Corporate Social Responsibility: Franciscan Approach from the Point of View of John Duns Scotus

Abstract

The present article seeks to explain the first step of the research project Franciscan view of corporate social responsibility, the teleology of which is to rethink, based on Franciscan thought, the issue of economy in light of the philosophical and theological presuppositions that John Duns Scotus presents in his theory of just price. The thesis underlying the text reads that, based on the presuppositions of Duns Scotu’s philosophical and theological thinking about the social justice of his time and on the Scotist conception of the just price, it is possible to update, in a phenomenological-hermeneutical way, the prototheorization of what we now call corporate social responsibility with a Franciscan frame of mind. The paper highlights, among other things, how the ethical legitimation of commerce and just price emerges in and from the Franciscan view of economics; how Mounts of Piety are an innovation in the economic field of the European society of the fifteenth century; how Duns Scotus, in his time, contributed with pro-categories that make it possible to give a new look at the way organizations are and act; and how the Scotus theory of just price is an ethical and normative principle from which important theoretical implications can be inferred.