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The Bedrock of Business Ethics
I studied ethics for years in seminary and represent a tradition that has done some serious thinking on the subject. Even so, what is called “ethics” in many business schools cannot be found in Saint Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica. “Business ethics” as it is usually taught is not ethics in any traditional sense but an ideology committed to “social justice” and other fuzzy abstractions that, to my way of thinking, conflict with the Ten Commandments.How Christianity Created Capitalism
- Capitalism, it is usually assumed, flowered around the same time as the Enlightenment–the eighteenth century–and, like the Enlightenment, entailed a diminution of organized religion. In fact
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In the Meadow That Is Called Runnymede
Lord Acton, the great historian of freedom, understood that “liberty is the delicate fruit of a mature civilization.” The liberty of which he spoke embraced a broad scope of human freedom, including dimensions political, intellectual, economic, and, especially, religious. The civilization of which he spoke was the West, whose heritage of Greek philosophy, Roman law, and Christian faith indelibly marked it and inexorably pushed it toward the full panoply of liberties we enjoy today and to which the rest of the world looks.Toward Responsible Stewardship
What does Christianity teach about the place of the environment in political and personal ethics? I can think of no clearer statement than that provided by Pope John Paul II in his 1991 Encyclical Letter Centesimus Annus. In one passage, the pope addresses environmental issues by saying that ecological problems result when “man consumes the resources of the earth and his own life in an excessive and disordered way.The Ecological Garden
... the Lord formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, ... took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till and keep it. (Gen. 2:7-8, 15 nrsv)Can Christian Theology Let the Trees Do the Talking?
In 1958, an eighty-seven-year-old Stoney Indian by the name of Walking Buffalo spoke to an audience in London, England. The question before him that day was something like: “Why, in the end, could white Americans and native Americans not get along?” He gave this extraordinary answer:Keeping Stable the Fabric of the World
In 1997 the Media Research Center surveyed prime-time television’s portrayal of the businessman. The results, while not surprising, were sobering. The study found that, on television, businessmen committed far more crimes (29.2 percent) than those in all other occupations, including career criminals (9.7 percent). Overall, businessmen were shown making a contribution to society 25 percent of the time, but they cheated to get ahead almost 30 percent.The Heritage of the Spanish Scholastics
The Yucatan was the center point of one of the most im- portant moral debates in history. It can be summarized in the title of the book, In Defense of the Indians: The Defense of the Most Reverend Lord, Don Fray Bartolome de Las Casas, of the Order of Preachers, Late Bishop of Chiapa, Against the Persecutors and Slanderers of the Peoples of the New World Discovered Across the Seas.On the Universal Destination of Material Goods
From the very first pages of the Book of Genesis it is clear that all creation is ultimately a gift from God and that man was created to be his steward of this creation for the benefit of all God’s children. As captured in Gaudium et Spes, a Vatican II document, “God intended the earth with everything contained in it for the use of all human beings and peoples.The Challenge of International Debt Relief
Proponents of third-world debt relief are lobbying for complete forgiveness of loans to poor countries in or by the year 2000. Some go on to argue that the citizens of these nations do not even owe the debt because it was borrowed by past corrupt governments for political and military purposes. All point out the moral issues behind debt relief, for such nations are unable to spend enough on education, health care, welfare reform, and infrastructure because they are saddled with the oppressive burden of large external debt.Modern misconceptions about monopoly
Much of the modern-day concern about the existence of monopolies is woefully misdirected. The government’s current assault against Microsoft provides good evidence of a very misinformed understanding about what constitutes a detrimental monopoly. As D. T. Armentano has pointed out in connection to the case, “[Microsoft] earned its market position by innovating a user-friendly operating system at minimal cost to the consumer….
Peace and Trade, Not Sanctions, Will Change Iraq
The Vatican has come under pressure from the United States to shun Iraq, the birthplace of the Prophet Abraham, during the travels of Pope John Paul II. The State Department is reportedly concerned that the pope’s scheduled December visit will be manipulated by Saddam Hussein “for political purposes.” No doubt. There are few heads of state anywhere whose political motivations are more suspect than Saddam’s; meanwhile, the pope’s motivations are unquestionably religious and humanitarian.