Source: First Things
There is a simple truth about business: individuals, not “the organization” or “the law,” make the moral decisions behind each and every action a business takes. In a piece just released by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, this vital point is highlighted: the unequivocal responsibility of the individual within the business context is at the center of every major business crisis and success we’ve experienced from the Wall Street mortgage meltdowns and the lingering echoes of Enron to inspiring entrepreneurs starting companies that cure cancer and bring essential services to poor families.
From this new reflection on the vocation of the business leader we learn that it is our individual aim that matters, not only the “system,” the environment, the perceived cultural or institutional constraints on our actions. No sum of laws and regulations prevent malignant intentions from achieving their goal. Personal responsibility, then, must be a part of any solution to corruption, power-mongering, and cheating in any aspect of human action, business included.
Wise business leaders, the document points out, create both profit and well being; “just wages for employees, just prices for customers and suppliers, just taxes for the community, and just returns for owners.”
It is true that sometimes we encounter an obsessive focus on financial profit to the exclusion of any other aspect in business; but this is a symptom, not a cause. The cause is the practice of separating our business from our faith and moral life. “Dividing the demands of one’s faith from one’s work in business is a fundamental error which contributes much to the damage done by business in our world today, including overwork to the detriment of family or spiritual life, an unhealthy attachment to power to the detriment of one’s own good, and the abuse of economic power in order to make even greater economic gains.”
Most business professionals know this and are searching for answers and ways out of that division of their lives. Thus the business community represents a fertile field for the practice of the Gospels and this is, I think, the aim of the Justice and Peace document.
It is, alas, common in our age to separate faith from business and promote a dualism between secular and holy.
Categories: Business/Marketing, CHRISTIANITY, Faith, Human values, Morality/moral values, Religion, Religious Values, Society