Question

what are our sources for ethical discernment?

Answer 1

Economic and financial issues are attracting our attention today as never before due to the increasing influence of financial markets on the material well-being of most people. What is required, on the one hand, is appropriate regulation of the complexities of the markets and, on the other, a strong ethical basis which ensures a well-being achieved through the performance of human relations and not merely by economic processes that can not be achieved by themselves.This ethical framework needs to inform a number of people, but especially those employed in the economic and financial fields. A fusion of technical knowledge and human knowledge is necessary in this situation. Every human activity tends to deteriorate without such a synthesis. But where it exists, it can promote progress towards the human person's integral and concrete well-being.

The Church pursues this goal with the certainty that there are multiple areas of ethical agreement in every culture that express a common moral wisdom[4] and form the objective order on which the person's dignity is based. From the solid and indispensable foundation of such an order emerge the clear and common principles which establish the fundamental rights and duties of the human person without which the control and abuse of the most powerful dominate the whole human scene.

The Church recognizes among her primary duties the responsibility of calling everyone, with humble certainty, to clear ethical principles, in order to liberate every realm of human activity from the moral disorder that so often afflicts it. The shared human reason, which inevitably characterizes each person, in this regard requires an enlightened discernment. In addition, in truth and justice, human rationality seeks the solid foundation that sustains its operation and maintains its sense of direction

Every human reality and activity is a positive thing if it is lived within the horizon of an appropriate ethic which respects human dignity and is directed towards the common good. This applies to all institutions, because human social life is born within them, and so it also applies to markets at all levels, including financial markets. It should be remembered that the processes which give life to the markets— before implementing the anonymous mechanisms made possible by ever more advanced technologies in reality are focused on relationships which require individual human beings ' independence.

While revealing in each human person a trace of the affinity with God who creates and calls one into a relationship with himself, this original nature of communion is also that which naturally orients the person towards the life of communion, the fundamental place of fulfillment. The self-recognition of this character as an original and constitutive aspect of our human identity enables us to look at others not solely as potential competitors, but as possible allies, in the construction of the good that is true only if it is simultaneously concerned with each and every individual.