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Philosophy of Management
Published in: Philosophy of Management 1/2022

21-06-2021

Why Catholic Social Thought is not a Theory (and How that Has Preserved Scholarly Debate)

Author: Matthias P. Hühn

Published in: Philosophy of Management | Issue 1/2022

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Abstract

CST is widely disregarded in the academic and public discourse. This essay argues that this is the case for two related reasons. Firstly, CST is based on the pre-Enlightenment approach to moral philosophy, virtue ethics, while the mainstream in business ethics favours the rule-based approaches consequentialism and deontology and their variants. Secondly, mainstream approaches also have adopted a positivist epistemology where theories represent the Truth that must not be questioned: they have become ideologies. This paper argues that CST, mainly through the virtue ethical doctrine of the mean, is saved from having become an ideology and is much closer to the ideal of science as a self-questioning system than the mainstream in business ethics. This essay explains this counter-intuitive conclusion by tracing the history of CST and embedding it in an epistemic discussion and then suggesting what business ethics could take from CST to regain the all-important discursiveness it once had.
previous article Is Relationality Always Other-Oriented? Adam Smith, Catholic Social Teaching, and Civil Economy
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Footnotes
1
Some observers make a difference between Catholic Social Teaching and Catholic Social Thought . For the purposes of this paper I will not enter into a debate whether and what the differences are and will use the acronym to refer to both as has been done before (see for instance Wolcott 2018: 57).
 
2
I will follow Hannah Arendt’s (1973: 457) rather non-technical but succinct definition that an ideology is the serious and ridiculous belief to have the Truth by having “found the key to history or the solution to the riddles of the universe”. The precondition for achieving ideological purity is “the killing of man’s individuality” (454) to achieve what she calls “mass atomization”. Leo’s and Arendt’s ideas are identical in many ways because they both have the individual with a soul as the starting point of their ideas and Arendt contrasts this view with Himmler’s “slave-like souls” (457).
 
3
I will use person and individual interchangeably; person is the preferred technical term used by CST scholars while individual is the term used in the social sciences. Leo and John Paul II used both and sometimes, to stress the difference between collectivism and Catholicism, combined them as “individual person” (1891: 13; 1991: 13).
 
4
Aeterni Patris makes Thomism the philosophical base of the Catholic Church and St Thomas Aquinas (ST II, Q64) affirms Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean.
 
5
Just like in current business ethics scholarship on the corporation, the State is conceptualised as separate entity or as a fictitious collective person or very often as some vague mixture of both. For an in-depth debate on the issue see David Rönnegard & Manuel Velasquez 2017).
 
6
I also read a qualification of Kant’s dictum “Whatever has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; on the other hand, whatever is above all price, and therefore admits of no equivalent, has a dignity.”
 
7
The popes often use the imprecise term ‘capitalism’ (there is no theory of capitalism other than that offered by Marxist) and that injects an amount of uncertainty.
 
8
Marta Rocchi and David Thunder (2017) offer a very good review of MacIntyre and his attitude towards the financial service industry.
 
9
The debate in the philosophy of sciences arguably shifted from the natural sciences to especially economics in the 1930. Popper in particular tried to apply falsificationism - the MSRP is often called sophisticated falsificationism - to economics. I follow, just like Adam Smith (Hühn 2018), the Stoic structure: Natural philosophy, moral philosophy, logic. Everything to do with humans falls under moral philosophy.
 
10
Darwin’s Theory of Evolution only explains and Newton’s Theory of Gravitation only predicts so the symmetry hypothesis is another argument against positivism.
 
11
Wildenauer at least reaches the surface of one of many arguments that giving non-physical entities (ideas) physicality is wrong, but he, like a whole generation of business ethicists, refuses to even take the first analytic step. An individual can act without an organisation, but the organisation cannot act without an individual. In philosophy this syllogism alone destroys the case for collective/corporate personhood (Downie 1969).
 
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Metadata
Title
Why Catholic Social Thought is not a Theory (and How that Has Preserved Scholarly Debate)
Author
Matthias P. Hühn
Publication date
21-06-2021
Publisher
Springer International Publishing
Published in
Philosophy of Management / Issue 1/2022
Print ISSN: 1740-3812
Electronic ISSN: 2052-9597
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s40926-021-00178-w

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