There is a growing genre of television dramas focused on the lives of the uberwealthy that has received significant public attention. Shows like Succession, Billions, and White Lotus, to name few, seem to have captured the imagination of many by revealing the extravagances of extreme wealth and the misery it creates. For instance, HBO’s four-season drama, Succession, chronicles the Roys, a media tycoon family, apparently loosely based on the Murdochs, as the siblings—Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Shiv (Sarah Snook), Roman (Kieran Culkin), and sometimes Connor (Alan Ruck)—incompetently and furiously jockey and betray each other, and anyone else in their way, in an effort to take over the family business from their father, Logan Roy (Brian Cox).1 They fight with an astonishing level of deprivation given that the stakes of failing seem so low—the winner inherits the family business and all its billions and the losers inherit billions of dollars without the headache of running a family business. 

Part of the appeal of the show seems to be the assurance that many aspects of uberwealth are absurd. For instance, the show spawned commentary describing the “Succession era” phenomenon of  “stealth wealth” or “silent luxury.”2 That is, luxury clothing that signifies its expense by being discreet, plain, and without branding. This was epitomized in the significant attention that Kendall Roy’s plain black $625 cashmere baseball cap received.3 I might be missing something here, but the joke seems to be on the uberwealthy, for there is no possible way a $625 cashmere baseball cap is near twenty times better than my (arguably overpriced) $30 Boston College wool baseball cap.

But most of the appeal of the show, I suspect, is a kind of schadenfreude we viewers take in watching the myriad ways that money leads to misery. For why else revel in the downfall of the Roy family except to be assured that life is worse with private jets and yachts? Although the show is wildly crass and often audacious, the characters are developed with enough nuance that is easy to imagine how the family dynamics could have gone a different way had the Roys not been cursed with all that money. 

The characters treat each other in awful ways that easily map onto behaviors that Kate Ward warns about in her book, Wealth, Virtue, and Moral Luck.4 There is the unforgettable balcony argument scene in season 4 where the harsh exchanges between Shiv and her husband reveal that fidelity was always impossible given that money and power are the primary objectives for both of them.5 And the brothers, Kendall and Roman, display a complete lack of fortitude when they pressure their network to falsely call a presidential election in favor of the candidate who they believe will serve their interests at the expense of society.6 In numerous ways, the Roys typify Ward’s warnings about how money “as an end itself” and hyperagency can malform the wealthy (133–70). As a result, the Roys are anything but happy.

But Ward’s well-researched and insightful book uses the lens of wealth to make much more trenchant and challenging societal critiques than what is possible by simply criticizing the uberwealthy. Ward affirms the dignity of the poor and challenges a large swath of readers to recognize their own wealth and the negative moral effects it has on themselves and society. It may be entertaining and satisfying to watch the Roys crumble under the weight of their wealth, for as the blithely cynical German phrase goes, revealing a likely widespread moral failing, “Schadenfreude is the best type of freude.” But instead of falling into that mode, Ward does the hard work of challenging many readers of her book to introspect on how our relationships with money might be harming ourselves and those around us. It is laudatory and brave to raise these points and I admire Ward’s prophetic voice in this regard. 

A central insight of Ward’s book is that in a capitalistic society one’s wealth (or lack thereof) determines one’s position to a range of choices/access to power, goods, activities, and opportunities. And that relationship to goods, services, opportunities, etc., is likely to encourage or thwart virtue in particular ways that may or may not be obvious. For Ward, this orientation to the world predicated on the moral luck of one’s economic situation has serious moral implications that have generally been overlooked.

To make her point, Ward works with two primary categories that are intentionally broad, wealth and poverty:

Throughout this book, I define wealth as ‘having more than we need,’ and poverty as lacking the goods necessary for a life worthy of human dignity, or being able to secure those goods only through constant and precarious struggle (118).

She defends these definitions for numerous reasons (118–32), and if her definition of wealth makes many academics uncomfortable, that is by design. She quips, “Perhaps attempts to define wealth feel especially fraught as specialists confront the risk of self-implication” (124). And she specifically wants readers of her book to consider that they might be wealthy, even if they are not in the 1 percent, and that this matters for virtue:

I suspect that many 1 percenters, those living on half a million dollars a year or more, give little thought to how their wealth affects their virtue, conscious though they may be of giving from that wealth to support the common good. Perhaps more controversially, I argue the same about most of the people who will read this book: relatively educated Westerners whose households live on income(s) from work, people who would agree that they have more than they need but who would likely never self-define as rich. The next chapter demonstrates how such people wield hyperagency over and compared with the poor and how wealth affects virtue in their lives as well as those of the 1 percent (127).

She joins David Cloutier and Sondra Ely Wheeler in criticizing Christian theology for permitting a “middle class exemption” that allows many of us to ignore the tradition’s admonitions against wealth (127). Ward boldly states:

When middle-class readers in wealthy societies hear scriptural warnings to “the rich,” perhaps we imagine them directed at the richest 1 percent, nothing for us to worry about—and perhaps that is a mistake (126–27).

Following this, Ward offers a brilliant description of the hyperagency of the wealthy that presents a challenge to middle-class and upper-class readers of the book by applying it more broadly than her source materials does. Ward writes that Paul Shervish defines hyperagency as such:

‘What is different for wealth holders is that they can be more legitimately confident about actualizing their expectations and aspirations because they are able to directly effect the fulfillment of their desires’ (134).

Wards explains that Shervish applies this to people with millions of dollars, but she thinks it applies to all people who satisfy her definition of wealth, that is to everyone with more than they need (134).

In this way, Ward presents a profound challenge to middle-class and upper-class readers, myself included, who might easily enjoy a critique of the Roys but who might let themselves off the hook when thinking about the ill effects of wealth. Ward’s sympathetic but unrelenting insistence that anyone who has more than they need is vulnerable to the vicissitudes of wealth and its relationship to the virtues of prudence, justice, solidarity, fidelity, humility, self-care, temperance, and fortitude (140–64) made reading her book not only academically edifying, but also personally challenging. 

Furthermore, the urgency of Ward’s analysis is made especially clear in her attention to the ways that the demands of poverty can impinge on agency, forcing moral agents to choose between important obligations, such as caring for one’s own family and caring for others (175, 183), and result in “burdened virtues” (a concept from Lisa Tessman that Ward powerfully expands on, 171–208). Ward is clear that this is not victim-blaming (171–76); rather she calls our attention to the ways that economic imbalances put people in morally precarious situations that we can no longer ignore. 

While I appreciate the demanding ethic Ward proposes built around her broad definitions of wealth and poverty, I do wonder whether utilizing only two categories is, ultimately, limiting. There are different levels of poverty and wealth and this seems to greatly affect what kind of moral luck (99–112) people are dealt. There seems to be a meaningful difference between the hyperagency that one is able to wield from having a surplus that allows one to spend on the occasional latte and fresh berries (which Ward is quite critical of, 136–37, 161) versus a Costco membership and Costco-sized boxes of berries versus surplus enough to save for retirement and sending children to college versus the Roy-level of surplus that allows one to buy political campaigns. 

But while we can debate the definitions of wealth and poverty and a taxonomy of the possible subsections, this does not take away a central point of Ward’s work that also makes Succession so compelling—our interest in whether it is true that money doesn’t buy happiness, even though it is clear that a certain threshold of money is required to obtain the goods necessary for flourishing in this life in our capitalistic society. And Ward raises the stakes of this truism showing how money also does not buy virtue. Ward uses the contexts of wealth, poverty, and inequality to reveal challenges in the moral life because her ultimate concerns are individual and communal flourishing, what she describes as “human excellence” (47). Her references to inequality are generally related to economic matters, while at the same time calling us to view the human person and society in much more than economic terms, such as when she persuasively argues for a broader view of societal prosperity than GDP (18–19), and how she persuasively elucidates the many ills that income inequality causes (15–20). By bringing moral formation into the purview of analysis of inequality, Ward invites us to broaden the ways we understand inequality and prosperity. 

Following this, I would like to consider the value of theology taking seriously individual and communal measures of well-being with special attention to the problem of “well-being inequality” and the prospects for this kind of data to guide public policy.7 There is a vast and growing literature in psychology, public health, and beyond on how to evaluate individuals, communities, and societies in reference to what is often called “well-being,” “life satisfaction,” “happiness,” or “flourishing,” all of which are meant to point to objective or subjective holistic assessments of life.8 Such measures provide a broad picture of people’s lives, and when considered at the level of communities and societies, can guide public health policies to work toward supporting the flourishing of individuals and society.9

There are numerous ways to measure well-being in the social science literature and a discussion of these is beyond the scope of what can be addressed here. To name one useful measure, the Flourishing Measure was developed at the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard where I am a post-doc. The Flourishing Measures is a twelve-question survey asking respondents to report on the following six domains of their lives: (1) happiness and life satisfaction; (2) mental and physical health; (3) meaning and purpose; (4) character and virtue; (5) close social relationships; and (6) financial and material stability.10 Using these areas to assess the flourishing of individuals and society offers a holistic and robust assessment that address various areas that are of concern to Ward and others.

Importantly, this kind of data paints a complex picture that, commiserate with Ward’s concerns, indicates that promoting well-being requires supporting numerous aspects of peoples’ lives. For instance, from this data it becomes clear that social connectedness is critical to well-being. Canadian economist, John Helliwell, explains the findings from the World Happiness Reports, based on Cantril’s ladder life satisfaction question: 

In recent World Happiness Reports, six factors have been found to explain three-quarters of the differences in average life evaluations among countries and over time…GDP per capita and healthy life expectancy. The other four factors, all reflecting some aspect of the social fabric widely construed, are having someone to count on in times of trouble, a sense of freedom to make life choices, generosity, and a trustworthy environment, as proxied by the absence of corruption in business and government.11 

This also highlights the need to expand how we assess inequality within a society. Helliwell explains the importance of emerging work on well-being inequality or “happiness inequality”:

Most previous studies of inequality have relied on income inequality when studying the effects of inequality on health (Pickett & Wilkinson, 2015) and happiness (Alesina, Di Tella, & MacCullough, 2004). But recent research (Goff, Helliwell, & Mayraz, 2018; Nichols & Reinhart, 2019) has shown that inequality in the distribution of life evaluations is more powerful than income inequality in several explanatory roles where inequality is thought to be a factor. This is an important finding. If average life evaluations are an appropriate measure of community welfare, then the effect of happiness inequality on life evaluations provides an empirical measure of a society’s aversion to inequality (Helliwell, 2020).12

Thus, attention should be given to how well-being or flourishing may be experienced unequally within societies and across nations, and public policies should work towards rectifying this. Studies have started to look at the problem of “flourishing inequality,” but more work must be done.13 For instance, one global well-being study shows that life satisfaction is higher in wealthier nations, while nations with less wealth score higher on meaning and purpose.14 So then, there are lessons about how to cultivate meaning and purpose that less wealthy nations can offer and that should be investigated further. The Global Flourishing Study, a five-year longitudinal study using the Flourishing Measure, will look into flourishing inequality in more depth.15

Policy aimed at addressing flourishing inequality is a hopeful way forward because it would be holistic in nature and would address not only economic and health factors, which absolutely must be addressed, but do so in a way that supports the whole person and communities. Such policies would likely complement many of Ward’s policy suggestions (216–17). Work in this vein could highlight the strengths of marginalized communities that could be instructive for promoting flourishing cohering with many of Ward’s reflection, such as how those in poverty may embody the virtue of solidarity (184–87). Importantly, policies that come out of this data can be led by the voices of the poor and vulnerable, as Ward suggests solutions should be (220). This is because many of these measures, such as the Flourishing Measure, are based on self-reports. And such data-led policies could both support the flourishing of marginalized communities and learn from their strengths. Policies that come out of flourishing inequality research are also likely to be better equipped to address the harms of wealth given that prosperity is assessed much more broadly than by economics alone. For as Helliwell explains, using well-being inequality as a guide “in turn suggests, but does not necessarily require, a policy framework that explicitly targets those most in misery.”16 

I don’t know what the Roys would score on the Flourishing Measure, but I do like the idea that this kind of data zooms out to offer a robust view of prosperity where money is not an end in itself and where the struggles and strengths of the poor and marginalized can drive social policy in innovative and profound ways. And I am grateful for Ward’s prophetic voice challenging us to reexamine the moral implications of wealth and inequality, thus prompting personal and social change. 

One of the most important but least appreciated essays on the virtues was penned in 1960 by the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg. Born of a Jew and a Catholic, raised an atheist, Ginzburg’s sensitivity to the subtleties of moral life is nearly unmatched—as is the elegance of her prose. Ginzburg begins her essay “The Little Virtues” by asserting that often we approach moral education with a focus on inculcating prudence in the narrow sense: thrift, caution, tact, and shrewdness. She charges that, instead, we ought to be focused on the “great virtues,” those that make for an exceptional life rather than a competent life, virtues like courage, generosity, frankness, and neighbor-love. The little virtues aim at coping with the risks of the world; the great virtues point beyond the world.

At the heart of Ginzburg’s essay is an account of what virtue looks like with respect to money. She reflects on the child who spends months saving up for an expensive item he covets. When he starts saving, money is just like any other object he favors, like rabbits or flowers. But as he saves, money takes on increasing significance. Finally, when he has enough money to buy the item he wants, he is inevitably disappointed – and lonely, without the money he grew to cherish for the potential happiness it represented. Compared to the potential of the money, the actual object it purchased seems quite dull. The child begins to prefer money over things.

Instead of encouraging a child to save up for a coveted object, Ginzburg suggests that “we should give him money to spend when there is money—because then he will learn to part with it without worrying about it or regretting it.”1 If tomorrow the child is poor, it will not be such a hardship, for he has not learned to worship money but rather he knows “how quickly it runs through our hands.”2 In sum, Ginzburg’s prescription is this: “The money we give our children should be given for no reason; it should be given indifferently so that they will learn to receive it indifferently; but it should be given not so that they learn to love it, but so that they learn not to love it, so that they realize its true nature and its inability to satisfy our truest desires, which are those of the spirit.”3

I take Kate Ward to be aspiring to an account of the virtues that is related to that put forward by Ginzburg. For Ward, having insufficient money to meet our basic needs leads to vice and having more money than required to meet our basic needs also leads to vice. Having just the right amount of money, somewhere around lower-middle-class status in the US, is the ideal context for the cultivation of the virtues. Ward suggests that everyone, and especially Christians, ought to be concerned with growing income inequality because it has detrimental effects on the moral health of the nation: inequality means more poor people and more rich people, so there are more vicious people. Drawing on social science research as well as the Christian tradition (in its liberal, North American, Catholic flavor, which now incorporates insights from liberation theologies), Ward makes the case that income inequality out to be addressed as an ethical issue, not just a political issue.

While Ward offers many examples of causal links between vice on one hand, and poverty and wealth, on the other, it strikes me that her project might be productively redescribed in Ginzburg’s terms. If the right relation to money is indifference and the wrong relation to money is to mystify it, to give it god-like power, poverty and wealth tend to promote the latter. Having about as much as one requires to meet one’s basic needs is the precondition for indifference to money. While sometimes one will be short and sometimes there will be extra, when the amount of money approximates needs it is possible, with effort and grace, to become the sort of person who does not fixate on money, as is the habit, in different ways, of both the poor and the rich. And indifference to money, Ginzburg observes, is the prerequisite to genuine generosity, allowing us to be attentive to and responsive to the needs and desires of those around us. 

This strikes me as correct, and I appreciate Ward leading us toward an implication of this point for those in the academy: while there is a great deal of conversation about adjunct labor being under-compensated, there is not enough conversation about tenured faculty labor being over-compensated. If we want our educational institutions to cultivate the virtues but faculty are either too poor or too wealthy to develop the virtues themselves, the enterprise is bound to fail. We might say the same of religious communities in which the culture is set by the rich or upper-middle class: these will struggle mightily to become virtuous communities. 

When I taught Ward’s book last year to a group of theology masters students, mainly with pastoral interests, the students treated her thesis as essentially uncontroversial. Wealth and income inequality are problems—to such an extent that they could fittingly be labeled moral crises. Students were appreciative of how Ward filled out the meaning of “moral” in this context. But about a third of the students were dissatisfied. They wanted to hear more about the need to transform our current economic system, and they worried that Ward’s focus on the virtues distracts from what they take to be the root causes of inequality.

This concern points to a general problem that I worry does not receive sufficient attention in our conversations about ethics, and particularly Christian ethics. How do we navigate the difference between the register of ethical analysis and that of political analysis? It is too simplistic to see these two registers as disjunct. There are cases where the politics of a context means that ethical analysis, while possible, is not apt. It might be possible to examine how memorializing war heroes promotes the virtues in the case of both heroes from the Confederacy and the Union, and to do that in a highly sophisticated way, using cutting-edge tools of ethical analysis. But such an enterprise is not apt because of the political context. That political context means that what appears to be virtue (in this example, developed by the Confederate monuments) is actually the simulacrum of virtue: particularly pernicious vice. It is only by shifting to the political frame that the true nature of supposed virtue becomes visible. The analogous worry, in the economic case addressed by Ward, is that the apparent virtues of the lower-middle class are simulacral given the political context (say, capitalism). 

Put another way, it strikes me as more plausible that Ward’s analysis is correct when it is put in the following terms: a near-match between capacities and needs is the prerequisite to cultivating virtue. But adding money into this proposition, as shorthand for capacities, muddles matters. In the Communist Eastern bloc, in medieval Europe, or in pre-colonial North America, for example, it is plausible that for many people there was a near-match between capacities and needs—for many more people than holds today in the US and around the world. In such contexts, at least as they are romanticized, capacities are more relational than monetary: when someone has a need, that person can draw on a web of relationships to meet that need (rather than on an income stream). Calculating the per capita gross domestic product in such contexts obscures the relevant features of the near-match between capacities and needs—and also obscures political structures, forms of domination, that can block that near-match.

I think that the context of virtue that Ward identifies, what Ginzburg might call the necessary context for the cultivation of the great virtues, is aspirational, maybe eschatological

After systems of domination are overthrown, we will live in a way that our capacities nearly match our needs. Marx talks about this in terms of the end of alienation and the realization of species-being. Christians call it the land of milk and honey. And it strikes me as a grave confusion to talk about virtue as it manifests at the end of time in the same way we talk about virtue as it manifests in time, during the world. 

Let’s identify a third species of virtue, neither small nor great. Let’s call these virtues grand. Small virtues tie us to the world. Great virtues are exercised after the world; when they are exercised in the world, they offer a foretaste of the eschaton. Grand virtues are those which we can only cultivate as we work together toward transforming the world. As Marx says somewhere, through struggle we become fit to govern ourselves. In a theological idiom, through struggle against domination, against false gods, we orient ourselves toward the one true God. Through struggle against domination—against racial domination, against patriarchy, against colonialism, and against capitalism—we discern the machinations of the powerful, we learn how to tap into the capacities of our community to respond to mastery, and we become attuned to the meanings of justice, care, prudence, solidarity, and fidelity when those virtues are stripped of the distortions imposed upon them by ideology, by the interests of the wealthy, powerful, and white. The grand virtues whither in those who accede to domination, from both sides of the relationship of domination. But no one fully accedes. Just as it is our nature to dominate, it is our nature to struggle against domination. When those struggles are amplified and when we join together in such struggle, in collective movements against domination, the grand virtues develop.

One worry I have about Ward’s argument is that it is precisely in the petite bourgeoisie, in the class where capacities and needs are most closely aligned, that struggle against domination is most often muted. Among the poor, with little to lose, it is natural to struggle against the systems that impoverish them—they are hindered only by bandwidth deficits (and by ideology, though ideology filters down to the poor only imperfectly, given the friction created by unmet needs). While the wealthy are obviously invested in preserving their wealth, excessive capacity to meet needs also opens space for a few of the wealthy to become artists and intellectuals, and for a few of these to align their interests with those of the poor, that is, to struggle. It is just the lower-middle class who can cultivate an indifference to money, and so an allergy to struggle. In sum, where the great virtues can be cultivated, the grand virtues are inhibited; where the grand virtues can be cultivated, the great are inhibited.

But this may not be the case anymore. Today, it is not clear that even the great virtues can be cultivated in the lower-middle class. Classically, the lower-middle class referred to small shopkeepers and family farmers. (For a couple decades after the Second World War, American factory workers imagined themselves to have ascended from the proletariat to the petite bourgeoisie, but as Gabriel Winant has recently, brilliantly shown, this was always illusory.)4 Today, the occupations of the lower-middle class, the seat of virtue according to Ward, increasingly involve small-scale management; they are the bureaucrats of the public and, especially, private sector. Middle managers, marketing specialists, project supervisors, and a whole lot of people in financial services and insurance back offices. They occupy what David Graeber analyzes as “bullshit jobs,” jobs that fulfill no social needs or are detrimental to society, jobs whose uselessness is perfectly evident to their holders.5 For those who work in “bullshit jobs,” their income may nearly meet their basic needs, but the jobs themselves are soul-draining and create deep moral damage, the result of realizing you are spending eight hours a day doing, essentially, nothing. This moral damage imposes a bandwidth tax that may have effects as significant as that imposed by poverty. In short, it is not clear that there are a substantial number of jobs left in the US and Europe that would create the conditions for the cultivation of the great virtues. On the contrary, as the wave of protest movements from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter demonstrates, we are seeing increasing opportunities across the classes to cultivate the virtues of struggle.

Finally, reading Ward’s book makes me wonder whether there is a sort of second-order virtue that has to do with appreciating moral luck, with attending to the ways fate puts us in situations that ease or hinder the cultivation of the virtues. Even after we have ended income inequality, fate will still play a role in determining how rocky the road is to flourishing, and this is something we ought to be ever-mindful of in ourselves and in the lives of those around us. Ward’s book helps to build our capacity for attentiveness in this regard. And it helps us notice how strong the ideology is that ties goodness to monetary success, poverty to failure. 

Natalia Ginzburg, once again, has advice on how to cultivate this sensibility. Counter-intuitively, she argues that those charged with moral formation need to stop rewarding success and punishing failure:

Life rarely has its rewards and punishments; usually sacrifices have no reward, and often evil deeds go unpunished, at times they are even richly rewarded with success and money. Therefore it is best that our children should know from infancy that good is not rewarded and that evil goes unpunished; yet they must love good and hate evil, and it is not possible to give any logical explanation for this.6

In a sense, we are back to the primal point that Nietzsche famously makes and Elettra Stimilli has recently elaborated, about the connection between debt and guilt, between money and morality. The problem may not only be income inequality; deeper down, it may be about income itself, about the tendency of money to solidify and mystify a system of rewards and punishments that obscures the paradox at the heart of faith.

Coming from a thought-space of rural contextual theology, I engaged this work from Kate Ward with the hope of gleaning some wisdom about how to better conceptualize moral luck in contexts that tend to resist discursive or even narrative definition. “The rural” is often a contested concept, particularly in the United States, where the rural is a context home to multiple competing definitions and narratives that range from the rural as social crisis and decay,1 to the rural as idyllic country homeland,2 to the rural simply as a non-concept.3 How can one speak lucidly of moral luck—the idea that “life circumstances … affect moral development” (86)—when life circumstances themselves push against the coherence of a description and yet simultaneously call for one? What the rural United States is cannot easily be defined, but nevertheless its influence on politics, economics, and religion in the U.S. can hardly be overstated. As such, Christian social ethics (roughly 73–83 percent of rural Americans identify as Christian)4 is ripe for rural contextualization, a small part of which is the goal of this brief article. What follows is something of a rural reading of Ward’s book, particularly as her insights illuminate the purpose of moral luck as a concept, its interaction with community and God, and the role of scarcity. 

To begin, a brief word is warranted about what the rural United States is, as well as why such a word is necessarily inadequate: On the surface, it may seem relatively straightforward to suggest a definition of the rural. In the minds of many people, rural areas are those places where lots of people are not. Cities tend to be densely populated, suburban areas, while more sparse than cities, nevertheless hold many people, and whatever is left over—the space where lots of people are not—is the realm of the small town and the rural. This isn’t necessarily an awful definition, but in the United States the word “rural” does not only carry connotations of population. It also carries diverse cultural connotations, often political connotations, and sometimes also religious connotations. Herein lies the problem. If I speak of “rural America,” those terms conjure up myriad competing images and narratives that each hold lesser and greater shares of truth. Agrarian rural America can look quite different from mining rural America, which can look quite different from manufacturing in rural America, and many more could be listed. And that is just with respect to economic engines of rural places; the list gets more complex when one adds histories of prosperity and decline, religious history, physical location and climate, political history, racial history, and other contextual factors. To lean on a popular phrase, “if you’ve seen one rural place, you’ve seen one rural place.”5 Nevertheless, the idea that there is a “rural America” is stubbornly resilient, to the degree that it’s become something of a norm for folks who write about rural issues to do so with full vigor, and yet include pointed acknowledgments such as “there is no such thing as ‘rural America.’”6

That said, understanding the rural United States is not necessarily a lost cause. Like many other endeavors, it is complex, and attention to complexity can yield helpful models of understanding even when definitions remain elusive. To my eyes, the most helpful model for understanding rural and small-town America (and, as I see it, the one best situated for a conversation with Ward’s work) comes from sociologist Robert Wuthnow, who argues that rural America tends to self-organize into what he calls “moral communities.”7 For Wuthnow, a moral community is “a place to which and in which people feel an obligation to one another and to uphold the local ways of being that govern their expectations about ordinary life and support their feelings of being at home and doing the right things.”8 While rural America may not have a monopoly on this communal self-understanding, it takes on a particular character and cultural importance when enfleshed in places where many people are not. Put differently, what rural America is may resist definition, but what it means to be a rural American very often includes having one’s identity tied to the life of a concrete, geographically local community. Obligation and home are integrated with one another in this; ordinary life and doing the right things are subjects of geographically local discernment. In a sense from this rural perspective, “moral luck” hardly needs a name; identity and home (life circumstances) nearly self-evidently constitute the womb of moral development. 

This is exactly the place where Ward’s work is particularly helpful. Recognizing a reality (like moral luck) is not the same as understanding its function or potential. A Christian theological approach to moral luck sheds light on the subject in a way that can resonate with many (though not all) rural American contexts. For Ward, “what is unique in a Christian concept of moral luck is its use: to recall agents’ dependence on God for their pursuit of virtue and to hold out hope for redressing moral luck’s fragmentation of selves with the help of God and community” (87). Others have pointed out the significant role that Christian faith has played in the social history and context of rural America,9 and to understand moral luck as a way to re-emphasize dependence upon God for moral development in the context of one’s community is a very helpful cornerstone in constructing social ethics from a rural perspective. 

This resonance runs deeper with the second half of Ward’s definition of moral luck, regarding fragmentation of selves. Much can be said about the values common to much of rural America, and while they are not monolithic, they tend to include things like independence, responsibility for one’s self and neighbors, and accountability to family and/or tradition. In fact, taking agrarian rural America as an example, research suggests that values like these are both what draw persons into the practice of farming, and what constitute the vision of what farming is or ought to be.10 That said, such emphasis on the agency of an individual and surrounding local community tends to splinter when faced with the realities of global market competition, hyper-industrialization of agriculture, and the necessity of working with social and governmental entities beyond one’s own moral community. Agency becomes less and less local, fragmented by larger contextual factors that demand satisfaction in order for an agricultural enterprise to remain viable. As the locality of agency fragments, so also does the coherence of the local moral community, and consequently also the coherence of the particular rural person’s agency. Put simply, local and individual rural identity can be at risk of dissolution in a sea of non-local forces, but a Christian account of moral luck can move in the direction of reimagining life in and as a moral community. Taking inspiration from Ward’s work, I’d like to gesture toward one possible (but certainly not the only) way this may function.

Ward’s book is especially illuminative in its treatment of scarcity and poverty in relation to the power of others. In her words, “to be poor means to be at the disposal of others and to be treated in society as disposable” (124). This attention to the meaning of poverty, rather than simply its definition, opens a possibility to include reflection on experiences of scarcity with regard to human resources in addition to financial resources. While it is true that rural areas of the United States include some of the most economically distressed,11 it would be a mistake to wholesale equate “rural” with “poor.” However, if we were to acknowledge that scarcity (and even poverty) can include less-than-adequate human resources and the services that are dependent upon them (e.g. healthcare access requires healthcare professionals, education access requires teachers, religious access often requires ministers, etc.), then to be rural in the United States very often includes some (or many) experiences of scarcity. In a world whose structures tend to shift talent and expertise toward the areas of highest-volume demand or most lucrative compensation, human resources tend to take flight from rural areas that can often offer neither high volume of demand nor lucrative compensation. This has sometimes been called the “brain drain” problem,12 and while some have contested the accuracy of this narrative,13 it remains a powerful animating myth of rural social reality.

Part of what makes the rural “brain drain” problem so damaging is that absence of high-volume demand does not mean absence of any demand. For essential services such as healthcare and food access, there is a massive and important difference between low-volume demand and no demand at all. While a large hospital may be unsustainable in a rural area, that does not negate the very real need for reliable access to medical care. While massive grocery superstores may not be sustainable in many rural areas, that does not negate the very real need for access to healthy food sources. And of course, if a rural area cannot sustain a school or church according to the most common contemporary models of such things, that does not negate the very real need for education and religious ministry in rural contexts. Put differently, there are relatively few reliable safeguards against rural access to these and other essential services simply plummeting to zero when talent and expertise are drawn away to higher-volume demand and compensation, which means many rural areas and small towns tend to experience a near-constant state of precariousness, or feelings of being under threat.14

This experience of precariousness, or scarcity of human resources that leads to diminished access to necessary goods and services, places many rural areas and small towns “at the disposal of” forces and agents outside the moral community. Will the church stay open? That often depends on the good will and support of the diocese/bishop/synod (read: external governing body). Will the grocery store remain? That often depends on whether the town can sustain sufficient volume of demand to keep one open and attract someone to run it. Will the school close? That often depends on the discernment of the political centers of power. The list goes on. 

This is where I find Ward’s work most helpful. In contexts where access to necessary services is consistently precarious or even absent, virtue can often be re-imagined in order to achieve some level of that access. For example, elder care and nursing home access are significant needs in many rural areas and small towns in the United States. However, it is a perennial problem to find sufficient human resources to staff these needs. In response, values of sufficient staffing (and the virtues related to it) are in direct competition with values supporting necessary care and quality of life for an aging population (and of course the virtues that interact with that). In Ward’s words, “poverty [in this case lack of human resources] burdens virtue especially when two virtues conflict” (171). A common coping mechanism in response to this problem is for rural nursing homes and elder care facilities to operate at understaffed levels, because the stakes in fending off the alternative (closing the facilities) are extremely high; alternative facilities may be many miles away or effectively unreachable for those who need them. Politically speaking, this can translate into rural opposition to what may seem to others like common-sense staffing mandates (for example, bipartisan rural opposition to the federal staffing mandate for nursing homes proposed by the Biden administration in 2023).15 Virtue is not necessarily absent in such opposition; often it is burdened by the pairing of scarcity of human resources and the necessity of access to services.

There is much more that could be explored here in relation to Ward’s work and rural approaches to Christian ethics, and I look forward to further discussion. For example, Ward’s drawing from the wisdom of womanist theologians to regard communities “as fertile grounds where virtue can grow” (108) certainly invites dialogue with rural contexts as moral communities. Additionally, Ward’s three-part understanding of exactly “how life circumstances function as moral luck” (110–11) provides a useful hermeneutic by which to read particular contexts, including the rural. In sum, Ward’s work holds a good number of implications and applications ready to be drawn out further.

I want to thank Kate Ward for her ambitious book and Sara Bernard-Hoverstad for the invitation to participate in this symposium. I would like to begin by reflecting on several fruitful connections between Kate’s work and my own recent study of “tainted legacies.”1 As I read her book, I found myself wishing it had appeared in time for me to incorporate aspects of her analysis in mine! I also noticed ways my approach might suggest additional pathways for her to enrich and expand this already excellent work. My hope, then, is to identify areas for mutually enriching dialogue between our projects.

One of my favorite features of Ward’s book is her focus not only on economic inequality as a form of structural injustice, but one that has ramifying generational impacts. In “Groundwork,” she draws on social scientific research to illustrate how inequality “self-perpetuates”: by bolstering the political voice of the wealthy while diminishing that of the poor and middle class; by decreasing social mobility; by harming child development and education outcomes; and by virtue of the fact that the rate of return on investments outpaces growth (21–27). She provides examples from cross-cultural studies that highlight the generational dimension of this problem, showing, for example, how “inequalities in economic status are quite persistent across generations” and that “parental socioeconomic status—a composite of income and education—continues to be the single factor with the most impact on a child’s educational outcome” (23–24). Ward’s attention to the transgenerational impact of this structure is especially important, as intergenerational dimensions of problems often go unnoticed or undertheorized in Christian ethics.  

Her attention to legacies of economic inequality resonates with my work on “tainted legacies,” or how to engage thinkers, traditions, and institutions whose perpetration of traumas like slavery and sexual violence tarnish their invaluable contributions to human flourishing. I examine cases like those of John Howard Yoder, who theorized Christian pacifism and perpetrated sexual violence; political traditions like that of the United States that claim “liberty and justice for all” while celebrating vestiges of its slave past (i.e. Confederate monuments); and educational institutions like Georgetown that enslaved hundreds despite their religious commitments to human dignity. I theorize this problem in terms of “legacies” to highlight the often-inherited nature of the problems such figures and institutions present, their own self-perpetuating dynamics, and their long-ranging generational dimensions. Like economic inequality, tainted legacies often come down to us from the past, create challenges for us now, and portend difficulties for the future. As with economic inequality, we can find ourselves grappling with structural injustices not of our own making but with which we must contend. What we have received, we will also hand down; consequently, recognizing the intergenerational nature of such issues is prerequisite to addressing them well.   

This point of connection challenged me to see how Ward’s attention to economic inequality would have benefited my account. Economic inequality is a transgenerational structural injustice that I neglect in my focus on slavery and sexual violence. Slavery itself is of course an economic institution that contributed to current economic inequality (deeply intertwined with sexual violence), and economic inequality is often dependent upon and productive of various forms of sexual violence; but I did not explicitly address the economic facet of slavery and sexual violence. Reading Ward’s text alerted me to ways I might have conceived of economic inequality as a tainted legacy of our national and global economic traditions in its own right—thereby potentially expanding my definition of what constitutes a tainted legacy. It also challenged me to see how I could have better addressed economic inequality as a dimension of the traumas I do identify as constitutive of tainted legacies.

If Ward’s attention to economic inequality would enhance my analysis, I believe my use of trauma studies may be productive for hers. More specifically, trauma theory would enrich Ward’s account of economic inequality as a self-perpetuating, generational problem. I drew on trauma studies in my focus on slavery, racism, and sexual violence to both underscore the gravity of the wounds tainted legacies involve and to glean the wisdom of clinical psychologists for addressing them. Some of the most striking research I encountered is on “intergenerational” trauma. Psychiatrists Rachel Yehuda and Linda M. Bierer, for example, study the transmission of trauma on an epigenetic level, showing a “transgenerational vulnerability” to PTSD in the children of mothers who survived the Holocaust.2 Adding such research to her portfolio of social scientific resources would enable Ward to strengthen her account of economic inequality as a structural injustice, demonstrating not only its self-perpetuating structural features but also its nature as a potentially transgenerational form of trauma—with all of the relevant ramifications for the study of virtue.     

Ward’s work would also benefit from increased attention to race and gender. While I take her larger point about the potential impact of wealth and poverty on the pursuit of virtue, it seems to me that the effect of economic inequality on virtue is likely far more complex than Ward’s account often allows. She recognizes this herself, acknowledging that neither wealth nor poverty affects virtue in straightforward ways: “As with wealth, poverty does not have a uniformly positive or negative impact on virtuous life; it encourages some and burdens others” (9). Nevertheless, a focus on economic inequality without close attention to race and gender runs the risk of oversimplification. Ward occasionally acknowledges that race and gender affect the pursuit of virtue (86; 95; 111; 142; 189), but she does not use these categories as tools of analysis. Given her reliance on feminist philosophical accounts of “moral luck” and her nod to “implicit” womanist accounts of moral luck in Chapter 3, the lack of a more robust intersectional analysis surprised me. Attention to race and gender seems especially pertinent for discussions of agency, a topic to which I will return shortly.

First, however, I want to address a tension in Ward’s book related to the generational dimension of economic inequality. I focus on the transgenerational dynamics of tainted legacies not only to better diagnose the problems they present but also to respond to them. I find most of what I call “common responses” to tainted legacies inadequate because they do not recognize the structural and transgenerational nature of the problems tainted legacies create. Not teaching Yoder’s theology, for example, does nothing to address Yoder’s influence on generations of scholars, institutions, and current trajectories in Christian ethics. Simply removing and destroying Confederate monuments may censure White supremacists and affirm Black dignity and political rights but it does nothing to address the seemingly intractable legacies of economic, racial, and sexual disenfranchisement of Black folks. My own constructive response focuses on structural reform to address these dimensions of the problem. Given Ward’s early attention to the generational dynamics of economic inequality as a structural injustice, I initially found her focus on how economic inequality affects the personal pursuit of virtue—rather than attention to large-scale political and economic responses—strange. 

But then, I reminded myself, this is not Ward’s project. Her goal is to examine the effect of economic inequality on personal virtue—not to provide proposals for structural reform of economic inequality. Ward identifies her project as belonging to both a neo-Franciscan approach that focuses on individuals (in the context of community), and a neo-Thomist approach of reforming unjust structures. She briefly discusses large-scale political and economic policy responses to inequality in Chapter 7, where she also proposes relevant church practices, but her stated focus is the impact of economic inequality on personal morality.

This approach has significant benefits. It draws attention to another dimension of the problem of economic inequality. That is, not only is economic inequality productive of material political, social, and economic problems, it is also productive of moral problems. Showing how economic inequality threatens the pursuit of virtue provides another angle of vision on why it is a structural injustice. To borrow language she cites from another context, her analysis demonstrates how economic inequality can function as a “hostile architecture” for the development of virtue (27). In this sense, Ward’s work shares philosopher Lisa Tessman’s concern to reveal the full range of damage structural injustice produces. Tessman’s work 

dwells on what may be missed by much feminist and other liberatory prescriptive moral theory. For while such theory can help determine what is the best way to live or to act under or in opposition to oppression, it does not typically pause to lament the fact that the best—in the circumstances—is really not very good at all. By lamenting this, I hope to increase the breadth of the complaint about systems of oppression, to name moral limitations and burdens as belonging on a list of harms that oppression causes, and to express both anger and grief over these harms.3

I see Ward’s work in this vein: enhancing understanding of the harms, burdens, and limitations economic inequality imposes. Her analysis of “hyperagency” among the wealthy and “scarcity, internalized negative self-regard, burdening virtues, and limiting access to practices” among the poor and its impact on virtue development contributes to understanding of the potential ways economic inequality functions as a system of oppression for all (8–9). This is Ward’s intended focus and it is valuable work.  

But Tessman’s reference above not only to “under” but also to “in opposition to oppression” is critical. I point to it to identify an additional area of exploration for Ward’s project—one that might alleviate her concern not to contribute to the stereotype that the poor lack in virtue (171–76). While Ward is obviously keen to avoid this judgement and recognizes that “poor people always retain moral agency” (202), I sensed tension between her account of moral agency and those of Tessman and the womanists she cites, particularly Katie Cannon. Paying close attention to the full contexts of their respective analyses reveals the source of this tension: Unlike Ward, both Tessman and Cannon develop their accounts of virtue not only in the context of oppression, but also in the context of liberatory struggles against oppression or resistance to oppression. 

Such studies begin, as does Tessman’s, with the presumption that those resisting oppression are already virtuous agents struggling for justice. Tessman focuses on how virtue is “burdened” in liberatory political struggles, not “impeded” as in Ward’s account. Similarly, the fact that womanists’ “implicit” accounts of moral luck take their point of departure from Black women’s modes of resistance against racism, sexism, and classism is instructive. They emphasize “making a way out of no way” and “alternative” virtues like “unctuousness” that enable Black women to survive in death-dealing situations.4 Womanist accounts of moral luck name the damage that systems of oppression do while simultaneously championing Black women’s moral agency in resisting injustice. 

Indeed, as Cannon’s discussion of Zora Neale Hurston’s life and work suggests, traditional frameworks of virtue ethics—such as the one Ward uses—often fail to account for the kind of moral agency Black women exercise in their resistance to oppression. Cannon’s use of Black women’s experiences “restructure[s] the categories” of “dominant ethical systems.”5 The moral agency of the oppressed—indeed, one’s very account of what constitutes virtue—looks different when one takes as one’s context not only oppression but also resistance to it. Focusing on contexts in which folks are already engaged in virtuous pursuits for justice—already exercising their dignity—seems critical, then, not only for a fuller understanding of how economic inequality affects the pursuit of virtue but for our very understanding of virtue itself. One of the many strengths of Ward’s study is her attention to the voices of the poor and their allies (i.e. liberation theologians). And she sounds the appropriate cautions against romanticizing the agency of the oppressed; nevertheless, expanding her account to include the voices of the poor as they participate in liberatory political movements for economic justice would be a worthy addition to Ward’s already incisive study of how economic inequality affects virtue. 

Decades ago, in the mid-nineties when I was starting my masters in theology, I took an undergraduate economics class. As a nascent theologian, I had some idea that I needed to relate economic life to the life of faith and the theological enterprise. Well before I encountered liberation theologies, there already existed a concern or restlessness in me that economic forces, the market, and the dynamics these established and nourished in society impacted people’s ability to live into certain dimensions of the life of faith. Specifically, I wanted to understand what about economic life as lived in the U.S. made it so difficult for U.S. Christians to practice justice toward the impoverished and marginalized in the nation and globally. I asked the professor what the central moral category was for economic health. As an economics Ph.D. candidate in a very classic department, he declared there is no morality to the economy—it is neither good nor bad, it just behaves according to basic principles. I asked again, thinking he did not understand how I phrased my question, and he repeated the same idea: the economy is not a moral agent. Like the laws of physics that make apples fall from trees, the economy operates without concern whether the apple falls on the ground or bonks you on your head causing harm. As I engaged Kate Ward’s Wealth, Virtue, and Moral Luck I was reminded of this moment in my early studies. Had Ward been another student in my economics classroom way back then, I think she would have argued with my instructor on the moral dimensions of the economy, specifically an economy in which diverse degrees of inequality are not only possible, but seemingly necessary for its very functioning. Ward’s rigorous exploration of how economic inequality impacts communities and their abilities to foster the Christian moral life focused on the virtues confront us with the insight “that inequality harms persons morally… [and] shapes nearly every sphere of human interaction” (4). Way back then in that economics classroom I wish I had had Ward’s clarity of mind to respond to the instructor with the concern that “wealth and poverty function as moral luck to hinder virtue pursuit, and that inequality makes their impact worse.” (4)

What followed for me were years of training in liberation theologies and Christian social ethics. Woven into my scholarly activity throughout the years has been considering the impact of socio-economic standing (and the norms, attitudes, and practices that sustain these) on one’s ability to practice the virtues of charity, solidarity, courage, temperance, prudence, and, above all, justice both personally and collectively in the U.S. context. In what follows I engage Ward’s discussion of the concept of moral luck as it relates to inequality and the possibility for developing the virtues mentioned above from two perspectives. The first is a review of a prior study in the grammar of socio-economic positioning as it relates to the possibility for U.S. Christians to live into the preferential option for the poor.1 Framing this discussion around the formation of “moral imagination” across different socio-economic groups supports Ward’s argument while expanding the questions about what ought we to do to correct for such disparities in formation. The second is a liberationist analysis of moral luck in the context of inequality. If many forms of inequality represent a form of structural violence, how do we properly account for inequality as violence in addressing the impact of moral luck on the moral imagination?

Following Foucault,2 de Souza Santos,3 and others who examine the relationship of grammar to power and coercion,4 we ought to consider the possibility that socio-economic, cultural, and political positioning forms us in specific grammars: linguistic systems of vocabulary and rules of expression that impact our meaning making and world production. These various grammars through which we shape the world are in large part deployed to benefit dynamics of power and privilege. Echoing Ward’s analysis of the impact of inequality and moral luck on the moral formation of different groups along the spectrum of socio-economic experiences, the discussion of grammar and power suggests that there are systems of language whose very development prevent us from a proper cognitive experience of other’s pain and suffering. In this line of thinking it follows that the grammar developed by the socio-economically privileged impacts our ability to express compassion or solidarity, or make demands grounded on the discourse of justice. Ward refers to this as the impact of moral luck on the formation of virtues key to building relationships of solidarity, care, and the common good among people in contexts with a high level of inequality. Can we scientifically measure this impact on what I refer to here as “moral imagination”?

Cognitive research on class differences and responses to suffering, for example, support Ward’s observations. One experiment measured how higher socio-economic status has an impact on empathic responses of subjects on people they encounter on the street.5 The researchers determined that in this case socio-economic status operates as a cultural milieu that develops its own grammar, vocabularies, and systems of discourse. Status also reproduces its own discourse, sustaining relationships within the cultural circle that reproduce this group’s grammar (world-building and meaning-making), while setting up clear boundaries of belonging to such socio-economic circles. The same study found that lower classes have a more sensitized “mirror neuron system”: “our cognitive systems, the degree to which they’re attuned to other people in the environment is affected by our own social class.”6 Alternatively, a different study found that higher-class subjects exhibit a shorter “social gaze.” That is, their ability to linger on images of individual persons (measured by using brain imaging to monitor attention span of subjects on images of human faces with various emotional expressions) is impacted by socio-economic level. These studies suggest that “social class cultures can influence social attention (attention toward human) in a deep and pervasive manner… your class shapes the ‘ecology’ that you grow up in, and that anchors your habits of attention.”7 Inequality segregates, yes, but this does not mean that the various socio-economic divides are untethered from each other. On the contrary. A long-standing and complicated relationship of violence exists between one and the other as St. Ambrose and so many other early Christian thinkers pointed out.8

If developing moral imagination or the virtues requires consistent dispositions, attitudes, habits, and practices, what happens when one of our more consistent forms of encounter with others—the economic interactions that connect the human family globally —are directly complicit with the violence that harms so many? Liberationist thought not only judges the negative impact of the dynamics that establish the conditions of wealth, poverty, and inequality, but it also confronts the intentionality of these dynamics. These dynamics are not accidental. They are the purposeful participation in systems of economic violence. The dynamics and conditions that shape moral luck don’t just hinder virtue pursuit. They purposely deform it into the vices that blind us to the conditions our economic practices create and sustain. In societies (whether locally or globally) with various forms of inequality having privileges relative to these inequalities means participating in relationships shaped by economic harm. Ignorance, indifference, cowardice, intemperance are the vices that keep us from engaging the kind of encounter called for by Ward. (218) 

I am indebted to Ward for refreshing and reframing a conversation that very much aligns with liberationist ethics. As she rightly points out, “solutions” (if we dare use that term) to this moral question depends greatly on the work of communities of faith. Very few of them understand the dynamics laid out by Ward, or the cognitive science cited here, about how the economy is itself a moral agent with good and bad practices, supporting or harming the development of the virtues, and ultimately our ability to fully understand the harm that we cause others. I am encouraged that this Syndicate conversation might help us all better understand and live into practices of social integration, in communities that better prepare us to sustain our gaze on the practices and positions we occupy on both sides of the inequality spectrum.