Debts, Debtors, and Guarantees
The Entangled Starting Point of Obligations
This is the first in an extended series on the nature of moral obligations.—Management
The Knot of Obligations: You Don’t Get to Pick Them All
As promised, we’ll spend the next…while….on the nature of moral obligations: where they are generated from, to whom we owe them, why we’re obligated in an economy of grace—it’ll range far and wide. The basic definition that I’m going to be working with is something like this: “an act or course of action to which a person is morally or legally bound”. It’s a fairly bland definition, in no small part because obligations comprise much of our lives without us giving too much thought about it. And as such, it’s important for us to step back and give some attention to them.
Examining the nature of obligations can become impossibly knotted quickly, for two reasons:
We operate out of a sense of obligation all the time without sussing out where these things begin or end. We do not wake up one morning and decide to be obligated to our loved ones; we are obligated to them, and for reasons that we can’t quite sort out, but yet form the structures of our lives. The best example of this is, I think, falling in love: once you fall in love with someone, that’s it—you’re in it. And in fact, by the time you realize it, it’s too late: you’ve bound yourself to the beloved without giving too much conscious deliberation to it. You enter into a marriage to someone not because you created a pro/con list, but because you realize that you’ve already committed to them. Sometimes, we find ourselves in commitments that are not simply burdensome, but morally corrosive. But the point here is that obligations frequently overtake us before we make decisions about them.
Our obligations are mutually informing, reinforcing, and proliferating. To return to the first example, one set of obligations leads to another, strengthening both the reasons for the new one and the old one. Because I am not just freely giving myself to my spouse, but obligated to her1, it shapes all downstream relationships, such as those with our children. When my oldest asks for breakfast in the morning, I don’t feed him because I am duty-bound to do so (though I am), or solely out of love (though I love him), but because by entering into the relationship with my wife, that shapes my obligations to our children as well. I don’t have a competing obligation to either my children or my wife, but they are interrelated.
To give a different example, when you enter into a job obligation (a more willing kind of obligation), you enter into all kinds of downstream obligations, some of which you love (like teaching my students) and some of which are pure obligation and duty (like paperwork), but which are entailed with being a part of an institution which provides employment. The secondary obligation is not an optional feature, but a downstream commitment which I find myself entrenched in without having ever given my volition to.
All this brings, of course, to loan forgiveness.
Shared Obligations, Unchosen: Malicious and Transparent
In a loan, we are taking on a specified form of obligation: money is given up front, but with the self-incurred obligation to repay it. It’s fairly straightforward in nature, except for the obscure nature of the compounding interest involved in many loans. Accordingly, it’s not uncommon for people to pay for a decade or more—on time—and still be nearly at the same point they were when they started.
The wrinkle to obligations which student loans in particular bring up is that the terms of obligation are, like many kinds of obligations, open-ended: in committing to my wife, I am committing directly to any number of things which I cannot foresee, including many downstream commitments, such as our children. Only in the case of student loans, the commitment which is undertaken is knowingly obscured by one party. In a marriage, or in a job situation, there is transparency with respect to what is obligated to, and when we cannot know something—like a spouse’s future health or what kind of offspring we may or may not have—it’s something which neither party knows. In the case of loan structuring, one party does not have the relevant information and obligates themselves in good faith nonetheless.
It doesn’t negate the original loan: the student takes the money and uses it to purchase an education. Whether or not they get the future they envisioned when they borrowed it isn’t the relative concern: whether or not the terms of the obligation were intentionally one-sided is. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a person finds themselves in a debt they cannot repay, due to one-sided information about the deal they entered into, and to alleviate the debt, others incur a burden to help alleviate the debt.
The Entangled Beginnings of Obligation
By virtue of being an American citizen—and our family having no educational debt now—I will take up this obligation, not as an act of will, but as a downstream obligation which I did not foresee but comes with being a member of a body politic anyway. As citizens of a country, we do this all the time—we become obligated to pay for things we did not ourselves choose, secondarily because this is how societies work but fundamentally because this is a mirror of how our obligations work all the time.
The complaint that sticks is that some have the means to shoulder this more than others—and that one seems to be in need of working out. Those with lower incomes have less way of contributing to this obligation being met than those with higher incomes, but all are in this together, as a consequence of being a citizen. And none of us asked to be citizens in the first place, but are born into this. Obligations begin, in other words, not by us having chosen them, but by us finding ourselves in the midst of them already.
This is the nature of obligation as we find it in Scripture: it’s not something that we choose so much as something that we find ourselves in. God rescues Israel from Egypt and then says, “Okay, since you’re here: this is what it looks like to be my people.” God creates the world and all that is, and then instructs the newly created humans what it means to live in that world. It’s all one-sided, but not malicious. Insofar as we always find ourselves in this world with obligations and commitments that don’t originate with our acts of will, our complaint cannot be that we didn’t choose these things: we didn’t choose our own existence to begin with!
In framing obligation’s starting point in this way—that obligation is not fundamentally something we choose—I’m trying to open up the scope to say that our obligations are not fair, and probably won’t be. Waiting for our duties to level out leads to thinking of obligation as only obligation if it is chosen. We’ll get to this eventually, but to begin, I want to deflate the role of choosing our obligations significantly.
The flip-side to this, theologically, of course, is that God becomes obligated to a creation in ways which are both becoming of God, and which are not necessary for God to do. God is God, unbound by necessity, and yet: while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us, the righteous for the unrighteous. So it goes.
Reading: Andy Crouch’s The Life We’re Looking For. So far, not bad. I’ve read of lot of tech stuff as of late, and Crouch has a winsome way of framing these concerns in a more pastoral voice that I find helpful. The two volumes of Primacy in the Church, for reasons of a writing project that I won’t bore you with—it’s part of the major writing project I need to finish soon. Haunting of Hill House—the creepiness continues to ramp up.
Writing: I had the chance to contribute to this book, which has the benefit of each of the authors responding to each of the other sections. I won’t spoil it for you, but it’s worth your reading. Whereas my co-authored book on nonviolence is more descriptive, this one was a chance for me to put my constructive stake in the ground, and to be a little polemical against what I took to be some bad alternatives.
And once again, the back-to-school special is good through Thursday!
In a different issue, we’ll get into the question of what difference volition, or free choice, makes for how we think about our obligations. I’ll just say here that I think the will is properly restrained and channeled by obligation, even if we enter into obligations as an act of will.