Does political morality begin with the formation of virtuous persons, or with the reconstruction of society to produce more equal conditions? Fortin’s essay “Natural Law and Social Justice” (1985) directly addresses this problem. His concern is that modern social-justice theory can shift moral attention away from the virtues of individual persons and toward the redesign of social structures.
Ernest Fortin on social justice: compassion versus virtue
The key to connecting Clifford Orwin’s critique of compassion with Ernest Fortin’s critique of social justice is this question:
Does political morality begin with the formation of virtuous persons, or with the reconstruction of society to produce more equal conditions?
Fortin’s essay “Natural Law and Social Justice” (1985) directly addresses this problem. His concern is that modern social-justice theory can shift moral attention away from the virtues of individual persons and toward the redesign of social structures.
1. Fortin’s central distinction
Fortin questions whether “social justice,” as a distinct concept, identifies a genuine virtue in the classical sense.
In the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition, justice is a virtue: a stable disposition of a person to render what is due to others. Justice concerns our actions and relationships, and it belongs to a broader account of human virtue and the common good.
Fortin argues that modern social justice often works differently. Its subject is not clearly the virtuous individual, but society considered as an overall arrangement of institutions and conditions. The proposed remedy for injustice consequently becomes the reorganization of those structures.
This shift raises a fundamental question: if society is treated as the primary source of injustice, might political reform take precedence over the moral formation of the people who compose society?
2. Fortin’s own words on the politics of compassion
Fortin makes the connection to Orwin unusually explicit in his 1985 essay, “Catholic Social Teaching and the Economy.” He writes:
“the ‘politics of compassion’”
He associates this political tendency with Hume and Rousseau, arguing that efforts to soften the inequities of modern liberal society through compassion have only partially succeeded. He then calls for something more than appeals to sympathetic feeling.
This is an important qualification: Fortin is not saying that the poor should be ignored. In the same essay, he insists that Christians cannot close their hearts to people suffering misfortune. His criticism is directed at the assumption that compassion, by itself, supplies a sufficient foundation for social and economic policy.
3. The deeper philosophical disagreement: Rousseau versus Aristotle and Aquinas
Rousseau and the modern social-reform approach
Society's institutions and arrangements are treated as major sources of human corruption and inequality. Reforming those arrangements becomes a primary means of improving human life. Fortin connects this approach to the modern effort to make social well-being less dependent on individual moral character.
Aristotle and Aquinas
Political life must be understood in relation to virtue, justice, and the common good. Good institutions matter, but they cannot substitute entirely for the formation of people capable of acting justly. Fortin explicitly urges Catholic social thinkers to emphasize virtue and moral character as foundations of a legitimate political regime.
The disagreement is not simply over whether society should help the poor. It concerns what kind of human good political society should seek and what means can genuinely achieve it.
4. Why this matters for Catholic charity
Fortin makes a distinction that is particularly important for Catholic moral theology.
He argues that the New Testament's governing principle is love, but that love does not automatically settle the specific questions involved in economic policy. Deciding how to distribute resources, structure taxation, or organize social institutions requires further moral reasoning and practical judgment.
This is where we can connect Fortin to Aquinas:
Charity directs us to love our neighbor and seek the neighbor's genuine good.
Justice concerns what is due to others.
Prudence helps determine what should actually be done in particular circumstances.
These virtues work together. Compassion can move us to respond to suffering, but it cannot independently determine whether a particular policy is just, effective, or proportionate.
Fortin's argument is therefore not that public assistance is inherently wrong. It is that we should not confuse a good intention with a demonstrated moral or political good.
5. The problem with making social structures the primary moral agent
Fortin's critique becomes sharper when he examines the modern hope that better institutions can compensate for declining virtue.
He describes a political and economic outlook in which social arrangements are designed to make collective well-being less dependent on people's moral character. He contrasts this with a classical and Christian emphasis on moral formation.
The underlying questions are:
Can a just society be produced principally by rearranging institutions?
Can political equality substitute for moral virtue?
Does relieving someone's material distress necessarily advance that person's complete human good?
Who decides what an equitable social arrangement requires, and by what objective standard?
These are questions about political philosophy, not reasons to dismiss every social reform or welfare program. Fortin himself acknowledges that practical policies require judgment and that reasonable people can disagree about them.
6. The connection to your critique of modern rights theory
There is a further connection to Fortin's “Human Rights and the Common Good” and “The New Rights Theory and the Natural Law.” His broader criticism of modern political philosophy concerns the tendency to make individual rights and the ordering of social arrangements central, sometimes at the expense of virtue and the common good.
The parallel is this:
The classical question
What is the good of the human person, and what virtues and duties enable people to live well together?
The modern question Fortin challenges
How should social arrangements be reconstructed to secure individual freedom, improve conditions, and distribute benefits more equitably?
The danger
The second set of questions can become detached from the first, leaving political reform without an adequate account of human virtue and the objective human good.
That is the connection to your concern about rights becoming detached from duties to God, natural law, and charity. In Fortin's framework, the problem is not that rights or institutional reform have no legitimate place; it is that neither can serve as a complete substitute for moral philosophy.
My synthesis: Fortin and Orwin
Orwin's critique of compassion and Fortin's critique of social justice converge on a common philosophical concern: a moral sentiment or political ideal can become dangerous when it is elevated above the standards by which its proper object and expression should be judged.
For Orwin, compassion cannot replace moral and political judgment. For Fortin, compassion-driven social reform cannot replace an account of justice, virtue, and the common good.
The strongest formulation of their shared concern is not that compassion is bad or that helping the poor is misguided. It is that compassion must be governed by truth about the human good. Otherwise, the desire to relieve suffering can become a justification for policies whose justice and consequences have not been adequately established.
And this is where the Thomistic distinction matters most: charity seeks the good of the neighbor; it does not make the feeling of compassion, or the political program presented in its name, the final measure of that good.
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