Moral Agency within Social Structures and Culture

A Primer on Critical Realism for Christian Ethics

Daniel K. Finn

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781626168015, 9781626168008
• eBook ISBN: 9781626168022
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Teologia cristiana

Christian ethics has addressed moral agency and culture from the start, and Christian social ethics increasingly acknowledges the power of social structures. However, neither has made sufficient use of the discipline that specializes in understanding structures and culture: sociology. In Moral Agency within Social Structures and Culture, editor and contributor Daniel K. Finn proposes a field-changing critical realist sociology that puts Christian ethics into conversation with modern discourses on human agency and social transformation.

Catholic social teaching mischaracterizes social evil as being little more than the sum of individual choices, remedied through individual conversion. Liberation theology points to the power of social structures but without specifying how structures affect moral agency. Critical realist sociology provides a solution to both shortcomings. This collection shows how sociological insights can deepen and extend Catholic social thought by enabling ethicists to analyze more precisely how structures and culture impact human decisions. The book demonstrates how this sociological framework has applications for the study of the ecological crisis, economic life, and virtue ethics.

Moral Agency within Social Structures and Culture is a valuable tool for Christian ethicists who seek systemic change in accord with the Gospel.

CHAPTER 1

How Critical Realism Can Help Christian Social Ethics

David Cloutier

Christian social ethics is about Christian ethics and about society. From its beginnings, Christianity wrestled theologically with questions of the social order and engaged in controversy over the actions of civil authorities. But the present configuration of “Christian social ethics” emerges in the late nineteenth century, in both Protestantism and Catholicism. Within the academy, new spaces for completely secular “social sciences” were increasingly powerful, and within society, science-inspired movements like social Darwinism and Marxism shaped social practice. How should Christian ethics interact with these new configurations of knowledge about society? Multiple influences have given birth to a wide variety of approaches. The aim of this volume is to indicate how a particularly insightful form of social science—critical realist sociology—can improve each of these.

VARIETIES OF DISCOURSE

Helping to sort out the variety of approaches, James Gustafson, in his work for the World Council of Churches, developed a typology of four sorts of discourse evident within social ethics.¹ The first is “prophetic discourse,” whose primary purposes run parallel to those of Israel’s prophets: to offer sweeping indictments of the current situation, to kindle hope for a “more utopian form” of society, and to evoke “a sense of urgency.”² A second form Gustafson calls “narrative discourse.” Its primary role is to “sustain the identity of the community through memory” but in its “parabolic” form can also offer specific stories that “suggest courses of action in particular circumstances.”³

The third form he labeled “ethical,” and it is “rationally rigorous” in making “precise distinctions” and using “syllogistic logic.”⁴ This sort of discourse is valuable because it shapes with greater rigor the identification of middle axioms and proximate principles that name what we ought to do. The fourth form of discourse he identifies as “policy,” which is not so much what we ought to do as what it is possible for us to do right here and now. It “seeks to determine what is desirable within the constraints of what is possible.”⁵ The third and fourth forms are related, but whereas the third form relies on a historical tradition of philosophical inquiry worked out with some precision, the fourth form is much more attentive to particular circumstances and dynamics.

While appreciative of these forms of social ethical discourse, Gustafson identifies shortcomings of each. He is concerned that prophecy and narrative lack a self-consciousness about their limitations. Prophetic discourse “dramatizes,” he says, but “cannot inform incremental choices” when “good and bad are comingled,” especially since it stresses an “ideal future” at the expense of short-range possibilities.⁶ Narrative discourse is limited in its ability to speak to “those who do not share its authority” and requires “more rationally rigorous” means to do the inevitable task of choosing an order of priority among the multitude of possible stories and symbols one can find in the Christian tradition.⁷

Gustafson sees a shortcoming in ethical and policy approaches as well. He implies that a Christian social ethics merely of precise philosophical distinctions and wonky applications would not only be uninspiring but more importantly would be incomplete in its overall worldview. For example, it would be problematic to suggest the term “justice” would receive its form only through the working out of the philosophical tradition without biblical influences. Moreover, Gustafson also worries that policy discussions and conclusions can seem indistinguishable from what one might find in more popular, secular journals of opinion.

ENTER CRITICAL REALISM

The aim of this chapter is not to evaluate Gustafson’s typology or his own views on the four forms of social ethical discourse. Nor is it to provide a new analysis of the four or to call for an integration or balancing of the various forms of discourse. The point is to argue that critical realism—a metaethical perspective on the natural and social worlds—can improve each of the four approaches in ways that scholars employing that approach would value. This is done by providing each a more precise and insightful understanding of how social structures and culture, on the one hand, arise from and depend on the moral agency of individual persons but, on the other, simultaneously exert a causal influence on those persons by altering their actions and in the long run shaping the character of each. This chapter is not the place to explain critical realism in detail, but we can start by naming a few key insights that distinguish a critical realist approach, indicating their worth in enhancing each of the different types of social ethics.

As Daniel Finn explains in more detail in chapters 3 and 4, critical realism offers a metatheory for explaining both the real causal force of social structure on human agents and the impact of agents on structures. This social scientific analysis grows out of the philosophy of science and, for the purposes of this chapter, can be understood to resist two sorts of reductionist explanations for human action. The first reduces structures to individual free choices. This sort of “methodological individualism” assumes an unconditioned—more precisely, an unpositioned—individual as the agent exercising free choice. Critical realism recognizes how individuals take on a variety of positions in social structures throughout the day and how their choices to attain their goals (whatever they may be) are altered by the restrictions and opportunities they face within those structures. On the other hand, the second sort of reductionism explains (away) individual moral agency in the face of powerful social forces—often characterized as “laws” but sometimes as a broader, more complex entity called “culture.” Critical realism recognizes that the power of culture and structure is actuated only through the free-but-constrained decisions made by acting persons.

These two reductionisms create what Christian Smith characterizes as “a Homo duplex model of humanity” that “assumes that two basic realities exist—individuals and society—and that between them a primal opposition and divergence of interests operates.”⁸ Each of these flawed explanatory models then prioritizes one over the other. To correct for this, ethicists sometimes attempt a “both/and” balance between them, but unfortunately this is typically done without attending to the fundamental reductionism that creates the duplex model in the first place.

Critical realism aims to avoid both forms of reductionism by emphasizing that human agents are always positioned within already existing social structures that possess real causal force. Yet structures and cultures have causal impact only through their influence on the decisions of agents. Agents are always positioned and constrained, but they really do exercise their own powers too. Neither agents nor structures exist independently of one another, but there is no inherent conflict in which the explanation of one must be reduced to the other. Both are real, but differently so. An analogous set of insights are available concerning the relation of culture and individual choice, as Matthew Shadle explains in chapter 5. Resisting a “myth of cultural integration” that views culture as a totalizing whole, critical realism insists that any “cultural system” includes a variety of (sometimes conflicting) resources that precede (and therefore shape) agents but that agents are also creative users of these resources in their interactions.

This recognition of the problems of reductionism should be particularly attractive for Christian social ethicists, given the anthropological assumptions that are widely shared within the field. The freedom of agents is a necessary condition of any account of moral responsibility, yet the Christian tradition also believes agents are inherently, and not merely accidentally, social. Being social is constitutive of what it means to be a human person. Amid modern tendencies toward one reductionism or the other, Christian social ethics is best served by a social theory that can make sense of the relationship of these two claims adequately, providing a social scientific view that comports well with a theological understanding of human freedom. Critical realism certainly does so.

Because it does, even this very brief sketch of the approach can help us see how it might enhance the four types of discourse identified by Gustafson. The first two types—the prophetic and the narrative—have become more prominent precisely because Christians have become more self-consciously aware of the importance of broader, structural questions for social ethics. In particular, there is a much more vivid awareness of how the scriptural texts themselves address larger social structures, often in very challenging ways. Readings of the New Testament that depict an essentially non-Jewish Jesus offering quietistic moral advice to individuals have been recognized by both perspectives as historically irresponsible.

Yet, as Gustafson intimates, these discourses often face challenges. While the texts do frequently name particular moral responsibilities—for example, the prophets explicitly call for acts of repentance and sustenance for the poor—they do so in imprecise ways, and indeed their particular suggestions sometimes appear to cut in different directions. One needs a social analysis to connect scriptural images and ideas to particular responsibilities in contemporary situations. Yet too often this analysis is a totalizing materialist or cultural critique, unwittingly participating in what Margaret Archer calls “the myth of cultural integration.”⁹ That is, scriptural images are tied to overly sweeping analyses of the realities of modern societies. At their most extreme, as I have argued in detail elsewhere, prophetic or narrative critiques of this sort can lead to paralysis or to entirely either-or rejections of existing conditions.¹⁰ Critical realism can be helpful here because, while it takes the causal power of structures seriously, it avoids a totalizing reductionism or (even worse) a reification that renders agential responsibility moot. Instead, critical realism can enhance the authentic task of prophetic and narrative modes: to describe in vivid, moral terms the directions and forces existing in any given time and place, and to provide forceful, imaginative reasons for agents to pursue ends that structures might otherwise make difficult and unattractive or that existing cultural configurations of ideas might impede. What critical realism can do is provide a clearer place for prophecy and narrative to do their ethical work.

Critical realism also supplements the third type of social ethical discourse. A preoccupation with precision of definition can sometimes become an end in itself. If we accept Alasdair MacIntyre’s claims, we should recognize that moral concepts always have a history—indeed, a socially embodied history—and so cannot function as ahistorical foundational assertions from which we directly deduce further principles or applications.¹¹ For some, this recognition of “historical consciousness” in ethics can lead to a kind of cultural relativism that ultimately dissolves the task of ethics. However, for others, the greater temptation is to believe that the task is just to “get the definitions right” and then deduce moral responsibilities from these. Critical realism enables us to avoid both a facile relativism or a static, “classicist” deductionism. Instead, these moral concepts should be used carefully in the analysis of both structure and culture in any given society, impinging on the choices made by the reflective, enstructured agent. Daniel Daly’s chapter on critical realism’s contribution to virtue ethics particularly shows how this works (see chapter 8).¹²

Finally, the relevance of a critical realist approach for enhancing policy discourse should be obvious. By providing a better understanding of the relation of structure and agency, it illuminates the places where agents can or should act to transform structures. Indeed, combining the moral convictions of Christian social ethics with the insights offered by critical realism would make for more persuasive policy analysis than any alternative, even in the broader public sphere.

AN EXAMPLE

Matthew Shadle’s chapter 7 looks in more detail at how crucial realism illuminates economic life, but here we might simply consider the ways that critical realism’s more detailed description of social structures proves useful in the long-standing debate about Christianity’s relation to capitalism. Central to Catholic social thought on the issue is the encyclical Centesimus annus, by St. John Paul II. The discussion of this document often becomes a pro-versus-anti oversimplification, with scholars on the Right and Left appealing to different statements within the document.

What is sometimes overlooked is that, in the encyclical, John Paul gave an account of a morally good “business economy”: “an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• 1 How Critical Realism Can Help Christian Social Ethics
• 2 How Critical Realism Can Help Catholic Social Teaching
• 3 What Is Critical Realism?
• 4 Social Structures
• 5 Culture
• 6 Critical Realism and Climate Change
• 7 Critical Realism and the Economy
• 8 Critical Realism, Virtue Ethics, and Moral Agency
• Afterword
• Further Reading
• Index
• About the Contributors