Certainly in business one must make a profit, and one’s business must survive if it is to serve. But not at the expense of the public good and the well-being of individuals who depend on you—not, for example, if you must sell tainted food or shoddy furniture or electronic devices to stay afloat or thrive. And certainly not as the aim or goal of those involved in business.

It is not enough to say that “the market” will drive you out if you don’t do what is right. That slogan, with its grain of truth, is brain surgery with a meat cleaver, at best; and in fact it rarely turns out to be true. It serves at all only because, at this particular time in our history, moral calling and moral character have no weight and are thus unable to serve as established points of reference for individual practice and public policy. They are not treated as aspects of reality which must be appealed to in judgment and with which any decent person must come to terms. There is no legitimating support, therefore, for the idealism of young people who go into the professions, nor for the justifiable demands of the public to be served.

It is a convincing framework of calling and character that must be restored if professional life is to be directed in a manner which—surely everyone deep-down knows—is suited to its function as provider and protector of the public good and thus of individuals throughout our neighborhoods and beyond. The greatest challenge facing an officially post-Christian world is to provide that framework. To this point it is not doing very well with the task.