Coalition Thinking and Community Thinking: Two Roads in the Moral Woods
Public Moral Discourse is Changing, and We're All the Worse Off For It
In this issue, we continue the themes from the last few weeks—how our corporate moral lives operate—looking at some of the fallout from this week’s SCOTUS decision on abortion. After July, this will normally be available in full only to paid subscribers.
Last week, I was with family down near the Texas coast, so of course that would be the week that the Supreme Court released the Dobbs decision. As a non-lawyer, I have nothing to add to any of the commentary surrounding the decision—it’s not unexpected given the leak from earlier this summer. The trigger laws which are now in play as replacements for Roe are very hit and miss: some have nuance, and provide for medically necessary procedures such as ectopic pregnancies, life-threatening pregnancies, or even procedures to clean the uterus. That on-demand abortion will probably undergo nationally a 20% reduction12—that’s good, but as virtue ethics has told us from time immemorial, pursuing a good end in the wrong way and by the wrong means may lead to short term goals being accomplished, but will also corrupt us. How we get there is as important as where we go.
I’ve said most of what I plan on saying regarding abortion itself already in my Comment piece. But, in the aftermath of Dobbs, what I find really interesting is the way that people have begun arguing about the future after Dobbs. In the arguments around abortion, we are finding what we can call the difference between coalition thinking and community thinking about moral questions. There are few issues around which the public argues so vigorously as they do abortion, so it’s an illuminating opportunity for us to see how these work, and why they matter.
So, first, a couple of definitions:
Coalitions are, by nature, tactial alliances which emerge out of common cause. What draws together adherents is the common cause, though they have divergent reasons for advocating for the thing. We see this really frequently in public discourse, and in all kinds of directions: it’s the common thread between the way in which Planned Parenthood and the National Association of Evangelicals operate, pulling together people who otherwise have little in common except that they care about the one end, for diverse reasons.
Communities, are, by nature, non-tactical. As we discussed last week, communities operate on a principle of “being for” rather than “being alongside”. In communities, commitment to the other persons within a group precedes and generates the ways in which common purposes emerge. So, for example, a church may very well care about abortion, but the way in which it cares will be primarily according to the shape of the church itself, not necessarily the public form of the issue.
How each group thinks, then, about justice differs broadly:
Coalitions are concerned first with outcomes, such that justice is named as a matter of fairness. Insofar as coalitions emerge out of some agnosticism of things like intent of action, other goals that the divergent actors have, and values unrelated to the goal, what matters is not how the end (in this case, preserving or ending abortion) is related to other values of the sub-groups, but that the goal is something which can be appropriated by everyone within the group. It doesn’t matter what Presbyterians or Methodists or Baptists are going to do after Dobbs, in this case: what matters is that everyone gets what they want in the Dobbs decision.
Communities, built out of prior commitment to the persons involved in their group, think about justice with respect to the principle of how this action fits into the long-term vision of their community. So, in this case, it’s not ultimately about Dobbs, but about what is named by Dobbs: the way in which certain decisions of government enable or prevent a vision of a good life from flourishing.
This language of justice depends in large part because of divergent assumptions about what kind of personal agency we have.
In the rhetoric surrounding Dobbs, here’s how this has been playing out, I think:
Coalitions tend to view personal agency as inviolable: we can come together for a certain cause, but the reasons for our union and all of its mysteries remain beyond what we can reasonably talk about. If libertarians and hard-core statists join together to oppose the Dobbs ruling, it’s because both of them think that individual agency around abortion should be something preserved apart from government. What one does with the agency is a different question, and beyond the scope of the reason for their joining common cause.
Watch for the language of “this decision is all about power” and “this decision is a victory for the rights of the unborn”: both of these rest upon this presumption surrounding personal agency.3 In both cases, an outcome is sought because it is in violation of personal autonomy and agency, irrespective of the ends of that action. When this is employed, I think you’ve got coalition thinking going on.
Communities, committed to the persons, do not see their individual agency as unlimited, but limited according to the needs of the persons. As Tish Harrison Warren pointed out in her op-ed, bodily autonomy does not—for anyone—extend in infinite ways. Women’s bodies bear the brunt of pregnancy, full stop, and all well-intended movements to have men legally share the responsibility of pregnancy don’t mitigate this. But if a pregnancy is, in truth, a genetically differentiated being gestating within the mother, then any moral claims to autonomy are upended by the prior biological differentiation in play in pregnancy.
In the Dobbs decision, then, this is why you have the twin phenomenon of “we now need to be about building up a culture of life”, and “there needs to be provision for medically necessary procedures”. In community thinking, there is the acknowledgment that one’s own desires necessarily must pass through the contingencies of others, and in the process, one’s own advocacy is altered.4 But all told, when these kinds of presumptions about personal autonomy are operative, I think you’ve got community thinking going on.
I’m painting with some quick strokes here, but I think what I’ve put out here is correct. The two modes of moral reasoning, then, rest on two different understandings of both how our individual agency operates, and what kinds of public goals are desirable. For coalition thinking, solidarity and common cause become premium, not only because there are overlapping visions of the good in the world, but because many of the ways that we get to that overlap are really beside the point for public action: what matters in public is the result, not the way we get there, which you can keep for yourself. For community thinking, the persons are premium, resulting in less tactical movement and more negotiated outcomes. We’re in it together, and in ways which are not easily separated from one another.
Where does this go next?
Already, we are seeing (at least online) a desire for mobilization around the new battlegrounds: states and municipalities. This will play out in broadly the ways I’ve sketched out above, with one new wrinkle: the community arguments which want to preserve some nuance with respect to abortion are going to get much harder to make. Some of the trigger laws which have gone into play have the necessary nuance to preserve room for medical professionals to do their jobs well, but some trigger laws have taken this as a chance to make a big political swing (again, coalition thinking in play which thinks about outcomes, not people.)
It’s one thing for us—in a world where Roe still was the law—to argue for nuances within abortion policy. I might hold that some procedures are licit and others not, while others could take a more expansive view, but there is some common ground. But with many states’ trigger laws offering zero-tolerance approach to abortion, any arguments for nuance now get swept up into coalition thinking: moving the switch from Off to On.
What this means is that umbrella terms such as “justice” will now be doing the work of not only including ectopic pregnancy, but on-demand abortion as well. The new advocacy—that of the coalition on/off switch variety—is bad news for moral reasoning, in that it kills any sense of nuance, judgment, or distinction which we employ in pretty much all areas of moral life.
To whit:
In the tweets prior to this, he’s absolutely correct that there was a lot of duplicity and bad faith that went into the election of Trump, without whom you don’t have the justices needed to overturn Roe.
But what interests me is the way in which his use of “the oppressed” is expansive in precisely coalition-style thinking. To rectify the over-correction of some trigger laws, in a post-Roe world, now means putting all uses of abortion under one rubric: either it is allowed or not, advocated for full stop or opposed full stop. This is the apex of coalition thinking, and the beginning of the end for the life of the moral mind.
In outlining the differences between these types, I want us to see two things:
Community Thinking bears the possibility of moving beyond ideological boundaries by expanding our concerns and care. Note, in the example above, how both proponents of community thinking want to expand the boundaries of who is cared for, in different ways. This becomes an opportunity for shared care, and not just shared action. To only have shared action is to limit one’s care to the outcome, and sometimes to the other persons contributing to the action. But to care for the persons first means that our shared action must first be actions of care.
Coalition Thinking bundles together these differences in ways which prevents nuance of thinking, and thus, moral thinking. I am not saying that coalitions aren’t moral—just that they don’t operate on moral thinking, and doing so long-term is detrimental to us. Coalition offers a more simple way forward to accomplishing a desired end, but a long-term cost of having to now affirm an increasingly strained set of goods to be able to affirm any of the specific things under them (i.e. supporting abortion full stop to be able to support ectopic pregnancy, medical emergencies, rape, incest, etc.)
Coalitions get us somewhere in the short run, but in the long run, make it harder and harder for us to reason in ways which don’t get reduced to us and them. Whatever moral agency I have is always and already entangled with the lives of others, and I can’t ever forget that. We don’t get to the end unless we get there together.
There are a number of things to be very on guard against going forward: the criminalization of women who seek abortions, medical professionals more on guard in ways which could undermine patient health, a surge of babies in need of fostering or adoption when both systems are overwhelmed. The thing I’m watching for, given my context of training ministers and working with churches, is two-fold:
The way in which coalition thinking will affect church discourse. Will it mean a further sorting of churches, with one telling the pregnant that the babies are solely their responsibility and the other telling them that abortion is the way forward? Will it mean, with the new On/Off switch thinking, that churches that had a more nuanced understanding will now start funding abortion travel? Will it mean that being pro-abortion, full-stop, is now just part of some church identities in ways it wouldn’t have been before?
The way in which community thinking will affect church discourse. Given the prevalence of coalition thinking, will churches seeking to have some nuance find themselves in a new wasteland? What kinds of new fellowships among these churches will emerge? Is it possible to even train students to think with nuance when its less likely their churches will be hospitable to it?
Some of the prevalence of coalition thinking in churches may just be that they’ve played the public advocacy game so long that that’s all they know how to do. It’s time for us all to dig in, take a deep breath, and get real comfortable with both the friction and with the bad takes that are about to ensue.
Again, clarity: Dobbs throws it back to the states, which means it’s not like abortion has been abolished in any meaningful way. Something to watch for in the coming months is the rise of a new industry of abortion-related travel, as states such as Illinois, California, New Mexico, and several East Coast hubs develop.
Abortions had, prior to last week, already been dropping nationally, and had been for several years running. This was a combination of some legislative practices, but also decreased rates of sexual activity, decreased fertility, increased availability of contraception and birth control, and other factors. See Guttmacher’s report, which indicates a recent uptick, but not a significant one.
NB: there are real power dynamics occurring whenever governmental decisions are made about any issue, and it’s most prescient when those decisions concern bodily life. Laws always involve moral thinking—they’re about what is good and proper for people to do—and none of these laws are made in vacuums w/r/t power dynamics.
For community thinking to be good faith, though, it has to bear this out, and bear it out in ways which on the question of abortion, which lag far, far behind the need.