Catholic Social Teaching and Economic Life: language and power…..

Dr Anna RowlandsKing’s College, London

Overview

Caritas in

Veritate

Common Good

Social Justice

Some interpretations

in context

Caritas in Veritate

• Commemorating 1967 ‘On the Development of Peoples’

• Reading ‘authentic human development’: challenges and opportunities 2009

• Markets: from a logic of exchange, logic of duty, to a logic of gift, fraternity and communion

• From a market economy to a ‘civil’ market economy with a human face…

Logic of crisis

• Markets are best autonomous and self-regulating

• Markets drive towards wealth, governments re-distribute

• Moral activity is best understood outside the business/market transaction

• The state should be a neutral broker of interests in economic affairs

CST and markets

• Markets are moral agents, every stage of the process is a moral matter, manifests/denies justice

• Markets are relational spaces and organ of connected social body

• Markets cannot produce their own i) view of good ii) limits iii) hope

• Markets CAN serve but can’t define the common good

• The state is a moral not neutral actor in economic affairs, with particular responsibilities

Common Good

• The greatest good for the greatest number?

• Determined by majority interest/ballot box/opinion polls?

• A balance of interests determined by a government?

• What most people agree is good?

Common Good

• Is God…. Is never experienced completely in this life

• Can be reasoned about, is reached towards in communities of virtuous practice

• Is the true good/end of each person

• Is local, national, global• Is measured against the well-being

of the ‘least’• is the ‘common purpose’ of

persons, families, businesses, faith groups, charity, the state, markets etc… cannot be achieved by any alone

Justice with three facets in CST

Distributive

SocialCommutative

Distributive justice

• meeting of basic needs (food, shelter, care etc) and ensuring a fair distribution of the world’s goods and resources – including the fair distribution of justice itself. Business, politics and civil society are all part of that work of distribution.

Social Justice

• the freedom to contribute actively to the common good and to shape the laws to which I will be subject and the society in which I live. A just society is one in which there is greatest potential for me to act, participate and communicate as a social, political, economic, cultural, (religious?) person….

The role of the state in relation to the market?

• Healthy relationships + healthy institutions = State must do more than ‘balancing interests’

• The State has ‘moral’ tasks = humanise relationships

• A vital part of subsidiarity is humanising institutions by ensuring that the structures we create meet real needs, involve those whose lives are most affected by those institutions and that they are meaningfully accountable.

Commutative justice

• Justice for the Christian is ALWAYS a form of personal relationship

• This mirrors God’s justice as a person-to-person relationship which incarnates justice in DIGNITY and through CARITAS

• Many forms of justice/injustice happen in a personal and relational or ‘office holder’ context outside of ‘law’, these encounters are still governed by criteria for just conduct.

Equality, justice and participation

CAFOD concrete calls: case example

• Substantive justice – in prices, wages and rates of interest• Systems that foster economic relationships of mutuality and

trust – true economic renewal is viewed as dependent upon that.

• A new model for business to conceive of itself as a relational enterprise

• Dispersed forms of political authority, stretching from local to international levels, willing to hold markets to just practice, and to provide a service of redistribution that markets themselves cannot fully achieve.