ABSTRACT

Man works . . . to provide for the needs of his family, his community, his nation, and ultimately all humanity . . . [H]e collaborates in the work of his fellow employees, and in the work of suppliers and in the customers’ use of goods, in a progressively expanding chain of solidarity. 7

Efforts to gain profits that do not expand the “work and wealth of society” in this way, but rather depend on “illicit exploitation, speculation, or the breaking of solidarity among working people,” violate the fundamental social function of business: “Riches fulfill their function of service to man when they are destined to produce benefits for others and for society” (ibid.: 392). Thus, businesses that pursue profits at the expense of other stakeholders in fact invalidate their right to own and control productive resources, as this right is predicated on using them to serve the common good. Many of the specific dimensions of corporate behavior taken to be integral parts of social responsibility also relate closely to ideas in Catholic social thought. For example, the tenet that companies should produce safe and useful products corresponds to the idea that businesses can and should contribute to the common good by creating new products that meet people’s needs in better ways:

A person who produces something other than for his own use generally does so in order that others may use it after they have paid a just price . . . It is precisely the ability to foresee both the needs of others and the combinations of productive factors most adapted to satisfying those needs that constitutes [an] important source of wealth in modern society.