On JD Vance's Invocation of the Phrase "ordo amoris"

You may have heard that Vice President Vance was recently urging people to Google "ordo amoris." It's not often that Latin theological terms are pulled into mainstream debates about immigration or foreign aid or trade policy. But for us in particular this is a conversation worth having, not just because of the latest headlines but because of our own identity. The ASP is a Christian Democratic party: that is, it's a party that takes what the Christian tradition has said about human beings and our duties to each other and tries to apply that to modern political life. We don't often talk about theology per se, but it's important to stake out the big convictions that move us to get involved in public life in the first place.

First, we recognize that every single human being without exception, from womb to tomb, has inherent dignity and value, and that we have moral responsibilities toward them that don't depend on age or ability or race or sex or nationality. We imagine that the VP, as a Catholic, would agree with that.

Second, it is also true that our ability to actively seek the good of other people—to love them—is limited in some ways, because we are limited. We can *wish* the well-being of everybody in an abstract sense, but we can only act on those wishes for particular people within the bounds of circumstances. Those circumstances include particular places and communities and relationships. It is a good thing that we have marriages, and families, and neighborhoods, and countries, which all contain some people and not others, because those social contexts give us more ability to do good and recieve good things from others, not less.

As a result, we have special moral obligations to some people, and Vance was correct to say that there are hierarchies of those obligations. It is naturally important for us to act where we can do the most good. You really do have responsibilities to your children you don't have to other people's children, because you can parent them and most people can't. We recognize this reality when we talk about subsidiarity, the idea that social and political problems should be handled by the lowest competent level of authority.

That's not the end of the story, though, particularly within Christianity (others have wrestled with these questions too, of course). That's because Christians have always taught that while the first principle doesn't contradict the second, it can and should unsettle the way we tend to understand it. A man famously asked Jesus "who is my neighbor?" The implied answer of the parable of the Good Samaritan was the person in front of you for whom you can do good, even if conventional social relationships would lead you to hold that person in indifference or contempt. Not all people are neighbors in exactly the same ways, but this way of thinking rejects being complacent about whom we are obligated towards: "If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you?"

That admonition doesn't mean that you *shouldn't* love people who love you, or that you have no special responsibilities to those people. You do. But the historic Christian view is that those special responsibilities to the inner circle are never absolute (that spot would be reserved for God, after all).

For one thing, those responsibilities never permit us to do an inherently evil thing to somebody in a "wider circle" of moral concern, even if it would benefit someone closer to us. The ordo amoris does not give us the right to be callous toward anyone. It also doesn't mean that a graver responsibility toward someone more distant to you is necessarily a lower priority than a lighter responsibility to someone closer. Common sense tells us that the ordo amoris is not an excuse to ignore a stranger's toddler wandering into traffic just so your own kid isn't late for soccer practice.

Our care for the good of the closer circles in our lives should also serve the common good that helps make those relationships possible in the first place. We should take care of ourselves, but in ways that make us good members of our families. We should take care of our families in ways that make us good neighbors and citizens. Perhaps more controversially, our country should take care of itself in ways that make it a good member of the family of nations. This truth doesn't remove our special obligations to our families or our fellow citizens: it is inseparable from what they mean.

As you've probably figured out by now, the difficulty with the ordo amoris is not the principle but the application. Which neighbor has the biggest moral claim on our attention is not always self-evident, especially in a world where instant and constant global communication complicates our sense of the extent of our communities. Likewise, how best to love our neighbors as citizens in a nation of 350 million people is not always straightforward either. In any single case we have to uphold some obligations that are universal and some that are particular. On top of that, not every claim about the circles of moral connection we belong to is right on its own terms: for instance, people who tell you that you should feel more attached to people of your race in another state or country than your literal neighbors of a different race are not relying too much on the ordo amoris. They are simply misrepresenting and misapplying it.

Often these debates come down to a question of emphasis: is it more important at the moment to be reminded of our narrower obligations or our wider ones? When it comes to policy issues like immigration or foreign aid, there's usually a balance to be struck. Citizenship is a category that does confer unique moral and political responsibilities, just not the only ones that exist. You can check out the ASP platform or some of our other tweets to see where we think the balance lies, and we'll have more to say about this later.

But the answer might also depend on who you are. As the saying goes, some people want to save the world but don't want to do the dishes. People like that do need to be reminded of the limits and the human ties that shape their ability to love others in practice, not just in sentiment. You might be one of them, and in that case you risk failing the "who is my neighbor" test in your own particular way.

But instead you might be, by temperament or ideology, the sort of person who is so attached to your "close" obligations that you are inclined to forget or downplay others. And if that's you, you might need to be reminded that when you are forced to decide how to treat a person or a group of people, and you ask "how much do I owe them?", the answer, whatever it looks like, will never be "nothing," and will always be "love."