Earlier this year, Vice President J.D. Vance triggered quite a firestorm when he mentioned the Christian concept of ordo amoris, also known as the order of charity. “There’s this old-school—and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way—that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world,” Vance told Fox News host Sean Hannity. In a flash, American journalists were researching the phrase and writing feature stories quoting experts critically dissecting Vance’s comments. Even Pope Francis seemed to reprimand Vance, writing in February: “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups.”
Whether or not Vance properly understands and articulates ordo amoris, there’s little doubt regarding the concept’s historically theological pedigree. For example, St. Augustine declared: “Since, however, one cannot do good to all, we ought to consider those chiefly who by reason of place, time or any other circumstance, by a kind of chance, are more closely united to us.” Consider also St. Thomas in his Summa Theologiae: “Wherever there is a principle, there must necessarily also be order of some kind. … Consequently there must necessarily be some order in things loved out of charity.” And, as Notre Dame professor Melissa Moschella argues in her new book, Ethics, Politics, and Natural Law: Principles for Human Flourishing, it is also a concept that can be identified in natural law theory.
That’s not to say that this is necessarily the overarching thesis of Moschella’s book, which is a short, accessible articulation and defense of contemporary natural law theory, featuring chapters on first principles, moral principles, the social and political dimensions of human flourishing, and human flourishing as it relates to morality and God. Nevertheless, I could not help but notice, once Moschella had set the rhetorical stage, how frequently something akin to ordo amoris kept appearing.
The first chapter is devoted to helping the reader understand foundational concepts that underlie natural law theory, such as free will, intelligible goods, and first principles. Intelligible goods—as opposed to instrumental goods—are those basic goods we choose for their own sake, rather than merely for the sake of or in relation to some other good. For example, we may pursue money but not for its own sake, as if thin bits of colored paper or metal are themselves what make us happy. Rather, money is an instrumental good acquired to help us possess such things as knowledge or beauty.
First principles in turn are those self-evident, foundational tenets of thought that cannot be logically demonstrated but upon which all other thought depends. One of these, taken from Aquinas, is “good is to-be-done-and-pursued and evil is to-be-avoided.” Others include that the whole is greater than the parts and the law of noncontradiction, which holds that a proposition and its negation cannot both be true at the same time and in the same sense. Denying these “leads to absurd conclusions or is performatively inconsistent,” Moschella explains. Though we cannot conduct an experiment to prove the rules of logic, “they are nonetheless just as objectively true (in their own way) as the laws of physics or the existence of the plant on my desk.”
These foundational points established, Moschella moves on to discussing moral principles, of which there must be a hierarchy in order to differentiate various goods. Underlying all these, consistently found across the diversity of human civilization, is the moral norm of the Golden Rule, which follows from the often-unstated master moral principle: Choose and act only in ways that are compatible with a will toward integral human fulfillment. Many familiar moral norms flow from this, such as prohibitions against lying, stealing, and cheating; as well as waiting one’s turn, doing one’s fair share, and keeping one’s promises.
That said, even if one wishes to live a life seeking the good and avoiding evil, how does one prioritize the many goods one could pursue? Here Moschella responds by explaining what she calls the “Vocation principle,” which is ordering one’s priorities in line with one’s vocational commitments, and the “Unity of Life Principle,” which is harmonizing and integrating one’s pursuits and commitments by establishing order or hierarchy. This applies not only to such things as knowledge, health, and beauty but also relationships. “The very nature of these goods requires a certain prioritization of the good of one’s spouse, children, relatives, friends, and so on over others to whom one has no such relationship,” writes Moschella. For example, if I prioritize time with the guys on my softball team over that with my wife and children, I will necessarily undermine both the vocation and unity of life principles.
Moschella closes this section by noting the need for an “overarching commitment,” a single, ultimate choice that governs and integrates all one’s choices, actions, and loyalties. Religion seems best suited to serve this function, it being the only good that can reasonably govern and relate to every choice we make. “The person who takes harmony with God as her single ultimate end can therefore harmoniously subsume all of her morally upright pursuits and commitments under this overarching purpose, without treating them as merely instrumental.”
Perhaps the sections of the book most relevant to contemporary debates are those on sociology and politics. For example, Moschella argues that children need to be in a full-fledged community with their biological parents for several important reasons. For one, they need to develop an integrated understanding of their overall personal identity, including their bodies and how they fit in with their identity, which most beneficially happens in communion with one’s biological parents, given that parents are jointly the source of a child’s biological identity. From biological parents, children learn the potentialities and pitfalls of their unique biological constitution, how to be at peace with their physical appearance, and to be comforted that others with similar “raw materials” have successfully navigated the complexity of understanding one’s identity. Peer-reviewed academic research validates this, as many children conceived through assisted reproductive technologies feel robbed of important insights into their identity, and a vast majority of children conceived through donors hoped to be in contact someday with their donor.
There are also the relational benefits stemming from being loved and knowing oneself to be loved by biological parents. A person is permanently and intimately linked to biological parents, and the love of those parents matters to a child in a way that the love of a stranger or casual acquaintance does not. If a child is raised by biological parents in an intact family where he or she feels secure, “the biological origin story will be continuous and harmonious with that child’s current family situation.” If not, difficult questions arise: Who are the child’s biological parents, what are they like, what characteristics does the child share with them, and why are the biological parents not raising the child? Did they not want the child? Was the child not good enough? Did they not care for the child? Again, psychologists confirm that it is common for adopted children and those not raised by their biological parents to pose these sorts of questions, and research clearly demonstrates that family structure matters for children and decreases the likelihood of various negative emotional, psychological, or educational outcomes.
All this also presumes the operation of the ordo amoris: Parents prioritize the needs of their children over other persons, such as their friends or even other relatives, as well as over other impersonal objective goods related to one’s vocation or hobbies. How many children have been harmed by parents who demonstrate that their jobs or personal passions matter more to them than the relationship between father and son or mother and daughter?
Turning to politics, Moschella’s generally aligns with classical liberalism, in that she believes natural law affirms the defense of civil liberties (e.g., freedom of speech, association, religion) and other aspects of liberal government. The government’s role in promoting human flourishing, she argues, should be “indirect and subsidiary to the role of individuals, families, and other subpolitical communities.” There are five broad sets of needs that subpolitical communities cannot justly and reliably attain on their own in the absence of an overarching political authority: public order, restorative justice and dispute and resolution, security, public goods, and social welfare. Thus the state through the organs of governance supplies the conditions for the flourishing of subpolitical communities by exercising authority over them.
Moschella argues against the idea that consent of the governed is the foundation of the government’s legitimacy, but rather that its legitimacy derives from its ability (albeit imperfectly) to justly and efficiently resolve coordination problems for the common good. Here I offer a minor quibble. While perhaps technically true, it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which the consent of the government is not a, if not the, determinant factor in the viability of a regime. When a government no longer enjoys popular support, it has only two choices to maintain its authority: Make changes to improve its standing in the eyes of the people (thus regaining their consent) or enforce more coercive measures to stifle dissent. Thus, even if a government’s legitimacy in an abstract sense derives from its justness, in practice consent of the governed—which is effectively how much of the citizenry determine a regime to be just—must ultimately play a role, if not the most consequential role, in the regime’s fate.
The author’s general agreement with classical liberalism stems from one of the foundational principles of natural law: the difference between instrumental and basic goods. The political community’s value, she posits, is mostly instrumental rather than intrinsic, as people form political communities not for the end of civic friendship but to acquire other goods, such as security, restorative justice, and protection of property. The political community is thus subsidiary to the subpolitical communities that compose it, existing to assist them so that they are free to pursue their own good. (This is the concept of subsidiarity, in which larger communities exist to assist smaller communities and must respect their self-governance.) The ideal political community thus enables its members to realize their own happiness, rather than coercing them, though some coercion (say, in terms of policing fraud or protecting citizenry from the effects of dangerous vices) is necessary for the sake of safety and public order. Again, we see the ordo amoris: One has a more immediate obligation to one’s family and one’s community (say, a neighborhood, municipality, state, or nation) over those communities further afield.
It’s true, as Moschella notes, that many accounts of liberalism assert that government and law should be neutral about the good or take no interest in the moral welfare of its citizens. Yet this was certainly not the perspective of the framers of the U.S. Constitution, who constantly argued that their political experiment required a moral people, and at various local, state, and federal levels promoted a certain (read: Christian) conception of morality. Moreover, no liberal society in practice acts this way—current debates over such contentious topics as abortion, euthanasia, and surrogacy demonstrate that a philosophical framework on ethics informs the opinions of those who either favor or oppose them.
And, as Moschella (briefly) argues in her final chapter, religion certainly brings further clarity and coherence to our conception of the good life, both by giving us greater confidence in the dependability of the factors that inform our reasoning and by giving us a sturdier motivation to pursue the good even in the face of evil. In effect, religion can establish a properly informed order of charity to help us govern not only ourselves but also our polis aright.
