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The Virtue of Courage in Entrepreneurship: Engaging the Catholic Social Tradition and the Life-Cycle of the Business

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2015

Michael J. Naughton  and
Jeffrey R. Cornwall
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Abstract:

The paper examines the problematic understanding of “risk” in entrepreneurial literature that locates courage in either the loss or gain of having or in the difficulty and hardship of the doing. We argue in this paper that what is lost in this vernacular view of courage is a deeper notion of the subjective dimension of work and the social need of society. Grounded within the Catholic social and moral tradition, we find a richer notion of courage, which in part corrects and rounds out the insufficient description of the vernacular understanding of courage in entrepreneurship. What we also find in this account of the virtues and subjective dimension of work is greater explanatory power of what happens to the entrepreneur in the work that he or she does. The end result of this analysis is a more spiritual, ethical and social understanding of entrepreneurship.

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Articles
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Business Ethics Quarterly , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , January 2006 , pp. 69 - 93
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Business Ethics 2006

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References

We are very grateful for the various suggestions given by Bob Kennedy, Sara Freund, Stephanie Rumpza, George B. Brenkert and the two anonymous reviewers from Business Ethics Quarterly.

1. See Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical letter Rerum novarum, which is often considered the Catholic Church’s first official response to the industrial revolution (Catholic Social Thought: The Documentary Heritage, ed. David J. O’Brien and Thomas A. Shannon [Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1992]; N.B.: all references to papal and conciliar documents are by paragraph number from this collection).

2. The following criteria are adapted from Dennis McCann’s “Catholic Social Teaching and the Economics of Health Care Management,” Christian Bioethics: Non-Ecumenical Studies in Medical Morality 6(3) (December 2000): 231–50, with the specific reference to “Managed Care, Catholic Vision, and the Claims of Justice,” ed. B. Andrew Lustig, 233–34.

3. One of Catholicism’s thinkers, E. F. Schumacher, in a provocative essay entitled “Buddhist Economics,” argued that when questions of theology, metaphysics and anthropology are bracketed from an understanding of economic life—and in particular work—then one is always dealing with a truncated understanding of work. As Gandhi is credited as having said, those who say religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means. Similarly, to say that religion and spirituality have nothing to do with work and economic organizations is to “privatize” religion into insignificance. The bishops at Vatican II condemned in no uncertain terms the divorcing of faith from work. In a paragraph that might be entitled, “Don’t Ghettoize the Faith!” Christians, they proclaim, are “wide of the mark who think that religion consists in acts of worship alone and in the discharge of certain moral obligations, and who imagine they can plunge themselves into earthly affairs in such a way as to imply that these are altogether divorced from the religious life. The split between the faith which many profess and their daily lives deserves to be counted among the more serious errors of our age.… Let there be no false opposition between professional and social activities on the one hand, and religious life on the other. The Christian who neglects his temporal duties, neglects his duties toward his neighbor and even God, and jeopardizes his eternal salvation. Christians should rather rejoice that they can follow the example of Christ, who worked as an artisan. In the exercise of all their earthly activities, they can thereby gather their humane, domestic, professional, social, and technical enterprises into one vital synthesis with religious values, under whose supreme direction all things are harmonized unto God’s glory,” Gaudium et spes, 43. See also Michael Budde, The (Magic) Kingdom of God: Christianity and Global Culture Industries (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1997), 4, where he writes of a “dual ethic” that has permeated the Christian tradition, especially since the fourth century. See also David Tracy, “Defending the Public Character of Theology,” Christian Century 98 (1981): 350. Tracy argues for the proposition that “no major religion, properly understood, can accept a privatistic self-understanding.”

4. See John XXIII, Mater et magistra.

5. John Paul II, Centesimus annus, 59.

6. David Herrera, “Laborem exercens, ‘Traditional’ Organizations and the Democratic Mondragón Model” Work as Key to the Social Question (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2002). Lorna Gold, The Sharing Economy (Burlington: Ashgate, 2004). Luigino Bruni, ed., Economy of Communion: Toward a Multi-Dimensional Economic Culture (New York: New City Press, 1999). Joan Coffey, Leon Harmel: Entrepreneur as Catholic Social Reformer (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003).

7. For this general problem of disconnectedness, see Jeff Gates’s insightful book, The Ownership Solution: Toward a Shared Capitalism for the 21st Century (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1998). See also George G. Brenkert’s “Entrepreneurship, Ethics, and The Good Society” for a survey of ethical issues in entrepreneurship (Ethics and Entrepreneurship, The Ruffin Series 3 [2002]: 5–43).

8. See Gates, The Ownership Solution.

9. See Robert Kennedy, Gary Atkinson, and Michael Naughton, eds., The Dignity of Work: John Paul II Speaks to Managers and Workers (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1995), 45, 50, 54, 81–82, 93.

10. Jeffry A. Timmons, New Venture Creation: Entrepreneurship for the 21st Century (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1999), 3–17.

11. John Paul II, Laborem exercens, 9.

12. The challenge of comparing and contrasting these two traditions is that neither of them have provided a systematic exploration of the relevance of courage to entrepreneurship. The Catholic moral and social tradition has a sophisticated understanding of courage but it has not done much to apply it to entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship has a sophisticated understanding of itself, but it has not done much to apply a rich notion of courage to its self-understanding. What we have done in this paper, which has not been done elsewhere, is to take the various understandings of courage and entrepreneurship within these two traditions and have them in more direct dialogue.

13. Frank Hannafey, Entrepreneurial Ethics in Modern Roman Catholic Social Teaching (Ann Arbor: UMI Dissertation Services, 1998), 18–19. For a summary of this dissertation, see Francis Hannafey, “Entrepreneurship in Papal Thought,” Louvain Studies 26 (Fall 2001): 217–44.

14. See Timmons, New Venture Creation, 14.

15. For example, Walter Kuemmerle captures this notion in his paper on entrepreneurship in “A Test for the Fainthearted,” Harvard Business Review 80 (May 2002): 122–127.

16. See Stanley Hauerwas and David Burrell, “From System to Story: An Alternative Pattern for Rationality in Ethics,” in Why Narrative? Readings in Narrative Theology, ed. Stanley Hauerwas and David Burrell (Grand Rapids: W. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1989), 158–90. This shift in entrepreneurship is similar to the shift in moral philosophy that has moved to evaluate moral decisions from character to discrete actions. Hauerwas and Burrell have argued that certain moral philosophies have “thought it impossible to discuss what kind of character we should have” (165). By concentrating only on decisions, this account of ethics as well as entrepreneurship fails to take seriously the formation of a moral self that is always occurring in all forms of human organization. Ethics has become “construed as a rational science that evaluates alternative ‘solutions.’ Moral decisions should be based on rationally derived principles that are not relative to any one set of convictions” (163). See also Alasdair MacIntyre, “The Recovery of Moral Agency?” Harvard Divinity Bulletin 28(4) (1999): 6–10.

17. For example, see Howard Stevenson and David Gumpert, “The Heart of Entrepreneurship,” in The Entrepreneurial Venture, ed. William Sahlman and Howard Stevenson (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1991). Courage, however, can be found within the management literature. See Thomas Teal, “The Human Side of Management,” Harvard Business Review 74(6) (November–December 1996): 35–44. See also Teal’s book First Person: Tales of Management Courage and Tenacity (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1996).

18. See Robert Hisrich and Michael Peters, Entrepreneurship, 4th ed. (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2002); and Ray Smilor, Daring Visionaries (Holbrook, Mass.: Adams Media, 2001).

19. Michael Naughton and Jeffrey Cornwall, “Who is the Good Entrepreneur? An Exploration within the Catholic Social Tradition,” Journal of Business Ethics 44 (April 15, 2003): 61–75.

20. As our colleague, Bob Kennedy, explains in an unpublished essay, “This ability to master fear is one of the two elements of courage. We might call it the material element. The coward, who cannot master his fear, falls short of courage. The fool, who does not so much master fear as ignore it, fails at the other extreme. The courageous person acknowledges that fear has a voice in making choices, but never permits it a deciding voice. The second element of courage, its formal element, gives this virtue its moral character. True courage is given shape, or form, by the goals a person pursues and by the means employed to achieve those goals. A person cannot be authentically courageous unless he or she is consistently able to choose good means to pursue good ends. An individual’s inability to recognize that some means or some ends are genuinely bad makes real courage impossible.”

21. Prudence is particularly important in understanding the unity of the virtues, especially for someone like Thomas Aquinas, who wrote that the moral virtues are united in prudence. He writes that every virtue “is a kind of prudence” (I II, 58, arts. 4 and 2). As Stanley Hauerwas has pointed out, Aquinas, like Aristotle before him, “emphasized the centrality of practical wisdom, since the doing of good deeds is not sufficient to make a man virtuous: ‘it matters not only what a man does but also how he does it’ (I–II, 57, 5). And the ‘how’ is always determined by prudence” (Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 141. Aquinas himself put the unity of the virtues this way, “Now right choice requires not only an inclination to an appropriate end, which arises directly from the habit of moral virtue, but also the correct choice of means to the end, which is made by prudence, which deliberates, judges and commands in regard to the means. Likewise, one cannot have prudence without having the moral virtues since prudence is right reasoning about what is to be done, whose starting point is the end of action, to which we are rightly disposed by the moral virtues.” (I II, 65, art. 1) Aquinas also wrote that charity is “the form of the virtues” because charity, as a theological virtue, makes clear that our ultimate end is friendship with God, which perfects virtue (I II, 24, art. 8, see also I, II, 65, art. 2).

22. This unity of the virtues does not mean that there is not tension and conflict within the self and with others in the pursuit of the good, but always at the heart of this pursuit is not some necessary disunity in the world and the self, but rather that disunity originates from personal and structural disorders of our ends that is humanly constructed (our disunity may also simply arise from our misapprehension of situations).

23. Josef Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966), 117. The book was first published in 1954.

24. See E. Glenn Hinson, “Praying without Ceasing,” Weavings 13 (May/June 1998): 34–43.

25. Hauerwas and Burrell, “From System to Story,” 174.

26. Jean Porter, The Recovery of Virtue (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1990), 116. See also Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (New York: Benziger Brothers, Inc., 1947), II II 125 arts. 1 and 2.

27. Aquinas, Summa II II 123, art. 12. We often fear losing security/survival, power/control and affection/esteem.

28. Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues, 126; see also Aquinas, Summa, II II, 126, art.1.

29. Robert Kennedy, unpublished paper on 9/11 and courage.

30. Porter, The Recovery of Virtue, 103.

31. See Aquinas, Summa, II II, 57, art. 1.

32. Ibid., II–II, 123.3. Aquinas explains, “it belongs to fortitude that man should moderate his fear according to reason, namely that he should fear what he ought, and when he ought…. Now this mode of reason may be corrupted either by excess or by deficiency. Wherefore just as timidity is opposed to fortitude by excess of fear, in so far as a man fears what he ought not, and as he ought not, so too fearlessness is opposed thereto by deficiency of fear, in so far as a man fears not what he ought to fear” II–II, 126, art.2.

33. Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues, 122. Aquinas: “Virtue essentially regards the good rather than the difficult. Hence the greatness of a virtue is measured according to its goodness rather than its difficulty” (II II, 123, art. 12, reply obj. 2).

34. We are indebted to Bob Kennedy for this point.

35. The critical question here then is, “For what good do I risk my life and resources?” Pieper is very helpful here in bringing some order to clarify this question. He explains that “fortitude keeps man from so loving his life that he loses it” (Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues, 134). We see this in three orders of human living, orders which intermingle with each other and are difficult to distinguish in day-to-day life. He describes these orders as premoral (psychological), moral (ethical) and supermoral (spiritual). Pieper explains that these three orders of fortitude give us essential insight into the human person: “man accepts insecurity; he surrenders confidently to the governance of higher powers; he risks his immediate well-being; he abandons the tense, egocentric hold of a timorous anxiety” (Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues, 138–39). Courage, then, is a premoral habit that enables us to give up our desire for total control and to cope with the various difficulties that hinder our development. It is a moral habit that provides the strength to act justly and prudently in the face of difficulties or fears, so that we do not abandon or lose sight of what is the true good. And it is spiritual habit that gives us the capacity to endure the love of God.

36. Pius XI, Quadragesimo anno, 51. Francis T. Hannafey, S.J., “Entrepreneurship in Papal Thought: Creation of Wealth and the Distribution of Justice” in Rediscovering Abundance: Interdisciplinary Essays on Wealth, Income and their Distribution in the Catholic Social Tradition, ed. Helen Alford, Charles Clark, S. A. Cortright, and Michael Naughton (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005). Oswald von Nell-Breuning, who drafted Quadragesimo anno, writes in his commentary of the document that magnificence is an “entrepreneurial virtue” (Oswald von Nell-Breuning, Reorganization of the Social Economy [Milwaukee: The Bruce Publishing Co., 1936], 115–16). Liberality is a virtue of giving away or being generous with one’s possessions (see Aquinas, Summa, II II 117); whereas magnificence is about producing good and great things (Ibid., II II 134 art. 3 reply obj. 2). Liberality for Thomas comes under justice, where magnificence comes under courage.

37. In the Summa II II 134, art 4, Aquinas asks whether magnificence is part of fortitude. He argues that it is, but not in a principal manner but rather magnificence is annexed to fortitude. He explains this distinction in the following way: “In order for a virtue to be annexed to a principal virtue, two things are necessary, as stated above (Question [80]). The one is that the secondary virtue agree with the principal, and the other is that in some respect it be exceeded thereby. Now magnificence agrees with fortitude in the point that as fortitude tends to something arduous and difficult, so also does magnificence: wherefore seemingly it is seated, like fortitude, in the irascible. Yet magnificence falls short of fortitude, in that the arduous thing to which fortitude tends derives its difficulty from a danger that threatens the person, whereas the arduous thing to which magnificence tends derives its difficulty from the dispossession of one’s property, which is of much less account than danger to one’s person. Wherefore magnificence is accounted a part of fortitude.”

38. Aquinas, Summa, II II 134, art 3 reply obj. 2.

39. Ibid., II II 128 art. 1.

40. Ibid., II II, 134, art 2. See also Richard O’Connor, The Theology of Work (Indore, India: Sat Prachar Press, 1995), 67–71, on a Thomistic understanding of making and knowing. He writes, “The desire to make, then, is as strong as the desire to know because it arises from the desire to know, or to know better” (69–70).

41. John A. Oesterle, Ethics: The Introduction to Moral Science (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1957), 180–81.

42. Aquinas, Summa, II II 134, art 2. Aquinas contends that the virtue of magnificence is not only a virtue for the rich, although at first sight that does not seem to be the case. He explains that in order for some great work to be accomplished, a sizable amount of wealth is needed. The act of producing must be something great. However, he explains: “The chief act of virtue is the inner choice, which virtue can have without wealth or rank, and so even a poor man can be magnificent. But external acts of the virtues require the blessings of fortune as a means. In this sense the poor man cannot practice an outward act of magnificence with materials actually great, although he may do so with material relatively great; when, for example, he tackles something small in itself but magnificent by comparison with others of its kind. For as Aristotle says, small and great are relative terms” (II II 134, art. 3, ad. 4). Practically speaking, Aquinas directs the virtue of magnificence to those in control of large amounts of wealth. The power of the rich is significant to the direction and health of the economy. For a more extensive discussion of the role of fortune in the moral life, see John Bowlin, “Aquinas on Virtue and the Goods of Fortune,” The Thomist (October 1996): 560ff.

43. Aquinas, Summa, II II 134, art. 2 and 4; see also Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (South Bend, Ind.: Dumb Ox Books, 1993), 229.

44. Aquinas, Summa, II II, 135, art. 1.

45. Quoted from John Kavanaugh, Christ in a Consumer Society, Still (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2000), 11. For Thomas, work, like all human acts, should be directed to an ultimate end. To divorce work from spiritual principles that inform the faith of the entrepreneur frustrates the possibility that work can help develop the person spiritually. He wrote that “magnificence attempts to achieve great works. Now works performed by men are directed to some end, and they have no end so great as giving honour to God. So magnificence achieves a great work above all when it is directed to God’s honour” (Aquinas, Summa, II II 134, art. 2, ad. 3.)

46. John Paul II also speaks of the subjectivity of society. In writing about the importance of subsidiarity, he asserts that no social group “has the right to usurp the role of sole leader, since this brings about the destruction of the true subjectivity of society and of the individual citizens, as happens in every form of totalitarianism. In this situation the individual and people become ‘objects,’ in spite of all declarations to the contrary and verbal assurances” (Sollicitudo rei socialis, 15).

47. Robert Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 72.

48. Philip J. Chmielewski, Bettering Our Condition (New York: Peter Lang, 1992), 188.

49. Kennedy, Atkinson, and Naughton, The Dignity of Work, 128.

50. Aquinas Summa, II II 134, art. 4.

51. Ibid., II II 135, art. 1.

52. Authors will sometimes break the business life-cycle into more distinct stages. For example, some talk of early stage growth and high growth as being distinct. Others do not address the pre-venture stage in their models. For the purposes of this paper the four most commonly used phases were used to illustrate the main arguments of our model.

53. Naughton and Cornwall, “Who is the Good Entrepreneur?” 61–75.

54. Von Nell-Breuning, Reorganization of Social Economy, 115.

55. Ibid.

56. William F. May, Beleaguered Rulers (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 172. See also William F. May, “The Virtues of the Business Leader,” in On Moral Business (Grand Rapids: W. B. Eerdmans, 1995), 699.

57. The following information comes from conversations Mike Naughton had with Bob Wahlstedt and Bob Carlson from Reell.

58. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame, 1984), 122.