Q: The main goal of a business is to successfully create, market, and sell a product or service for profit. How does a Catholic business school navigate the tension between teaching its students to be effective businesspeople, and discouraging cynical and self-serving practices like exploiting the vices of consumers?
Naughton: A Catholic business education is a formation in “practical wisdom,” an education that engages students in the utilization of highly effective means toward morally good ends. It is an education in both the how and the why of business.
If our students are not effective in the “how,” they can go broke; but if they are not thoughtful on the “why,” they can become corrupt.
One of the most powerful insights in Catholic social teaching comes from John Paul II’s 1981 encyclical letter on work, “Laborem Excercens.” He explains that work is not only about the effective changes on products and services, but more profoundly the change work has on the person.
As John Ruskin put it, “The highest reward [or punishment] for man’s toil is not what he gets from it, but what he becomes by it.”
[blockquote]Q: The main goal of a business is to successfully create, market, and sell a product or service for profit.[/blockquote]
Allowing this statement within the question to stand is allowing the interlocutor to frame the question. Always something to beware of. The statement could better be stated by leaving off the final two words: [i]for profit[/i]. If the main goal is to successfully sell a product or service, profit is not important. “Successfully” implies that enough money will be taken in to cover overhead, including salaries and provide reasonably for the future. By inserting “for profit” into the goal, it becomes the whole goal, which we have seen in too many American businesses. And in fact, that the profit is for stockholders, people who are often extrinsic to everything about the business except money. As stated in the quote, this definition of the purpose of business could be summed up as “to indulge greed”. I don’t think that need be the purpose of any business, and certainly shouldn’t be encouraged, either by schools or government, which has the power of the sword to reward virtue and restrain vice.