Monthly Archives: June 2014

Several years ago the UN issued a set of Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. I may be missing something but they seem to have had relatively little airplay, so I was surprised to stumble over them recently. Within a wider commentary, they make three simple yet profound statements of claim on businesses and governments, that:

• each State has a duty to protect human rights, including in relation to the activities of businesses acting domestically an extra-territorially;
• each business has a corporate responsibility to respect human rights and to take action to prevent abuses occurring and to make corrections where it fails, and
• States are required to set in place judicial and legislative means by which there is access by the injured to remedy.

The human rights to which these principles refer to are the International Bill on Human Rights (which contains the better known Universal Declaration plus some other documents). I find this an interesting document in several ways. First, the high level of onus on both States and businesses (including business leaders) to ensure compliance and the level of due diligence and reporting that should surround it. These expectations imply accountability without specifying to whom exactly. Second, the breadth of application, which might extend out to related parties, such as suppliers. Third, where there is a conflict between business’ requirements, still it is expected the human rights principles will be respected. Fourth, where abuse has taken place, States are required to set in place judicial mechanisms for effective remedies to be provided to the affected parties, state-based grievance procedures or monitored non-state-based grievance procedures.

You could argue that it contains little that is new but I would say that the collection of these principles by a body with the status of the UN, and force of the principles it contains is new. In particular, I think it is worth noting the clear move in these principles to locate the responsibility of business formally into the public sphere. Not that it hasn’t always been there but these principles make it quite clear that the operations of business should be open to public inquiry, that business is responsible for a level of care for people on human rights terms and that the State has a duty of oversight and where necessary enforcement. The principles give support to those advocating more formal versions of the social licence to operate and challenge self-regulation, especially where it has become cartel-like.

While the principles lie confined to a UN document they have few teeth. Governments need to adopt them as state principles and build enabling legislation to give effect. The business impact of governments doing so for globally competitive companies is obvious and we can expect reluctance to adopt without there being a ‘level playing field’. Witness Australia’s Carbon Tax and Emissions Trading debate!

In my view it is the responsibility of the Church to engage in the debate over the implementation of these kinds of social principles because they provide a contemporary and operationally effective way of giving action to our principles for the protection of the most marginalised people in society. Some will argue that this is not the business of the Church, but I say if it is a matter of public principle, which is what the UN says, then it is a matter of concern for the Church as a socially engaged participant in plural society.

One of the key issues of the Enlightenment that confronts people of faith is the largely successful project to relegate faith and religion to the private sphere. In doing so the ‘public square’ has been evacuated of the presence of the Church, the public profession of faith by the faithful and of public discourse on principles of faith, especially where ethics are concerned. Certainly there are some who speak out, the Pope for one, William Dean in the history of Australia and we cannot discount the influence of these prominent people. But I think it is the case that public political discussion is almost entirely on the subject of mundane civil politics, which is now overwhelmingly about economics.

Yet we sense a dissatisfaction with the uber-rationalism of neoliberal politics and its economics. Even philosophy, which has been no friend to faith, is beginning to doubt the claim of universal rationality suspecting there is something missing. So people like Thomas Nagel reject the material reductionism (that all of what takes place in the universe is able to be explained by biology and its foundational physics and chemistry), that has been a mainstay of atheists like Richard Dawkins.

It has been interesting then, in the last couple of weeks to receive invitations from Melbourne and Monash universities to public square events. The first, at Melbourne University Faculty of Business and Economics, was an event of the Cluster for Organization Society Markets (COSM). This group is interested in the relationship between the market and other spheres of political life – economics, finance, science, arts, music and, to my surprise, religion. COSM plans to conduct a research program on these relationships. The second, at Monash University Business and Economics, was a presentation by Ed Freeman, the founder of Stakeholder Theory – the best (in my view) account of community relationship with business going. His presentation was on the need for business to evolve a ‘new story’, to move away from the old paradigms of profit, production and growth and look to how the business adds value to the community.

In both emergent attitudes to business, economics and community relationship there is a clear opportunity for the viewpoint of the Church to be put. But is the Church the right institution to do this? Metz’ work on public theology distinguishes between anthropological Christianity and incarnational Christianity. The former focuses, obviously, on the human in the world and human institutions and preferences. It is bound in the Church and in this world. The trouble is anthropological Christians have a tendency, where not diverted by worldly idolatry, to become world deniers. Engagement in the public square is problematic for world-deniers, naturally. Metz says the alternative of incarnational Christianity has something to say to the world because it provides a vehicle for hope – in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, and the promise of his return – the hope of a future that lies outside the limits of the world, and which locates fulfilment outside the world. Eschatology.

Yet, in recognising the God-created-ness of the world, incarnational Christianity has a love for it and seeks to engage, and transform. However, in abandoning the anthropological I wonder if the institution of the Church, at least as we presently know it, has to be a casualty too? Certainly all the traits that make it inward looking must go. It must be prepared to make its claim on truth in terms the secular world can access – 1 Peter 3.15. It must expect to be a minority and yet in community and open to those who are not sharers of its particular faith. It must be bold and prepared to step outside the confines of its community and its buildings. It must make its truth claims boldly but respectfully of those who doubt them; it must not resile from making these claims even when ridiculed. It must never try to simplify faith in order to make it more palatable because that will leech out all its meaning and its beauty, what makes it compelling. Only a confident, well-argued and sophisticated faith will make the grade in this emerging public square.

References:

Nagel, Thomas. Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. Oxford: Oxford, 2012.

Metz, Johann Baptist. Faith in History and Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology. Translated by J. Matthew Ashley. New York, NY: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1992.

The extraordinary program for social change in Matthew’s Gospel (particularly chapters 5-7) compels every generation of people who read that particular book to examine their society to understand how it fails to reach the challenge set by Jesus Christ, or is should. The challenge is thoroughly adversarial. Not only does Jesus take a disputatious stand against the entrenched privilege of those who held power in his society, the religious elite, but he also takes each of us to task over our commitment to participation in social transformation, which must, of course, commence with our selves and our lives.
At the social level, proposing such change will at some point start a discussion about certain rights of the individual – to freedoms that social transformation may circumscribe, to particular styles and comforts of life, to protection from a range of threats and so on. Rowan Williams, reflecting Alasdair McIntyre, reminds us there are no rights, at least in the sense that we understand them, what we usually call human rights. That is a challenge too, isn’t it? Are there no human rights? Williams and McIntyre point out that these are merely claims that we make. They seem like very good claims and usually they arise from good hearts, but they can also be dangerous. If I claim the right, say, to fulfilling work, I must on Kantian principles universalise that claim to all. Then I, especially if I am in fulfilling work myself, have an obligation to provide, indeed to ensure, that right to most if not all other people. Can I, or will I, really do this?
Although it raises difficulties, the language of obligation is a better foundation for doing what rights language seeks to do, to provide some form of maximal universalised utility. In a social sense these obligations are not hard to arrive at or comprehend, restraint from violence, respect for human dignity, provision for the dispossessed, and so on.
What, however do we expect of our business corporations? Leave aside for the present that their obligations are set in either law, which they are but only to a limited and insufficient extent, or manifest as the sum of the obligations of their various stakeholders, which I do not think they are at all. Given that our business corporations have the greatest share of personal talent, of financial resources, of intellectual property, of information, and of primary resources like land and minerals, how do we expect them to contribute to the good of the community?
The first and most obvious answer is the goods and services that they produce: food, clothing shelter, entertainment and so a very long list goes on. But do we as a community really have any control over how these corporations do this? Do we set obligations in any material sense and monitor their observance. Of course, we do, through the law, but as I said, it is insufficient, as moral philosophers will agree. The same law allows dairy farming that allows the production and distribution of tobacco or gambling services.
What are their obligations to us? Milton Friedman said, controversially, that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits. Looking at the three chapters in Matthew’s gospel, 5, 6 & 7, known also as the sermon on the mount, there are immediate statements which challenge us and Friedman. Right at the outset, Ch5 vv3-11, the beatitudes – ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit …’ and the 8 that follow it make a radical statement of the need for inclusion. They say emphatically that the basis on which we give honour – wealth, power, social standing, possessions, dress and so forth have no meaning in a transformed world, indeed poor, the powerless, the socially misfit, the scruffy and the dispossessed have at least equal standing. Such radical ideas unsettle our notions of who from the business perspective we prefer – who do we call our stakeholder – our customers, our employees, our shareholders, our suppliers? Are any of these poor, powerless, socially misfit, scruffy or dispossessed? Tell me what you think.
Refs:
1. Williams, Rowan. Faith in the Public Square. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc., 2012.
2. MacIntyre, Alasdair, C. After Virtue. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame, 1984.
3. Friedman, Milton. “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” New York Times Magazine, 1970.