Marketplace Ministry

The Business of Business

Dallas Willard

Business is a profession, and professions have a moral role in society

What is business (manufacturing, commerce) for? Today the spontaneous response to this question is: The business of business is to make money for those who are engaged in it. In fact, this answer is now regarded as so obvious that you might be thought stupid or uninformed if you even ask the question. But that is only one of the effects of the pervasive mis-education that goes on in contemporary society, which fosters an understanding of success essentially in terms of fame, position, and material goods.

This response, however, only reflects a quite recent view of the professions—of which we will here assume business to be one—and even today it is definitely not the view of success in professional life shared by the public in general. No business or other profession advertising its “services” announces to the public that it is there for the purpose of enriching itself or those involved in it. All will say with one accord that their purpose is service. I have never met any professionals who would tell their clients that they were there just for their own self-interest. Still, many professionals today are dominated by self-interest, and that is the source of the constant stream of moral failures that occupies our courts and what we now call the “news.” Many, too, who would never say it publicly really do think of their success in terms of self-advancement, and will say so “after hours.” But the “professional” yet holds a moral role in society, not just one of technical expertise in the marketplace of untrammeled competition.

The older tradition of the profession as having, at bottom, a moral role in society was more obvious and defensible before the days of mass society and urban anonymity. Today an individual doctor, lawyer, or other such figure more or less disappears as a person living together with other persons. In other days, they received special training, position, and respect as an appropriate response to the special and potentially self-sacrificing good that they made available to the ordinary people around them—to the public or “common” good, as it used to be called. Considered with respect to the merchant and manufacturer, there has always been less clarity about this role than with the traditional professions of clergy, medicine, and law, but their elevated position and power in the community was nonetheless understood to bring with it unique and unavoidable moral responsibilities.

Writing of this in 1860, John Ruskin remarks: “The fact is that people never have had clearly explained to them the true functions of a merchant with respect to other people.”[1] He then puts what we today would call “business” in the context of the “five great intellectual professions” necessary to the life of “every civilized nation.” With respect to that nation:

The Soldier’s profession is to defend it.
The Pastor’s to teach it.
The Physician’s, to keep it in health.
The Lawyer’s to enforce justice in it.
The Merchant’s to provide for it===>Click headline for the complete article . .

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