Consent is Not the Whole of the Law

On Consent and Just Wages

For many Catholics who self-identify as politically conservative, minimum wage is seen as, at best, an impractical policy which requires too much of employers and gives the state power over the autonomy and self-direction of the worker. Yet there is a reason why the Church has always maintained the justice of the state’s enforcing of a minimum wage by law, and it is the same reason why the Church recognizes, for example,

that not all consensual sex acts are morally licit. In every case of moral judgment, consent between the involved parties involves only one necessary but not sufficient criterion to determine the goodness or badness of an act.

Consent and Moral Sources

In ethics and moral theology, the term “moral sources” is used to denote the criteria necessary in order for acts to be judged as good or bad. Generally speaking, the Church has recognized three sources or criteria that make an act to be a morally good or a morally evil one: intention, object, and circumstances. Briefly, the intention is that end for the sake of which we perform some action. The moral object is the act itself, performed as a means to the aforementioned intended end. Finally, the circumstances are those particulars (when the act is taking place, where the act is taking place, etc.) which also help to condition this particular act.

Importantly for the present question, the Church maintains that an act must be good in all three parts (or to meet all three criteria) in order for the act as a whole to be called good. If any one of the three criteria do not pass muster, then the act falls short of what it ought to be and must be judged as evil.

Let us consider some examples: a man giving proper help at the proper time to help the poor in a foodbank, but for the sake of vanity or pride commits a bad act. In this case, the moral object (helping at a foodbank) and the circumstances under which that act are performed are all good, but the intention is toward an evil and therefore the act is an evil act. Conversely, if a man wishes to alleviate the suffering of another but chooses as the means to do so to poison the sufferer so as to bring death, then the act is evil not on account of its intention but, this time, on account of its moral object, since the murder of an innocent is always and everywhere unjust. Similarly, target practice in order to improve accuracy as an archer might be fine, except, say, in the middle of a crowded grocery store. In this case, the circumstances determine the act to be evil.

The above suffices to illustrate why consent between involved parties is not a sufficient grounds for calling an act good. In the above example of euthanasia, the Church teaches that whether or not the sufferer consents to being poisoned, the moral object remains contrary to human nature and its concomitant dignity. Similarly, the Church maintains, contrary to popular opinion, that consent alone does not justify every sex act. Consent is a necessary but not sufficient grounds for calling a sex act good. If the act is consensual but contrary to the dignity of those involved or contrary to the natures of human beings and human sexual intercourse, then the act is contrary to the truth of things and remains evil even though it is consensual.

Veritatis splendor §78 - 79 says:

An act is therefore good if its object is in conformity with the good of the person with respect for the goods morally relevant for him…. Reason attests that there are objects of the human act which are by their nature “incapable of being ordered” to God, because they radically contradict the good of the person made in his image.

Consent and a Just Wage

Many self-identified conservative Catholics recognize this principle in certain arenas of moral action but not in others. In my opinion, this seems to insinuate an ideological rather than principled opposition to the Church’s position on minimum wage.

The reason that there can or ought to be a minimum wage at all is that consent between employee and employer over wages is not sufficient to render this or that wage consonant with the nature of work and the shared human nature of the employer and employee. Just as a perverse sex act may contradict the goodness of those engaging in the act, so might a certain (albeit agreed upon) payment for work contradict the goodness of the employer and employee.

This is precisely what the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, §302 says, drawing upon Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum.

The simple agreement between employee and employer with regard to the amount of pay to be received is not sufficient for the agreed upon salary to qualify as a “just wage,” because a just wage “must not be below the level of subsistence of the worker: natural justice precedes and is above the freedom of the contract.

Similarly, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, §2434 states:

A just wage is the legitimate fruit of work. To refuse or withhold it can be a grave injustice. In determining fair pay both the needs and the contributions of each person must be taken into account. "Remuneration for work should guarantee man the opportunity to provide a dignified livelihood for himself and his family on the material, social, cultural and spiritual level, taking into account the role and the productivity of each, the state of the business, and the common good." Agreement between the parties is not sufficient to justify morally the amount to be received in wages.

The Value of Work

What determines the value of wage work has been of particular interest to social philosophers for several centuries. A full analysis is unnecessary here, but it should suffice for the present question to show that the Church teaches, as seen in the above CCC quotation, that a “just wage is the legitimate fruit of work.” That is to say that a full-time wage worker’s labor is proportionate to a payment which guarantees man the opportunity for him and his family to subsist. Subsistence here means the ability, in a dignified manner, to provide for the necessities of life, e.g. food, clothing, medicine, shelter, and so on.

At first glance, this may be hard to swallow. After all, isn’t the value of work proportionate exclusively or primarily to the market value of the goods or service produced? On the contrary, says Laborem Exercens, §6:

This does not mean that, from the objective point of view, human work cannot and must not be rated and qualified in any way. It only means that the primary basis of tbe value of work is man himself, who is its subject. This leads immediately to a very important conclusion of an ethical nature: however true it may be that man is destined for work and called to it, in the first place work is "for man" and not man "for work".

The value of man’s work may be determined in some ways based upon the market value of the object of the good or service worked, but the primary source of value of labor comes from the subject of that labor, who is a man. This requires a fundamental shift in the way that we consider the value of labor, to be sure. But it is a principle which follows from the very truth that the market’s primary objective is to ensure the material subsistence of every man and family. “A salary is the instrument that permits the laborer to gain access to the goods of the earth,”¹ and therefore the value of work must begin with the consideration of the nature of the worker and the meaning/value which the worker imparts to the work.

If it is true that a) being primarily ordered toward subsistence is an intrinsic aspect of the nature of work, and b) human nature means that subsistence is determined by the necessary goods listed above, then the moral object of the act of wage payment is of its own nature ordered toward wages which make subsistence possible, just as the moral object of a sexual act is of its own nature ordered toward procreation. Consenting to an act which deviates from its natural end does not make said deviation non-existent, and therefore consent does not make the act well ordered. Rather, it is simply a disordered act agreed upon by two parties.

This natural end of wages sets a kind of minimum bar for just wages. Quadragesimo anno, §68 states, “For they are greatly in error who do not hesitate to spread the principle that labor is worth and must be paid as much as its products are worth.” This principle can be applied in both directions, i.e. that the worker does not have the right to demand as payment the entire worth of the product nor can the employer justly determine payment based solely upon the market worth of the good produced. Those workers who provide more market value may be remunerated at a higher wage than others, but there is a minimum necessary which is determined, as we have said, by the nature of worker and work, which is not simply determined by market value of good produced by said worker.

When a Just Wage is Impossible

Finally, we ought to note that there are extraordinary conditions under which an employer may be unable to pay just wages to his employees. Quadragesimo anno, §72 states:

In determining the amount of the wage, the condition of a business and of the one carrying it on must also be taken into account; for it would be unjust to demand excessive wages which a business cannot stand without its ruin and consequent calamity to the workers. If, however, a business makes too little money, because of lack of energy or lack of initiative or because of indifference to technical and economic progress, that must not be regarded a just reason for reducing the compensation of the workers. But if the business in question is not making enough money to pay the workers an equitable wage because it is being crushed by unjust burdens or forced to sell its product at less than a just price, those who are thus the cause of the injury are guilty of grave wrong, for they deprive workers of their just wage and force them under the pinch of necessity to accept a wage less than fair.

In this case, although there is an evil being done (i.e. the evil of unjust payment for labor), this is not an evil caused by the employer but by a disordered state of the market overall, something for which other employers, the government, or others are responsible. This does not exempt the worker from a just wage, but rather exempts the employer from guilt in the worker’s not receiving a just wage because the employer himself is being deprived of that which he himself ought to have. (Of course, as implied above, if the employer is unable to pay a just wage because of his own mismanagement of business, that is another story).

This means that a just wage is not a panacea for an ill market. It was for this reason that, during the Middle Ages, governments would often help to regulate just wages dependent upon the cost of living. Bede Jarrett, O.P. notes that:

Efforts, therefore, were made to ensure that the just price [of goods] when settled by the state should be so fixed as to be adjustable to the cost of living. The assize of bread under Henry II., for example, established wages on a sliding scale based on the price of bread.²

It is for this reason that Rerum novarum, §16 states that the Church:

does her best to enlist the services of all classes in discussing and endeavoring to further in the most practical way, the interests of the working classes; and considers that for this purpose recourse should be had, in due measure and degree, to the intervention of the law and of State authority. 

And similarly Quadragesimo anno, §49:

Yet when the State brings private ownership into harmony with the needs of the common good, it does not commit a hostile act against private owners but rather does them a friendly service; for it thereby effectively prevents the private possession of goods, which the Author of nature in His most wise providence ordained for the support of human life, from causing intolerable evils and thus rushing to its own destruction; it does not destroy private possessions, but safeguards them; and it does not weaken private property rights, but strengthens them.

Note, however, that even when an employer finds it impossible to pay his employee a just wage, this does not change the principle that consent alone is insufficient to determine what constitutes just pay. In fact, Laborem Exercens, §19 notes that the ability for employers to afford just payment to their employees is “the concrete means of verifying the justice of the whole socioeconomic system and, in any case, of checking that it is functioning justly.” A situation in which many employers found themselves incapable of paying a just wage to all of their employees is a situation in which there is significant disease in the market and the government’s regulation of the market. Such a situation would be one of objective and grave injustice.

1. Compendium of Catholic Social Teaching, §302.

2. Bede Jarret, Social Theories of the Middle Ages (Tacoma, WA: Angelico Press, 2012), 161.