More on ordo amoris: The messy ethics of loving near and far neighbours

A response to Tijmen van der Maas

Written by Vesa Hautala

The usual disclaimer: Christ and Counterfactuals is a multi-author, multi-perspective blog curated by EA for Christians. Opinions may not represent the stance of EACH.

Tijmen van der Maas wrote a response to my earlier post The ordo amoris has an important exception. He argues that while you are indeed allowed to help strangers, this does not constitute an exception to the ordo amoris. This post presents some thoughts on duties, consequences, virtue, and drawing the line between helping family and helping strangers, sparked by his piece.

First, I admit I was imprecise: I’m not an expert on Aquinas, but Tijmen is probably right that Aquinas wouldn’t consider what I called an exception to the ordo amoris as a real exception. I wanted to succinctly convey that Aquinas isn’t saying that you don’t need to help strangers at all because you should prioritise those close to you. This seemed like an important point to make because the ordo amoris has been misused in support of a position something like this, as Tijmen also points out in his post.

EA isn’t telling you to leave your family to help strangers

Still, there are a couple of points I want to make in defence of Effective Altruism. Tijmen points out that treating distant strangers equally to immediate family is not universalisable, because it would lead to people “heading[ing] off to deepest Africa, abandoning our families to their lots and collapsing society.”

It would be quite obviously bad if everyone abandoned their families and society collapsed in the US or wherever it is that they’re emigrating from. Effective altruism would therefore not recommend such collective action. Even on naïve consequentialism (which EA is not), the actions other people perform should be taken into consideration. If everyone doing something has bad results, then everyone should not do that. If it would still be good that some people do it, some mechanism to decide who should be the ones to take action should be figured out.

To be clear, I don’t endorse people abandoning their families and going to help distant strangers until their families are as bad off as the strangers. I agree that abandoning your family is off the table in the first place, but I think so does EA by and large. EAs generally embrace the principle “don’t do things that are evil from the point of view of commonsense morality.” This principle should be especially clear to Christian EAs.

You can fit this together with consequentialism if you model inviolable duties as “side constraints.” In an influential paper, Will MacAskill and Theron Pummer define EA as “the project of using evidence and reason to try to find out how to do the most good, and on this basis trying to do the most good, without violating constraints.”¹ The need for observing deontological constraints is professed by even EA-adjacent hardcore atheist consequentialists. I wouldn’t call myself a consequentialist, but I think this point is worth making in the defence of consequentialism.

Beyond duties

Later in the post, Tijmen discusses the nature of duties and the ordo amoris. His crucial claim is that duties prescribed (described?) by the ordo amoris are inviolable. He refers to the Pauline principle in Romans 3:8 that one may not do evil so that good may result. (Pope John Paul II referred to this verse in condemnation of utilitarianism in his encyclical Veritatis splendor.) However, these inviolable duties to family are limited, so they leave room for helping strangers when you have sufficiently cared for those close to you.² There is also something beyond duties to the ethics of loving your neighbour:

A purely duty-based ethics would […] be a skeletal framework, that does not suffice for an ethical person, and must be fleshed out with the virtue of an ethical heart. Once our duties are fulfilled, we must live in “the law of love,” using an ethical or virtuous heart to determine how we spend the rest of our energies. To ensure that we move beyond this skeletal framework and into the law of love as soon as we can, we must read the duty-based ordo amoris minimally […]

I like the virtue-ethical framing and agree that there is more to ethics than just duties. This virtue-guided part is also part of the ordo amoris, according to Tijmen. This means that even when we move beyond duties to immediate family, etc., we are still operating within the ordo amoris. Hence, helping strangers in need is not an exception. The virtue-based ordo amoris is not without a structure: “A virtuous person, operating with a virtue-based ordo amoris, does not love everyone equally (this would be practically unwise, would lack phronesis), but loves people to a degree that is appropriate.”

Yet I’m unsure whether the commonsense idea of “make sure that the needs of your family are met to a reasonable degree before helping strangers” is best conceptualised as absolute duties you have to fulfil and then after that proceed with a virtuous heart. Maybe it’s just that the absolutely inviolable duties phrasing sounds so… Western. I’m Orthodox, and we tend to talk less about duties when discussing ethics. Not that we would be consequentialists or relativists, or that the utilitarianism common in EA would necessarily fit well with Eastern Orthodox ethics. Still, I feel there’s a different vibe to Orthodox ethics compared to classical Western Christianity.

What I particularly appreciate about this virtue framing Tijmen presents is that it acknowledges the need for prudent, proportional responses instead of operating rigidly based on rules. I think there are two opposite temptations when it comes to deontology: one is to think you are clever enough that deontological rules don’t apply to you and that you could do more good if not bound by them (see: Sam Bankman-Fried). The other is to retreat to rules to avoid the demands of love and the hard and messy realities of life—to make duties a fig leaf for not caring.

Dominic Roser discusses this later temptation in his article in the book Effective Altruism and Religion:

Following clear rules allows for peace of mind about having clean hands. In comparison, the open-ended task of taking responsibility for every way in which one’s choices impact others is harder to bear.

Dominic claims that the consequentialist elements in Christian morality are in danger of being crowded out by an overemphasis on deontological considerations. Two reasons this temptation exists are that “deontology allows us a simpler way to ascertain that we have paid our dues” and “makes space for toning down” ethical demands. Deontology allows retreating to supererogation: unlike some forms of consequentialism, notably the utilitarianism prominent in EA, most deontological systems don’t say one should always choose the morally best option.³ I do believe supererogation exists, but I think Dominic is on to something: there are good spiritual reasons to be wary of overusing this category.

A focus on virtue could also fill the function of nudging people away from excessive deontology. I would be curious to see more exploration on this in the context of Christian effective altruism.

You can’t avoid the messiness

In the end, there appears to be no clear escape from the messy reality of balancing duties to loved ones and the overwhelming needs of strangers. As Tijmen observes, we metaphorically walk past drowning people every day:

We have access to so many charities, to so much need, that it may be tempting to regard any care at all for ourselves, for our families, and for those closer to us, as being wrong. How can we justify spending $3000 on a new car, when that $3000 could buy enough malaria vaccines to save a child in Africa? The balance is very tricky to strike.

It seems that if we want to preserve anything at all for those close to us, some domains of life need to be guarded by clearly defined, (nigh?) inviolable duties or side constraints. But at some point, we need to transition from these to actions guided primarily by virtue, prudence, love, consequential reasoning, etc., and open up to the needs of people further away from us. Tijmen describes this as fulfilling a set of inviolable duties and then moving beyond it to act based on a virtuous heart. I’m less certain if it’s best modelled that way, but I believe we share the basic sentiment and the recognition that drawing the line is difficult. We are left to deal with messiness where we cannot rely on exactly delineated rules and duties, and must rely on different kinds of decision-making—and the grace of God.

1. Theron Pummer & William MacAskill. “Effective Altruism”. International Encyclopedia of Ethics (2020).

2. A lot of the political debate implicitly hinges on what is a sufficient level of care; taken to the extreme, this principle could be used to back up a radical “[insert your group here] first” approach where spending any resources on helping anyone else is wrong as long as there’s something even slightly wrong in your own group—so, in practice, there will never be any help for people further away.

3. It’s true that deontology can be very demanding in other ways: in addition to taking the right actions, it may also demand the right motivations.