Morals and economic life. The Compendium considers Xxxx XX’s Quadragesimo anno and the pastoral constitution of Vatican II Gaudium et spes, as official documents of the RCC that serve to see the Catholic point of view on the relationship of morals and economics.13 Some developments regarding this relationship will be present in almost each of the following chapters of this study, as this is one of the most frequent topics in social teaching. 12 Compendium, 328 – 329. 13 See Compendium, 330 – 331. It is in the public debate about business ethics, as it is usually referred to today, that we see the dominant understanding of economic behaviour as standing in relation to something else, namely morality. In such secular discourse, morality is frequently treated as totally different from economics and external to it. RC social thought agrees to a certain extent: we can distinguish certain principles, both in morals and economics, and see how these are justified in relation to their specific grounds. Nevertheless, as the Compendium points out as well, to distinguish something is not the same as to separate it. According to Roman Catholic Church’s social thought, as will be seen in the following quotations, morality and economy are interwoven human activities. More precisely, social teaching states that the ultimate end of economic activity belongs to the moral order. In this regard, the ultimate end of economics is something that regards its activity, but does not totally belong to the field of economic science. Philosophically speaking, we could say that the role of morals according to social thought is something that transcends the economic order. In this perspective, economics uniquely does have the task, which is not final, of producing wealth, distributing it and consuming it. In other words, we should find ways to administrate scarce resources in a profitable way but profit cannot be the ultimate end, for if this would be the ultimate end, economics would have an end in itself. In Roman Catholic Church’s social thought, profit is considered an indicator of the quality of economic actions, but it does not exhaust the end of economics. Hence, in social thought’s perspective, scientists in economics should accept a certain degree of openness in their object of study for something that does not entirely belong to their intellectual order. The position of the RCC also involves the entrepreneur as an economic actor. The entrepreneur should be aware of a specific role within society in med...
