A continued series for supporting subscribers introducing 20th century saint Dorothy Day.
A Brief Lament for Contemporary Moral Discourse
A moment of insider baseball: the discipline of Christian Ethics is having an identity crisis, one in which the political eclipses the personal.
Let me explain. The question of what it means to be a moral being has always intertwined personal action and social context in some way: to be a person at all is to be someone who comes from others, raised with and by others, lives among others, and exercises a life in concert with others. This is just what an ethos is: a personal life conjoined with one’s neighbors.1
Among both Protestants and Catholics, these two questions have been sundered for quite some time. Discussions of virtue typically circle around individual character; questions of the public good cycle through appropriate modes of distribution, public justice, and the common good. This isn’t to say that these two don’t belong together (they do!), but the two streams have been converging on a focus on public life for some time now2:
The Personal as Political. Within the virtues, justice has typically been conceived of as the capstone virtue, the virtue which has to do with how a person lives their life well among others. This presupposes that being just is more than having the right frame of distribution: we have to also be temperate in our desires for goods, prudent about how to distribute goods well, and consistent in our application of reason and judgment.
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BUT: what if how I come to understand desire, distribution, and reason is the function of a tyrannical society? I might very well come to conclusions about what is just that are just reflections of a bad society! Being the kind of person that I am, thus, requires me to see myself as a reflection of the political, that what I do and am is ultimately not just personal, but political. To be virtuous in character means to exclude a separation between my piety and social concerns, insofar as my virtue is a reflection and production of my social world already.
The Political as Personal. If considerations about what a person is have been subsumed by what it means to be a member of society, a similar trend has been happening in social ethics, pushing beyond procedural niceness and into personal conformity. Justice, as the measure of what a society is to be, was once concerned with establishing rules of engagement: to function in a society wasn’t necessarily to be the same, but to have a common grammar to help keep the wheels on. You can have private opinions, but not if they are “conversation stoppers”, like whether bears are better than beets, or if all people need to be Christians to be reasonable. Over time, then, how I think about public goods becomes part of how I think about what kind of private values are appropriate3. No longer is it enough to think one way in public and another in private, but being a good members of society means being authentic in public, such that my personal thoughts need to be consistent with what I do in the public sphere, the public colonizing the private.
Whichever way you slice it, then, the political has arguably4 become the dominant frame, even if “identity” is what we’re talking about, because—you guessed it—the way that identity conversations happen is calibrated around whether the identity I claim for myself is doing good or harm to my neighbor, or what it means for my neighbor to recognize my identity fully.
This is where Dorothy Day becomes exceptionally heterodox to contemporary moral discourse, by way of a little old-fashioned anarchy. What if the moral life required skepticism toward social institutions, and indeed, toward the political as the first and ultimate concern of the moral life?
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