Recognizing Collectives as Moral Agents

Abstract

Until recently, discussions on moral agency focused almost exclusively on the individual moral subject. Recognizing that social structures and cultures influence human subjects but do not have agency, this article argues that we must now recognize the moral agency of organized collectives. Invoking the work of philosophers and other theologians who already do, this article turns to theological ethicists writing on community organizing, racism, and social virtues, and, finally, to feminists engaging moral luck and intersectionality to illustrate the importance of collective moral agency. It concludes by describing qualifications for estimating the ethical agency of such collectives.

In 1932 Reinhold Niebuhr warned ethicists that they lacked “an understanding of the brutal character of the behavior of all human collectives, and the power of self-interest and collective egoism in all inter-group relations.” ¹ In Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics, he insisted that we do not see “the limitations of the human imagination, the easy subservience of reason to prejudice and passion, and the consequent persistence of irrational egoism, particularly in group behavior.” ² He challenged us to recognize the forces that empower “the inequalities of privilege (that) are greater than could possibly be defended rationally.” ³

Assuredly, Niebuhr explores not only the agency of collectives but the need to recognize the diminishment of reason and the role of egoism in collective agency. ⁴ Rather than debate the prevalence of harm or the promotion of the good at the hands of any collective agency, I want in this article to promote the need for the recognition and complex engagement of collectives as moral agents.

Indeed, there has been renewed interest of late in moral agency, but often that interest tends to default singularly to considerations regarding the individual person as moral agent, foregoing any sustained consideration of collectives. There are, however, notable exceptions, like Kristin Heyer, Cristina Traina, Lisa Sowle Cahill, Christine Firer Hinze, Nicholas Hayes-Mota, Luke Bretherton, Anna Rowlands, Kevin Ahern, Meghan J. Clark, Kate Ward, Brian Stiltner, Brian Hamilton, Katie Walker Grimes, M. Shawn Copeland, Bryan Massingale, Laurie Johnston, and others whose investigations will lead us to some refreshing insights not only about collectives but also about why we need to consider their moral agency. Still, to appreciate this argument we need first to take stock of how collectives are considered.

Preparatory Ground

Clearly one important discussion on moral agency involves those who invoke the critical realists. Under the leadership of Daniel Finn, several theological ethicists developed a new approach out of the school of critical realism, which distinguished between a human person as moral agent and social structures that do not have agency but rather can and do influence persons. In 2011 Daniel Daly, for instance, presented such an argument; later in The Structures of Virtue and Vice he furthered the understanding of social structures significantly. ⁵ Around the same time, Finn edited a primer on critical realism for Christian ethics, addressing moral agency and social structures and cultures, but not collectives. ⁶ In a brief nod to collectives, Finn calls it a “minor issue,” and adds, “only persons are agents.” ⁷ I concur with him on the second phrase but not the first. I believe that collectives are precisely of moral agents but when we act collectively there are agential dynamics that are complex and different from the agency of individual persons. And when we act collectively, we are more than the sum of the persons involved.

Indeed, Finn’s primer provides many approaches toward the social, but these generally proceed through what I would call non-agential pathways like social structures or cultures, leaving us only with the singular agent under the category of agency. Theodora Hawksley brings critical realism to Catholic Social Teaching in a very thoughtful contribution, engaging the word “social,” but never taking us to instances of actual social agency that are found in “collectives” like Black Lives Matter (BLM), the Jesuits, or the Society of Christian Ethics. ⁸ Nonetheless, she introduces us to the work of Roy Bhaskar who discusses the importance of “persistent relations between individuals (and groups).” ⁹ In a similar way, Matthew Shadle helpfully engages culture, but like Hawksley’s approach to social structures, he views culture as an “influencer” on agency, but not itself a (collective) agent. ¹⁰ While Kristin E. Heyer rightly notes that the primer helps “resist methodological individualisms that downplay the social positioning of individuals and their agency and better account for relationships between structures, culture, and agency,” still they stop short at collectives. ¹¹

While critical realists do not argue against the move toward collectives, like others, they default to the individual as a model of moral agency. The default to the individual is a commonplace in writings on moral agency, in part because we presuppose that the landscape of the social is adequately caught by both the concept of social structures and now the concept of cultures. But what happens when individual moral agents collectively organize and exercise their agency? Is that not collective moral agency? And if so, what light does it refract for us regarding the general notion of moral agency?

In this article I look to make room for the collective, expanding both the ambit of moral agency and the function of the social in moral matters. I ask us to hesitate both in identifying moral agency solely with individuals and in thinking that questions of the social are adequately covered by influential structures and cultures. I ask us, in a way, to trace our earlier steps when we began to talk about social sin more than fifty years ago.

In his landmark essay on social sin, Kenneth R. Himes described both the agential and the structural in his claim: “the language of social sin refers to collectives, systems, and institutions that are expressive of and supported by a group.” ¹² Unfortunately, most of our reflection on social sin fell to considering the influential but non-agential social structures, without attending to what Himes also proffered: collectives or groups.

Today, we cannot discuss many ethical issues and agency without talking about collectives. For instance, language on racism is predominantly about needing to engage collective agency, whether one is talking about white supremacy, antiblackness, Black Dignity, or BLM. Similarly, ethicists recognize the overriding importance of collectives on the two other major ethical issues of our time, migration and climate change. On migration we can consider the collective agency of the now famous Popular Movements meetings that Pope Francis convokes in Rome. ¹³ In terms of collectives for climate change, one can review the attendee list at any COP (Conference of the Parties) conference to see that those on the list participate precisely through a shared agency in an established collective. ¹⁴ If those who are addressing the greatest and most urgent ethical challenges of our time understand moral agency through collectives, do not those theologians who work with philosophers and social scientists need to establish ways of expanding their category of moral agency beyond the autonomous person?

Still, while we are more interested in collectives that work for social change, whether in sixteenth-century confraternities or in contemporary movements like BLM, we need to recognize that there are collectives that have other interests in bringing people together for a common purpose, like scouting, prayer, or art-appreciation groups.

Among philosophers there are significant investigations into the nature of moral agency that includes both the personal and the collective. From a young scholar like Niel de Haan to major business ethicists like Patricia Werhane and Carl Soares, we find attempts to parse questions about the nature of collective agency. ¹⁵ While a few still contend that collectives cannot be moral agents, the larger issue is how are they to be assessed as Marion Smiley notes in her essay on “Collective Responsibility.” ¹⁶ These philosophical investigations predate in fact the theological positions of the 1980s, and can be found in the mid-1960s, when Dorothy Emmett authored her Rules, Roles and Relations ¹⁷ and Mancur Olson philosophically interrogated the sociology of group behavior, ¹⁸ as to some extent sociologist Christian Smith does today. ¹⁹ Others, like psychology professor Ervin Staub, ²⁰ social psychologist James Waller, ²¹ and Norwegian philosopher Arne Vetlesen, ²² specifically pursue the question of collectives as significant sources for training and empowering individuals for the work of doing evil.

Finally, some of these philosophers have yielded basic claims about what constitutes a collective. Smiley highlights, for instance, that for the group to be a collective, it must be organized: “We cannot expect a disorganized group (say, a mob or a group of persons who are not in any way institutionally connected) to instigate such a transformation. For such a group is by definition not organized enough to act as a collective.” ²³ Martin Hewson, who works with Timothy Sinclair in developing global governance approaches, authored the essay on agency in the Encyclopedia on Case Study Research and argued that there are three forms of agency: personal, proxy, and collective. He contends that there are “three key properties of human beings that give rise to agency”: intentionality, power, and rationality. ²⁴ At the end of this article, I will give an outline of other properties that seem essential for understanding the collective as a moral agent.

Groundwork in Other Theological Fields

Significantly there are those in other fields of theology who are much more accustomed to engaging collective agency than in theological ethics: ecclesiology, sacramental theology, systematic and political theology. By examining these fields briefly, we see that the collective as opposed to the personal is often presumed, in fact, to be the point of departure for understanding human agency.

Lumen Gentium’s definition of the church as “the people of God” provides us with the clearest way of seeing the church as a collective. The people of God gather collectively at the eucharistic liturgy, where they begin signing themselves with the cross, confessing their sinfulness, articulating their credal faith, and invoking their prayerful petitions. Their agency is understood precisely as a people called and responding collectively.

The Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace’s Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church refers to and commends the agency of Catholics, both “individually and collectively” more than twenty times in their foundational document. ²⁵ It concludes treating lay ecclesial associations where laity are called to collectively express their response to the call to witness to Christ and to love. ²⁶ Thus, we see multiple instances of collective organized agency in the church with such differing agendas as Discerning Deacons, ²⁷ Catholic Workers, ²⁸ or the parish Rosary and Altar Society. ²⁹

These collectives emanate from the church collective itself. From 1978, when Thomas O’Meara investigated the church as a collective in his essay, “Philosophical Models in Ecclesiology,” ³⁰ in this journal, to Joshua Cockayne’s recent Explorations in Analytic Ecclesiology: That They May be One, ³¹ the church as collective is more presumed than examined. Paul Lakeland, for instance, in his description of the church as hospice, refers to the church “as a collective incarnate subject in history,” ³² while a sociologist of religion reflects on collectives at prayer and writes about the inspirational Holy Spirit as a “Conscience Collective.” ³³ Indeed, the Australian theologians Gerald O’Collins and David Braithwaite and the late American ecclesiologist Richard Gaillardetz think of the church’s tradition as itself a “collective memory.” ³⁴

Frequently, discussions on the church lead more to the language of community than collective. The emphasis on community further hones the intimate engagement within the ecclesiological collective. As such, the church expresses itself as an inspired, organized, participative, collective, nearly familial agent. Not surprisingly, then, ethicist M. T. Dávila proposes the language of the common good as ecclesiological language for the church. ³⁵

When we turn to sacramental theology, we find an even greater emphasis on the collective in its explorations of the assembly. In a recent article by sacramental theologian John Baldovin on mass intentions, he insists on the agency of the collective community assembled in the liturgy:

Pope Francis has emphasized the united action of the priest and the rest of the assembly by reaffirming the unity of the assembly in its celebration of the Eucharist in 2022. ³⁶ These ideas are in fact very traditional, since they reaffirm that our liturgical prayers are always prayed in the first-person plural: “We give thanks,” “we offer . . ..” All are celebrating; the priest is presiding. The presiding priest is, as one early theologian put it, “the tongue of the assembly.” ³⁷

Like Baldovin, Thomas O’Loughlin has insisted on the agency of the assembly in the Eucharist in both his historical and systematic writings. ³⁸ Moreover, personal participation and agency derive from the collective itself; baptized into the church, into the people of God, we each become a child of God. In these contexts, the language of the personal follows from the collective; our personal agency derives from a shared one. Ethicists should be able to see the distance between their starting-point preference for moral agency in personal activity and those of ecclesiologists and sacramental theologians who call us to recognize first the Christian community of faith. ³⁹

The same can be said for engaging the work of systematic theologians, especially in trinitarian theology. The richness of trinitarian theology was caught and presented by Catherine LaCugna: “Trinitarian theology could be described as par excellence a theology of relationship, which explores the mysteries of love, relationship, personhood and communion within the framework of God’s self-revelation in the person of Christ and the activity of the Spirit.” In this light we see that the Trinity is “not about the abstract nature of God, nor about God in isolation from everything other than God, but a teaching about God’s life with us and our life with each other.” ⁴⁰ One could say that because God is Triune, the church has to be a community. Declan Marmion critically examines LaCugna’s contributions focusing on “how the doctrine has been developed as a symbol of inclusive communion where the values of mutuality, equality, and reciprocity are paramount.” ⁴¹

Additionally, we do well to appreciate that in the teaching of the Trinity, the concept of “person” does not refer to an autonomous identity, but rather to an intrinsically or constitutively relational one. While a person in the Trinity is certainly not a modality, the person is constituted in the ineffable relationships among one another. Paolo Gamberini, for instance, warns us away from an impoverished notion of person: “If by this concept we mean a free and autonomous consciousness, distinct from others (Selbständiges Subjekt), then this expression cannot be used for God’s trinitarian being.” ⁴² He asserts: “The Christological and trinitarian concept of ‘person/hypostasis’ points to the identification between God and Jesus in relational terms. When this reciprocal identification fails to be acknowledged the theological intentionality of the concept is lost.” ⁴³

In the image of the triune God, our personhood defines not our singular agency but rather our constitutional relationality that cannot be compromised. When we think of our personal agency as unrelated to our agency in collectives, we miss that it is by our being related that we can act personally.

Finally, even canon law has shown recently its need to recognize and engage collective agency and has done so by the concept of “public juridic person.” This is a term that acknowledges both collective agents and corporate structures. For instance, healthcare facilities and their staffs in a diocese relate to their ordinary in their agency as a public juridic person. Helpfully, Nancy Mulvihill explains, “‘Public juridic person’ is a canon law term for a group of persons, an ‘aggregate of things,’ approved and established by the Church who come together as an entity recognized under Church law to participate in the apostolic life and mission of the Church. An analogous term in U.S. law might be a ‘civil corporation.’” ⁴⁴

In light of these reflections, we can move to theological ethics itself.

Postconciliar Reflections in Theological Ethics

Among the many arguments promoted by Gaudium et Spes ⁴⁵ is its consideration of the human as personal and collective. After insisting that the church “now addresses itself without hesitation, not only to the sons of the Church and to all who invoke the name of Christ, but to the whole of humanity,” ⁴⁶ it acknowledges “the anxious questions about the current trend of the world, about the place and role of man in the universe, about the meaning of its individual and collective strivings.” ⁴⁷ Additionally, it reports, “Triggered by the intelligence and creative energies of man, these changes recoil upon him, upon his decisions and desires, both individual and collective, and upon his manner of thinking and acting with respect to things and to people.” ⁴⁸ In another paragraph, Gaudium et Spes raises concern about personal and collective needs and then notes the challenges posed by “the ambition to propagate one’s own ideology” as well as the “collective greed existing in nations or other groups.” ⁴⁹ Later, in turning to human activity throughout the world, it notes, “Throughout the course of the centuries, men have labored to better the circumstances of their lives through a monumental amount of individual and collective effort.” ⁵⁰

In the seventieth paragraph on investments, it refers not only to “individual and collective” matters of consumption, but also to “individuals or groups of public authorities” as decision-makers regarding “the necessities required for a decent life both of individuals and of the whole community.” ⁵¹ While “collectives” are invoked twelve times in notions of moral agency, the word “group” or “groups” appears often with “persons” or “individuals” as acting or in being acted upon over twenty times in the document.

Even in the paragraph that defines and describes the conscience, the agency of the individual and collectives appears: “Hence the more right conscience holds sway, the more persons and groups turn aside from blind choice and strive to be guided by the objective norms of morality.” Clearly the document is recognizing that in speaking of moral agency or even the conscience, we can no longer think primarily, and certainly not exclusively, of agency as personal. Indeed, the Religious Studies Faculty of Leuven comments on this very sentence, inviting consideration with another conciliar document, Dignitatis Humanae, which, they contend,

understands the search for truth to be a genuinely communal venture, not something pursued by only one religious denomination. If one is truly seeking truth by engaging conscience, one of the ways to verify whether one’s conclusions are correct is to compare one’s insights with those of others. The more agreement is reached, the more we begin to see a consensus in what we might—together—call “objective norms.” ⁵²

Remembering that in the 1970s moral theology developed particular areas like “sexual ethics,” “medical ethics,” or “business ethics,” we can, nonetheless, note that its foundational courses remained fully bifurcated as “fundamental moral theology” and “social ethics.” The two had different agents and hermeneutics, with the former being personal and the latter, social. With the Council, the ethical consciousness of the church began to look more frequently to the long-overlooked field of social ethics, famous for its support of unions, a very collective form of agency. Its principles—subsidiarity, the dignity and sanctity of human life, solidarity, charity, distributive and social justice, and the option for the poor—entered fundamental moral theology as inescapably needed.

In the United States, a significant development occurred with the appearance of Modern Catholic Social Teaching: Commentaries and Interpretations in 2005. In the volume’s introduction, Kenneth Himes bypassed the bifurcation by proposing social teaching as relevant for both fundamental moral theology and social ethics. He wrote, “Properly understood, social teaching is not social ethics. Ethical discourse entails critical reflection aimed at achieving a systematic and especially methodological investigation. The papal and episcopal teaching under consideration in this volume exhibits a different intent—to enlighten, inspire and guide moral reform on social matters.” ⁵³ With this volume, fundamental moral theology now had a text for investigating social matters. Himes facilitated how ethical matters are not so easily distinguished as either personal or social. The former hermeneutical contexts needed to be rethought, and fundamental morals, by including social teaching, could no longer examine solely the realm of the personal.

Feminist ethics was also a main driver in this fusion. Theologians like Lisa Sowle Cahill, Rosemary Radford Reuther, and Margaret Farley highlight a deeply relational theological anthropology that not only had been fundamentally bracketed in the moral manuals, but was often overlooked in the work of the reformers of moral theology in the 1960s to the 1980s. As they began writing in the 1970s, feminists promoted a constitutively relational theological anthropology. Cahill notably makes the social invariably evident as the titles of her books highlight. ⁵⁴ In Feminist Ethics and Natural Law: The End of the Anathemas, Cristina Traina builds on these feminist claims and effectively conveys the natural law as necessarily engaging not only the personal but the social as well. ⁵⁵

Liberation theology too raised up the collectivist from its inception of base ecclesial communities. These collectives served as the agents and conduits through which liberation theology found expression. In 1988, David H. Levine assessed the impact of liberation theology particularly through these base communities and greatly advanced our understanding of them. ⁵⁶ Remarking that liberation theology and these communities “are linked historically,” he added, “it is fair to say that they are related as theory is to practice.” ⁵⁷ Detaching our perception of them ideally, from their actual expression, Levine described them as “small groups of ten to thirty people ordinarily homogeneous in social composition, usually comprised of poor people. Whatever else they may do, at a minimum they gather regularly (once every week or two) to read and comment on Bible, to discuss common concerns, and occasionally to act together toward some concrete end.” ⁵⁸ While he acknowledged that the communities are differentiated by the regions in which they developed, still he insisted that generally they “are much more conventionally religious than is commonly realized. Members pray a lot, both individually and as a group.” ⁵⁹ He adds, these communities “represent a notable break with hitherto normal religious practice. Consider daily practice once again. Members meet regularly to read and discuss the Bible, to pray liturgies as a group. None of this was true on any significant scale before the mid-1960s.” ⁶⁰ The laity’s dependency on over-extended clergy diminished. He adds, “Access to the Bible lessens dependence on traditional authority figures for guidance and interpretation. Moreover, the stress on shared reading and discussion elicits ideas, interests and leadership skills that otherwise would surely have remained latent. In so doing, it promotes new criteria of legitimate action, and enhances different ideas about leadership than the community is likely to have encountered before.” ⁶¹ Noting, “how often repression failed to achieve its goals,” he further observes:

When the churches began to promote ideas about justice, rooting them in participatory, reinforcing group structures, they found a ready audience. The moral sanction of the churches, reinforced by solidarity and mutual support in the groups, helped sustain membership and uphold its commitments as possible and correct, even in the face of great danger. Initially limited religious agendas thus broadened as the needs of members were echoed and reinforced by guiding ideas derived from liberation theology. Together they undergirded a range of new commitments and activities. ⁶²

These qualities of solidarity, mutual support, sustaining membership, and developing leadership structures add to our understanding of the actual traits of a collective. Their emergence from 1970 to the present captures the legacy and hope of liberation theology, an insight validated by Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú, who writes, “I am convinced that the people, the masses, are the only ones capable of transforming society.” ⁶³

As Latin American theology generated collectives through base ecclesial communities, African theology proposed through Ubuntu the palaver (“word”) ethics. African Ubuntu philosophy hinges on the fundamental insight “I am because we are,” and was engaged in theological circles by Placide Temples and John Mbiti in the mid-twentieth century. ⁶⁴ It is hard to overestimate the claim of Ubuntu as Léocadie Lushombo makes clear in her contribution to women’s political participation in Africa today. ⁶⁵

The structure of African collectives began to emerge as the Zairean theologian Bénézet Bujo promoted the use of a “palaver” ethics. ⁶⁶ Bujo saw it as effective: through discourse the community resolved crises and determined itself for the future; palaver is integral to the community coming to fuller realization. Juvénal Ilunga Muya provides a helpful description:

In the logic of the palaver, everyone has the right to speak. In this sense the palaver guarantees equality and everyone’s access to speak in view of building up the community. The final decision arrived at its end is not the result of compromise or of voting according to the majority, but of a solid consensus among all members. The fundamental experience at the basis of the word is that of communion. . . . Communion is not true unless it promises and guarantees the originality of each member, and unless each member is conscious of not being free except in relation with the community. . . . Individual freedom is not therefore a value absolute in itself, but in relation to the community, in the same sense that the community is not an absolute value but one linked to the individuals. ⁶⁷

Bujo makes it clear that the communion-oriented stance of a palaver ethics does not deny the personal. ⁶⁸ Relationality does not compromise the personal, nor does the personal compromise relationality. ⁶⁹ Still, while focusing on community, Muya points out that the palaver is tridimensional as it engages the ancestors, the living, and the not-yet-born. By nature, then, there is always a plurality of perspectives, both among the living individuals within the community and by contact with those from the past and expected from the future. This plurality extends, then, beyond the confines of the present community.

Bujo develops the dynamics of his ethics as it pertains to leadership:

The chief must pay attention to everything that happens in the community. Above all he is obliged to receive everything by patient listening and then to try to digest it well. Being a good listener and digesting the word are linked in general to Black Africa. . . . He is the last to speak, after having carefully examined all the aspects of a problem and digested the word well. But first he must propose his own word for debate, at least in the palaver of the elders. In other words, the word must be made available for rumination. ⁷⁰

To make the discourse effective, the chief and all the participants in the palaver must have large, broad ears and they must distinguish themselves as listeners before they speak. When they speak, they must be willing to share the word with other members of the palaver, since it is too large and wide for the mouth of one individual. ⁷¹

These qualifications about palaver similarly help as qualifying categories about the nature of collectives offering more directives for the right moral agency of collectives: the mutual engagement of members, giving a full hearing to all members, and subjecting leadership to accountable structures for decision-making.

Recent Contributions in Theological Ethics That Promote the Agency of Collectives

Here now we examine recent contributions from theological ethicists that promote the agency of collectives ⁷² under four different contexts: (1) community organizations, (2) theories of virtue ethics that move from the personal to collectives, (3) race, and finally, (4) feminists’ concerns about care, moral luck, and agency.

Community Organizations

In 1985, in light of the discussion on social sin, ⁷³ Charles Curran proposed that we look not only at how we sin collectively, but also the converse: how we organize collectively to create better communities. Toward that end, with his uncanny foresight, Curran proposed we study the founder of the movement to organize communities, Saul Alinsky. ⁷⁴

In 2008, James Ball prompted theological ethicists to revisit Curran’s original proposal of examining Alinsky’s school of community organizing. ⁷⁵ Ball borrows from theologian Bernard Loomer and agrees with his claim that the Alinsky school’s “purpose is to develop a collective leadership and a strategy so that we can negotiate with those institutions that are driving the economic, the political and cultural forces that shape our cultural reality.” Loomer adds that this use of power abandons the “top down” power approach that Lord Acton warned us about; rather it prompts “the capacity to build relational power, which involves not only acting on, but the calculated vulnerability to be acted upon.” Ball then argues that the Alinsky school offers “a pedagogy and praxis of political agency that enhances the parish’s ability to live out its calling to be the church, and to be a mediating institution of public life.” ⁷⁶

More recently a variety of ethicists have returned to community organizing as a worthy model of collective agency that delivers the values and virtues of Catholic Social Teaching. In 2012, Luke Bretherton argued that the ability of community organizing “to convert anti-political self-interests into political mutual interests gives it much of its potency as a performance of democratic citizenship.” ⁷⁷ In an online symposium on Bretherton’s most recent book, Christ and the Common Life: Political Theology and the Case for Democracy, ⁷⁸ Nicholas Hayes-Mota notes that Bretherton’s work “aims to invite, perform, and embody the kind of democracy it advocates. As Bretherton understands it, ‘democratic politics’—as distinct from the governmental structures and electoral procedures with which it is often conflated—is a set of constitutive practices for weaving together a ‘common life,’ and discerning ‘goods in common,’ across many vectors of difference.” ⁷⁹ Hayes-Mota roots Bretherton’s interests in democratic theology in his previous work, Resurrecting Democracy: Faith, Citizenship and the Politics of the Common Life, an in-depth study of the Alinsky school’s work on community organizing in London. ⁸⁰ In that work, Bretherton sees Alinsky’s organizing as “an exemplary praxis of democratic politics” and that “like organizing in particular, aims to distribute political agency as widely as possible, and works to enable the formation of shared (though always fallible) judgments, the performance of shared action, and the conversion of possible enemies into friends.” ⁸¹ Bretherton recognizes that even though democracy could establish a despot, still institutionally it does not follow “those forms of political order that inherently subordinate the individual to a collectivist vision of peoplehood, as is the case with nationalist, fascist, state socialism and state communist regimes.” ⁸² Bretherton’s insight that a valid collective does not subordinate the individual becomes yet another quality for describing collectives as moral agents and resonates with the advocates of palaver collectives as well. Hayes-Mota adds that the moral agency of collectives needs to embody and promote the common good. ⁸³ Elsewhere he writes, “the whole point of organizing, as Alinsky conceived it, was to create solidarity from division for the sake of the common good.” ⁸⁴

Anna Rowlands offers another direct response to the Curran invitation through a case study of Citizens UK, an Alinsky-based community organization with distinctively Catholic roots that worked to respond to challenges facing asylum seekers. She highlights how Alinsky communities become themselves generative:

Alinsky was strongly against single-issue pressure groups and founded his community organizations to be lasting and durable community bases that would enable multiple issues to be addressed by a changing community over many years. The community remains—the issues, campaigns and solutions change. A by-product of this structure and a real strength of community organizing is not only that campaigns emerge from stories told in a worshiping community—but that a seeding process occurs enabling one action to emerge from the insights of another. ⁸⁵

Rather brilliantly, she bridges the notion of commutative justice and the matter of collectives through community organizing. Arguing that commutative justice presents the state with “its dual responsibility to negotiate the local and universal common good,” she claims, “both community organizing and Catholic Social Teaching suggest the need for a complex regeneration of political culture in which renewal of practices of moral responsibility and judgment emerge in a subsidiary and localized fashion, rooted in what Hannah Arendt would call ‘responsible intersubjectivity,’ and we might call commutative justice.” ⁸⁶ In terms of the qualities of collectives, Rowlands’s emphasis on the dual responsibility to negotiate the local and universal common good is extraordinarily helpful. She concludes by warning against thinking that the apparent compatibility of Alinsky with Catholic Social Teaching is “a match made in heaven” and suggests that as we go forward, we not overlook how conflictual community organizations might become, how compromise-oriented they often do become, and how confessionally shy they often are. ⁸⁷

Through the Virtues: Moving from the Personal to Collectives

Over the years, as the field of virtue ethics expanded, ethicists engaged the virtues more frequently within collectives. One of most significant observations of this move was made by Christopher Vogt in 2016 in this journal. ⁸⁸ At the third international conference of Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church (CTEWC), held in Sarajevo in 2018, Victor Carmona and Kate Ward each reported on how the virtues had found a home in social agency. ⁸⁹ Similarly, in his significant study of conscience in worship, Thomas Ryan takes conscience and its virtues from the ambit of the personal to the church as she worships. ⁹⁰

Seven years ago, Brian Stiltner authored Toward Thriving Communities: Virtue Ethics as Social Ethics. There he makes his case that although virtues form the person, they also form communities, and suggests that moral agency cannot be studied by simply looking at the individual person. Instead, he recognizes and argues that communities are contexts for becoming good and introduces virtues into these communities to shape their members. Still, Stiltner hesitates, arguing that “communities can shape members’ moral agency” and, from what I can see, does not acknowledge collectives themselves exercising moral agency. ⁹¹

There is no hesitancy in Kevin Ahern’s Structures of Grace: Catholic Organizations Serving the Global Common Good, which focuses on “collectivist agents originating within the Roman Catholic Tradition” so as to highlight “the transformative potential of the wide range of Christian groups involved in the promotion of human dignity and the common good.” ⁹² Specifically he investigates such collectives as the Jesuit Refugee Service, Young Christian Workers, and Plowshares. Ahern argues against Niebuhr that “collective egoism, while present and real, should not be seen as the only or even the primary way to understand collective social agents.” Through “a deeper theological and ethical analysis of these organizations,” we will see inevitably the sinful shortcomings of any collective, but in those he presents he hopes we see how they “embody God’s grace and concerns for the plight of human beings in a complex world of suffering and indifference.” ⁹³

He raises up a variety of issues that we have already seen on human dignity, solidarity, subsidiarity, and the common good, but he adds a new evangelization marked by prophetic dialogue that promotes the reign of God as well as structures of grace that stand against structures of sin. By highlighting the working of the Holy Spirit, he engages the discernment of spirits as necessary for the ongoing work of any Christian social movement as it understands its own place in the wider church ⁹⁴ and as it especially explores the “balance between the demands of mission and the need to organize some form of institutional structure.” ⁹⁵ He concludes by highlighting that these collectives need to practice self-care as they move forward promoting justice and in service of their fellowship to the constituents they serve. ⁹⁶

In a Festschrift to David Hollenbach, long known for cultivating a participatory approach to social ethics, his former students write on the relationship between public theology and the global common good. ⁹⁷ The most evident essay on collectives as expressive of a participative political theology is Ahern’s, wherein he advances his own thoughts on how participatory collectives themselves might mediate the global common good by providing a map for building bridges and crossing borders through Catholic NGOs moderating and realizing collaboration among persons and local communities with both global governance offices and ecclesial structures. ⁹⁸ Kristin E. Heyer and Mark W. Potter also provide a case study of the binational Kino Border Initiative at the US-Mexico border city of Nogales as a model of a collective’s capacity to promote solidarity and mutual transformation through accompaniment and advocacy with and for undocumented migrants. They highlight how the collective initiative prophetically challenges the problematic practices of receiving communities. ⁹⁹ Grégoire Catta raises up Jesuit Refugee Services as a collective exemplar in “learning from the poor,” ¹⁰⁰ while Matthew Bagot recognizes a small but notable collegial collective in the intellectual solidarity among Hollenbach, the Sunni legal scholar Abdullahi Ahmed An-Naʿim, and the Iranian Shiite scholar Naser Ghobadzadeh regarding the political role of religion. ¹⁰¹ Finally, in addressing the virtue of solidarity that bridges differing, participative collectives acting to respond to the world on fire, Meghan J. Clark takes from her advisor, David Hollenbach, the inspiration to see the sign of the cross as the “ultimate symbol of compassion and solidarity with those who are suffering.” ¹⁰² Indeed, in speaking of collectives, Clark has advanced the work greatly by her groundbreaking book and other writings on solidarity. ¹⁰³

The issue of solidarity arises for Matthew J. Gaudet as he examines the landscape of the university that singularly recognizes individual labor and success. Mindful of the struggles of non–tenure-track faculty, he raises the innumerable obstacles that such faculty have in forming solidaristic collectives or gaining due recognition. ¹⁰⁴ Gerald J. Beyer sees collective organizing through unions as a step toward promoting solidarity at universities, particularly for non–tenure-track faculty. Additionally, he advocates that other collectives work together not only for such alienated faculty but also for those populations who are economically disadvantaged or racially biased. Building solidarity across the university he sees Catholic Social Teaching confronting the corporate world of the university. ¹⁰⁵

Racism

While Ahern talks of collectives with their structures of grace, Katie Walker Grimes, in Christ Divided: Antiblackness as Corporate Vice, addresses the matter of collective agency through corporate virtues and vice. And while Ahern highlights the good we do collectively, Grimes raises up the evil in corporate vice. Moreover, she emphasizes that we not only corporately act viciously, but that we are in ourselves vicious when we do so. She goes beyond the claims of the moral impact of social structures on individuals to unmask “the operation of vice within corporate bodies. Rather than simply acting upon bodies, antiblackness supremacy lives within them just as habits do. White people do not simply cooperate with racial evil; we have it.” ¹⁰⁶ She adds, “my theory of corporate virtue scrutinizes the racial habituation of not just individual but corporate bodies.” ¹⁰⁷

Brian Hamilton has made a similar point in his influential essay. ¹⁰⁸ He recognizes that the social forces that inhibit our moral responsibility are not only externally influential in institutional structures, as critical realists assert, but they are internally engaged and constitutively present in the interiority of ourselves. Hamilton argues that structural sin inheres “not just in policies or institutions or social roles but also in the embodied habits of knowing and willing the good that constitute human agency itself.” ¹⁰⁹ Hamilton is reacting against the critical realists, who, he argues, do “not provide language for talking about how structural sin shapes us from within. Structural sin remains ‘out there.’” ¹¹⁰ He adds, “But by conceiving of structural sin entirely in these external ways, they never arrive at a rigorous accounting of its internal dimensions, the way the structures we inhabit reshape us from within.” ¹¹¹ To give an account of his own read of matters, Hamilton turns to Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus in his Outline of a Theory of Practice and argues that “the inner life of agents is marked by a habitus: ‘systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures.’” ¹¹²

This notion of interiority is terribly important for the difference between social structures and collective agency. Collectives have within the interiority of their members the inclination for sharing identities and forging a collective one. Unlike structures that guide, move, and organize the way we proceed, collectives depend on the interior lives of members to be constantly engaged to achieve together the goals they have articulated. These inclinations help collectives cohere by laying claims on one another, as the members together articulate and pursue goals that organize their agenda and their identity. These shared inclinations further substantiate the integrating cohesion of the collective itself, empowering the claims the members make on one another to realize their goals.

In his important work on accompaniment and recognition, Gerard J. Ryan emphasizes how collectives are formed and sustained. ¹¹³ He invokes Axel Honneth, who writes, “Feelings of having been unjustly treated can lead to collective actions to the extent to which they come to be experienced by an entire circle of subjects as typical for their social situation.” ¹¹⁴ Ryan emphasizes time and again the topic of collective identity, invoking the works of Honneth, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Seyla Benhabib. ¹¹⁵ Throughout his argument, like Hamilton he underlines a certain mutual recognition among members seeking to identify what binds them collectively.

What happens when these habits are not only individually experienced but are collectively engaged? How are we influenced by the habits of family and friends? What happens, for instance, when we have internalized not only individually but collectively the habit of the corporate vice of racism? And still, what happens when members of those collectives begin to recognize the viciousness of those structures and begin the process to recognize the need to correct, repent, and restore?

Social structures certainly guide the way we act; nonetheless, we form collectives to change those social structures. White supremacists form alliances to resist any traction of racial justice and to continue their domination; they work together to resist internally and externally any of the truth about the lie of white supremacy. ¹¹⁶ To fight back against the violence and injustice of that racial domination, collectives like BLM recognize, as Vincent Lloyd proposes, “Black Dignity” as performative. Black Dignity needs to be internally embraced, collectively shared, and practically and publicly realized. From within we are prompted to collectively engage.

One cannot think of combating racism without collective interruptions. Racism teaches us that any oppressed group can only combat the influential structural viciousness of racism with organized collectives that articulate and embody a new strategy for social order. ¹¹⁷ Theologians like James H. Cone, ¹¹⁸ Bryan N. Massingale, ¹¹⁹ and M. Shawn Copeland ¹²⁰ write to engage their readers in the liberative work of transforming an entrenched racist nation. In the public square, Ibram X. Kendi raises up the lie of white supremacy and pursues an agenda where understanding the truth of racism is insufficient; rather there need to be mobilized collectives that stamp out racism, uproot racist habits, and establish social structures of equity. ¹²¹ With great insight, Massingale writes, “Racial reconciliation, if its goal is the establishment of just relationship between unequal social groups, demands the elimination of the stigma and privilege associated with race.” ¹²² But Massingale’s words remind us that the end of the struggle for racial justice is not victory but reconciliation; J. J. Carney and Laurie Johnston have provided a remarkable collection of essays on that topic entitled The Surprise of Reconciliation in the Catholic Tradition. ¹²³

Feminists on Power, Care, Moral Luck, and Agency

While those working with critical realism provide us a way of categorizing our reflections on agency, those working as feminists raise questions of whether we adequately recognize and understand the complexity of human agency. Toward this end, Christine Firer Hinze proposes a collective “power to” as opposed to a “power over” as the normative starting point to investigate the ethical use of power. ¹²⁴ Later she argues that the promotion of solidarity can only get “traction” if it acknowledges what Reinhold Niebuhr saw as the actual human condition. While proposing collective forces of solidarity to work with the marginalized, she argues that such collectives must be careful in their self-understanding and their exercise of agency. Hinze refers us to Niebuhr’s idea that we are

simultaneously sinner and saved, enmeshed in, yet transcending, a history both fallen and graced. Human beings are perpetually, dialectically, suspended—“vertically” between spirituality and temporality, “horizontally” between individuality and sociality, impelled to tack ceaselessly between sinful extremes as they navigate the dramas of history. Within history, each human life, to some degree, proceeds at others’ expense. To live, inevitably, is also to sin. No aspect of the person or of human relationships escapes sin’s taint. ¹²⁵

On even its best days, collective agency still needs to be redeemed, a reminder to temper not only activists’ expectations, but also the moral narcissism that animates collectives as much as it does persons.

In her new work on “radical sufficiency,” that is, the pursuit of an equitable livelihood for all, ¹²⁶ Hinze insists on an intersectional understanding of actual work production to appreciate the complex, historical ways that power inequity takes shape. ¹²⁷ To set our goals aright, she presents her major findings on “gender and economic livelihood,” “livelihood racialized,” and “class, inequality, and livelihood,” with a feminist regard for getting the narrative right. Before delivering her argument for radical sufficiency, she examines “livelihood consumed” reminding us of our own agency as consumers.

While intersectionality allows us to appreciate the complexity of constraints and controls, the term moral luck helpfully counterbalances our propensity to assign praise and blame for what agents do, by recognizing that often agents are not fully responsible for the constraints or controls to which they find themselves subject. ¹²⁸ In her essay on complex, constrained, and burdened agency, Traina explains that feminists use the term “to develop complex descriptions of accountability that recognize both the culpability of the constrained agent and the fault of those who create the constraints.” ¹²⁹ She argues that although feminists “focused primarily on constrained victims, people with significant social, economic, and political power are likewise constrained.” She adds, “This fact does not excuse them from taking responsibility for altering the constraints; rather, it warns them against avoiding constructive action out of fear of soiling themselves with complicity.” ¹³⁰ She concludes noting that “feminists shift the focus of moral analysis from the calculation of personal guilt for past events to description of personal and corporate responsibility for future transformation of present injustices. In particular, they demand that we judge our actions toward our distant neighbors by their effects on our neighbors’ ability to give and receive care.” ¹³¹

Kristin Heyer has long been recognized for pursuing matters related to individual and collective agency. ¹³² Like Traina, she examines gender, race, and agency in social production “to provide better accounts for the roles oppression, precarity, and scotosis play in constraining freedom.” ¹³³ Remarkably she sums up the insights gained from recent investigations. While noting that freedom and agency “has suffered from individualistic conceptualization,” she acknowledges that “the freedom to pursue one’s agenda may only be made possible by forced labor, (uncompensated) gendered labor, undercompensated labor, and displacement of others. Hence given the impact of economic, racialized, and citizenship constraints, the freedom of the privileged often directly depends upon the exploitation of others; these costs sustain myths of absolute autonomy as they compromise others’ well-being.” ¹³⁴

Helpfully Heyer identifies the problem of keeping agency personal or individualistic: “An understanding of agency taking seriously ‘invisible’ constraints or boosts and rooted in a social vision of the person and realities of human dependency and intersubjectivity can counter the lie of meritocratic individualism and the harms gender essentialism exacts.” ¹³⁵ She raises up “the tradition’s commitments to solidarity and the common good” “to counter against individualistic anthropologies, meritocratic idols, and the privatization of caring labor.” ¹³⁶

Among her conclusions, she notes, “An intersectional analysis of domestic labor illuminates how dependency constitutes agency and how pervasive, individualistic myths of meritocracy, the individual agent, and unfettered freedom—can further undermine sensitivity to structural injustice.” She concludes, “Antidotes of resistance and solidarity can enhance our commitment to responsibility for the shared work of social production.” ¹³⁷

Conclusion

Much more could be said about collectives that was not discussed here, for instance, matters on social sin, ¹³⁸ human dependency, ¹³⁹ and the work of healing and reform in light of the church’s sexual abuse crisis. ¹⁴⁰ Still, here I need to conclude as promised by filling out a profile for collectives as moral agents. I proceed by noting that, while interested in all collectives as such, many of us look specifically to the capabilities of collectives that aim for social change and improvement. Toward that end I invoked a variety of collectives throughout this article: BLM, the Jesuits, the Society of Christian Ethics, Discerning Deacons, Catholic Workers, the parish Rosary and Altar Society, Citizens UK and other Alinsky-style community organizations, Jesuit Refugee Service, Young Christian Workers, Plowshares, and the Kino Border Initiative. Social movements, religious orders, professional guilds of ethicists, church reform groups, community organizations, and service collectives for the marginalized are but some types of collectives. Indeed, discussing collectives requires ways of categorizing them, but here we have seen particular qualities that they must embody if they are to be valid collectives of moral agency.

First, philosophers teach us that collectives must be organized and that like personal agency they must express their agency with intentionality, power, and rationality. In short, they must have an articulated purpose and a capable strategy.

Second, the experience of base ecclesial communities highlighted the need for solidarity and mutual support as well as structures for sustaining membership and developing leadership. Within this framework was also an appreciation for the principle of subsidiarity.

Third, the African palaver method argues for members to mutually engage and to give a full hearing to all members, while holding leadership accountable to methods for decision-making that allow for reconsideration and revision. Here the virtues of mutual respect and prudence are complemented with a regard for subsidiarity and solidarity.

Fourth, echoing the palaver method, community organizers highlight that collectives cannot subordinate the individual for the sake of the collective, need to embody and promote the common good, and have the dual responsibility to negotiate the local and universal common good. These guidelines apply for all collectives, not solely for those working for social change.

The remaining three sets of guidelines are directed to collectives for social change.

Fifth, collectives need to understand the situations they are addressing. Toward this end, feminists propose an epistemic humility that prompts collectives not to simplify their understanding of the issues, but rather to develop a healthy suspicion that equitable and just goals are easily attainable through concepts like intersectionality and moral luck.

Sixth, those working with collectives addressing racist, sexist, and homophobic persons and societies appreciate the need to interrupt and confront the internalized and externalized social structures of caste and domination. These collectives, which exist to “fight back” whether to promote racial, gender, or class equity, to end caste, or to redirect climate change, recognize the need to appreciate how virtue and vice function individually and collectively. Indeed, the end of these types of collectives must eventually be reconciliation, as Massingale, Carney, and Johnston note.

Seventh, collectives must see their work in light of the kingdom of God. The most clearly “Catholic” qualities for moral collectives came from Kevin Ahern who, besides acknowledging Catholic social teaching on human dignity, solidarity, subsidiarity, and the common good, added that collectives ought to be marked both by prophetic dialogue that pursues the reign of God and by structures of grace that stand against structures of sin. He also recommended collective and member-attending practices of self-care and the discernment of spirits.

I think of collectives of moral agency as finding worthy exemplars in those multiple collectives mentioned above. But I also think that there are vicious collectives like those that are racist, sexist, or homophobic, as well as morally ambiguous collectives (like many populist movements). But until we recognize the moral agency of collectives, I do not think we will learn how to engage them. Recognizing the urgent need to address them in light of the precarity of our world today was what inspired this article. ¹⁴¹