Against effective altruism, the ordo amoris
“It is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not.” - Caiaphas, the High Priest (John 11:50)
If a stranger is drowning in a lake, but saving them would violate the ordo amoris, should you save them? Contra a recent article by
, where he claimed that “greater need can override the usual order in some cases. Extreme necessity can trump the usual hierarchy of love,” the ordo amoris harbours no exceptions. If saving a drowning stranger would violate the ordo amoris (though it is hard to think of realistic circumstances where it would), it may not be done.We have duties towards those closer to us that precede those towards people further away. It is absolutely impermissible to violate this duty-based ordo amoris. These duties must, of course, be fleshed out by a virtue-based ordo amoris, a strong heart of love for those closest to us as well as (to the appropriate extent) for strangers. Neither the duty-based nor the virtue-based ordo amoris may be violated.
By the end of this article, my opening claim that we don’t need to save drowning strangers will be thoroughly qualified. However, if you enjoyed the drama, please subscribe here before I kill the fun with philosophy:
The ordo amoris of duties
We have duties towards people closer to us that precede those to people further. Duties to ourselves—to grow in virtue and to preserve our bodies from unnecessary harm. Without, these, it would be impossible to fulfil our duties to our family, for whom we must care in so far as we are capable. Then, duties towards strangers,1 whom we must feed when they come to us hungry. Later, duties towards animals, whose lives we must improve when we control them. I do not think that EA denies this order, accepting as he does that “There needs to be some prioritising going on, of course.”
The necessity of ordering our loves seems all the more imperative (haha, get it), when examined through a lens of Kant’s categorical imperative. Kant argues that moral duties must be universalisable—and if everyone followed the maxim of treating distant strangers equally to our immediate family, we would all head off to deepest Africa, abandoning our families to their lots and collapsing society. This reinforces that our duties to those closer to us are at the foundations of a coherent ethical system.
For this reason, God commands us to place those closer to us first: “if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.” (1 Timothy 5:8) Elsewhere, these infidels are criticised for only loving those who love them (“If ye love them which love you, what thank have ye? for sinners also love those that love them.” Luke 6:32). Given that failing to provide for one’s own is worse than being an infidel, if seems that violating our duties is even worse than failing to love strangers at all. God is quite serious about sticking to a duty-based ordo amoris.
We may not violate duties
We are ethically responsible for our actions, and not for their results. This is because our actions can be ethical or unethical, while the results of what occurs in the world is a historical, rather than an ethical, fact. This is why ethics starts with reflection on how to act (deontology)—even consequentialist ethics ends up using the calculated consequences of our acts to work backwards to advice on how to act, or how to calculate our ethical duties.
Although being an ethical person often leads to better results, ethics are not valuable as an instrumental means to the results. Instead, we must set the premium on the fulfilling of our ethical duties, realising that these are valuable in themselves. We are ethically responsible for fulfilling our duties, not for whether our ethical duties end up leading to the maximisation of good in the world. Being ethical would preclude violating ethical duties for the sake of achieving something non-ethical, results.
This duty basis of our ethics is why we as individuals may not do evil, even if good may come thereof—the Pauline principle seen in Romans 3. If we instead set an ethical premium on the outcome of our choices, we would be well-advised “to play the game of life in any old way, as long as we attain the objects of good in view.”2 The Pauline principle is a cornerstone of Christian / Western ethics, and anyone who rejects it is redefining ethics outside of the Christian tradition.
Returning to the drowning stranger
I must here be careful to distinguish my theory from one that excludes charity towards those further away. As EA points out: “Otherwise, we would need to prioritise even a tiny benefit to our families over saving a stranger’s life, and so on.” We have seen this frequently in recent right-wing nationalist dialogue, which has used the ordo amoris as an excuse to avoid any charity towards foreigners and migrants. Pope Francis recently warned against this:
Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. In other words: the human person is not a mere individual, relatively expansive, with some philanthropic feelings! … The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the “Good Samaritan,” that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception. (Letter to the Bishops of the USA, Feb 2025)
In fact, we may be obligated to help those further away from us, even when this would delay or slightly hinder our ability to care for those those closest. If you see a man drowning in a lake, even if it would make you late for work and ruin your clothes, we all agree that we would have a duty to help him, and that anyone with an ethical heart would desire to help him. However, we must distinguish that with a more hypothetical scenario: Someone who walks past multiple people drowning in lakes every day. If he stopped to help each one, he would make himself incapable of walking to work, violating his (closer) duty to care for his family. To take care of his primary duties, his ability to walk down the street without massive interruption is instrumentally necessary. We have already discussed why he may not violate his duty to his family to save all these strangers.
In the modern world, we do indeed walk past multiple people drowning in lakes every day. We have access to so many charities, to so much need, that it may be tempting to regard any care at all for ourselves, for our families, and for those closer to us, as being wrong. How can we justify spending $3000 on a new car, when that $3000 could buy enough malaria vaccines to save a child in Africa? The balance is very tricky to strike.
Living in charity
A purely duty-based ethics would not strike that balance. It would be a skeletal framework, that does not suffice for an ethical person, and must be fleshed out with the virtue of an ethical heart. Once our duties are fulfilled, we must live in “the law of love,” using an ethical or virtuous heart to determine how we spend the rest of our energies.
To ensure that we move beyond this skeletal framework and into the law of love as soon as we can, we must read the duty-based ordo amoris minimally. “What do I need to do for myself? What do I need to provide my family?”3 This “minimal reading” is not a way to love our families any less. It is just a way to ensure that we do not unnecessarily grant exceptions to our ethical duties. Rather than grant unnecessary exemptions, we strictly delineate the boundaries. Then, after we have fulfilled our duties, we move to a virtue-based ordo amoris to determine whom we should love and how.
Ordo amoris of virtue
In the first chapter of the Abolition of Man, CS Lewis describes beautifully what a virtue-based conception of the ordo amoris means, and why it is central to ethics:
St Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind of degree of love which is appropriate to it. Aristotle says… [that] the pupil who has been thus trained in ordinate affections or just sentiments will easily find the first principles in ethics but, to the corrupt man, they will never be visible at all, and he can make no progress in that science.
It is not only to fulfil our responsibilities, but also to promote our own virtue, that we must put first our love towards those who are close to us. Aristotle, the master of virtue ethics, in his Nicomachean Ethics, differentiates between different degrees of friendships (philia), and which response each type requires. The virtuous person, he says, develops a practical wisdom (phronesis) to discern how to respond to each. A virtuous person, operating with a virtue-based ordo amoris, does not love everyone equally (this would be practically unwise, would lack phronesis), but loves people to a degree that is appropriate.
We all know that caring for close friendships and for family is a virtuous trait.4 Even evolutionary “virtue” recognises the importance of sacrificing for the sake of our children and our genetic connections (family and tribe, essentially). God commands the same: love first Him, then ourselves, then others as ourselves. Being virtuous depends on honoring our closest relationships first.
Difficulties of virtue-based ordo amoris
Here then, is where the situation gets tricky. Once we move into this virtue-based ordo amoris, the right ordering of our hearts, we have moved into a subjective value. By this, I mean that phronesis belongs to the subject, unlike duties, which belong by right to the object of love (the other, or their relationship). A subjectively virtuous ordering of our loves is the freedom of the law of love as lived out by a well-formed heart. It requires not analysis or definition, but good formation—one that loves others and recognises the infinite value of their lives, but applies phronesis to discern how to act in that love.
I don’t think that anybody, including
, would say that we should exempt ourselves from the phronesis of an ethical heart (which is to say, a virtue-based ordo amoris). In fact, I think his argument in favour of saving the drowning stranger relies on a virtue-based ordo amoris. We do not owe that stranger the love that gives our lives in service, as we might, for example, to a spouse, but we do owe them a love that recognises the infinite value of their lives, and would save their life at little cost to our own. This is no exception to a virtue-based ordo amoris, it is rather its fulfilment.Conclusion—no exceptions to the ordo amoris
It is very tricky to analyse precisely what our duties are towards whom, where the skeletal structure of those duties stops and the virtue-based ordo amoris (the “law of love”) begins, and what actions we are to take under either. This trickiness may lead us to conclude that duties have exceptions, and that we are permitted to violate duties if we believe doing so leads to a good result, which would be the result of following
’ argument. However, our duties are absolute, and once we have moved beyond them, a well-formed heart is part of the ordo amoris. It is unconscionable to violate either in favour of a more effective altruism. The ordo amoris, therefore, harbours no exceptions.I do not, in this essay, go into the question of whether there are differing levels here - e.g., local vs. distant strangers, fellow citizens vs. non-citizens.
S.B. Drury, “The Pauline Principle,” The Review of Politics (Cambridge University Press 1985), p. 436.
I have left God out of this section because his nature and the nature of our obligation to him makes the discussion very confusing. Because God is being itself, and is therefore one with all other being, because his image is in everyone, when we serve our neighbour, we serve God. There is no “balancing” between serving God and others. As St Ignatius writes so beautifully in his Suscipe, “Thou hast given all to me. To Thee, O Lord, I return it.” (“Quidquid habeo vel possideo mihi largitus es; id Tibi totum restituo.”)
I know very little about “care ethics,” but this is even a new school of ethical thought, represented by Noddings.
I appreciate this article. It provides a much needed nuance, and wisely presents the pitfalls of jumping into immediate and mechanical treatment of moral obligations as a mere "care calculus".
This highlight of ordo amoris today is potent however, as it lays out the flaw of the liberal virtue signalling and the self-destructive tendencies invoked, and serves as a position from which we can start to rebuild the society on a different, sensible basis.