Profitability in enterprise must consider both human dimensions

In my previous column on business and virtue, I employed the metaphor of a garden and its need for productive care, likening it to enterprise. The metaphor of a garden, ordinarily made possible by private property, raises the question of flourishing — or, as it is called in the field of economics, profit. For a garden to flourish requires cultivation, much as a business does.
 
Without stewardship, chaos results because people are no longer able to place value on the land.
 
Another way of speaking about flourishing is to speak of profit. To “make a profit” is to achieve gain, rather than loss, from an economic activity. Profits are often considered morally suspect. But in a strict sense, to profit only means to avoid making a loss. In trade, it is valuable to discover tangible evidence that one’s activities have netted a gain for everyone by rendering a benefit over a previous circumstance. To profit is to produce a harvest worth more than the effort that went into planting it. Put simply, profit is “an indication that a business is functioning well,” as Pope St. John Paul II said in Centesimus Annus (35).

In any economic exchange, two things must be harmonized. The first is the subjective value to the consumer: what he or she sees as desirable, useful, or needed. This is the level of utility — an important and undeniable economic truth, but not the whole truth. This is parallel to the dynamic that comes into play when the message of Christ is proposed to someone who then comes to see that his needs are met by an acceptance of His message.
 
This second reality comes into play simultaneously with the first. The one doing the trading is a human person, and while the economic truth about human conditions is true, it is not the whole truth. Something more needs to be taken into consideration, something that encompasses a fuller understanding of the human person. To reiterate: the subjective dimension is true and useful for calculation, but it is not everything about who the human person is. This is what constitutes virtue in business: when the whole person, and not just their economic dimension, is considered.

Because commerce involves people interacting, there is a psychological profit associated with every economic action. People trade with one another with the expectation that they will be better off than before. Otherwise, why trade in the first place? It is the same with investing—of which the cultivation of a field, as we see in in various parables, might be considered an example. All of us want to back efforts that are successful in some way. This is as true of a market economy as it is of the cultivating of a field or garden.
 
Even efforts of evangelization might be said to contain the hope of spiritual profitability, as we see in Jesus’ metaphor of the laborers and the harvest in Matthew 9:37-38. This creative and productive dynamic, when cultivated into a habit, can encourage a tendency to reward or affirm decisions that are consistent with the prudent and virtuous use of resources and accomplishing goals set forth. Humans depend on profitability to live better; such a creative dynamic can help to bring about this abundance.

The core lesson of the Parable of the Sower relates to the receptivity of the human heart to the offer of grace, a willingness to listen, to learn, and to receive. The desire to embrace truth when we find it is the challenge, and it is vital to know what enables or disables that capacity.
 
This is the second part of a two-part series. The first part appeared in our February 2023 issue.