Ethics and Economics: Towards a New Humanistic Synthesis for Business

Kurzfassung/Abstract

Where social encyclicals have traditionally justified policy proposals by natural law, revelation, or theological reasoning, Caritas in veritate gives priority to economic arguments. The encyclical defines the framework for a new business ethics which appreciates allocative and distributive efficiency, and thus both markets and institutions as improving the human condition, but locates their source and reason outside the economic sphere. It places a clear accent on the ontological connectedness of the economic and ethical dimensions of human action. It is the proper and thus normative ordering of means towards the end of integral human development that allows mankind to leave a vicious circle of consumerism and enter a virtuous circle that applies the creativity fostered by markets.