Does J.D. Vance’s appeal to an ordo amoris (a ranking of love) make any sense?
In January 2025, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance cited the Catholic concept of “ordo amoris” in the context of the debate over immigration. He said that “there’s this old-school [concept]—and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way—that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then, after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.” Vance’s statement resulted in much controversy about whether he correctly described the concept.
Here are slightly edited notes from a discussion of this question among four members of the CLN board:
Richard started:
The background deep context in which the discussion about the ordo amoris is taking place is Peter Singer’s idea of “effective altruism.” Singer thinks that we should walk right past the hungry, the imprisoned, and the other local needy if more good can be done with our contributions over in Africa or India or some other place. That’s one reason why he also advocates infanticide of handicapped kids. They’re just too expensive. They don’t deliver enough bang for the buck, compared to mass immunizations in Africa, for example.
Both the Good Samaritan parable, and the Gospel of Matthew emphasize that we will be judged according to how we treat those who call out to us, either in an auditory way or in terms of their plight lying close before us. We cannot adopt a philosophy which lets us ignore the cry of neighboring humans, even if our refusal to help is done in favor of a greater number of more distant humans.
Peter Singer is teaching people that a consistent morality requires equality, and who wants to be against equality? That’s why his appeal is so dangerous. He calls a preference for helping one’s actual neighbors “tribalism” because it fails to consider the needs of all human beings equally. But the value he denigrates as tribalism I would call communitarianism. Lending sugar to a near neighbor builds community as well as providing calories. Individuals who consume sugar we send abroad are never going to be related to us in such a close and multifaceted way. Gift giving is important for many reasons besides the satisfaction of physical needs.
As for migrants, I would say that it is not permissible to deny aid and shelter to those whom we meet in the USA. They are now our neighbors, too, even if they were not yet our neighbors a few years ago.
We should not ignore the needs of those who remain further away, but they should have less priority.
This ranking of our love makes sense to me.
Bill commented:
The issue has some complexity. None of us individually or generally organizationally can respond to all needs in the world. There is always a need to prioritize. There are different ways to do it. I think we all disagree with Peter Singer’s approach to that. There are other rational approaches, and there are approaches that are beyond the rational. The Church of the Saviour tradition, of which my church is part, emphasizes call. We listen to God and seek to hear God’s call on our life. We act in accordance with that call. We are not then much concerned with how what we are called to do relates to global priorities. We are rather assuming that each person, as well as each collective body of persons, has a particular role to play. If everyone fulfills their part, it will all be taken care of. I think that has strong roots in the Christian tradition. I expect it also has counterparts in other faith traditions, but I don’t know enough about other traditions to specify anything. I also think that there are ways of looking at the general concept that can work for secular people. A secular way of putting it might be that we each have our own niche in the larger work, and we need to find that niche and live into it fully.
Julia countered:
Thank you for clarifying your own position, Richard. It seems much more reasonable, humane and CLE-compatible than Vance’s, and I share your critique of “effective altruism,” which is a particularly impersonal form of utilitarian ethics.
You did seem to be conflating a critical position toward effective altruism with the “America first” approach to public policy that Vance was directly defending. The latter is what the popes have rightly critiqued – particularly the idea of placing limits on our concern for others based not only on physical distance but on degrees of difference from “us,” or on specific categories like national origin, race, or level of need. That’s what I object to as incompatible with the CLE (and also with Catholic teaching and Christian faith more broadly).
It also just occurred to me that physical distance is a very different kind of factor in considering one’s personal practices as an individual, versus in the public policies of a country with a large economy and a long-running practice of international aid.
This difference may be at the root of our very different readings of Vance’s comments. Please correct me if I’m mistaken here, but maybe you heard his description of the “ordo amoris” concept in terms of applying it at an individual level, and then thought, “Well sure, of course, otherwise we’d be left with effective altruism.” In which case you’d be right, up to a point (although I don’t think it’s quite as simple as a choice between those two concepts at an individual level either). But that overlooks the context of what idea Vance was explicitly defending, namely “America first,” specifically as reflected in domestic policy in open hostility to immigrants, and in foreign policy in the abrupt cutoff of existing humanitarian aid programs without so much as a phase-out.
There’s a pretty significant difference between attempting a moral defense of that kind of mass-scale callousness on the one hand, and factoring in geographic proximity when deciding where to give one’s time or money on the other.
Richard responded:
Yes, Julia. That’s exactly what I was thinking. I was thinking that the ordo amoris idea is a pretty good way of setting priorities for an individual. And I didn’t like the idea of the pope and others just plain debunking it, especially given the menace of effective altruism (which has even reached a study group in my own parish). I wish the pope and others had given your clarification, namely, that the ordo amoris has got to have a very different meaning for a large institutional actor. Or maybe it just doesn’t even apply to such an actor.
Rachel closed with this comment:
Vance was using ordo amoris as a way of justifying being cruel to people at a distance, and I think that’s why Cardinal Prevost (now Pope Leo) had that reaction to using it that way. But Singer uses “effective altruism” as a way of being hard-hearted to people near you on the grounds the same amount of money could do more good elsewhere. That gets especially vicious if that means killing disabled infants that are near you in favor of, say, mass vaccination programs.
But in either case, whichever direction they aim it, hard-heartedness is contrary to any form of true ethics.
There is also the consideration of proportion. Yes, someone out in the world trying to address poverty while their own family at home is starving should be criticized. But to use ordo amoris to justify the wealthiest, most powerful nation in the history of humanity, a nation that spends more on its military than much of the world combined, is ridiculous. Are we to believe that the US has been inadequately looking after it’s own security and interests?