Orwin: Compassion does not settle political questions. Fortin: Structural reform does not replace personal virtue. Rist: Neither compassion nor virtue can be fully understood within a Christian moral framework if God and humanity's dependence on Him are excluded.
John Rist on compassion, social justice, and Christian virtue
John Rist’s approach is especially relevant here because he pushes the argument further back than a critique of social policy. He asks what makes something genuinely virtuous in the first place.
In What Is a Person? Realities, Constructs, Illusions, particularly the chapter “Virtue, ‘Virtue’, Rights,” Rist argues that modern thought has increasingly subordinated virtue to rights, weakened the role of God in moral reasoning, and replaced an objective understanding of human nature with accounts centered on the self.
This gives us a useful framework for connecting Rist to Clifford Orwin’s criticism of compassion and Ernest Fortin’s criticism of modern social justice.
1. Rist’s fundamental question: what makes compassion virtuous?
For Rist, the crucial distinction is between a virtue understood within a Christian account of reality and a supposedly similar virtue detached from God.
In his essay “On Inoculating Moral Philosophy against God,” Rist draws on St. Augustine to argue that Christian virtue cannot be adequately understood apart from the existence of God, humanity’s dependence on God, and the ultimate end for which human beings were created. He explicitly discusses how this changes the meaning of justice and the other virtues.
Applied to compassion, the argument would be:
Feeling another person’s pain is not, by itself, proof that our response is morally good.
We need to understand what is genuinely good for that person.
We must judge our response according to justice, prudence, and charity.
Christian love has a theological foundation: the neighbor is not merely an object of sympathy but a person whose good must be understood in relation to God.
The key point: Rist would distinguish compassion as an emotion from compassion rightly ordered by Christian virtue. The former may be admirable, but it does not independently establish the moral rightness of an action or policy.
That is a synthesis of Rist’s moral philosophy, rather than a direct quotation from him specifically about Orwin’s essay.
2. Rist’s criticism of “impersonal justice”
Rist makes a particularly important argument in On Inoculating Moral Philosophy against God. He accepts that impartial justice has a legitimate place in political society: the powerful and the weak must be held accountable, and bribery and favoritism must be excluded. But he argues that Christian morality changes how justice should be practiced.
His reasoning rests on two Augustinian principles:
Original sin: Human beings are morally frail, and we should not presume that we are morally superior to those whom we judge.
Dependence on divine grace: We cannot understand our own goodness as an achievement wholly independent of God.
Consequently, Rist argues that Christian justice should be impartial without becoming vindictive. We can condemn wrongdoing and punish crimes while recognizing that we do not know another person's entire moral history, motives, or capacity for repentance.
Applied to social justice, this raises a question: can a political movement's desire to defend the disadvantaged become morally distorted if it divides people too simplistically into the innocent victims and the guilty oppressors?
Rist's Augustinian approach would challenge that simplification. Human beings are morally responsible, but none of us stands outside the need for grace.
3. Rist versus modern social justice
Rist's chapter “Against Political Panaceas” in On Ethics, Politics and Psychology in the Twenty-First Century is especially relevant. The book's contents and publisher description establish his broader criticism of moral autonomy and political schemes that fail to take adequate account of the human condition.
The following is an application of his philosophy, rather than a claim that Rist uses every one of these formulations himself.
Modern tendency Rist would question | Augustinian alternative |
|---|---|
Treating unjust social arrangements as the principal explanation for human wrongdoing. | Recognizing both institutional injustice and personal sin. |
Assuming that better institutions can overcome fundamental moral defects. | Reforming institutions while acknowledging the enduring reality of sin. |
Treating compassion for victims as sufficient justification for a political program. | Requiring justice, prudence, and an adequate account of the human good. |
Treating moral progress as increasingly autonomous human achievement. | Recognizing humanity's dependence on God and the necessity of grace. |
This does not establish that every modern social-justice movement makes these mistakes. It identifies the philosophical tendencies that Rist's account gives us grounds to examine.
4. The crucial difference between Rist and Fortin
Fortin's critique emphasizes the relationship between virtue, political institutions, and the common good. Rist adds a more explicitly Augustinian and theological dimension.
Ernest Fortin
Does the modern concept of social justice displace the classical understanding of virtue and encourage us to look to structural reform rather than moral formation?
John Rist
Can any adequate account of justice and virtue be separated from humanity's dependence on God, the reality of sin, and the ultimate end of human life?
Rist's question is more foundational. Even if a political program succeeds in distributing goods more equally, we still need to ask whether its principles are just, whether its means are morally legitimate, and whether its conception of human flourishing is adequate.
5. The synthesis with Orwin: compassion as a political authority
Orwin questions the elevation of compassion into a supreme political virtue. Fortin questions the modern tendency to make social arrangements the principal instrument of moral improvement. Rist asks what makes virtue objectively good and why Christian virtue cannot be understood apart from God.
Together, their arguments suggest a three-part critique:
Orwin: Compassion does not settle political questions.
Fortin: Structural reform does not replace personal virtue.
Rist: Neither compassion nor virtue can be fully understood within a Christian moral framework if God and humanity's dependence on Him are excluded.
The deepest issue is therefore not whether society should relieve suffering. Christian charity plainly requires concern for one's neighbor. The issue is whether the desire to relieve suffering is being treated as an independent moral authority, capable of overriding justice or determining the meaning of the common good by itself.
Rist's distinctively Augustinian contribution is that compassion must be joined to humility. We must take suffering seriously without imagining that our sympathy makes us infallible judges of society, that our political solutions can overcome the human condition, or that those we seek to help are merely passive victims rather than morally responsible persons.
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