Over the last half century, United States debates about abortion focused at first on the question whether the fetus is a person with rights and later on whether involuntary conception—for instance, as a consequence of sexual assault—might mitigate a woman’s responsibilities toward the fetus she carries. This article argues that, whatever one’s position on these two questions, a third, morally salient dimension of most US women’s experiences of unwanted pregnancy deserves more attention: both abortion and birth burden women with their (...) inevitable moral failure to fulfill their responsibilities to persons who frequently have de facto last‐resort and unavoidable claims on them. Using Lisa Tessman’s work on moral failure and Pope Francis’s interventions on abortion and mercy, I argue that this moral anguish is not a simple emotional remainder. Structural evil, not necessity, is the primary driver of forced pregnancy choices that injure women and their children both materially and morally. Consequently, whether they abort or carry to term, women with unwanted pregnancies need mercy or forgiveness. But they also need compassionate solidarity: prophetic, active efforts to transform the social structures that make material harm and moral failure, and consequent moral anguish and moral injury, inevitable for many pregnant women. (shrink)

This paper asks how to account for vulnerable integrity in the temporal dynamism of human lives without relying on a subtractive vision of integral human nature, borrowing from presumed past or future rationality and maturity, or depending on an external attribution of dignity. Illustrating the challenges with vignettes from the author’s life, it argues inductively that human integrity includes morally inviolable vulnerability to others with whom we are in interdependent relationship and without whom we cannot develop or maintain our selves. (...) Others reside at the core of our integrity, for better and for worse, and we reside at theirs. Augustine’s accounts of memory, time, and the narrative self; Whiteheadian process thought’s understanding of continuity through change; and feminist theories of narrative all provide theological and philosophical justifications for this vision of integrity. John Wall’s and Johan Brännmark’s non-foundational approaches to integrity and human rights lead us to the same conclusion without entailing theological anthropological claims, ensuring its relevance in a pluralist culture. (shrink)

CHILDREN ARE INCONSISTENTLY LABELED MORAL AGENTS IN SOME HIGHLY charged situations and denied that status in others. This essay draws on the writings of Nomy Arpaly, Lisa Tessman, and legal theorists to argue that both children and adults should nearly always be considered moral agents. But agency does not imply autonomy, ability to articulate rational reasons, or legal liability for either adults or children. Rather, all agents are dependent and conditioned. This quality divides them from a strict Augustinian vision in (...) which adults and children are fully and solely responsible for their actions. The subtext of Augustine's Confessions suggests that Augustine's biography can as easily be interpreted according to the present framework as according to his own thematic of concupiscence. (shrink)

Adults typically take pleasure in the physical dimension of caring for children. Confusingly, much recent theology either condemns adults' physical enjoyment of children as exploitive or accepts it without comment. A convincing, unifying theological moral argument is needed to yoke the two instincts systematically. Although this essay acknowledges sexual abuse's harmful effects on children, its focus is the ordering of adult desire and behavior. Beginning from the premise that all human love is erotic—hoping in, if not expecting, pleasurable reciprocity—I draw (...) upon the work of Wendy Farley and Linda Holler to argue that healthy human love for children combines desires for the other with unpossessive delight, attunement, and realistic responsiveness. I examine the documented examples of female abuse of children and the example of male abuse in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita to demonstrate the usefulness of this discussion for an analysis of Western accounts of abuse, and I suggest that the approach may be illuminating in other cultures. (shrink)

ALTHOUGH "CHILD LABOR" IS UNIVERSALLY CONDEMNED, CHILD WORK will be a feature of global life for the foreseeable future because many children without adequate access to the requisites of human dignity must work to gain them. With help from the recent work of John Wall, Mary M. Doyle Roche, Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, and others, the author claims children's right to work in Ethna Regan's sense, as an expression of a "situated universal." Rights on this view are real but contingent. They (...) are means to protect universal human goods and vulnerabilities under attack in particular situations. In this case, a situated right to work protects children's flourishing in a global culture still shaped by liberal and capitalist institutions, even as it criticizes that culture's injustices and exclusions. (shrink)

In a proleptically queer mode, Avery Cardinal Dulles’s Models of the Church argued that the church—a mystery—must bear multiple simultaneously true, dynamic, indispensable, yet inadequate labels. If so, one theological test of our ethics is their ability to sustain ecclesiological multiplicity. The anti-trans* policies of some US dioceses and of the Congregation for Catholic Education (CCE) document “‘Male and Female He Created Them’” embrace Dulles’s institution model to the point of exclusive authoritarian institutionalism, while other CCE documents, embracing open-ended, loving (...) dialogue across difference, favor his communion and community of disciples models without discarding the other dimensions of church. Dulles’s belief in the dynamism and temporality of ecclesiological models is permission to replace the institution model, which is vulnerable to abuse, with a kenotic model drawn from queer theology that installs apophasis and self-criticism as indispensable elements of ecclesiology. Ethics of sexuality and gender must pass this ecclesiological test. (shrink)

The 2016 American presidential campaign raised awareness of structural evil among segments of the population whose privilege has protected this knowledge, both making them self-conscious of their vulnerability as persons and revealing the role that the liberal narrative of progress has played in establishing and perpetuating structural evil. This moment of opportunity to shift both the political and the theological narrative demands liberal conversion: overcoming the temptations of anger, denial, and paralysis to embrace solidarity in vulnerability and power. An early (...) liberationist narrative that embraces utopian praxis rather than utopian ideology is both more theologically honest and more effective than the liberal narrative of progress. (shrink)

AGAINST THE BACKGROUND OF THE NEAR-PROHIBITION OF TOUCH IN RElations between unequals, this essay addresses very different questions: When do more-powerful people owe touch to less-powerful people as a consequence of their moral responsibility to care and nurture? How are we to understand morally the enjoyment that powerful adults receive from such contacts with their charges? This essay draws on psychological literature on touch to argue that touch is a condition of human flourishing. Consequently, in many circumstances the obligation to (...) care not only permits but requires physical affection. It argues as well that the lines separating required, permitted, and forbidden touch are somewhat culture-dependent but nevertheless can be adjudicated. Finally, it suggests how traditional theologies and ethics of embodiment might support and be developed by these claims, showing that a positive ethic of touch shares the same theological foundations as the existing ethic of protection. (shrink)