Parochial Altruism vs. Boundary-Crossing Love
The Challenges of Properly Ordered Affections
Editor’s Note: This post is a part of a series of responses to Stephen Pope’s essay “Revisiting the Ordo Amoris: A Contemporary Interpretation of a Classic Christian Theme.” The series is curated by Alessandro Rovati, the Associate Editor of the Journal of Moral Theology.
Stephen Pope has given us a splendidly judicious account of the ordo amoris, attentive to its historical roots and development within Catholic social teaching and rightly stressing the consistency with which the tradition has summoned Christians to special care for those most in need and most likely to be ignored and excluded. One dimension of the topic that Pope does not discuss here, though he has taken it up in his previous scholarship, is the way in which thinking about the ordo amoris was, at its origins and again today, informed by observations of natural orderings of attachments common among social animals.1 We share with other highly social animals a tendency to prefer conspecifics over members of other species, members of one’s own clan over others, friends over mere acquaintances, kin over non-kin, offspring over other relatives. The ancient Stoics noted these natural tendencies, while arguing that human beings were capable through reason of recognizing the fundamental equality of all human persons and of drawing those instinctively relegated to distant circles of concern closer to the center through oikeiosis.2 Christians deepened this teaching, inspired by Christ’s example of boundary-crossing love, his command to love enemies, and his promise of the assistance of the Holy Spirit.
Tracing the roots of the ordo amoris in observations of shared features of social animality sheds light on why Augustine, Aquinas, and others in the tradition have seemed to both support and challenge giving preference to the near and dear. To what extent should we affirm this default ordering of affections? We can say that it is natural to (and appropriate for) non-human animals, who do not have the capacity to take up a perspective from which to see that another’s loved one is just as precious to them as my loved ones are to me, let alone to grasp that each one is equally precious to God. Since humans do have this ability, however, our instinctive privileging of special relations is properly relativized. Not entirely, though, for we are also capable of recognizing the finitude of our resources and of our capacity to care and the goodness of special human relationships within which persons can be known and cherished in all their particularity. The challenge we face is to balance these appropriately, given both our capacities and our limitations. It is appropriate to accept the historical contingencies that render some particularly close to us “by place, time, or opportunity,” as Augustine taught, but also to recognize the contingency of these forms of proximity—it is as if by chance or lot that some are given into our special care, and chance can also bring a stranger or enemy into the orbit of our responsibility, just as the urgency of need can heighten responsibility for one whose claims might otherwise be perceived as distant.3
Recognizing the deep evolutionary roots of what scientists have called our “parochial altruism” helps us see just how difficult it is to overcome our instinctive privileging of in-group over out-group, friend over stranger, and just how alert we must be to unjustified forms of special preference.4 In-group bias appears very early in human development, and it is possible to trigger out-group hostility based on wholly arbitrary markers of identity.5 None of this legitimizes the deliberate distortion of a theological tradition of reflection that has clearly proclaimed that Christians should give priority to the urgent needs of even distant strangers over ordinary claims of nearer neighbors. But it does mean that we should not be surprised to see the ordo amoris being championed on behalf of privileging the in group. It is good to see clearly what we are up against.
1. Stephen J. Pope, The Evolution of Altruism and the Ordering of Love (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1994); see also Jennifer A. Herdt, The Great Wheel of Being: Ethics Beyond the Human (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2026), 115–120.
2. Joseph Clair, Discerning the Good in the Letters and Sermons of Augustine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 39–47.
3. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D.W. Robertson, Jr. (Macmillan, 1986), 24–24 (1.28).
4. Pope, Evolution of Altruism, 155. On parochial altruism, see Elliott Sober and David Sloane Wilson, Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 9; Hannes Rusch, “The Evolutionary Interplay of Intergroup Conflict and Altruism in Humans: A Review of Parochial Altruism Theory and Prospects for Its Extension,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 281 (2014): 1794:20141539; Herdt, Great Wheel of Being, 265–268.
5. Paul Bloom, Just Babies (New York: Crown, 2013); B. Mullen, R. Brown, and C. Smith, “Intergroup Bias as a Function of Salience, Relevance, and Status: An Integration,” European Journal of Social Psychology 22 (1992): 103–122. In the famous Robbers Cave experiment, twelve-year-old boys at a summer camp in Oklahoma were arbitrarily assigned either to “The Eagles” or “The Rattlers.” Violent conflict, name-calling, and in-group favoritism ensued in short order. Muzafer Sherif, O.J. Harvey, B. Jack White, William R. Hood, and Carolyn W. Sherif, Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation: The Robbers Cave Experiment (Norman: University of Oklahoma Book Exchange, 1961).
Editor’s Note: For more conversations with the Journal of Moral Theology’s authors and responses to their essays, check out HERE.
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