By Nicholas Santos, S.J.
Worldwide, COVID-19 has had a staggering impact, with the number of cases already past one million and the death toll over 70,000 as of this writing. The toll is projected only to grow in the next many weeks. What the stark numbers don’t show, however, is that, as governments and public health officials implement measures to stop the spread of the virus, the group most affected are those at the lower end of the socio-economic pyramid.
In a poignant New York Times piece, reporters Max Fisher and Emma Bubola point out that, alongside old age and pre-existing health conditions, low socioeconomic status is a major risk factor for COVID-19. That factor is doubled in the case of the undocumented, as Charles Bethea’s recent piece in the New Yorker suggests.
As of April 3, about 41 states in the United States had implemented stay-at-home orders with health experts advising people to avoid large crowds, maintain social distancing, work from home, stockpile food in case of being quarantined etc. But as Abby Versoulis highlights in Time, a problem with such advice is that many low-income people cannot afford to follow it.
As we reflect on the tensions that exist between public health recommendations and socio-economic considerations, we realize that the individualism of the capitalistic system that we belong to is seriously flawed in addressing the situation that we are faced with. We cannot overcome the COVID-19 pandemic with impersonal market forces, self-interest, accumulation, and profit maximization.
Instead, we need a solidaristic approach aimed at the common good such as that proposed by the late German Jesuit economist, Heinrich Pesch, S.J. (1854-1926) who held that human beings are inseparably individual and social. In his book Ethics and the National Economy, coincidentally first published in the pandemic year of 1918, Pesch writes: “We see individuals as not simply left free to follow their own self-centered inclinations, but as bound together with the whole community by obligations and mutual concern for one another and assisting one another.”
According to Pesch, virtues of justice and charity, not of pure profit and self-interest, ought to regulate the economy. Pesch advocated for an economic system that was intricately connected with morality and had human dignity as its ordering principle. While Pesch’s system did not find a foothold in mainstream economics, his ideas do have relevance in the situation we find ourselves in.
As we grapple with rising unemployment, the threat of a severe economic recession, lack of adequate healthcare infrastructure and provisions, and many other such matters, it might be helpful to bring to the center of these conversations, concepts that are an integral part of Pesch’s system, such as ethics, human dignity, and mutual responsibility.
The question, of course, is how willing are we to do so.
Nicholas Santos, S.J., is associate professor of marketing in the Heider College of Business at Creighton University and is rector of Creighton’s Jesuit community.
With an enduring interest in convening business school faculty colleagues for conversations about the common good, Nicholas Santos, S.J. (above fourth from the left), contends that discussions about the post-pandemic rebuilding process ought to be characterized by concepts such as ethics, human dignity, and mutual responsibility. Photo courtesy of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities.