On Not Not Having Moral Agency
You're Only a Hero if You're Not Doing it Alone
There are any number of times when we distinguish between the individual and community when it comes to the moral life: the good community and the deviant member, the corrupted community and the heroic member. Our instincts tell us something which I think is both right, and faulty: that what is within our immediate purview of action is something which I am responsible for, and responsible to even if the institution or the community doesn’t do it well. So, for example: I have agency over whether or not to treat person X in a discriminatory fashion. But whether or not Abilene is a historically and institutionally racially-biased place? I have little I am capable of doing about this on a macro level.1 Here, though, I’m wondering whether or not the tendency of marking our agency in this way (fully capable here, and incapable or less responsible in big circumstances) leads us to suppose that our personal agency is as robust as we think.
I’m teaching Stanley Hauerwas’ The Peaceable Kingdom this week and next. In a real banger of a passage, Stanley Hauerwas writes
We acquire character through the expectations of others. The “otherness” of another’s character not only invites me to an always imperfect imitation, but challenges me to recognize the way my vision is restricted by my own self-preoccupation. Thus the kind of community in which we encounter another does not merely make some of the difference for our capacity for agency; it makes all the difference…Our freedom is literally in the hands of others. I am free just to the extent that I can trust others to stand over against me and call my own “achievements” into question. (The Peaceable Kingdom, 45).
For Hauerwas, our character is what enables us to choose in a way which is consistent with the kind of creatures we are made to be by God. So far so good. But he adds to this an important caveat: we are all born into communities which draw that character out of us through expectations, summoning us to action, negating our preoccupations with ourself. The payoff is that the agency I have is not completely mine, but inseparable from the community drawing that agency out of me: I am always a person capable of moral agency to the degree that I recognize the ways in which my actions are dependent on others.
Everyone loves a hero, the guy in the crowd who stands up against all the others. But naming this as “heroism” assumes a kind of exemplarity to their lives that misses the point: they came from somewhere, and their agency in its most magnificent display is only possible to the degree that they are not by themselves. As much as I hate the Braveheart/The Patriot movie, it gets this right: the hero is a hero both to the degree that they are connected to others, and (more to Hauerwas’ point here) in the way they are connected to others. The most miserable kind of hero, in other words, is one who burns down the world and then realizes they’ve burned the world down for exactly no one. Braveheart dies not for his own purity, but as a member of a community, and for that community’s interests.
Thus, our moral agency, both to the degree that we have, and in the way we have it, is related to the community we belong to. That’s good news for all of us normies bound up by responsibilities: no one, including God, expects you to be heroic in ways which ultimately pretend that you’re not made who you are by a community. Burning down or exercising heroism in a way which burns down the people you’re ostensibly trying to save isn’t heroism: it’s pretending that we’re not from somewhere or bound up with others.
But here’s the flip side, and where complicity jumps back in: I can never disentangle myself from that community that fails, even if my specific moral contributions are divergent from the specific offending action. Even when I am morally horrified by the actions of my community I am what I am in no small part because of that body, and can’t disavow that any more than I can disavow my own thinking. If I find myself protesting against something in a way which shows me to be alien to them, then it’s an indicator for Hauerwas that I never really belonged to that community that I was living amidst, and thus, have in a real sense lost the ability to communicate with that community for the sake of helping it change.
In theological language, this is a doctrine of sin and a doctrine of salvation are tied together, particularly as Paul lays it out in Romans: I am both entangled in something beyond my immediate doing (sin), and in and through that entanglement, allowed to contribute to the healing of a community which has made me what I am, for better or for worse. Heroism is a way of naming those nodes of a community who help us all to aspire to sanctification, to the degree that their work is made possible by and responsive to the community. The hero who burns the whole thing down forgets that their ability to light the match comes from a real tinderbox of a community.
I’ve written about this question from the perspective of patience recently (and invite you to check those out again).