Person-Centeredness

Just a very brief observation, one that may be obvious to everyone, but one that needed making in a conversation I had today.

When Pope Benedict XVI talks about the need for an ethical framework to surround, or a healthy moral culture to undergird both the economy and our thinking about the economy, he is not talking about an externally-imposed superstructure or a kind of foundation from which economic activity might be separated.

Rather he is calling our attention to a fact: the economy is nothing other than the aggregate of energies directed to production and exchange of goods and services; those energies, however, are at their origin human energies - human beings engage in economic activities, and human beings are inherently, even essentially moral actors, so that human activity as such has a constitutive moral component.

LD