Moral Agency Between the Times: Shared Finitude,Fragility,and Fragmentation

Abstract

Given how moral subjectivity and action are constituted within networks of interpersonal and social relations as they negotiate emerging questions and insights, this moral note addresses (a) enduring, individualistic signs of the times in cultural, ecclesial, and methodological contexts; (b) models of agency that center our social and finite dimensions; and (c) what such contexts and scholarship suggest for an agenda for moral agency today. It proposes that deeper attention to the function of internalized structures, the graces of failure and disorientation, and responses to ambiguity are warranted to meet the moment, between the times.

Novel technologies, rising authoritarian threats, and ascendant self-deception in a “post-truth” era raise new challenges to standard understandings of the rational apprehension of goods and moral responsibility. ¹ New threats to dignity and social trust are not well served by simplistic understandings of freedom as the antithesis of coercion or models of moral agency that presume voluntaristic choice. Whether in the tyranny of meritocratic cultural narratives or self-justification through avoidance tactics in moral frameworks, the individualism shaping understandings of agency persists, despite more relational interventions.

Narratives in which we take control of our lives, overcoming challenges through cognitive skill, obedience, and acquisition of stable virtues—and then get what we deserve—hold the day in many quarters, even as they fail to tell the whole or true story. Given how moral subjectivity and action are, in fact, constituted within networks of interpersonal and social relations as they negotiate emerging questions and insights, this moral note addresses (a) enduring, individualistic signs of the times in cultural, ecclesial, and methodological contexts; (b) models of agency that center our social and finite dimensions; and (c) what such contexts and scholarship suggest for an agenda for moral agency today. It proposes that deeper attention to the function of internalized structures, the graces of failure and disorientation, and responses to ambiguity are warranted to meet the moment, between the times.

“Cowboy Individualism” and Meritocratic Myths

The myth of the free, self-reliant man has long been celebrated in US popular culture and has reasserted itself in the face of shifting demographic, cultural, and economic forces perceived to threaten its dominance of late. Historian Heather Cox Richardson argues Donald Trump’s ascent to the presidency was “the logical outcome of the myth of cowboy individualism,” first celebrated by President Ronald Reagan and embraced by his party since:

In that myth, a true American is a man who operates on his own, outside the community. He needs nothing from the government, works hard to support himself, protects his wife and children, and asserts his will by dominating others. Government is his enemy, according to the myth, because it takes his money to help undeserving freeloaders and because it regulates how he can run his business. A society dominated by a cowboy individual is a strong one. ²

She traces how this ideology has attracted voters across the nation’s history and how, once in power, such leaders reduce government programs, taxes, and distributive regulations, arguing that the concentration of wealth and power among elites leads to efficient governance. This rhetoric has succeeded in supporting massive wealth transfers, and in Trump’s second administration widespread cuts by the Department of Government Efficiency, the redistribution of resources to the wealthy, and the impact of the fall 2025 government shutdown have furthered this agenda. Rugged individualism has also contributed to the draw of authoritarian populism in the contemporary US context.

Cultural Signs of the Times

More modest strains of individualism continue to infuse dominant cultural, ecclesial, and theological signs of the times. Children’s literature often inculcates the belief in hard work and personal virtues, giving way to popular media platforms that peddle the promise of individual happiness via material gain or impoverished notions of “self-care.” Ideological carriers of economic globalization reinforce rhetoric of free trade and consumer choice while obscuring market distortions and coercive subsidies. In like manner, cultural globalization can tend to colonize freedom, insofar as neocolonial forces continue to impose hegemonic models and traditions that determine what is considered normative. ³ The enduring prevalence of individualism and meritocracy, broadly construed, have impacted contemporary understandings of agency and responsibility, particularly in the United States and the West.

Related conceptions of freedom abet such tendencies. Political scientist Elisabeth Ankler’s work on “ugly freedoms” traces how political actors employ freedom language to justify antidemocratic politics and expand the creep of authoritarianism, whether by blocking the teaching of certain ideas (critical race theory bans) or by undermining public health (Covid mask mandate lifts). She shows how such arguments reflect a long national history of restricting freedom to a privileged few: slave codes creating “White freedom,” for example, or early permissive domestic laws ensuring women’s freedom remained at the discretion of their husbands. ⁴ In his interdisciplinary exploration of the limits of neoliberal freedom in light of economic inequality, race, and gender, David DeCosse outlines how the highly abstracted character of voluntariness and individualistic notion of freedom serve as ideological justifications for structural injustices like the new Jim Crow. In response, he forwards “an understanding of freedom that is liberal; oriented to the good and to God; embodied and relational; sensitive to culture and history; and contextual but universal in its reach.” ⁵

In his recent book on the tyrannical function of merit in the US context, philosopher Michael Sandel illustrates how this concept’s hold across socioeconomic classes corrodes civic responsibility and harms the common good. On a meritocratic view, those at the top believe they deserve their success, whether due to ideas about inherent vices of economic “losers” or the survival of the well-educated, talented, hardworking fittest. Moreover, where a belief in equality of opportunity holds sway, this view contends that those left behind deserve such a fate, engendering disdain, resentment, and competition. ⁶ In Sandel’s view, the dynamic also helps explain resentment by those left behind globally and a related attraction to authoritarian populists who promote protectionist policies. ⁷ This myth that we make it on our own has been recast in terms of particular definitions of success and failure in recent years, thereby eroding the dignity of work, “leaving many people feeling that elites look down on them,” and further polarizing politics. ⁸ Treating market mechanisms as the primary means for achieving the public good further diminishes shared deliberation and isolates equality of opportunity from consequential contexts, whether historical, legal, or structural. ⁹

As DeCosse has argued, also at work for the “winners” and “losers” of economic globalization is an abstract idea of freedom set radically against uncontrollable conditions of human life, leading to unjustly unequal and thereby resented distributions of goods and opportunities. An impoverished view also leads to institutional erosion, diminishing checks on excesses of freedom, as well as belief in universal human equality, given a culture wherein freedom is understood to be a personal attribute with which to ascend or descend. ¹⁰ Intergenerational transmission of advantages/disadvantages through not only wealth but educational opportunities and connections give the lie to meritocracy.

A mythology of merit has been sustained not only by secular political cultures but also by the focus of some religious and moral traditions on striving and just deserts. ¹¹ For meritocracy is ultimately a moral claim about agency and freedom. Its emphases seek to vindicate the ideas that agents are responsible for their own success and therefore capable of freedom; that under fair conditions of competition, success will align with virtue and rewards with desert. ¹² In a related vein, if unencumbered individuals assume they have gained skills, capacities, and property on their own, it is unsurprising they feel no indebtedness to society or structures having played any role in such acquisition or development. ¹³ When the causes of social suffering are thus framed as individual failures, solutions remain individualistic as well, from charitable giving and service to selective demands for grit or resilience. Privatized responses further obscure systemic roots of such suffering for meritocratic “losers.”

Other anthropological assumptions operative in ideologies of meritocracy and individualism—for example, humans as self-interested preference maximizers—similarly hide from view the costly dynamics and relationships that sustain the privileges of most “choosers.” For example, as womanist, decolonial, and feminist ethicists and activists have shown, the ideal of autonomous choice is in many cases sustained by the (gendered, racialized, transnational) work of social production. ¹⁴ An individualistic anthropology feeds not only meritocratic cultural myths but also certain scholarly methodological emphases, even in the wake of communitarian critiques. Enlightenment distrust of the passions and elevation of reason as primary have been challenged by work on the role of narrative, emotions, and moral sentiments in moral reasoning; advances in neuroscience and moral psychology that signal the importance of how human persons, in fact, make decisions and act; as well as constraints on autonomy and virtue. Yet the self-governing, self-constituting, self-sufficient agent whose natural freedom and moral identity do not essentially depend on socially elaborated powers, roles, and relationships continues to bolster an individualistic ethos and approach. ¹⁵

Hence these dominant cultural perspectives in the West in general and the United States in particular—whether myths of meritocracy, absolute autonomy, or abstracted freedom—help sustain unjust arrangements, pathologize those left behind, and fuel the consequential “innocence” of privileged agents. As Cameroonian moral theologian Solange Ngah puts it, the elevation of individualistic forms of liberty and the ideology of modernism prevent responsible freedom anchored in the virtue of charity, integration in “freedom of the spirit,” and social change. ¹⁶

Ecclesial Signs of Times

Religious traditions are not immune to these tendencies. We encounter meritocratic dynamics at work not only in works righteousness, the prosperity gospel, or “zero-sum” approaches to religious pluralism, but also in Catholic catechetical emphases on sin management more broadly. Striving for scrupulosity or individual moral goodness (narrowly construed) and judging others to prove one’s own worthiness remains an “ecumenical” temptation apparent in certain strains of Christian preaching and public witness. Despite significant developments post-Vatican II, the lure of quests for unambiguous innocence and concern with defending identity markers persist. Catholic magisterial emphases on freedom as self-determination through personal choices “accentuate freedom as a human capacity that is exercised episodically in situations in which an agent has an ability to do otherwise.” ¹⁷ Preoccupations with preventing cooperation with intrinsic evil and scandal have too often led to ecclesial strategies that mirror the individual condemnation traced above, that encourage more passive responsibility, and that neglect accompaniment, compassion, and courage. ¹⁸ As Elizabeth Sweeney Block notes, the Catholic Catechism’s location of moral freedom in judgments of reason and rational powers to act deliberately limits churches and educational communities’ methods for forming moral agents. ¹⁹

A focus on a perfectionist teleology together with individualistic penitential rites has also obscured the importance of structural analysis and social responsibility in Catholic moral theology. ²⁰ Notions of conscience that reduce it to cleaning the slate or obediential conformity alone can eclipse significant dimensions of responsibility and disempower discernment. When truncated notions of conscience or selective invocations of cooperation with evil are invoked in public religious discourse, they can serve more as litmus tests than as invitations to communal growth and accompaniment. Such approaches neglect attention not only to structural sins that may dull conscience and cloud discernment but also to examining internal institutional biases. Hence certain ecclesial emphases similarly signal the need for models that expand notions of responsibility to account for broader influences. Pope Francis challenged Catholics to consider how disproportionate emphasis on cleaning one’s slate can shrink the scope of the concerns of conscience and avert our gaze from those excluded or harmed by structural violence. Early indications from Pope Leo XIV signal a similar departure. ²¹

Methodological Signs of the Times

The field of Catholic theological ethics both reflects and contests signs of the times evidenced in these wider ecclesial and cultural contexts. James Keenan’s historical work has traced the shifts from a focus on avoiding transgressions or securing self-justification through an autonomous ethics and an “eye toward Rome” to descending into the particularity of human suffering and responding with a more comprehensive method. As moral theology became more influenced by liberation and political theologies and less clericalized, responding to suffering rather than magisterial teaching became an increasing focus of theological engagement. ²²

Yet even as, in recent decades, moral theology witnessed shifts from a focus on acts to relationships, from an essentialist to a dynamic concept of the moral subject, from abstract to contextual moral reason, and from Eurocentrism to global consciousness, tendencies toward individual self-justification often persist. ²³ For despite such shifts, an assumption that blameworthiness and sin are identical endures. ²⁴ As Linda Hogan traces, revisionist claims and conclusions regarding conscience and the nature of moral truth have been subject to sustained rebuttal, rooted in theologies emphasizing the immutability and universality of moral commandments, particularly those prohibiting intrinsically evil acts. ²⁵ At the same time, a “shift to the social” has continued to expand personalist orientations of virtue ethics, shaped contextual considerations of conscience, and socialized bioethics and sexual ethics. Areas of natural law and human rights have also adapted to reflect postcolonial, feminist, and postmodern critiques.

Recent work on the inadequate confines of certain categories of moral theology indicates the impact of dominant individualistic emphases, from analyses of double effect, to avoiding scandal, to commonplace understandings of racism. ²⁶ Others have shown the shortcomings of Catholic moral theology’s broader assumptions that we can avoid sin and that we have “more ought’s than can’s.” ²⁷ These shifts have also tested the adequacy of the language of moral theology, whether epikeia, double effect, erroneous conscience, and even cooperation with evil. As Cristina Traina rightly contends, their use can focus our moral attention on self-justification rather than accountability to others’ needs and the real harm that tragic choices entail. ²⁸ Hence, just as some ecclesial approaches focus attention on resolving to choose worthy objects of acts in isolation, some theologians and philosophers influenced by the enduring impact of Enlightenment rationalism and neo-Scholastic theology have sought refuge in narrow proceduralism as a way of limiting or avoiding challenges posed by the operations of power. ²⁹ A primary focus on avoiding sin or vice can occlude attention to structural contexts as readily as meritocratic cultural myths.

Interdisciplinary resources have served the development of moral subjectivity that better attends to social structures and social relations. Ethicists drawing upon critical realist sociology or philosophical accounts of moral luck, for example, help counter approaches wherein agents attain their own security or virtue free from contingent vulnerability or practiced interdependence. A new festschrift for Daniel K. Finn develops the work he has pioneered to apply critical realist accounts of the impact of structures and cultures on agents’ free-but-constrained decisions. ³⁰ Theological applications of critical realism in recent years have specified implications in areas of virtue, ³¹ social ethics, ³² structural sin, ³³ and ecclesial reform, ³⁴ such as seminary education and the parish structural matrix.

Christian theological treatments of moral luck emphasize the persistence of moral agency amid oppressive constraints on the one hand or harmful vices of domination on the other. Such scholarship helps widen the lens from an isolated agent to the inherited, contextual, constitutive conditions that directly shape her agency. Womanist and feminist insights on moral luck illuminate the constitutive power of structural vices. For example, Katie Geneva Cannon’s groundbreaking methodological critiques expose the effects of social power on agency and identify virtues exhibited by constrained agents “to prevail against the odds with moral integrity.” ³⁵ Kate Ward’s work on how wealth functions as moral luck to hinder virtue pursuit illustrates how inequality “shapes us morally as we live within it.” ³⁶ Reflecting meritocratic influences, she notes that a Christian account of moral luck also indicates “whether communities are truly offering all their members the opportunity to flourish as full human beings with moral agency, or whether some members of the community are expected to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, morally speaking.” ³⁷

In related ways, ethicists across a variety of subdisciplines advance contextual conceptions of agency. Willis Jenkins offers a pragmatic approach to “wicked” problems that overwhelm agency, like climate change, and Karen Peterson-Iyer indicates why a choice model remains inadequate for a Christian feminist sexual ethic today. ³⁸ In the area of mental health, Jessica Coblentz distinguishes “small agency” as a sign of God’s grace amid the seemingly impossible for those suffering with depression. ³⁹ Janna Hunter-Bowman uncovers a constructive account of agency under duress in dialogue with peace studies; ⁴⁰ and Stephanie Puen integrates insights from design thinking to disrupt structural economic injustice. ⁴¹ Incorporating work in trauma studies, Stephanie Edwards proposes an ethic of “enfleshed counter-memory” framing relational agency. ⁴²

The interdisciplinary essays in the recently published collection Redeeming Autonomy: Theology, Agency, Social Justice result from two international seminars convened by a related research project. ⁴³ That project’s “stress testing” of autonomy has direct implications for moral agency, whether against secular concerns about oppressive conceptions of the good or ways in which “dominant political and cultural conception of autonomy reinforces socio-economic inequalities, colonial power asymmetries, and upends collective values.” ⁴⁴ Participants engaged inherited conceptions of autonomy in light of disputed questions in areas ranging from end-of-life issues, transgender ethics, and trauma to democracy, ecology, and migration. Finally, new work in philosophy also offers social accounts of agency that counter the Enlightenment’s “metaphysical illusion.” ⁴⁵ For example, Owen Abbott’s recent book analyzes the roles habit, intuition, emotion, and reflexiveness play in moral agency amid personal and power relationships alike. ⁴⁶

These challenges to cultural, ecclesial, and methodological individualisms contest the adequacy of abstract and meritocratic lenses to reflect reality, and they draw attention to the moral significance of our inherent finitude. We turn now to recent treatments of the consequences of human experiences of fragility and fragmentation as they relate to moral agency in order to shed further light on our capacities and call.

Finitude, Fragility, and the Graces of Moral Failure

As Martha Nussbaum has long reminded us, there is a fragility to goodness that cannot be fully captured by fixed principles. ⁴⁷ Theological ethicists writing on vulnerability today reflect this sense that fragility grounds human excellence with significance for the exercise of moral agency. ⁴⁸ In her 2023 Madeleva Lecture, Traina elaborates how flourishing in finitude reconfigures perspectives on virtue and the good life itself. Drawing on feminist theologies, she notes how such an approach strengthens us in pursuit of justice in a world marked by finitude and unjust oppression. ⁴⁹ Embracing this reality bolsters a vision of interdependence that incorporates “health and illness, ability and disability, healing and injury, and birth and death into a dynamic, unending process of attentive, humble mutual support among mortal, spirit-fleshed people.” ⁵⁰

Traina’s dynamic, interdependent model departs from one marked by individualistic pursuit of static purity. ⁵¹ She rejects the latter as invariably invoking arbitrary, exclusionary norms, inviting instead a “stance of epistemic humility and openness to change.” ⁵² She draws on examples of the saints as reminders that we all “image the divine” imperfectly in our vulnerable finitude and our “perichoretic interdependence across space and time.” ⁵³ Taking risks for the good supported by intergenerational networks of sinners and saints offers a different understanding of agency than do inherited models of refining reason or purging flaws in search of static perfection. ⁵⁴

In a related vein, other ethicists have examined moral dilemmas anew, reconfiguring their roles in the service of human flourishing. Kate Jackson-Meyer and Lisa Sowle Cahill defend the plausibility of moral dilemmas in Christian ethics, that is, situations in which “no fully ‘moral’ resolution is possible.” ⁵⁵ Employing the treatment of ambivalent decisions by Augustine and Aquinas, critiques of modern rationalist epistemologies, and theological hermeneutics of God and evil, they offer a “response entailing communal support for agents caught in moral dilemmas, as well as social-political remediation of contributing structural injustices.” ⁵⁶ For example, they posit that Aquinas anticipates the category of tragic moral dilemmas if he is read in view of his appreciation for social embeddedness, even as the reality of such dilemmas “disturbs the security of moral reason.” ⁵⁷

In light of theories that emphasize the context dependence of practical reason and dimensions of understanding that exceed the rational—from the cognitive value of the emotions to postcolonial and decolonial epistemologies—Jackson-Meyer and Cahill conclude that agency entails the emotions, embodiment, power relationships, and structures, such that Christian ethics must acknowledge “the plausibility of moral dilemmas.” ⁵⁸ These wider modes of understanding and social embeddedness illuminate how tragic dilemmas arise due not only to individual finitude but also to related structural inadequacies and conflicts of goods that shape agents’ contexts, capacities, and options. Acknowledging this possibility paves the way for responses that better respect “moral ambiguities in pursuit of communal healing,” and Jackson-Meyer and Cahill advance responses marked by “truth-telling, lament, accountability, and social change through solidarity.” ⁵⁹

Karen Guth moves beyond claims of plausibility to highlight ways in which moral failure can, in fact, foster significant aims of Christian ethics. She identifies goods that emerge across several categories of moral failure, whether produced by tragic, overwhelming, or unjust situations. ⁶⁰ Not unlike attention to cooperation with evil noted above, Guth “cautions against approaches to moral failure overly focused on prevention, avoidance, blame, and action guidance at the expense of witness, lament, and God’s agency.” ⁶¹ Methods that prioritize meeting moral demands, resolving problems, or even cultivating virtues, in Guth’s view, are regrettable in that they place further emphases “on diagnosing and preventing various types of moral failure rather than enlivening positive visions of the good life.” ⁶² She finds philosophical and theological approaches to moral failure overemphasize individual will and blame, ⁶³ countering that when agents confront inevitable moral failure, it fosters honesty about creatureliness and the moral life along with compassion for others’ suffering. ⁶⁴

Guth suggests that a more expansive treatment of moral failure underscores its latent gifts for moral formation and the potential deficits of moral success. ⁶⁵ Approaches focused on perfecting virtue in an imperfect world of competing goods detract from “actualizing possibilities for moral flourishing” by seeking “opportunities to participate in God’s love, generosity and joy.” ⁶⁶ For instance, Jenkins’s focus on “conceptual ineptitude” and “moral incompetence” in the face of climate change, rather than individual corruption, leads to practical, problem-based innovation (goods of creativity and courage). ⁶⁷ Guth identifies other “graces” of moral failure that go overlooked as opportunities to cultivate compassion, “to embrace survival and other ‘alternative’ virtues . . . and to give and receive love, joy, and beauty.” ⁶⁸

Some theological ethicists confront these tensions naturally raised by finitude and moral failure with moves that resolve them through agents’ acquisition of stable virtues, whereas others summon us to linger with inescapable fragmentation. Last year in this journal, Kate Ward turned to a social virtue framework for counteracting diminished autonomy, to which theological ethics itself has inadvertently contributed. ⁶⁹ She argues that conciliar attention to the universal call to work for earthly justice and shift to holistic, totalizing ethics focused on conscience contribute to moral helplessness, given they lack tools for practicing growth toward perfection and assessing one’s goodness when projects fail. ⁷⁰ Ward identifies a virtue ethics that accounts for moral luck as able to combat this pitfall, “by observing moral agency in action patterns that shape the self’s dispositions” over a lifetime. ⁷¹ Against an eschatological horizon, a virtue lens establishes clear connections between our acts and goodness and allows us to “see our moral selves, throughout time, as integrated and unitary,” rather than in light of utilitarian measures that fall short. ⁷² Ward combines Marget Urban Walker’s philosophical work on maintaining moral integrity through lives impacted by moral tragedy, luck, or injury with a Christian dependence on God for virtue.

An effort to reconnect acts with moral goodness and responsiveness to God is likewise central to Darlene Fozard Weaver’s The Acting Person and Christian Moral Life, against the backdrop of debates about the fundamental option. Her charge that the move from goodness to rightness does not move back from rightness to goodness raises a similar concern that the dialectical relation of the person’s response to God and her involvement in the world gets lost in an overemphasis in either direction. ⁷³ Even granting the historical and narrative contexts in which agents make choices, Weaver insists that it is through our concrete acts that we coauthor our own stories, responding to God who has already acted on our behalf and interacting with others whose stories intersect with ours.

Jennifer Herdt’s recent book likewise addresses fragile moral agency in terms of integrity and responsiveness to God. ⁷⁴ Her account characterizes agents as reason-givers responsible to other reason-givers, summoned by God to self-determination and to perfect our responsiveness to goodness as such. Like Weaver, Herdt considers moral obligations in terms of responsiveness to the call of God, “a transcendent-cum-immanent vocative that calls persons into relationships of mutual recognition and thereby into accountability-in-relationship.” ⁷⁵ Herdt is concerned to preserve concrete duties, the inseparability of virtue and obligations, and agents’ perfection through seeking the right relation to the good for its own sake. ⁷⁶ Her elaboration of “ecstatic Christian eudaimonism” as “an objective but fallibilist account of the good life, of flourishing,” acknowledges finitude and fragility. ⁷⁷ For Herdt, contemplating our eschatological reality serves to cultivate the imagination and strengthen resistance to “recalcitrant circumstances that surround and deform our agency,” perfecting responsiveness to the good and fellowship in that shared responsiveness. ⁷⁸ With a focus on Thomistic virtue ethics, William Mattison’s recent monograph also frames moral growth in terms of transformations “wrought by God’s grace at the nexus of divine and human agency.” ⁷⁹

For others, ambiguous circumstances between the times induce a helplessness not readily overcome, leading them to remain with fragmented, fractured realities. Willa Swenson-Lengyel locates the origin of moral “paralysis” not in incompetence but in human nature itself, for example. ⁸⁰ She worries that a “human-focused lens on catastrophe, the moral life, and autonomy” offers an incomplete picture of threats to the moral life and proper responses, excluding “attention to the persistent reality of natural catastrophes as they impact moral lives.” ⁸¹ She contends this partial perspective distorts understandings of catastrophe and morality. Using the biblical example of Job, Swenson-Lengyel argues that his agency is not necessarily linked to rational self-governance or integrity but rather “is a response of a fragmented self with a commitment to remain in fragmentation in light of his experiences.” ⁸² She notes that this demands that we “consider a limit to virtue and suggests the possibility that there may be responses to catastrophe that are good, autonomous, un- or at least nonvirtuous, and moreover, explicitly against God,” concluding that “Job should make us question the idea that virtue can easily help us in responding well to catastrophe.” ⁸³ Her admittedly abrupt incorporation of personal grief over the unexpected death of her newborn son, Jules, evokes the deep challenge traumatic ruptures pose to the moral life. ⁸⁴

Tisha Rajendra’s work in migration ethics offers another example in this vein, identifying the distinctive operations of solidarity in immigrant diaspora communities, appearing to “lack the connection to flourishing that is taken to characterize virtues.” ⁸⁵ She laments how Christian virtue ethics implicitly adopts an individualistic anthropology, despite “the embeddedness of the individual within a specific, historical community with its own struggles is impossible to ignore.” ⁸⁶ Drawing on Lisa Tessman’s concept of burdened virtues, Rajendra argues that in such contexts solidarity is burdened “because the self is not an individual free to choose voluntary relationships” but is more akin to a narrative self. ⁸⁷ She notes how the relationship between solidarity and flourishing is severed, particularly in communities “traumatized by war, displacement, and political oppression,” for the bearer must exercise virtuous choice under harmful circumstances, causing regret and/or exacting costs. ⁸⁸ As Therese Lysaught and Cory D. Mitchell argue, academic literature treating theological virtues remains nearly silent on race and embodiment, as well. ⁸⁹ They note that the field “remains largely captured by cognitivist-psychological accounts that locate virtue in individual rationality, will, conscience, character, and/or the affections,” which historically, has been problematic for persons hyper-identified with their bodies rather than with reason. ⁹⁰ This may cause such accounts to overlook the malforming and directly injurious impact of White supremacy or xenophobia.

Work like Ward’s and Traina’s drawing on womanist authors and integrating moral luck with virtue helps resist these tendencies, yet Rajendra, Lysaught, and Mitchell highlight dangers of generalizing about virtues and integrity or the stealthily residual, autonomous self that persists even in social accounts of the person and moral life. ⁹¹ They also suggest ways in which varied social contexts and epistemic authorities—particularly those not historically considered normative—can illuminate shortcomings of standard moral frameworks. ⁹² Here, attention to the lived experiences of disability also facilitates moves from abstract assessments of idealized selves or neurotypical views of practical rationality to relational and contextual elements. ⁹³ Elizabeth Agnew Cochran indicates how neurodiversity expands our understanding of the way humans are formed in the virtues, such that—not unlike the graces of moral failure or reconfiguring of fragmentation—“misfitting” can benefit character. ⁹⁴ Ethicists assessing moral failure, oppressive constraints, and fragmenting experiences together raise significant methodological and pastoral questions, even where they diverge on the possibilities for existing virtue frameworks to account for growth and responsiveness in tune with created nature and our telos.

An Agenda for Moral Agency Today

These insights from developing literature help shape a contemporary agenda for moral agency. Given that decontextualized methods obscure complicity and moral goods, understandings of agency and conversion require further attention in several veins. Enduring infiltration of individualism and meritocracy suggest (1) the significance of internalized—not just external—structures. Accounts underscoring finitude and moral dilemmas commend (2) further transitions from parsing complicity to taking responsibility. Emphases on fragmentation and burdened virtues suggest (3) models that account for natural evil, structural injustice, and moral incompetence, whereas the graces of moral failure signal (4) the hidden harms of “resolvism.” ⁹⁵

Given the enduring influences of meritocratic and individualistic scripts that undermine sensitivity to structural injustice, models of moral agency must build on recent turns to external forms of constraint or luck to further incorporate the influence of internalized structures. Anna Kasafi Perkins’s treatment of unconscious dimensions of moral life and their applications to Caribbean contexts indicates how emphases on rationality and free will neglect distorting social contexts. ⁹⁶ Experiences from the Global South such as those in the Commonwealth Caribbean, she notes, “are not usually countenanced in theorising on the nature of morality. The issue of agency—moral or otherwise—is a seminal one for Caribbean people, for whom the colonial legacies of disenfranchisement continue to reverberate.” ⁹⁷ Perkins applies the work of social psychologist Albert Bandura to expand the moral imagination, attend to moral disengagement, and draw on Caribbean storytelling in the service of moral formation.

Other decolonial scholarship on embodied knowledge, ⁹⁸ and recent work on the vulnerability of rationality, ⁹⁹ fragility of virtue, ¹⁰⁰ and moral intuitionism ¹⁰¹ analyze the import of distorted capacities of perception for moral method. Daniel Pilario’s work, grounded in his Filipino context during the Marcos regime, notes how religious practices themselves encompass both intentional and unconscious values. ¹⁰² In a similar vein, I have elaborated elsewhere the need to supplement attention to the impacts of structures and cultures on role-related behaviors or deliberate actions with attention to pre-reflective operations of “structuring structures” ¹⁰³ and agents’ inheritances. ¹⁰⁴ I indicate the value of Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus and Jesse Couenhoven’s account of Augustinian compatibilism for addressing our responsibility for qualities that diminish moral freedom. ¹⁰⁵

Pope Francis consistently invoked nonvoluntary forms of sin that elude cognitive accounts of culpability alone, reflecting the impact of CELAM at Medellín. ¹⁰⁶ In his recent Dilexi Te, Pope Leo XIV underscores Francis’s emphases on ideological dimensions of such injustices as the “absolute autonomy of the market” and a “dictatorship of an economy that kills.” ¹⁰⁷ Referring to his predecessor’s Dilexit Nos, he notes how social sin becomes part of a dominant mindset that comes to consider selfish indifference “normal or reasonable.” ¹⁰⁸ Like the innovative moves traced above, these tools better address what moral growth requires in light of unchosen experiences, powerful cultural influences, and dynamic contingencies than do idealized norms.

Scholarship on the operations of White supremacy and neoliberal capitalist markets is also instructive about how concealed dynamics shape moral perception and agency. Colleagues who have long analyzed the operations of White supremacy in light of Christian theological categories help capture such dynamics. In the US context, the ethos of individualism, meritocracy, and unfettered freedom profiled above has largely remained a White ethos, with the American Dream functioning as cover for harmful myths that malform a collective imagination and resulting agency. Kelly Brown Douglas’s recent book reflects longstanding womanist scrutiny of the distorting effects of imagination shaped by White habitus. ¹⁰⁹ As M. Shawn Copeland’s contribution to the Redeeming Autonomy collection makes clear, chattel slavery produced not only commodification, social death, and abrogation of personal autonomy but an annihilation of the subject. The inheritance and ongoing impact of such trauma shapes not only moral luck or unequal constraints but agency itself. ¹¹⁰ As Vincent Lloyd elaborates in Black Dignity, anti-Blackness does not simply entail wrong choices or a “discrete set of habits or practices”—it remains at the center of everything, interlocking with other systems of domination. ¹¹¹

Hence the sin of White supremacy conditions the freedom of White persons internalizing its pervasive, invisible logic—not only those struggling under and against it. For it not only helps guarantee payment of the costs of freedom but also functions to sustain false consciousness and normalize harmful patterns. ¹¹² As the poet Claudia Rankine warns, “Because white men can’t/police their imagination/black people are dying.” ¹¹³ Commonsense understandings of racism and of moral agency alike that focus on individual intention and personal culpability fail to connect formation to the ways agents are subconsciously or indirectly complicit in social marginalization and harm. The lament, truth-telling, and accountability noted above suggest preliminary ways forward.

The diffuse operations of neoliberal capitalism also impact moral agency in ways reflective of internalized structures. Pervasive understandings of the laws of the free market as natural, in which, as Matthew Shadle describes, the “forms of exchange and institutions characteristic of capitalism are treated as if they are natural outgrowths of universal human behavior, rather than the product of human invention and convention,” contribute to hidden subject formation. ¹¹⁴ Christina McRorie underscores this danger, given that it suggests such laws remain fixed and are “therefore not the appropriate subject of moral analysis.” ¹¹⁵ Christine Firer Hinze employs habitus to critique “consumerism’s power to colonize and shape perceptions and desires, even among the very young” in ways that surpass market boundaries. ¹¹⁶ Such a permeation of positional competition bred by consumerism “distorts people’s expectations, then disappoints them.” ¹¹⁷ Monetized social media platforms shape consumerist desire through messaging about novelty, scarcity, and impossible standards, not to mention dis- and misinformation that stoke polarization and bolster meritocratic narratives via algorithms. Laws exempt social media and digital platforms from liability for what they transmit, in contrast to standard media, indicating how structure, culture, and habitus mutually reinforce one another. ¹¹⁸

Paul Lakeland cautions that “surveillance capitalism intensifies this danger by threatening the freedom of human thought,” leaving us, in the words of Roberto Mangabeira Unger, “singing in our chains.” ¹¹⁹ The sale and manipulation of personal data directly abet the diminishment of genuinely human agency. Recent books by Kathryn Tanner and David Cloutier similarly critique the distorting reach of finance-dominated capitalism and the malforming effects of luxury, respectively. ¹²⁰ An understanding of agency that takes seriously “invisible” constraints or boosts, and which is rooted in the realities of human dependency and intersubjectivity, can counter the lie of meritocratic individualism and the harms that surveillance capitalism exacts.

Are agents “singing in our chains” merely apprehending apparent goods? Pervasive, diffuse, embodied influences pose challenges even to frameworks of culpable ignorance. Beyond welcome methodological moves from attributing blame to taking responsibility indicated by the future-oriented agency and insights from moral and epistemic luck, ¹²¹ penetrating cultivated indifference will require fresh approaches. As work previewed by Herdt, Ward, and Weaver make clear, agency is often understandably aligned with continuity, stability, and durable identity. Christian Smith identifies as a central accomplishment of personal existence overcoming “forms of loss, discontinuity, instability, unpredictability, and disruption,” given they make life “instrumentally inefficient” and “obstruct personal existence, the achievement of robust personhood.” ¹²² Ethicists whose anthropologies likewise emphasize a “conscious, reflexive, embodied, self-transcending center of subjective experience,”—who, “as the efficient cause of his or her own responsible actions and interactions, exercises complex capacities for agency and intersubjectivity” ¹²³ —are most compatible with such moral emphases, as well. Yet the authors highlighted who remain with tragedy or contemplate the gifts of failure invite us to consider how seemingly constrained or fragmenting experiences sensitize and expand moral vision in valuable ways.

Philosopher Ami Harbin’s work on the moral and political value of disorientations illuminates their tenderizing and awareness-generating effects. ¹²⁴ Her work delineates how “disorientations” produced by trauma, queerness, and migration help question harmful norms, detect vulnerabilities, and generate solidarity, shifting habits and expectations in ways that better reflect emphases herein on vulnerability. She notes how the effects of more “democratic” disorientations caused by facing illness or grief can extend beyond the realm of life in which they occur, in ways reminiscent of Swenson-Lengyel’s account. Harbin argues that resulting awareness generates epistemic humility and collaborative action, particularly beneficial given internalized structures that foster vicious oblivion.

Hence, reigning paradigms that channel “cowboy individualism” or idealize decisive action emphasize agents’ intentionality and efficacy, yet they obscure our lack of control and even deter us from experiences that sensitize to injustice and solidarity. Refusals of the type of disorientations Harbin traces—defensiveness, scapegoating—impede recognition, responsibility, and repair. ¹²⁵ Where temptations lie in certitude or individual improvement plans themselves, rather than missing the mark in objects of knowledge and will, there renewed frameworks and practices can serve moral agency and pastoral strategies alike.

Nonlinear, dislodging, reorienting processes can generate concern for the larger community, whereas inherited models noted at the outset risk despair and apathy, on the one hand, or circumscription of precise accountability that turns us inward, on the other. If sinful agency is “encrypted in socialization processes that encourage individuals in unreflective obedience to the ‘ordinary’ and ‘expected,’” ¹²⁶ as Cahill puts it, the new perspectives, creativity, and moral maturity often invited by disorientations offer necessary antidotes. In terms of the virtue ethics divergences noted above, Harbin cautions that traditional accounts emphasizing static, enduring, and global traits are ill-suited to understanding the effects of disorientations that are unchosen. It belongs to the ongoing agenda of moral agency, then, to wrestle with the values and disvalues of pursuing individual, stable character traits amid dynamic and disruptive contingencies.

Unconscious factors shaping immoral actions traced in terms of the White racial frame or market fundamentalisms should be distinguished from tenderizing disorientations, appraising them by their fruits. Harbin outlines morally promising effects of certain disorientations, such as changed attitudes, behaviors, and relational capacities. ¹²⁷ Her related work on critical consciousness-raising indicates how such awareness prompts different relations to felt power, such that agents are better primed to anticipate and welcome the new awareness such disorientations produce. ¹²⁸ Like experiences of ambush, ¹²⁹ for example, disorientations can help shift traditionally reliable loci and attune receptivity to God’s interruptive, sustaining grace, particularly where standard religious practice has reinforced harmful ideals.

The dynamics of freedom, sin, and grace call us to conversion and growth amid complex forces that condition perception and action alike. New work in moral agency will continue to uncover what it may mean for theological ethics, pastoral priorities, and political engagement that “human reason, agency, and moral options are conditioned by the same entanglements of justice and injustice that constitute the social world.” ¹³⁰ Social contexts extend beyond the human sphere, as well, and Luke Bretherton’s instructive portrayal of moral agency as “metabolic” offers a symbiotic account of networked responsibility across space, time, and species. ¹³¹ Such mutually constituting models break free of reified ones and make room for the Spirit’s invitations. For we cannot bypass how our “socially poisonous histories” constitute our present, even as they “can be metabolized in ways that acknowledge and seek to convert this reality.” ¹³²

Given how meritocracy obscures structural injustices and internalized ideologies deceive, multifaceted approaches will remain vital. Liturgy and education, bodies and minds, hearts and imaginations, restrictions and incentives, risk-taking and material practices, the irruption of grace and exemplars—all will be indispensable for shifting the ground soil that constitutes the agency for those on every side of today’s many divides. For moral agency “is not a hyperactive noumenal gland or an inviolable capacity; it is an unending task, a problem, a burden and a hope, a process of integration, requiring support, healing, solidarity, imagination and redemption as well as striving.” ¹³³ As we chart a new agenda for moral agency, may we resist too quickly assimilating the fragments, missing the graces of disorientation, moving from Holy Saturday to resurrection. In this vein, Shelly Rambo summons us to “keep the spirits close to the wounds, to not rise above them and to inscribe them otherwise. Scars maintain their texture; they inscribe memory forward.” ¹³⁴ Bearing witness to new and enduring traumas, visible and invisible, our own and others’, may Christian agents be guided by the One who rose with wounds intact (Jn 20:27).