José Luis Fernández

Desde los albores de la existencia humana, el sufrimiento, como constante antropológica, se ha constituido en una de las preocupaciones fundamentales de los hombres. Se le ha prestado atención constante, pero ello no ha de ser óbice para que no sigamos haciéndolo. La Filosofía puede contribuir a aportar luz a este concepto en nuestros días, en tanto en cuanto el problema del sufrimiento, a pesar de haber recibido respuestas muy distintas en las distintas épocas del pensar humano, parece persistir. Con el presente artículo buscamos aproximarnos al concepto del sufrimiento desde la luz que aportan algunos de los paradigmas filosóficos relevantes, al objeto de identificar algunas aplicaciones prácticas que favorezcan una gestión de recursos humanos más adecuada, tanto desde un punto de vista ético, como desde el lado de la rentabilidad empresarial. Ofrecemos por tanto propuestas para una gestión de recursos humanos responsable, sostenible y eficiente, de la mano del pensamiento filosófico.

The paper investigates how Catholic Social Teaching can contribute to the creation of fairer and more humane business models. It gives an outline of the main historical moments in the development of Catholic Social Teaching with regard to the economy and business management. Then it analyses the proposal of the Economy of Communion as a potential framework for companies that wish to implement Catholic Social Teaching in their activities. The EoC model suggests that company profits should be distributed in three parts. The first part is dedicated to the company’s growth, development, and economic sustainability; the second toward the most needy people in the social environment of the organization; and the third part invested in education creating a new type of economic culture that is at the service of people and of the common good. The companies that belong to the EoC movement are for-profit businesses which consider reciprocity and gratuity an integral part of their businesses. Both reciprocity and gratuity are guided by the logic of the gift which is innate to human relations and should be promoted so businesses become more authentically human and favor the development of people.

The article places its reflections in the precise point where management, business ethics and leadership converge. After considering and making reference to the latest publications at the international level on the ethical dimension of leadership, the article focuses on a certain type of leadership, so to speak, qualified, adjectival: that which emanates from the perspective offered by the spirituality of Saint Ignatius of Loyola and the Company of Jesus, to which so much interest has been paid in recent times. The approach to the topic is specifically oriented from a perspective of Moral Philosophy, which leads, in conclusion, to underline the constitutively ethical dimension of the human person. From this anthropological reality emerges, on the one hand, the condition of possibility of the proposals of moral content to which to abide in the decision-making; on the other hand, the need and inevitability of having to go each one of oneself in a certain way -good, bad, excellent, mediocre, lousy- at the same time that each one is leading himself -through his behavior-, do things and make decisions... Third, that moral structure must also be understood as the condition that allows us to affirm that, from a Philosophical Anthropology consideration, we all are leaders -at least, of ourselves-; that, consequently, we are also responsible for what we do and how we are doing, when acting; and that, finally, all this connects with the keys that lead to the so-called Ethics of Virtue.

This paper analyses the study plans and programmes offered in Spain to present and future businesspeople and executives in the academic year 2009-10. These offerings represent business administration studies in all Spanish universities, as well as postgraduate programmes taught by the universities themselves and/or other business schools. This is of special relevance because there are few data for assessing how our executives are trained, even though such data areessential to any attempt to improve corporate performance. Clearly, business ethics, corporate social responsibility, and other core courses related to sustainability can and should contribute to this end. But the actual results are not very promising: these essential courses are offered in a minority of postgraduate programmes, and they barely exist at the undergraduate level. We consider it long overdue that academic institutions explore the inherent value of this type of training and seriously reconsider alternative course planning for their students.