Reconstructing Christian Ethics 05: Virtuous Systems

I've spent some time discussing what a virtuous person is, and what virtues a Christian strives to have. But what about systems? What about rules and laws and processes and states? Christ is the redeemer and judge of the world, not just the humans in it. So what does a virtuous system look like?

First, a system cannot be formed to be like Christ in the same way that a person can. A person makes choices, and the choices we make become easier every time, building and changing us from the inside. A system doesn't learn and grow in response to choices, so that process can't directly apply.

Like individual Christians, a Christian system would have to be identified based on its impact; by its fruit you shall know it. That leads to two questions.

First, impact on who? The people making the system? Surely not. This would imply that a law made by one person with good intent can be a Christian system, even if it does immense harm to millions of people. A system with bad fruit is a bad system. Presumably, the fruit of the system is its impact on the people affected by it.

Second, what sorts of fruit do we want? For example, if we could implement a policy that feeds all the hungry, that would be good (all other things being equal), but would it be necessarily a Christian system?

I say that would no more be a Christian system than a person feeding the poor is necessarily a Christian person. Christ had all sorts of things to say about people who looked good on the outside, but were hollow tombs inside. Just as individual Christian ethics are not consequentialist or rule-based, neither are Christian systemic ethics.

Instead, a Christian system would help individual people become more like Christ. By that reasoning, any Christian system is, almost by definition, part of the Church! But what does that look like?

People build virtues through their choices and actions. So a Christian system would train people to make the virtuous choice, even when it's hard. That means a Christian system is basically pastoring, and is almost by definition part of the Church.

Would a Christian system actually make it hard to do the right thing? No, there's no virtue in purposefully creating stumbling blocks. But it might identify natural cases where it's hard to do the right thing, and put the right people in positions to make those decisions.

So a Christian system would always be presenting people with moral choices, would determine which choices are harder than others, and would help people grow in the Christian virtues by putting appropriate people in places to make those various choices.