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Notes -
All right, I guess I'll bite on this one at last.
Ordo amoris, in essence, is a relatively common-sense doctrine intended to make sense of most people's moral intuitions, while avoiding two absurd extremes. The first extreme to be avoided is the hardcore utilitarian, Peter Singer perspective - all lives are equally valuable, there is no rational basis for preferring those in close proximity to us, and therefore we should seek to improve as many lives as possible, affording no preference whatsoever to family or country. The second extreme to be avoided is the exclusive tribalist - we have definite moral obligations only to those with whom we are connected in some way, and all other people can burn for all we care.
Both those positions seem absurd to most people. Most people's intuitions seem to say that if we can treat even distant strangers benevolently, we ought to; but also that we have greater moral obligations towards those closer to us. That's roughly what ordo amoris is - we have moral obligations to behave benevolently and compassionately towards all people, but those obligations scale with proximity.
There is also a side issue here to do with how we conceptualise 'closeness' or moral proximity. Scott's tweet is particularly silly because most versions of the ordo amoris I'm familiar with would give quite a high moral priority to people who are literally, physically in front of you, whether they're related to you or not. (As James Orr puts it, "we must care for those who fall within the compass of our practical concern".) However, most also do consider the bonds of family, tribe, political or religious community, and so on, to serve as intensifiers. If there are two drowning people in front of you, there is only time to save one, and one is a family member, ceteris paribus you should save your family member. Likewise your nation, your faith, or whatever. However, most of what we might say about the ordo amoris works regardless of the exact way you define moral proximity.
The problem I have with the whole Vance-instigated ordo amoris debate is that it seems like every side is using this actually-quite-common-sense idea in bad faith. Vance is using it to suggest that American moral obligations towards foreigners are either nothing, or are far less than are currently being served by the (actually very small) American aid budget. Some of his opponents are therefore responding by caricaturing the whole doctrine as nationalist or racist, or by suggesting that American obligations to foreigners are exactly as the same as American obligations to Americans. None of this is what ordo amoris implies.
There is also the Hayekian local knowledge problem / skin in the game that Ordo amoris solves.
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Point of order- isn't Vance using it to suggest that deporting foreigners to their home countries is fine, even if it's bad for those foreigners personally?
I was reading it in the context of debates about the aid budget. I admit I haven't watched the entire Fox News interview. Is there a transcript of it anywhere? I've only seen the tweet with a one sentence quote that blew up.
At any rate, I do stand by the idea that there's a lot of talking past each other. Here's the National Catholic Reporter arguing that Vance is wrong, but only rebutting a strawman. At least in the tweet I saw, Vance wasn't saying that love should be calculating or conditional; rather, he doesn't seem to have been talking about love in that sense at all. Here's R. R. Reno in Compact:
This seems like a helpful distinction to me. A Christian ought to love all people, i.e. regard all people with an attitude of impartial benevolence, or agape. But a Christian's concrete duties and responsibilities are ordered in a particular way, and proximity is one of many factors influencing those responsibilities.
Other factors include things like need or culpability. If my family member has a skinned knee and a total stranger is drowning in a river, the stranger's greater need outweighs the family member's relational proximity to me. Likewise if I caused a total stranger to receive an injury, I have a much greater responsibility to care for that injury. So Christian moral responsibility is not univariate, and proximity, however we construe that term, is only one relevant factor.
Am I steelmanning Vance a bit here? Perhaps - I haven't been able to find the full original interview, and Vance's snipes on Twitter aren't enough to get a nuanced idea of what he means. But I hope that reflection on Christian moral obligation is useful even beyond the quest to indict or vindicate a politician of the moment.
The National Catholic Reporter is a liberal/progressive "Catholic" publication. They have and do promote political positions completely at odds with Catholic teaching, including defence of abortion and IVF, among many other things. To the point where bishops have called on them to remove Catholic from their name. I wouldn't take them as representative of the faithul Catholic position. It's in their interest to misrepresent Vance. This is the polite way of describing the NCR.
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