The Religious Underpinnings of the Marketplace

William F. May The Religious Underpinnings of the Marketplace This essay deals with the moral and religious underpinnings ofthe marketplace. I undertake this task, not as a specialist in business but as an ethicist. Specialists in applied ethics face a double risk when they attempt to comment on a field of practice. They occupy the middle ofa no-man's land. On one side, experts in theoretical ethics or theology feel that they have done the truly foundational work upon which applied efhicists abjectly depend. On the other side, practitioners worry that applied ethicists do not really know the complexities oftheir fields ofpractice. Thus applied ethicists run the risk of being semi-comic figures, carrying water from wells that they haven't dug in order to fight fires that they cannot quite find. I am consoled, however, in this risky enterprise by Machiavelli who, in his dedication to the Prince, asked himself bluntly how he This article is part ofa chapter titled "Unacknowledged Public Rulers: The Corporate Executive" from a forthcoming book by the author entitled The Beleaguered Rulers: The Public Obligation of the Professional, a book that will cover eight professions. LOGOS 3 : I WINTER 2ooo 6oLOGOS could justify offering advice on the art of governing to those who were vastly more experienced than he. Machiavelli responded by adroitly comparing himself to a landscape painter, that is, someone who does not himself work in the woods but whose cognitive distance might throw some fresh light on the forest. Let it be conceded at the outset that some believe that the marketplace does not need moral and religious underpinnings. Indeed, they argue that the marketplace mechanism, as opposed to more Utopian modes of social organization, spares us the need to place heavy moral demands upon people. It does not ask them to be idealistic or moralistic. It appeals chiefly to their self-interest. It recognizes that the man upon whom one can rely to stay up all night with a sick cow either owns it or is paid to care for it, his self-interest engaged in keeping the cow healthy. Adam Smith believed that the free marketplace nicely accommodates to human nature. Capitalism does not ask the butcher to be a saint, a patriot, a hero, or even a particularly public-spirited citizen . It asks him simply to be a good butcher, which, of course, in the marketplace system serves his own self-interest. He need not devote himselfto larger questions ofthe common good. The marketplace asks only that he slaughter and dress meat well and eventually exchange his product in the marketplace with other relatively knowledgeable and self-interested parties who have produced their own specialized products. Such exchanges enrich both parties and contribute cumulatively to the wealth ofthe nation, without anyone having to keep so much as a walleye on the question ofthe common good. So conceived, the marketplace is but one of four mechanisms upon which a modern democratic state depends to let the society function without demanding too much virtue ofits citizens and yet without tearing itselfto pieces. The other three mechanisms are: ( ? ) The political mechanism of checks and balances within a constitutional framework. The devices of checks and balances and RELIGIOUS UNDERPINNINGS OF THE MARKETPLACE6l divisions ofpower help limit the damage that merely self-interested persons or groups can inflict upon one another in a democracy. (2)The social mechanism of the large-scale organization. The modern corporation orbureaucracy typically does not ask for heroic but merely skilled performances from its members. Indeed, given its internal specialization of functions, the large organization would find extraordinary, idiosyncratic behavior disruptive. It prefers instead regularized procedures followedby reliable workers through which the corporation achieves economies of scale as it competes successfully in the marketplace. As one commentator put it, bureaucracies and corporations are devices whereby people who are not themselves great can nevertheless accomplish great things. (3)The mechanism of the modern positivist university. Institutions ofhigher learning no longer pretend to form their graduates morally, but simply to provide them with the objective knowledge and skills that they need to get them jobs within the large corporations , which, in turn, compete most advantageously in the marketplace , all...