Personalist Philosophy, the Relational Trinity, and the Business Firm as a Moral Community

The aim of this study is to identify the excellent goods that are required for the project of forming a moral community in a business firm. Trinitarian theology is used to reflect on these goods. Though there is a massive gap between the way the triune community expresses itself and the way human communities do, the Christian doctrine that humans are made in the image of God, and therefore imago trinitatis, suggests that Trinitarian theology offers a pattern for moral community in a firm. The Persons of the relational Trinity express love through an I–Thou–We modality. The work of Martin Buber and Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II) on the I–Thou or interhuman relation is first discussed. It is then noted that Wojtyla goes further in contending that I–Thou alone does not in and of itself constitute a human community; it is only when a plurality of “I”s act together to advance the common good that we can speak of the “we” (the social dimension). It is argued that a correlational reading of social Trinitarian thought and Wojtyla’s personalist phenomenology indicates what is required in a firm aspiring to be a genuinely moral community—namely, both intersubjectivity (I–Thou relationality) and a social profile (the “we”). It is further argued that these modalities are actualized in a business firm through moral friendship, good will (I–Thou), and commitment to the common good (“we”). These are foundational stones of a moral community.