Personalist Business Ethics and Humanistic Management: Insights from Jacques Maritain

Of the business ethics literature consulted for this article, only Melé (2009a, c) and Argandoña (1998) refer to Maritain’s work. Melé (2009c) observes that Maritain’s The person and the common good (1947/1972) “suggested that there is a ‘Thomistic Personalism’ mainly on account of Aquinas’s notion and meaning of person, which is expressive of dignity (S Th II–II, 32, 5). He understood ‘person’ as ‘an individual substance [subject] of rational nature’ (S Th I, 29, 4)” (p. 229) (“persona est rationalis naturae individua substantia”, originally Boethius’), and Maritain as a recent author who “especially stressed” the “concept of the common good” (p. 241). Argandoña (1998, p. 1100) acknowledges Maritain’s Humanismo integral (Integral humanism) and The person and the common good among Christian writers’ work with “interesting ideas” about the theory of the common good. In Spitzeck et al. (eds.)’s Humanism in business, Maritain’s work is only noticed by Melé (2009a) who quotes Maritain’s definition of humanism (p. 123), and lists him (p. 127) among authors who have developed a Judeo-Christian or “transcendent humanism” (along with Søren Kierkegaard, Gabriel Marcel, and Martin Buber). Zúñiga (2001) only mentions Maritain as one of the “realist personalists in the Christian anthropological tradition” (p. 163), along with Étienne Gilson and Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II). Even those authors explicitly writing within a Catholic tradition framework (e.g., Grassl and Habisch 2011; Sandelands 2009; Wishloff 2009) have not discussed Maritain’s contribution even though his influence on Second Vatican, particularly regarding the apostolate of laypeople and the role of human rights, and on Karol Wojtyla’s personalist work (e.g., Acevedo 2009) is well known. His friend Giovanni Battista Montini (Pope Paul VI), who admired him and even referred to him as his teacher, recognized his influence on his encyclical on economic justice (DeMarco 1991; Marrus 2004).

For more on humanism and its history, see Melé (2003, 2009a), Cherry (2009, from a secular standpoint), and de Lubac (1963/1995, from a Christian standpoint). Melé (2009a) also discusses recent anti-humanistic and post-humanistic trends such as structuralism and some ecologist positions such as “deep ecology” (pp. 124–126).

Radical idealistic, rationalistic, empiricist, and materialistic expressions of nonpersonalism, such as Hegel’s, Comte’s, Marx’s, and Nietzsche’s, have also been termed impersonalistic (Williams and Bengtsson 2009). Given this article’s scope, and for the sake of clarity, only the terms personalism and nonpersonalism are used throughout.

As pointed out by Melé et al. (2011, p. 2), the phrase “new humanistic synthesis” is used by Pope Benedict XVI’s Encyclical Letter Caritas in Veritate (June 29, 2009, n. 21), recently discussed by Grassl and Habisch (2011). Insofar as “the inviolable dignity of the human person and the transcendent value of natural moral norms”, “based on man’s creation ‘in the image of God’” (Gen 1:27) underlies it, this document (though also influenced by Augustinian theology, ibid.) has affinities with Maritainian personalism.

The following describes the economic view of the human being: “as a rational being, with self-interest in maximizing his or her utilities, generally led by desires for wealth, personal satisfaction, and to avoid unnecessary labor. Rational is understood as capacity for instrumental rationality, that is, for judging the comparative efficacy of a means to obtain an end” (Melé 2009b, p. 413).

In addition to the work of the influential social theorist Max Weber, also blamed for the value neutrality concerning ends with which business administration has tended to be approached (see, for example, Grassl and Habisch 2011, p. 37), University of Chicago theories in the tradition of Milton Friedman’s liberalism, such as “transaction cost economics, game theory, social network analysis, theories of social dilemmas” (Ghoshal 2005, p. 84), are also related to this brand of individualism.

In a recent interview, University of Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith has said: “Many, if not most, sociological theories operate with an emaciated view of the person running in the background, models that are grossly oversimplified. Persons are conceptualized as rational reward-maximizers or compliant norm-followers or essentially meaning-seekers or genetic-reproduction machines or whatever else. Often such views are one-dimensional and simplistic. They fail to even begin to portray the complexity and richness of human personal life” (Dreher 2011).

Even in those values-based management positions that claim to “apply ethical” values or principles, the ‘ethical’ basis is often ambiguous at best; relativistic at worst. The following quote illustrates this point: “Value choices always present dilemmas. A decision to downsize, which undermines the dignity of the workforce and the organization’s culture but increases efficiency, short-term profits, and stockholder returns, is grounded in a conflict between moral and economic choices. There are no readily accepted guidelines for resolving value dilemmas, which vary widely from organization to organization with the goals, priorities, and relative decision freedom of senior managers. How managers resolve these dilemmas defines the values and performance of the organization and many of society’s values as well” (Anderson 1997, p. 27).

Donaldson, whose Corporations and morality (1982) develops the notion of business-society contract, pointedly remarks that the “social contract justifies corporations as productive organizations, not as corporations”; i.e., the social contract “has fallen short of a full moral comprehension of corporations” (p. 54, emphasis added).

For more on the relationship between philosophy and the special sciences, see Alzola (2011), Buchholz and Rosenthal (2008), Hartman (2011), Karakas (2010), Smith (2010), Victor and Stephens (1994), Wishloff (2009), and Zúñiga (2001).

This explains why some thinkers have been called “personalists” but, clearly, are not (particularly from a Maritainian personalism standpoint); for instance, Friedrich Nietzsche and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (Maritain 1947/1972, p. 13).

Rather than as “one school”, Maritain refers to personalism as primarily a “current”, a “concept”, “an aspiration”, or “a reaction against both totalitarian and individualistic errors” (1947/1972, p. 12). With many voices that have enriched it and kept it vibrant, though, personalism has sound philosophical foundations as will be outlined shortly. Some distinguished personalist (though not necessarily in the Maritainian sense) philosophers from recent centuries are: Emmanuel Mounier, Gabriel Marcel, Max Scheler, Edith Stein, Martin Buber, Maurice Blondel, Étienne Gilson, Yves Simon, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Robert Spaemann, Dietrich von Hildebrand and Karol Wojtyła. Although some of this work has been addressed in the fields of economics and business ethics (e.g., Babiuch-Luxmoore 1999; Bouckaert 1999; Finn 2003; Melé 2003, 2009a, c; O’Boyle 2003; Puel 1999; Sandelands 2009; Whetstone 2002; Wishloff 2009; Zúñiga 2001), more research is necessary as presently argued. According to Williams and Bengtsson (2009), the term personalism originated “in Germany, where ‘der Personalismus’ was first used by F. D. E. Schleiermacher (1768–1834) in his book Über die Religion in 1799”. For an overview of personalism and personalist philosophers, see Melé (2009c); for more detail, including historical and linguistic aspects, see Williams and Bengtsson (2009) and Zúñiga (2001).

There have also been a few attempts to approach the natural sciences from a personalistic standpoint (e.g., the physical chemist and philosopher of science Polanyi 1958).

Unless otherwise noted, the quotes in this section are from Maritain’s works (see References).

“[The doctrine of the purification of the means] insists first and foremost on the positive will to raise up means not only good in general, but truly proportionate to their end, truly bearing on them the stamp and imprint of their end: means in which that very justice which pertains to the essence of the common good and that very sanctification of secular life which pertains to its perfection shall be embodied” (1951a, p. 63; see also 1947/1972, pp. 62ff). Besides, “the premises of philosophy are independent of theology, being those primary truths which are self-evident to the understanding, whereas the premises of theology are the truths revealed by God” (1931/2005, p. 84).

“The [intellectual] intuition of being is not only, like the reality of the world and of things, the absolutely primary foundation of philosophy. It is the absolutely primary principle of philosophy (when the latter is able to be totally faithful to itself and achieve all of its dimensions)” (1966/1968, p. 111; see also 1948/1966, pp. 19ff, 1952b, Chap. III). Metaphysics “proceeds purely by way of conceptual and rational knowledge. Like all rational knowledge it presupposes sense experience; and insofar as it is metaphysics, it implies the intellectual intuition of being qua being” (1952b, p. 29). According to Maritain, “the concept of existence cannot be detached from the concept of essence” (1948/1966, p. 25). These quotes already highlight some important differences between Maritainian personalism and, on the other hand, materialism, empiricism, idealism, rationalism, and (non-Thomistic) existentialism.

“When Aristotle writes that he who escapes social life is either a beast or a god (Politics, 1, 2, 1253 a 29), he certainly intends to reject any kind of solitary life […]” (1960/1964, p. 42).

The term personality (as well as personhood, person, and personal) is used throughout this article in the Maritainian personalism sense explained in this section, and not as distinctive individual mental and behavioral traits as commonly now understood in the field of (scientific) psychology. Conversely, the term psychology is used as commonly understood nowadays; the only exception, in the Thomistic sense as the study of the soul and its properties, occurs in the next paragraph.

Melé’s (2009c) explanation of this distinction, consistent with but different from Maritain’s, is as follows: “Personalism differs from Individualism. The person is not seen as having an isolated existence, united to others only by social contracts. On the contrary, the person is seen as a social being with intrinsic relationships with others and an interdependent existence” (p. 229).

Substance is a “thing or nature whose property is to exist by itself, or in virtue of itself (per se) and not in another thing” (1931/2005, p. 163).

The “persona” is a “whole which subsists and exists in virtue of the very subsistence and existence of its spiritual soul, and acts by setting itself its own ends […]. Only the person is free; only the person possesses, in the full sense of these words, inwardness and subjectivity […]” (1948/1966, p. 68).

As Maritain acknowledges, the notion of “natural law” is inherited from Greek, Roman, and medieval Christian thought (1950/2001). “By the very virtue of human nature” the natural law is, ontologically, “an order or a disposition which human reason can discover and according to which the human will must act in order to attune itself to the essential and necessary ends of the human being. The unwritten law, or natural law, is nothing more than that” (1951a, p. 86).

Maritain’s distinction between the way the moral law is known and moral philosophy merits further explanation. Knowledge through connaturality is “a kind of knowledge which is produced in the intellect but not by virtue of conceptual connections and by way of demonstration” (1951b/2001, p. 13, see also, 1952b, Chap. III; Aquinas, Summa Theologica 2a2ae, 45, 2). “In this knowledge through union or inclination, connaturality or congeniality, the intellect is at play not alone, but together with affective inclinations and the dispositions of the will and is guided and directed by them” (1951b/2001, p. 15). Moreover, this knowledge “plays an immense part in human existence, especially in that knowing of the singular which comes about in everyday life and in our relationship of person to person” (pp. 15–16). Accordingly, in a free decision, “[the human being] takes into account, not only all that he possesses of moral science and factual information, and which is manifested to him in concepts and notions, but also all the secret elements of evaluation which depend on what he is, and which are known to him through inclination, through his own actual propensities and his own virtues” (pp. 19–20). Moral philosophy, on the other hand, is “reflective knowledge […]. The moral law was discovered by men before the existence of any moral philosophy. Moral philosophy has critically to analyze and rationally to elucidate moral standards and rules of conduct whose validity was previously discovered in an undemonstrable manner, and in a non-conceptual manner, non-rational way; it has also to clear them, as far as possible, from the adventitious outgrowths or deviations which may have developed by reason of the coarseness of our nature and the accidents of social evolution” (p. 22)

For more on natural rights, classified as rights of the human person, rights of the civic person, and rights of the working person, see Maritain (1943b/2001, pp. 75–98, see also, 1951a). Of particular interest to business ethics, the latter category includes the following: “The right freely to choose his work; the right freely to form vocational groups or trade-unions, the right of the worker to be considered socially as an adult; the right of economic groups (trade-unions and working communities) and other social groups to freedom and autonomy; the right to a just wage, the right to work, and wherever and associative system can be substituted for the wage system, the right to joint ownership and joint management of the enterprise and to the ‘worker’s title’; the right to relief, unemployment insurance, sick benefits, and social security; the right to have a part, free of charge, depending on the possibilities of the community, in the elementary goods, both material and spiritual, of civilization” (1943b/2001, p. 98).

Maritain’s “more phenomenological and historical understanding of natural moral law” is his main contribution to Thomistic natural law thought (Proietti 2009, pp. 115–116; see also, Puel 1999).

Although in some cases they may be false or, at least, questionable. Attempts to explain and justify altruistic behavior (e.g., risking one’s life to help a stranger) on purely egoistic grounds, for example, have been questioned (Bowie 1991).

Maritain’s discussion on this fundamental matter evidences the Thomistic (and Aristotelian) roots of his thought. In contrast with positivism on the one hand (e.g., Comte), and pure intellectualism or idealism (e.g., Hegel) on the other, Maritain states that philosophy’s “formal principles are the first principles apprehended in the concept of being, whose cogency consists wholly in their evidence for the intellect, and […] its [philosophy’s] matter is experience, and its facts the simplest and most obvious facts—the starting-point from which it rises to the causes and grounds which constitute the ultimate explanation” (1931/2005, p. 96).

“A sound philosophy can therefore dispense with the particular system of scientific explanations of which it makes use in accordance with the state of science at a particular epoch, and if that system were one day proved to be false the truth of that philosophy would not be affected. Only its language and its illustrations with which it clothed its truths would require modification” (1931/2005, p. 78).

“[…] a period in the history of human culture in which philosophy is not allowed her rightful suzerainty over the sciences as scientia rectrix (St. Thomas, Metaphysics, Introduction) inevitably ends in a condition of intellectual chaos and a general weakening of the reasoning faculty” (1931/2005, p. 75).

See Footnote 12.

Actually, Maritain’s very intellectual life (see McInerny 2003; Schall 1998), in humble but unflinching commitment to the truth, is in itself inspiring to academics and researchers of all fields. In the Preface to one of his final books (he was 84 at the time), The Peasant of the Garonne: An old layman questions himself about the present time (1966/1968), Maritain states: “I will merely say that in the expression ‘an old layman’ the word ‘old’ has a twofold meaning: it says that the author is an octogenarian, and that he is an inveterate layman. […] A peasant of the Danube—or of the Garonne—is, as anyone who has read La Fontaine knows, a man who puts his foot in his mouth, or who calls a spade a spade. This is what, in all modesty, and not without fearing to be unequal to the task (less easy, to be sure, than one might believe), I would like to attempt.” In an earlier work, he says “the philosopher, just because the object of his studies is the most sublime, should personally be the humblest of students, a humility, however, which should not prevent his defending, as it is his duty to do, the sovereign dignity of wisdom as the queen of sciences” (1931/2005, p. 69).

For more on this distinction, see Hartman (2011, p. 7) and Giovanola (2009). See, also, footnotes 35 and 37 for Maritain’s observations on happiness.

In his Moral philosophy (1960/1964), Maritain also criticizes the following humanistic but nonpersonalistic teachings that have left their mark on the history of ethics: Hegelian idealism, Marxist dialectical materialism, and Comte’s positivism (three “anthropocentric” philosophers “whose work has seriously disorganized moral knowledge, not only among philosophers but also in broad sectors of the common conscience”, p. 353), Sartre’s atheistic existentialism, and Dewey’s “absolute” naturalism (pp. 396ff), among others (see also, his Three reformers (1929/1970) for critiques of Descartes’ and Rousseau’s thought, and The range of reason (1952b) for critiques of positivism, materialism, determinism, atheistic existentialism, and other nonpersonalistic trends). Not to be confused with other “varieties of existentialisms”, Maritain’s theistic existentialism is based on Thomas Aquinas’, the “only” “authentic existentialism” because it “affirm[s] the primacy of existence, but as implying and preserving essences or natures and as manifesting the supreme victory of the intellect and intelligibility” (1948/1966, pp. 1, 3).

For example, Melé (2009c); Williams and Bengtsson (2009). In many ways this is accurate, particularly given its categorical imperative’s recognition of the intrinsic worth of human beings. Strictly following Maritain’s personalism, however, there are some differences, as will be seen shortly.

“It is impossible for Aristotelian ethics to escape from the embrace of the Self, from a kind of transcendental egoism. Within the moral perspective of Happiness as the supreme Good, I cannot deliver myself, I can never be delivered of myself, I can never be freed from my egoistical love of myself. And yet in the end it is just such a deliverance that we long for.[…] By a curious paradox, it happens that all its principles are true (in particular, the very principle of eudemonism is true, in the sense that Happiness is the last subjective End of human life, or the last end relative to the human subject; Aristotle’s error was in not going further—and could he, with only the weapons of philosophical reason?).[…] True as they are (but incomplete), […] they are incapable of stirring his [man’s] aspirations and his profoundest hopes, which go beyond rational and reasonable happiness, incapable of probing the recesses of his ego and the world of the irrational with its impulses toward death and the void. In a word, what is infinite in man has been forgotten. The vanitas vanitatum of the Preacher is the reverse side of Aristotelian eudemonism” (Maritain 1960/1964, pp. 49–50). Maritain’s concerns were not unwarranted. The ‘objectivist’ Ayn Rand, claiming Aristotelian influence, developed a ‘rational egoism’ whose philosophical flaws and disturbing practical implications have been much discussed (e.g., DeMarco 2004a; Jacobs 2009). This fact, however, has not kept her novels praising extreme individualism, The fountainhead (1943) and Atlas shrugged (1957), from being best-sellers.

As evident from the section on Maritainian personalism, Aristotle’s notion of man is not equivalent to Maritain’s notion of human person. This difference may help to explain why viewing some human beings as inferior (e.g., slaves and women) is allowed by the Aristotelian framework, but clearly incompatible with Maritain’s personalism.

“[…] the pursuit of happiness here on earth is the pursuit, not of material advantages, but of moral righteousness, of the strength and perfection of the soul, with the material and social conditions thereby implied” (Maritain 1943b/2001, p. 78). Elsewhere, Maritain observes that happiness consists of “the full achievement or perfect fulfillment of the being and powers of the subject and of the desires rooted in his nature” (1960/1964, p. 99).

Kant “regarded the thing-in-itself as wholly unknowable” (Maritain 1931/2005, p. 169ff). “…since it is only as intelligence that he is his proper self (being as man only appearance of himself), he knows that those laws apply to him directly and categorically, so that that to which inclinations and impulses and hence the entire nature of the world of sense incite him cannot in the least impair the laws of his volition as an intelligence. He does not even hold himself responsible for these inclinations and impulses or attribute them to his proper self, i.e., his will, […]” (Kant 1785/1959, p. 77).

Perhaps its best known formulation is: “For all rational beings stand under the law that each of them should treat himself and all others never merely as means but in every case also as an end in himself” (Kant 1785/1959, p. 52).

According to Wojtyla (1960/1993, p. 41), “in its negative aspect, [the personalistic norm] states that the person is the kind of good which does not admit of use and cannot be treated as an object of use and as such the means to an end. In its positive form the personalistic norm confirms this: the person is a good toward which the only proper and adequate attitude is love”.

Although perhaps somewhat extreme (after all, consequential questions, though neither the sole nor determining dimension in ethics, are not overlooked by prudence; see Melé 2010), Maritain’s conclusion that “moral philosophy has [no] important lesson to learn from the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill” (1960/1964, p. 94) is not altogether unwarranted. A modern expression of utilitarianism, Peter Singer’s with its emphasis on “quality of life” (DeMarco 2004b; Melé 2009a, p. 125), underlines the shortcomings identified by Maritain.

Enron, for instance, was well known for its ‘socially responsible’ practices such as corporate philanthropy, environmental leadership, code of ethics, and publication of a triple bottom line report (Vogel 2005, pp. 38–39).