Thomas Aquinas on Business and the Fulfillment of Human Needs

In the history of Western thought, Thomas Aquinas is certainly the most influential medieval thinker. His stance on moral questions generally and his views on socio-economic justice in particular provided normative orientation to subsequent Christian thinkers, and they still influence Catholic social teaching, as exemplified in the social encyclicals of the Church. For instance, the latest papal letter, Caritas in Veritate, which addresses the moral challenges to business in the age of globalization, draws heavily upon the moral arguments of Thomas Aquinas. In this chapter, we wish to make Thomas’s stance on the ethics of business intelligible to a readership neither steeped in medieval studies, nor familiar with specifically Christian views on morality