NewWorld

Social Responsibility
and Globalization

by Robert McCann, Vice Chairman
and President of Global Private Client, Merrill Lynch

Excerpts from Mr. McCann’s intervention at the March 2004 Vatican conference co-hosted by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and the International Christian Union of Business Executives

The “integral” good of the human person as a reality goes beyond the economic sphere. Authentic personal development requires that the individual worker not be reduced to a unit of production in the economic enterprise, but that all of his or her needs as a person be addressed.
1. The primacy of the person over things.* The good of the person is the ethical norm that must guide all our actions. This includes those relationships through which the human person lives his or her personhood through communities and free associations. The affirmation of the primacy of the person is the key to the struggle against economic ideologies, representing both the “right” and the “left” in the political arena, that reduce personal life to the economic order, the ideology that has been called “economism.”
2. The priority of ethics over technology. The question that corresponds to the search for the common good is not “What can be done?” but “What should be done in accordance with the dignity of the person?” Actions that are guided only by technical know-how and possibilities are not ethical. They entail a sacrifice of full personal development to submission to power for the sake of power in the name of a “progress” which is the modern equivalent of that “fate” which scared and paralyzed those without hope in human creativity and in Divine Providence. “Progress” thus becomes the modern disguise for despair.
3. The superiority of spirit over matter. I understand the word “Spirit” here to designate the openness of the human person to a reality that transcends space and time and contains the key to the origin and destiny of each human person. It doesn’t mean that matter is unimportant, that the material needs of human beings can be ignored in favor of some vague, otherworldly concern. On the contrary, it means that the true importance and dignity of matter is found beyond the limitations of matter itself. This gives to material needs a “spiritual dimension” that cannot be ignored in the quest for personal development and the good of individuals and societies. All business enterprises, therefore, must respect the religious liberty and religious dimension of human life. This is the point of departure of an authentic business ethics within a just human society.

* These principles were drawn
from Redemptor Hominis