Religion and Business Ethics
Martin Calkins
Today’s business ethics is, in part, the product of religious leaders’ steadfast interest in business’s relationship to certain social issues. In the West, these leaders represent Judaism, Roman Catholicism, and Protestantism.
Judaism, the root of Christianity, provided business ethics with an operative set of norms. These norms, the most prominent being the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:1–17), are an admixture of judgment (mishpat) and loving kindness (hesed) and are reflective of God’s covenant with the Israelites. They continue to influence and regulate the behavior of contemporary businesses as the basis of the ‘‘blue laws’’ that regulate business hours (‘‘Remember the sab bath day, and keep it holy’’), as the source of the idea that transactions should involve proper entitlement (‘‘You shall not steal’’), and as the basis for the expectation of truth telling in negotiations (‘‘You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor’’).
Coming out of this tradition, Christians believe that Jesus Christ fulfilled (‘‘I have come not to abolish but to fulfill,’’ Matthew 5:17) and reinterpreted (‘‘the sabbath was made for hu mankind, and not humankind for the sabbath,’’ Mark 2:27) Jewish law. The New Testament is replete with examples of how Jesus interpreted the law to pertain to business transactions and the economy. In it, Jesus addresses business’s relationship to worship (the story involving the money changers in the Temple, Matthew 21:12–13 and John 2:14–16), he calls into question the relationship of work to wages (the story of the vineyard laborers, Matthew 20:1–16), he considers the worthiness of risk taking and enterprise (the parable of the talents, Matthew 25:14–30), and he recognizes the propriety of tax payment (in encouraging Jews to pay the taxes due Caesar, Matthew 22:20–1). Scripture also relates how, prior to his arrest and conviction, Jesus himself was an object of barter in being sold by a traitorous disciple (see the story of Judas’s blood money, Matthew 27:3–8).
Early Christian leaders tried to emulate Jesus by carrying on his concern for the justice of economic transactions, especially as they applied to the needy. St. Paul, for one, emphasized the idea of labor as a form of worship; that is, a way by which we might participate in creation and the building up of God’s Kingdom. Paul referred to early Christian disciples as ones who ‘‘work with me in Christ Jesus’’ (Romans 16:3) and repeatedly encouraged his audiences to excel in ‘‘the work of the Lord’’ (1 Corinthians 15:58).
Later, St. Ambrose and St. Augustine considered different aspects of labor; in particular, the link between work and entitlements. St. Ambrose’s (333–97) theistic property ethic, for example, held that certain entitlements are part of our birthright. He argued that since we share a common natural poverty at birth and death, we have a justified claim to nature’s wealth producing resources. The wealthy, he claimed, because they have resources in abundance, have a duty to make restitution to the needy among us who have been deprived of this birthright.
Following Ambrose, St. Augustine (354–430) asserted that the poor are the result of Adam’s Fall and original sin (Genesis 3). The poor are poor, he argued, because the propertied few have denied them access to the wealth that belongs to all. In paradise, Augustine reasoned, Adam was gifted with the wisdom to fulfill God’s created order and was able to recognize that society should hold resources in common. After the Fall, however, attempts to live according to a system of common ownership were undermined as significant numbers of people insisted on remaining attached to an ‘‘earthly city’’ and a life regulated by personal and selfish desires.
Centuries after Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) considered the theological and philosophical implications associated with com mutative justice (the justice between two equals in regard to private transactions) and distributive justice (the rendering of rewards according to proportion). Thomas’s Aristotelian and Augustinian based virtue theory, for example, held that justice to be a personal characteristic of habitual action that enables people to flourish in accord with God’s plan. This Thomistic theory became the cornerstone of most Christian teaching for the following three hundred years.
With the Protestant Reformation, however, Christian ethics bifurcated into two branches: (1) a Protestant branch that sought to be prophetic and capable of discerning the moral status of current practices and (2) a Roman Catholic branch that sought to prescribe and proscribe specific acts. The difference between the two approaches is evident in Max Weber’s and Pope Leo XIII’s writings on the economy.
Max Weber (1864–1920) is known for his commentary on the link between Protestantism and capitalism. His larger body of work, how ever, described the evolution of the modern institutional and organizational order of ‘‘rational bourgeois capitalism’’ and the psycho logical conditions that made possible the development of large scale business enterprises. As part of his inquiry, he investigated the connections between religious affiliation and social stratification and posited that something integral to Protestantism must have had some thing to do with the success of German business leaders. He then looked to the four principal forms of ascetic Protestantism (Calvinism, Piet ism, Methodism, and the sects growing out of the Baptist movement) and argued that the development of an economic spirit (an ethos attaching to an economic system) is likely sourced in (1) Luther’s notions of ‘‘the call’’ and the moral justification of worldly activity and (2) Calvin’s spirit of Christian asceticism and notion of a relationship between prosperity and salvation.
Although the accuracy of his work is being questioned at present, Weber’s provocative thesis impelled subsequent Protestant educators (Reinhold Niebuhr, John Howard Yoder, and others) to offer different sorts of important and influential commentaries on capitalism. Yoder’s notion of ‘‘servant strength,’’ for example, called into question the ethics of power that underlies the connections that Weber observed.
During and after the Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church remained immersed in casuistry and scholasticism. In the nineteenth century it began to apply these methodologies to issues associated with capitalist economies. Due to the work of German speaking Catholics such as Adam Mu¨ ller (1779–1829), Franz Von Baader (1765–1841), Adolph Kolping (1813–65), and Wilhelm von Ketteler (1811–77), the church began to consider the issue of worker alienation and the social suffering that attended to the transition from a feudal crafts system to a modern industrial order. Ketteler, in particular, was influential in an ability to move Pope Leo XIII (papacy: 1878–1903) to promulgate Rerum Novarum (The Condition of Labor, 1891), the Catholic Church’s first major social encyclical on the economy. Rerum Novarum, which considered the dignity of labor, the rights and just wages of workers, and workmen’s associations, has been celebrated subsequently in a number of anniversary encyclicals, the most recent being Pope John Paul II’s Centesimus Annus (On the Hundredth Anniversary of Rerum Novarum, 1991).
In the US, prominent Catholic lay and clerical leaders who addressed economic and business concerns in the recent past include Orestes Brownson (1803–76), Dorothy Day (1897– 1980), Peter Dietz (1878–1947), and John A. Ryan (1869–1945). In addition, in the twentieth century, the US Catholic Bishops produced two major pieces on the economy: The Pastoral Letter of 1919 and Economic Justice for All (1986), the latter being a collaborative and inclusive venture that addressed a broad sweep of economic issues with particular attention paid to the economic ally needy.
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