Interessante artigo dos editores da America, influente revista publicada pelos jesuitas americanos, sobre a última encíclica do Bento XVI.
Gratuity is a genteel term for a tip for services rendered by a waiter, taxi driver or bellhop. Of course, it also refers fundamentally to any gracious act that is not strictly expected. In times past it referred to the beneficence of kings. In its most exalted sense, it denotes the transcendent goodness of God to us. Perhaps the most remarkable proposition in Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical letter Caritas in Veritate, therefore, is the controversial assertion that gratuity—or as the official English translation frequently reads, “gratuitousness”—is essential to economic life. Can a gesture of politeness or a supernatural relationship have anything to do with everyday commerce? What has Jerusalem to do with Wall Street? Is it not true, as the late philosopher-theologian Paul Ricoeur wrote about the Gospel, that “the logic of generosity clashes head on with the logic of equivalence which orders our everyday exchanges, our commerce and our penal law”?
Over the centuries, the reduction of economics to pure commercial exchange has resulted in the fraying of the social bonds that both made the real economy run and compensated for its worse excesses. Now, in a flat, globalized world with egalitarian aspirations for material success everywhere, the system is gravely troubled. Economics, moreover, as the pope points out, has come to dominate all other sectors of life—the state, the economy and civil society—so that few people are any longer concerned about the well-being of others; and, in practice, most people presume they need be concerned exclusively with pursuing their private accumulation of wealth.
The metaphor underlying the term “gratuity” is that of gift-giving; and Pope Benedict believes the neglect of gratuity, of a generous readiness to give for the good of others, is a root cause of the current world economic crisis. “Marked by grave deviations and failures,” he writes, “today’s international economic scene requires a profoundly new way of understanding business enterprise.” He elaborates: “The great challenge before us” in the unfolding of globalization and in the current economic crisis is not only the need for “the principles of social ethics, like transparency, honesty and responsibility,” but also the need “that in commercial relationships the principle of gratuitousness and the logic of gift as the expression of fraternity can and must find their place within normal economic activity.”
This generosity has a public dimension; it is by no means a private virtue. Rather, it is akin to what the ancients called magnanimity, a greatness of soul that acts in the understanding that one’s deeds—in this case one’s business transactions—affect the whole of society. Thus, the primary meaning of the economy of gratuity for business seems to be that businesses function within a “stakeholder society.” “Business management,” the pope writes, “cannot concern itself only with the interest of proprietors, but must also assume responsibility for all the other stakeholders who contribute to the life of the business: the workers, the clients, the suppliers...the community of reference.” The notion of a “stakeholder society” is already a familiar one to business ethicists, management consultants and political philosophers. It is an idea whose day, the pope believes, will come.
Aware that critics may regard this ethic as utopian, Benedict points to businesses that already follow this model. “Alongside profit-oriented private enterprises, there must be room for commercial entities based on mutualist principles and pursuing social ends....” He expresses the hope that from the interplay of such groups with traditional commercial sectors, new hybrid forms of commercial behavior will continue to emerge and serve to “civilize” the economy. Following the publication of the encyclical, the Catholic lay movement Focolare reminded its friends that Chiara Lubich, its foundress, had promoted this kind of enterprise. Today the movement sponsors more than 700 such for-profit companies based on an ethic of gratuity and communion.
For Benedict, however, it is not enough that there be a special socio-economic sector operating on this model. All businesses must conduct themselves as members of the stakeholder society. Only 30 years ago the principle that business has moral ties to the wider society was made popular by the investor responsibility movement, and it was for a time affirmed by many corporations. Unfortunately, that realization was eclipsed in the last generation by an Ayn Rand-style of individualism and the prominence of high finance, the branch of business most abstracted from real people and fundamental human interests, as a leading sector of the economy. In the wake of the global financial crisis, the relevance of the stakeholder conception of business should be clearer than ever.
Fonte: America
