the lives of the various groups one is part of
and appreciating the potentialities and dangers they contain. It is about coming up with
viable approaches to living that make the most of the potentialities and reduce the
dangers. It is about implementing these approaches and regularly evaluating them to
determine whether they've produced the desired results. This process requires imagination, intelligence, energy, perseverance, and divine
grace, but there is no workable alternative. The question of the right way to live has to
be asked and answered in its particulars by each individual and community. This does not
mean that the good is relative in the sense that the good is whatever anybody happens to
think it is. It simply means that whatever is truly good in human living exists and
develops only in the concrete; it is not an abstract idea [1:27-29;2:27,36]. Still, it turns out that the good of a community or the good of an individual has
certain characteristic features, and being able to recognize them can improve one's
ability to identify and choose what is truly good. I want to turn first to the issue of
what constitutes the good of a community, the common good, a notion that is
important for understanding the religious value of business. The common good is the good of a community considered as a whole. Since a whole
is composed of parts, the common good includes the good of the different parts of the
community, whether groups or individuals. Yet, it is the good of those parts considered
not in isolation but in relation to all the other parts, with which they form a
functioning whole. Frequently the common good is thought of as essentially a lot of
particular items such as pleasures, economic goods, or rights, that get distributed more
or less equitably to individuals who happen to be grouped together in some way. But the
common good in the sense I am using the term has to do not with an aggregate of
disconnected individuals and their private needs, but rather with an ongoing community
composed of interacting individuals and groups. Pursuing the common good involves thinking
about how the various parts and their interrelations can be maintained, corrected, and
developed so that the whole community flourishes in a way that enhances the well-being of
its various parts and the individuals who ultimately make up those parts. Looked at in this way, the common good has three essential aspects: particular goods,
patterns of cooperation, and value [1:33-43,2:47-52]. This analysis, along with much of
what follows, is heavily indebted to the thought of the late Jesuit philosopher and
theologian, Bernard Lonergan. Particular goods are anything that meets a human desire or need. These include
material or economic goods but range beyond these to embrace objects in
every category relevant to human living: toothpaste, a full stomach, a
spectacular view, a conversation with a good friend, a piece of new information,
an office building, a song, radial tires, shade on a hot day, and a feeling
of contentment upon waking up in the morning. Patterns of cooperation are the ways in which the members of a community interact
in order to produce an array of particular goods. Practically every particular
good we enjoy has come to us through the cooperation of countless people
rather than by our own unaided efforts. For example, think of how many
different people were involved in making it possible for you to receive
your education -- everyone who gave money or was taxed, everyone who taught
you or trained your teachers, everyone who had a hand in the production
of your textbooks and the thoughts contained in them, everyone who planned,
built, or maintained the physical plants, everyone who administered the
schools. The particular goods we use are almost always the result of cooperation.
This is what happens naturally when human beings apply their intelligence
to daily life: they cannot help trying to figure out ways of combining
their energies and resources to meet common wants and needs more effectively
than they could as solitary individuals. Institutions and routines are
created, and people are taught the skills needed to function within them. The patterns according to which cooperative activity is organized -- the technological,
economic, political, cultural, familial, and religious patterns of activity in which we
spend most of our time -- are themselves crucial elements of the common good. There would
be very few particular goods of any kind without them. Therefore, in pursuing the common
good, we have to be especially concerned with promoting the cooperative structures and
arrangements by means of which society produces streams of particular goods for its
members. In this sense, taking care of the whole community and taking care of its parts go
hand in hand. Value is the third aspect of the common good. By value, I do not mean an abstract
quality, nor am I using the term in a relativistic sense. Value is a measure
of the worth of a particular good or a pattern of cooperation as a means
to our end of attaining union with God. Every community provides particular
goods in response to the desires and needs of its members. But in every
community, certain desires and needs are considered more important than
others, and the particular goods that fulfill them are considered more
worthwhile. The kinds of particular goods which are made available, their
quantity, and their distribution indicate the relative value assigned
to them by the community. The category of value is crucial because the common good refers to what is truly
good for an entire community. Simply to meet human desires and needs of any
description is not equivalent to achieving the common good. Not all the desires and needs
of people are wholly in harmony with the pursuit of the ultimate goal of human living.
Some have an ambiguous relation to it, and others are wholly at odds with it. So it is
possible for a community to establish a set of cooperative patterns geared to providing
particular "goods" that are positively destructive for all concerned (the Nazi
death camps provide a horrific example of this). Consequently, the common good has to be
pursued on the basis of correctly prioritized value judgments. It is not just a
setup that meets desires and needs of any description; it is a setup that produces goods
which are truly worthwhile, meeting desires and needs that are oriented toward our
ultimate end. It must be emphasized that the common good is not a utopia or a rigid,
one-size-fits-all ideal. Instead, it is a flexible, concrete possibility which becomes
real to the extent that a community actually succeeds in organizing itself to meet the
authentic needs and desires of its members. No community either fails utterly or succeeds
fully in this regard. In other words, the common good is more an ongoing project than a
far-off objective; it is both a partially realized fact and a standard for criticizing the
way things are at present. It does not arrive on the scene in a single, revolutionary
stroke. Gradually, and only with great effort and commitment, it develops out of the
concrete possibilities that happen to exist in a community at any given time. Given the viewpoint I have sketched, it is impossible to accept either of the two
standard answers to the question, "What is a business for?" [5:206-235]
The shareholder view defines the purpose of a business primarily in terms of
financial success, which is often expressed in terms of maximizing profit, shareholder
value, or return on investment. The stakeholder view says that the purpose of a
business is to operate in a way that balances the interests of all affected stakeholders
in each particular situation, even when this prevents the company from maximizing profits. Neither of these answers is convincing. The shareholder view, despite its continuing
popularity, does not reflect the facts. It is much too abstract. An abstraction is an idea
that concentrates on certain aspects of a reality while omitting others. The shareholder
view employs a way of thinking about individual businesses and the economy that is
abstract in the extreme. It tends to ignore or underplay any aspect which cannot be
described in terms of its effect on the bottom line. Because it treats human beings only
as consumers and the economic sphere as self-contained, the shareholder view fails to
appreciate fully the total social environment in which business operates, and it assigns
economic institutions and values greater importance than their actual roles warrant. In
short, the shareholder view is not concrete enough. It contains some of the truth, but not
enough to describe accurately what business is and does. As a result, it misses the mark
when it claims to know what the purpose of business is. The connection between business
and the common good ends up being little more than an afterthought. The stakeholder view has the merit of explicitly addressing the issue of the social
role and responsibility of business. But a little probing reveals that this view does not
offer much insight into the purpose of business. In general, people in this camp still
feel that the goal of business is to make the greatest possible profit within the limits
dictated by the need to balance stakeholder interests. In this respect, it does not differ
greatly from the shareholder view: the purpose of business is still defined in terms of
financial return to owners and investors. The balancing of stakeholder interests is often
treated in practice more as a necessity businesses have to put up with, not an essential
part of the purpose of business as such. Furthermore, the stakeholder view does not offer an adequate way of thinking about the
good of society as a whole. It assumes that the community benefits when all
self-interested parties agree to some sort of compromise in which each gets at least part
of what it wants. But this does not ensure that the end result really adds to the
comprehensive good of the community. The framework outlined here suggests an alternative to the shareholder and stakeholder
views about the purpose of business -- an alternative which is very much in keeping with
the general tenor of Catholic social teaching. From a more comprehensive perspective, it
is apparent that the purpose of business is to produce an economic standard of living that
reflects correctly prioritized values. To begin with, meeting people's wants and needs is
the reason why businesses exist at all. If there were no wants and needs that required
institutionalized cooperation for their satisfaction, there would be no businesses --
hence the truth of Peter Drucker's insistence that the purpose of business is to create a
customer [3:61]. Businesses serve the social order primarily by creating wealth and giving
rise to a standard of living that makes life, a whole way of life, possible for a
community. This is what business does naturally, and it is an essential function in every
society. On this point the position I am outlining bears a certain resemblance to the
shareholder view. Running a successful business that produces excellent goods and services
year after year is a very good thing. But human needs and wants are very diverse. A given standard of living may neglect
needs and wants that are harmonious with progress toward our ultimate goal, and it may
promote others that frustrate that progress. Businesses may be producing what people say
they want, but this does not guarantee that what people want is always truly good for them
either individually or as communities (think of pornography, cigarettes, sensational news
stories, violent video games, or $200 sneakers). Businesses need to provide not just any
standard of living, but one that furthers the emergence of the common good. The purpose of
the economic order is to provide a standard of living that not only meets people's basic
physical needs (such as food, clothing, shelter and medical care) but also facilitates
their pursuit of higher values, including the highest value of all, the ultimate goal of
union with God. This is where we have to part company with the shareholder view and its
overreliance on the invisible hand of the market. This kind of responsibility, which is different from the balancing of interests that
the stakeholder view recommends, raises the issue of values. Business leaders have a
responsibility to ensure that the goods and services they produce and the manner in which
they conduct business tend to support the comprehensive good of society. The difficulty of
performing this kind of evaluation varies from industry to industry and company to
company. In practically every case, however, exercising care for the common good demands
serious commitment, hard work, and ingenuity on the part of business people. Again, I am not talking about utopia. What I am talking about is the concrete problem
of trying to work gradually, by a process of trial and error, toward a standard of living
that is truly at the service of human beings, that makes it easier rather than harder for
communities to be cohesive and for individual human beings to develop their God-given
potential. As a rule, business people pride themselves on being problem-solvers. What this
approach asks is that they put their considerable talents to work not just for the
financial success of their shareholders or the interests of their stakeholders but for the
furtherance of what is highest and best in the human enterprise. From a Catholic
perspective, business, like every other facet of human activity, is called to care for the
common good, to promote progress and undo the effects of decline, and thereby to cooperate
with God's redemptive presence in the world. 1. Lonergan, B. Topics in Education, Volume 10. In Collected Works
of Bernard Lonergan, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993. 2. _________. Method in Theology, Second Edition, New York: Herder
and Herder, 1972. 3. Drucker, P. Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices.
New York: Harper and Row, 1974. 4. The Economist, June 24, 1995. 5. Naughton, M.J., H. Alford and B. Brady. "The Common Good and the
Purpose of the Firm: A Critique of the Shareholder and Stakeholder Models from the
Catholic Social Tradition." In Donahue, J. and M.T. Moser, R.C.S.J., eds.
Religion, Ethics and the Common Good, Volume 41. Twenty-third Annual
Publication of the College Theology Society, Mystic, Connecticut, 1996. 1. "Businesses do not have a natural propensity to do good. What is
natural for them is to minimise costs and maximize profits" [4:15]. 2. Peter Drucker dismisses it as "meaningless" [3:59].
Review of Business, Fall 1997
A publication of the College of Business Administration
St. John's University, New York
Copyright © 1997 St. John's University
Introduction
Christian Faith and Human Living
The Structure of the Common Good
The Purpose of Business
Conclusion
References:
Endnotes:
See also:
May 1997