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Specifying “The Space” Necessary to Exercise the Fundamental Option: How Human Capabilities Help Clarify Rahner’s Conception of Justice

Abstract

In his Theological Investigations article, “The Dignity and Freedom of Man,” Karl Rahner writes, “The personality of [the human]…requires of necessity a certain space for realizing itself.” What defines this “space” and how does it relate to Rahner’s conception of justice? The paper addresses this question by placing Rahner’s extant but under-developed conception of justice in constructive dialogue with the language of human capabilities developed by political theorist Martha Nussbaum. Capabilities, the paper argues, provide a promising moral framework for specifying the conditions necessary for saying “yes” to God, which, in turn, helps clarify Rahner’s overall understanding of justice. The paper concludes by recognizing how Rahner’s theology, in turn, can help answer the question of moral motivation—that is, why we ought seek to remove obstacles to human freedom—which is lacking in Nussbaum’s thought.

Introduction

Scholars of Karl Rahner have long noted the challenge of identifying a

comprehensive and coherent theory of justice within his thought. To be sure, Rahner

explicitly discusses “justice” in a few Theological Investigations articles. However, these

discussions seem to be relatively tangential and not fully developed internally, suggesting

that justice as a specific theme does not play a substantive role in his theology. It is for

this reason, in part, that Rahner has often been criticized for overlooking or otherwise

downplaying the existence of injustice, particularly structural injustice, as it relates to the

individual’s attainment of the highest good—a critique perhaps most fully developed by

one of Rahner’s former students, J.B. Metz, as we see, for example, is his influential

essay, “An Identity Crisis in Christianity? Transcendental and Political Responses” (Metz

1980). Others, including theologian Jean Porter, have criticized Rahner more generally,

asserting that his theology ultimately is too abstract to provide any significant concrete

moral norms for individuals or society (see, for example, Porter 1997).

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In response to these critiques, a number of contemporary scholars have sought to

defend Rahner by examining and evaluating the ways in which his conception of the

fundamental option provides the grounds for recognizing a moral obligation to remove or

diminish obstacles that hinder the individual’s capacity to say “yes” to God’s offer of

salvation, an obligation that is also grounded in the love of neighbor. From this

perspective, Rahner’s relatively infrequent appeal to justice as a specific concept belies

the profound concern he demonstrates for the reality of inter-personal harm and the

corresponding duty to prevent and redress it. In other words, there is an alternative

reading of Rahner that affirms that he cares deeply about justice, if we take justice to

mean an obligation to protect and advance all individuals’ capacity to realize their full

potential as human beings in relation to God’s offer of self.

This paper endorses this latter reading of Rahner, the view that he has a

substantive view of morality in general, and justice more specifically, grounded in the

vulnerability of the individual’s capacity to effect her fundamental option. It will engage

several relatively recent works on Rahner’s ethics, including those by theologians Brian

Linnane, Jennifer Beste, and Ethna Regan to demonstrate the ways in which Rahner’s

work has substantive value for examining the nature and application of justice.

Yet notwithstanding this general defense of Rahner’s moral vision, there remains

a problematic lack of precision in his thought with regards to the specific obligations

individuals have to assist each other in effecting the fundamental option and realizing

their full humanity. Rahner recognizes that the human good is vulnerable to both personal

and interpersonal harm, and specifically writes in his Theological Investigations article,

“The Dignity and Freedom of Man,” for example, “The personality of [the

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human]…requires of necessity a certain space for realizing itself” (TI 2: 240). He also

affirms that there are certain “material conditions” necessary for each individual’s proper

exercise of the fundamental option. Yet what defines this space and what specific

material conditions might be necessary for self-realization as Rahner defines it?

This paper will address this question by moving beyond previous scholarship to

argue that we must look outside of Rahner’s own theology to find an adequate moral

vocabulary to fully identify and interpret his conception of justice. In particular, I will

argue that the language of human capabilities, developed by political theorist Martha

Nussbaum, provides a promising framework for identifying potential obstacles to the free

exercise of the fundamental option. Establishing this kind of constructive dialogue

between Rahner and the language of capabilities is ultimately mutually beneficial. On the

one hand, capabilities help establish a clearer understanding of what could plausibly

define the external spaces and material conditions necessary for an individual to exercise

her fundamental option, which, in turn, helps concretize and specify what Rahner’s

conception of justice is, including providing an answer to the question of who is

responsible for providing these spaces and resources. On the other hand, Rahner’s

theology helps supply a more robust moral foundation for the language of capabilities

itself, helping answer the question of moral motivation in relation to justice—that is, why

we ought seek to create spaces that help the individual to fully flourish in the first place.

This constructive comparison between a secular philosopher and a Christian theologian is

warranted, the paper will argue, because both Rahner and Nussbaum understand human

freedom as a constitutive good in human life.

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Rahner’s Conception of Justice in in Own Words

Rahner only sparsely uses the term “justice” in his writing. As a specific theme, it

only appears in his Theological Investigations articles, “Theological Reflections on

Monogenism” (volume I), “Justified and Sinner at the Same Time” (volume VI), and

“The Peace of God and the Peace of the World” (volume X).1 The way in which he uses

“justice” in these contexts, however, relates more to soteriological conceptions of

“justification” before God rather than “justice” in a more social and political sense, as

represented, for instance, by Thomas Aquinas’s classic definition of justice in the Summa

Theologica: “justice is a habit whereby a man renders to each one his due by a constant

and perpetual will" (Aquinas 1920, II-II.58.1).

Rahner refers to “original justice” in “Theological Reflections on Monogenism,”

for example, to support his claim that all human beings descended from the same original

human family. To reject the thesis of monogensim (the common humanity of all persons),

he argues, is to reject both the foundational Christian doctrine of original justice—that

God created human beings as fundamentally good—and the doctrine of original sin, that

all human beings ineluctably participate in sin, which stems from an original rebellion

against God. As he writes in rejection of polygenism (the thesis that humans descended

from distinct ancestral human families), “[U]nless original sin is to be rejected outright,

several ancestral pairs who were in possession of original justice would have to have

sinned at various times and in various places; and they would have to have transmitted

their sin, i.e., the loss of original justice, to their posterity” (TI I, 268). Rahner’s concern

in the article is not about the meaning of justice per se, but, rather, to affirm that all

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human beings share in both the original created goodness of humanity and its subsequent

fall because all humans emerge from the same human family.

Rahner appeals to justice in a similar way in his article examining the

Reformation conception of justification (simul justus et peccatur) and the Catholic

response. He argues that Catholics rightly reject the Protestant (especially Lutheran)

claim that God’s redemptive grace in the form of justification only “covers” the sinner’s

sin rather than effecting an ontological change in the sinner’s existence before God.

However, he maintains that justice in this sanctifying, ontological sense cannot be taken

for granted; it remains vulnerable to human sin, particularly in the form of the use of

freedom to reject God’s offer of salvation. As he writes, “The doctrine of permanent,

habitual justice through infused sanctifying grace must not be understood as if this justice

were a purely possession or static quality in man. Rather, this justice is always tempted

and threatened by the flesh, the world and the devil. It is always dependent on the free

decision of man” (TI VI, 228). Here again, it is clear that Rahner appeals to justice more

in a soteriological rather than social or political sense; he speaks more to the right relation

between God and individual persons rather than between and among persons themselves.

Rahner turns to a more concrete and practical conception of justice in “The Peace

of God and the Peace of the World.” The article seeks to lay out a theology of what

Rahner calls “Christian Realism” in relation to the question of how the Christian ought

understand the possibility of attaining peace in the world. Christian realism embraces two

claims about the possibility of peace without seeking to relieve the tension between them:

on the one hand, Christians must recognize the reality of sin in human existence and,

thus, the necessity of responding to that sin with power and, more specifically, force

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when necessary; on the other hand, the Christian must also always seek to approximate

the Kingdom of God as much as possible in the world, which entails a final renunciation

of worldly power as a legitimate Christian pursuit. As Rahner writes, “The Christian is

sufficiently realistic to take his stand in principle at a point halfway between a total

rejection of power, an absolute hostility to it on the one hand, and an attitude on the other

in which power is accorded an absolute value raised to an ideology and monopolized” (TI

X, 381).

The most effective way for a Christian to strike this balance between the rejection

of power and the idolization of power, Rahner goes on to argue, is to understand and act

upon the right relationship between what he identifies as “justice” and “love.” His

argument on this point is complex. The two conceptions are irreducibly distinct, he

argues, and yet intimately related. Justice, conceived of as—and here he draws on

Aquinas’s definition—“each individual [being] accorded his due” (TI X, 383) plays an

essential role creating the conditions for peace to flourish among human beings. Citing

the Vatican II pastoral constitution, “On the Church in the World of Today,” he affirms

that true peace is not merely the absence of conflict, but, rather, the presence of just

relations among human beings both individually and collectively (TI X, 382). On these

grounds, Rahner argues that Christians must embrace the task of justice defined as

“[seeking] soberly, intelligently and empirically to create conditions in which rights may

be distributed among all concerned” (TI X, 384).

However, Rahner also emphasizes that justice can never accomplish peace

absence the presence of love. Indeed, the final efficaciousness of justice, in this sense,

depends on the what Rahner describes as the “madness” of love, madness in the sense of

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self-sacrificial devotion to the neighbor’s good, like that which we witness on the Cross

(TI X, 384). Absent love, he argues, justice is “constantly in danger of stopping short at

the level of an organized egoism, and thereby, [provides] the occasion for that conflict

and war which has to be overcome and humanized” (TI X, 383). Justice left to its own

isolated logic, in other words, inevitably leads back to injustice. It is thus only by moving

beyond the fundamental question of justice—“what is due to you (and me)?” to the

Christian affirmation, “what is mine is yours” (TI X, 383), that durable peace is possible

in the world.

Rahner thus ultimately identifies justice as a necessary but insufficient condition

for the realization of the Kingdom of God in history, to the degree that such a realization

is possible at all in this lifetime (a possible state of affairs that Rahner also calls a

“tolerable peace” (TI X, 387)). Although he admits several times throughout the essay

that his description of these concepts is “abstract,” he maintains that they still have vital

importance for specifying how the Christian ought live in the world, especially given that

we live in a time of “hunger,” “illiteracy,” “atomic bombs,” and “the population

explosion” (TI X, 387).

Looking for a Deeper Theological Account of Justice in Rahner’s Thought

Given these examples, claiming that Rahner has no operative conception of

justice in his thought ultimately appears unwarranted. As “The Peace of God and the

Peace of the World” in particular demonstrates, “justice,” for Rahner, is not merely a

theological concept for describing God’s relationship with humanity. It, in conjunction

with love, serves a profoundly practical principle that seeks to identify moral problems

and the obligations Christians have to address them. Yet notwithstanding these examples,

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how can Rahner escape the charge that his conception of justice, though extant in his

body of work, finally remains abstract, undeveloped, and ultimately tangential to his

broader theological concerns? What connection, if any, does it have to Rahner’s theology

more substantively?

In response to these questions, a number of scholars have turned to Rahner’s

conception of the fundamental option as a resource for moral reflection and action.

Theologian Brian Linnane, for example, has argued persuasively against the critique of

theologian Jean Porter that, in Porter’s words, Rahner’s ethics do “not serve to illuminate

[human experience] or to guide our efforts to live moral or holy lives” (Porter, 286).

Linnane responds that a correct interpretation of the fundamental option, defined as the

definitive human response to God’s gratuitous offer of self to each human being, provides

the grounds for identifying a robust ethical theory in Rahner’s theology. In particular,

Linnane emphasizes that saying “yes” to God specifically takes the form of loving the

neighbor for Rahner, which not only entails a general disposition of good will towards

others, but also the performance of concrete acts of love on their behalf. As he argues,

“Porter’s critique of Rahner…is mistaken because it fails to account for both the intimate

interaction between categorical and transcendental experience and because it fails to

attend carefully to Rahner’s claim that the paradigmatic human act is one of neighbor

love” (Linnane 2003, 234). While God makes Godself present in each individual’s

transcendental experience—which, for Rahner, is a necessary constituent of every act of

human knowing—the response to this experience can only take place in each person’s

concrete, historical, or, as Rahner puts it, “categorical” existence. This response,

moreover, ultimately can only take two forms: either one rejects God’s gift of self, and, in

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so doing, rejects the possibility of loving the neighbor for her sake alone (that is, loving

the neighbor agapically, independently of one’s own good); or one accepts God’s gift of

self, and in so doing, loves the neighbor precisely as other, seeking her good

unconditionally. This form of love, for Rahner, is only made possible by, and

paradigmatically demonstrated in, Christ’s sacrifice on the cross.

Rahner thus makes clear, Linnane affirms, that loving the neighbor is not

something one does in addition to saying yes to God; it is essentially how one says yes to

God. Embedded within the fundamental option itself, therefore, is a profound orientation

to the neighbor’s full flourishing, defined as protecting the integrity of her freedom to say

yes to God. Indeed, the integrity of one’s own relationship with God also ultimately

depends on how one responds to the neighbor’s needs construed in this way. As Linnane

concludes, “Rahner is clear [that] only those free and obedient actions which at once

manifest love of God and neighbor—or their rejection—are capable of affecting the

agent’s basic relationship with God in [a fundamental] way” (Linnane 2003, 236,

author’s emphasis). Given this centrality of neighbor love in Rahner’s conception of the

fundamental option, Linnane thus provides a strong case for recognizing that the good of

the neighbor, and, more specifically, her good precisely as an embodied historical

individual who needs protection, plays a central role in Rahner’s theology.

Theologian Jennifer Beste also offers a compelling argument in support of the

fundamental option providing the ground for a substantive social ethic in Rahner’s work.

Although she draws on trauma theory to critique Rahner on what she sees as problematic

lack of attention to the question of how interpersonal harm can undermine an individual’s

capacity to say “yes” to God, she maintains in her book, God and the Victim, that, with

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some revision, the fundamental option provides a strong justificatory warrant for

protecting the neighbor from harm and seeking her full flourishing as a human being.

Drawing on moments in Rahner’s thought when he appears to recognize that “external

influences” can undermine an individual’s constitutive freedom to accept God’s gift of

self by loving God and neighbor (see, for example, TI II, 242; I will discuss this

vulnerability in greater depth below), Beste makes the following argument: given that a)

human beings are the event of God’s self communication, which grounds the freedom to

respond to God’s gift of self, b) the normative use of this freedom is to accept God’s gift

of self in the form of loving God and neighbor, c) injustice, in the form of inter-personal

harm (such as sexual abuse), can undermine an individual’s freedom to respond in this

way, therefore d) humans, particularly Christians, have an obligation in the name of

loving the neighbor to prevent inter-personal harm and help redress it when it occurs. As

Beste writes, “our main objective is to ensure that we and our neighbors have sufficient

conditions that enable us to realize our freedom and live out a ‘yes’ to God” (Beste, 104).

We accomplish this, Beste argues, by recognizing that, for Rahner, “God entrusts the

human community with a grave responsibility to foster one another’s freedom and be

mutual vehicles of God’s mediating grace” (Beste, 105-106). Again, while Beste believes

that Rahner’s conception of the fundamental option requires revision in order to reach

this conclusion, she maintains that her revised Rahnerian theology still comports with

both the letter and spirit of Rahner’s thought because of the profound concern he shows

for both loving the neighbor and recognizing that the neighbor’s freedom to say yes to

God is vulnerable to pernicious external influences. Beste, like Linnane, thus finds a

robust social ethic embedded in Rahner’s conception of the fundamental option.

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Theologian Ethna Regan agrees with this insight, and, in her own book, Theology

and the Boundary Discourse of Human Rights, seeks to demonstrate how the

fundamental option in relation to neighbor love relates more directly to human dignity

and human rights. Regan focuses her attention, in particular, on Rahner’s conception of

human dignity, noting that, for Rahner, dignity is properly understood in two distinct but

profoundly related modes of existence: 1) as a part of the essential structure of a human’s

existence, and 2) as a task that each human ought seek to accomplish, a task that takes the

particular form of exercising the fundamental option (Regan, 85). Dignity as it relates to

the “essential structure of being” ontologically and morally defines humanity. It is a gift

from the divine that no human action can undermine or efface. It is, in other words,

invulnerable. Dignity as it relates to being a task to be accomplished, however, is

vulnerable, and, in particular, vulnerable to two sources: a) internal threats (threats to the

realization of dignity due to an individual’s own harmful decisions and actions) and b)

external threats (threats to the realization of dignity due to the harmful actions and

decisions of others).

It is in relation to the external threats in particular, Regan argues, that Rahner’s

conception of the fundamental option generates a moral obligation to protect human

beings from those actions, economic situations, cultural values, etc. that can hinder one’s

capacity to say yes to God, which is the means by which each individual accomplishes

the normative “task” of her dignity. Although Rahner does not substantively draw on

rights discourse in his thought, Regan concludes that his theology, in its own way,

provides a justificatory warrant for rights on the grounds of their necessity for protecting

human dignity as he has defined it. As Regan argues, “Theological engagement with the

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boundary discourse of human rights finds that Rahner’s concentration on the human

makes him an important theological companion for such engagement, a companion who

leads us to perceive human rights issues of provision and protection in their radical depth,

linking human rights with the ultimate luminosity of the human person” (Regan, 89).

Looking for Specifics

The combination of Rahner’s own limited discussion of justice with a moral

interpretation of the fundamental option and its implications—as we see in Linanne,

Beste, and Regan—ultimately provides strong grounds for concluding that Rahner does,

indeed, have some kind of operative theory of justice in his theology.2 However, the

question remains of what this theory looks like more specifically both conceptually and

in practice. It is one thing to identify a general orientation to the good of the neighbor; it

is another to identify what that orientation demands in terms of specific, concrete actions.

This is a lacuna in Rahner’s moral theology that those otherwise disposed to defend him

readily acknowledge. As noted, Beste believes she must revise Rahner’s theology to

render it practical for those who have suffered trauma.3 Linnane, in other text, openly

acknowledges that “Rahner’s critics are correct when they argue that he fails to provide a

detailed account of actions and modes of behavior that are paradigmatic of [the]

fundamental option” (Linnane 2007, 165). Another scholar of Rahner who is deeply

sympathetic to his moral theology, Shannon Craigo-Snell, likewise argues in her book,

Silence Love and Death: Saying “Yes” to God in the Theology of Karl Rahner, “[Rahner]

does not offer…concrete norms and guidelines for [specifying the openness and

boundaries of neighbor love]. Given the drastic harms human beings inflict upon one

another, such boundaries are terribly important” (Craigo-Snell, 93). Regan, in turn, does

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not identify which specific rights one might be able to extract from Rahner’s thought; she

only affirms that his theology provides a general theological grounding for human rights

as such.

Where might we be able to look in Rahner’s theology to find these specifics? One

place, as indicated above, to examine the vulnerability and, in particular, inter-personal

vulnerability Rahner attributes to the exercise of the fundamental option.4 Indeed, while

he appears to maintain that the freedom to respond to God is ultimately not utterly

vulnerable to pernicious external influences—that is, an individual’s freedom before God,

in the final analysis, cannot be totally eradicated by an external power (see, for, example

TI 2: 242)—he does, as Beste points out, clearly affirm that such influences can degrade

and undermine the integrity of that freedom. The question is thus: which kind of negative

“influences” might Rahner have in mind? What threatens the fundamental option and

how do we address those threats? Or, put positively: what conditions must be in place to

prevent or redress these influences?

A number of passages in Rahner’s work speak directly to these questions. Take,

for example, the following claim in Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to

the Idea of Christianity

All of man’s experience points in the direction that there are in fact objectifications of personal guilt in the world which, as the material for the free decision of other persons, threaten these decisions, have a seductive effect on them, and make free decisions painful. And since the material of a free decision always becomes an intrinsic element of the free act itself, insofar as even a good free act which is finite does not succeed in transforming this material absolutely and changing it completely, this good act itself always remains ambiguous because of the codetermination of this situation of guilt (Rahner 1978, 109).

Rahner’s clearly affirms in this passage that human sin does not operate in a

vacuum; rather, as a collective atmosphere of guilt, it has the power to harm individual

freedom by tainting every free decision with moral ambiguity. Although all humans are

given the gift of freedom in the supernatural existential, the exercise of freedom in human

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history cannot help but acquire some taint of sin in the categorical. No choice is thus

totally without moral blemish; objectively existing sin in the world effectively

“threatens” freedom and makes it “painful,” in Rahner’s language, because no individual

can act independently of the social structures of which she is ineluctably embedded.

Those who came before us have created “objectifications of personal guilt” within which

we cannot help but participate, and we, as humans, perpetuate and sometimes exacerbate

those structures for future generations. In this sense, sin undermines everyone’s freedom

before God and others.4

The question thus becomes whether sin affects all individuals’ moral freedom

equally or whether certain circumstances might exacerbate the pain of exercising freedom

in particular individual’s lives. Several passages in Rahner’s Theological Investigations

article, “The Dignity and Freedom of Man” suggest the latter, namely that particular

pernicious actions and structures can add insult to injury, as it were, by making the free

choice for God more difficult in specific cases. Rahner argues, for example,

There is no zone which is absolutely inaccessible to [menacing] influences from without. Every ‘external event can be significant and menacing for ultimate salvation of the person, and, is therefore, subject to the law of the dignity of that person who as such can be degraded by some intervention from without (TI 2: 242). As I’ve noted in previous work,5 this passage suggests that external historical events

beyond the objectified presence of original sin in history also have the capacity to pose a

real threat to the exercise of an individual’s fundamental option. Rahner here clearly

acknowledges that particular “events,” as he describes them, can be menacing for the

salvation—which is effected by means of the individual saying “yes” to God—for

particular persons, not only humanity in general. Although he does not elaborate on this

specific point, it is a reasonable extension of Rahner’s reasoning to conclude that

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different external events could potentially affect individuals’ freedom in different ways

and to different degrees, which, in turn, raises the question of what “external events”

Rahner might specifically have in mind.

Two additional passages in the same article provide some clues. Rahner argues,

for example, “Wherever (and insofar as) a certain freedom and security of the material

conditions of life belong to the necessary practical prerequisites of personal freedom,

they are sanctioned by the dignity of human freedom and must be demanded in the name

of this freedom” (TI II: 250). The lack of material resources thus appear to be one form

“event” that can affect an individual’s response to God; indeed, Rahner suggests that they

are a condition for the exercise of freedom itself. Moreover, although Rahner does not

use the word “right” in this context, by claiming that certain resources can be

“demanded” in the name of freedom, he appears to recognize that others, presumably

those with more resources, have an obligation to address any material deficits that

threaten to undermine individuals’ freedom to say yes to God.

Rahner goes on to argue, however, that material deficits alone might not be the

only threats to freedom, and thus the only deficit humans have an obligation to address.

He also writes in the same article,

The personality of [the human]…cannot be relegated to an absolutely internal realm. It requires of necessity a certain space for realizing itself. Such a space, although it is to a certain extent “external” to it (body, earth, economy, sign, symbol, state), is nevertheless essentially necessary and hence must be so constructed that it permits self-realization (TI 2: 240, my emphasis). The “self realization” that Rahner refers to here is the completion of the “task” of each

individual’s dignity, which, in turn, is defined by the exercise of her fundamental option.

As in the previous passage, Rahner affirms that “external” goods are necessary for this

“internal” decision, and specifies them, in this context, as “body,” “earth,” “economy,”

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“sign,” “symbol,” and “state.” Unfortunately, he does not specify precisely what he

means by these external necessities; however, at a minimum, he seems to be recognizing

that the normative exercise of an individual’s fundamental option requires more than

merely adequate material resources. It requires, as he describes it, an adequate “space,”

one that we have an obligation to “construct” for all people.

Filling the Space: The Turn to the Language of Human Capabilities

These passages add additional depth to Rahner’s conception of justice insofar as

they identify, with some specificity, what individuals have an obligation to provide each

other on the grounds of the fundamental option: namely, adequate material resources and

a “space” that provides the conditions for each individual to realize her dignity. This

recognition, in turn, adds additional justification to the claim that Rahner does, indeed,

have a substantive conception of justice in his thought.

However, as noted, his language ultimately remains problematically vague and

undeveloped. Given the stakes involved—ostensibly, lacking material resources and a

suitable space for self-realization can negatively influence an individual’s salvation—

there remains a need to attain greater precision on the conditions necessary for each

individual to choose freely to say “yes” to God. Indeed, Rahner’s recognition of the

intimate relationship between the love of God and the love of neighbor would seem to

demand the same. What, in particular, could “body,” “earth,” “economy,” etc. mean in

relation to the fundamental option?

The language of human capabilities, developed and advanced, in part, by political

theorist, Martha Nussbaum, can help answer this question. Yet before engaging

Nussbaum’s thought and arguing for how it applies to Rahner in this context, it is

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important to establish why such a comparison is warranted given that Nussbaum argues

from a secular perspective and Rahner from a theological one. What common ground

exists that could form the basis for a valid comparison? More pointedly, how is it

justified to use Nussbaum’s thought to clarify Rahner’s?

The answer, I believe, lies in the recognition that both Rahner and Nussbaum

identify human freedom as a foundational human good, not merely one good among

others. Although Nussbaum and Rahner would sharply disagree on the normative

“object” of the individual’s freedom (that is, what the individual ought be freely

choosing), both identify obstacles that inhibit the normative use of freedom as the

primary problem of justice. Justice, as we have seen in Rahner, and will soon see in

Nussbaum, is not merely ensuring that individuals keep contracts (commutative justice)

or that they receive their fair share of goods (distributed justice), but, rather, ensuring that

individuals exist within socio-political and economic environments that allow and enable

them to freely choose to realize their potential as individual human beings. In other

words, both Nussbaum and Rahner see freedom as the defining mark of justice, not

merely resources (like moral philosopher John Rawls’s conception of “primary goods”)

or the satisfaction of preferences (as we see in Utilitarian conceptions of justice). For

both, in short, to be human, in a fundamental sense, is to possess the potential for free

action; for both, to be fully human is to exercise that capacity to its fullest potential.

Yet notwithstanding this common moral vision, it is Nussbaum, I believe, who

provides much greater specificity on what kinds of individual and social obstacles inhibit

freedom and, therefore, what kinds of obstacles we have an obligation to remove by

means of, in her language, enhancing individuals’ “capabilities.” Rahner’s thought can

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thus benefit, I believe, from constructive engagement with Nussbaum, though I will also

note, in the conclusion, how Nussbaum can benefit from an engagement with Rahner, as

well.

Nussbaum has written extensively on capabilities over the course of her career.

One of her most developed expressions comes in her landmark text, Women and Human

Development: The Capabilities Approach. One of the text’s overriding goals is to

demonstrate that moral theorists can speak validly about “universal values,” particularly

as they relate to women, while still recognizing the profound socio-economic, cultural,

linguistic, religious, etc. difference that characterize global human communities (she

relates much of her analysis to her personal research in India). Although she does not

want to limit herself to a purely Kantian or Rawlsian theory of justice, she writes, for

example,

[W]e need only notice that there is a type of focus on the individual person as such that requires no particular metaphysical tradition, and no bias against love and care. It arises naturally from the recognition that each person has just one life to live, not more than one; that the food on A’s plate does not magically nourish the stomach of B; that the pleasure felt in C’s body does not make the pain experienced by D less painful; that the income generated by E’s economic activity does not help to feed and shelter F; in general, that one person’s exceeding happiness and liberty does not magically make another person happy or free….If we combine this observation with the thought…that each person is valuable and worthy of respect as an end, we must conclude that we should look not just to the total or average, but to the functioning of each and every person. We may call this the principle of each person as an end (Nussbaum 2000, 56). For Nussbaum, this recognition of each individual as an end in herself (Nussbaum also

uses the word “dignity” to describe this claim) is a sort of universal intuition—

“universal” in this sense that all people in all cultures should agree to the validity of this

moral viewpoint even if they individually or culturally act otherwise. Each individual, as

human individual, she affirms, deserves equal moral recognition.

The question for Nussbaum thus becomes what is best to way to recognize the

value of all persons given their irreducibly equal moral status. Her answer is to seek to

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protect and enhance each individual’s capabilities. Criticizing both classical utilitarian

and liberal approaches to justice (utilitarianism wrongly looks to aggregate preferences

rather than the individual’s good; liberalism, in turn, wrongly overlooks the importance

of community and social development, including the values of “love” and “care,”

as necessary for the individual’s flourishing), she seeks to establish the capabilities

approach as an alternative. Rather than focusing on resources alone, either aggregately or

in terms of individual possession, capabilities focus on freedoms, and it is attention to

individuals’ freedoms, Nussbaum maintains, that most effectively respond to the moral

obligation to treat them as “ends.” As she explains, “[T]he capabilities approach directs

us to examine real lives in their material and social settings…[Its] central question is not

‘how satisfied is [this person]?’ or even ‘How much in the way of resources is she able

to command?’ It is, instead, ‘What is [she] actually able to do and be?’” (Nussbaum

2000, 71).

On this point, Nussbaum distinguishes between an individual’s “functioning” and

her “capabilities.” An individual’s functioning’s are defined by her “doings” and

“beings”—that is, whether she is educated, whether she is well-fed, whether she is

financially independent, whether she is employed, etc. Capabilities, on the other hand,

refer to the ability or freedom to do or be these things. The extreme ascetic and the

homeless person may, for example, be functioning the same in term of their daily caloric

intake; likewise, the Hollywood trust baby high school drop out and the Appalachian

food-stamp recipient drop out may also be functioning the same in terms of their

educational achievement. However, in both cases, the capabilities between the two are

profoundly different: the ascetic could freely choose to eat more, the homeless person

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likely cannot; the trust baby likely has few, if any, obstacles to finishing high school, the

Appalachian teen likely has many. In other words, the problematic deficit in these cases

is not material (or only material). It is a deficit of freedoms to be and do.

It is for this reason Nussbaum focuses her theory of justice on capabilities rather

than resources. Our obligation is not only to provide resources; it is to enable and

enhance individual freedoms. As she writes, “a necessary condition of justice for a public

political arrangement is that it deliver to citizens a certain basic level of capability. If

people are systematically falling below the threshold in any of these core areas, this

should be seen as situation both unjust and tragic, in need of urgent attention—even if in

other respects things are going well [in society]” (Nussbaum 2000, 71).

The task for Nussbaum is thus to identify and defend a list of “core areas,” as she

describes them, that establish the minimum requirements of justice. In a later article

entitled “Human Dignity and Political Entitlements,” Nussbaum clarifies that these sets

of capabilities all rest on the recognition that they need external support in order for

individuals both to possess and employ them fully. As she writes (referring to

“capabilities” as “capacities” in this context), “human capacities require support from the

world (love, care education, nutrition) if they are to develop internally, and yet other

forms of support from the world if the person is to have opportunities to exercise them (a

suitable political and material environment)” (Nussbaum 2009, 357). In other words,

capabilities may exist inherently as potentialities in individuals; however, the

development and full exercise of these potentialities into their full flourishing form

require both particular actions on behalf of others (e.g., “love,” “care,” “education,” etc.)

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and the right kind of environment for individuals to act within—that is, a just space for

the normative development and realization of individual capabilities.

As noted above, Nussbaum is cognizant of the cultural, religious, geographical,

etc. diversities that can affect how different communities define the good. However, she

maintains that no matter what definition of the good any particular community embraces,

it must seek to develop ten “central” capabilities, as Nussbaum describes them. It is these

ten capabilities that are, in here view, universal. Below is an abbreviated list as they

appear in “Human Dignity and Political Entitlements,” with a brief paraphrased

description of each.

1) Life: being able to live to the end of a human life or normal length (i.e., not dying prematurely).

2) Bodily Health: Being able to have good health, to be adequately nourished, to have adequate shelter

3) Bodily Integrity: being able to move freely from place to place and being secure again bodily assaults

4) Senses, Imagination, and Thought: being able to exercise one’s senses, imagination, and thought, including the capacity of human reason; receiving an education that allows one to engage and develop these capacities to their fullest potential; being able to engage (or not) in religious worship and artistic enterprises.

5) Emotions: being able to form relationships with others; to be in healthy, non-abusive relationships; to be able to be loved and to love.

6) Practical Reason: being able to form one’s own conception of the good and being able to act upon it, which includes freedom of conscience.

7) Affiliation: a) being able to live in community with others, including political communities (that is, living in a nation), which includes freedom of speech and assembly; b) having the social basis for self-respect and non-humiliation, which includes protection against unjust discrimination.

8) Other species: being able to live in relation to the natural world and to demonstrate concern for other forms of life in addition to human life.

9) Play: being able to laugh and engage in leisure and recreational activities. 10) Control of One’s Environment: a) political—being able to participate fully in

political life and influence laws and policies; b) material—being able to hold and enjoy property on an equal basis with others; having the right to seek employment; being secure against unreasonable search and seizure (Nussbaum 2009, 377-378).

Nussbaum stresses that while this list is universal in the meaning of “universal”

specified above, its particular application can take different forms depending on different

contexts. For example, having access to a car may be necessary in some communities

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(such as in very rural communities) in order to participate fully in the life of the

community, while such access may not be necessary in urban environments. Likewise,

not having a computer at home may be a cause for shame in some communities (think of

children who cannot print out school assignments), while, in other communities (for

example, those that still have no electricity), it would be absurd to feel inadequate or

socially excluded for not having a computer. Nevertheless, Nussbaum maintains that it is

the central task of justice to seek to protect and expand these basic capabilities as much as

possible in relation to each individual person and the community she is a part of. As she

concludes in Women and Human Development in reference to the list of core capabilities,

“we aim to create citizens who have these powers and opportunities, as active planners of

their lives and as dignified equals” (Nussbaum 2000, 285).

Making the Fundamental Option Fully Free

This understanding of Nussbaum’s capability theory of justice, though

abbreviated, forms the basis for constructive engagement with Rahner. In particular, I

believe Nussbaum helps clarify and concretize three areas in Rahner’s thought. First, as

noted above, both Nussbaum and Rahner show profound concern for human freedom as a

constitutive good of human life, and both recognize that certain conditions must be

present in order for humans to exercise their freedom to their full potential. Yet, as also

noted, Rahner identifies the need for an external “space”—which includes “body,”

“earth,” “economy,” “sign,” “symbol,” and “state”—as necessary for acting on one’s

freedom unhindered, but does not specify what these conditions might mean or entail.

Nussbaum’s list of capabilities can help provide such specificity. For example, Rahner’s

appeal to “body” could plausibly include Nussbaum’s capabilities for life, bodily health,

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bodily integrity, and, potentially, emotions, as well as control over one’s environment

(e.g., being able to freely move one’s body from place to place). “Earth,” in turn, could

include the capabilities associated with the body (e.g., being well-nourished), but also

with the capabilities of having contact with the natural world itself and with other

species. Likewise, “economy” could include the capabilities associated with bodily

integrity (being able to support oneself financially), and also include the capability of

control over one’s environment (being able to be employed), being able to participate

fully in society, and being secure from unjust forms of discrimination. “Sign” and

“symbol,” in turn, (though perhaps the vaguest of Rahner’s references), could include the

capabilities of sense, imagination, and thought (including practical reason) insofar as one

ought to have the freedom both to appreciate beauty and participate in its creation and to

receive an education that refines and develops these senses, and the capability of

emotion—being able to, in Nussbaum’s words, love, grieve, experience longing,

gratitude, and justified anger (Nussbaum 2009, 377). Finally, “state” could include the

capabilities of affiliation and control over one’s environment, insofar as being a citizen of

a polity ought, from this standpoint, both entitle and enable one to influence government

and civil society and their effects on one’s own life.

By applying the language of capabilities to Rahner’s thought, it becomes clear

that the “material preconditions” he cites as necessary for the exercise of freedom would

not only have to include basic necessities like food, clothing, and shelter; they would also

include the material necessities for the existence and maintenance of the other capabilities

listed above, as well (e.g., the presence of schools for education, a police force for

protection, civic institutions necessary for the proper functioning of representative

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government, perhaps even access to museums, theaters, etc.). In other words, the

capabilities approach helps confirm an insight that is native in Rahner’s thought but also

one he could have made much more explicit: the full development and exercise of human

freedom does not depend on bread alone.

Second and related, Nussbaum helps clarify what Rahner’s conception of “space”

in this context could mean. As noted above, she recognizes that protecting and enhancing

human capabilities requires both concrete individual actions (what she calls “love” and

“care” for example), and a more general environment in which individuals can exercise

their freedoms (what she calls a “suitable political and material environment”). In other

words, the capabilities approach recognizes the importance of just social order, in

addition to the importance of just individual actions, as necessary for the flourishing of

human freedom. As noted above, Rahner has his own view of how greater social forces

and institutions can undermine freedom embedded in his view of sin, which he calls the

“objectification of personal guilt.” However, he does not directly relate his view of sin to

the “space” he recognizes is necessary for the exercise of human freedom. Nussbaum

helps bridge this gap by illuminating how an unsuitable political and material

environment (for example, an unjust economic order or a corrupt political system) can

thwart an individual’s core capabilities. Applied to Rahner’s concept of space, the

implication is that justice requires addressing not only individual acts that undermine

human freedom, but also the objectifications of personal guilt that generate the structure

of sin. Failing to do so denies individuals the space they need to fully exercise their

freedom.

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Third, and closely related, Nussbaum helps clarify what moral obligations a

Rahnerian conception of justice could have in mind in relation to protecting and

advancing human freedom. Given that individuals require a space to realize their freedom

and that that space is vulnerable to both individual and structural injustice, Rahner would

have to be committed to protecting individuals from both particular acts of injustice (for

example, sexual abuse, torture, mugging, etc.) and structural injustice (for example,

systematic discrimination, a lack of access to education or health care, a corrupt

economic order, etc.) in the name of protecting and advancing their freedom. An ethics of

personal virtue construed as individual moral rectitude would thus be insufficient from a

Rahnerian standpoint; as a matter of justice, one must not only refrain from causing

others harm, but also seek to create the conditions that enable them to flourish. This

individual and social ethic is present in Rahner’s thought; however, Nussbaum’s

emphasis on the necessity of both in relation to the protection and development of

capabilities helps make it more explicit and concrete.

In short, Nussbaum helps fill the lacuna in Rahner’s theory of justice by giving

specific examples of what conditions might be necessary for acting with authentic

freedom, freedom uninhibited by individual and social forms of harm that can undermine

its exercise. In other words, given that the exercising the fundamental option is an act of

freedom in saying yes to God, Nussbaum helps specify what obstacles we ought seek to

remove so the choice for or against God can be truly free. To wit: we ought to seek to

create a “space” in which an individual has bodily integrity and health; a space in which

she can develop her senses, her imagination, and her capacity to think and reason,

including reasoning about the nature of God, the good, and the dictates of her own

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conscience; a space in which she is able to love and be loved; a space in which she can be

in community with others, speak her mind, freely worship, and be respected; a space in

which she can be in relation with the diversity of God’s creation in the form of the natural

world; a space of Sabbath where she can play and rest; and, finally, a place where she can

participate fully in political, economic, and social life. It is our collective and individual

responsibility to create this kind of world, Nussbaum helps illuminate, for it is this kind

of world in which the individual can be as free as possible to say yes to God’s offer of

self. It is this kind of world, that is, in which one is most free to complete the task of her

dignity rooted in the supernatural existential but carried out and realized in the

categorical: to love God and neighbor.

Conclusion: Returning the Favor—A Rahnerian Response to Nussbaum

As noted above, I believe this application of Nussbaum’s thought to Rahner is

warranted because of the centrality of freedom to Rahner’s moral theology in the form of

the fundamental option and because of the specific passages cited above in which he

recognizes a problematic vulnerability of the fundamental option to external influences.

Nussbaum, I have sought to argue, helps clarify what those influences might be and how

we might effectively address them. She helps fill out what a Rahnerian conception of

justice looks like in more detail, including specifying what moral obligations we have

both as individuals and as societies. As argued earlier, Rahner has his own theory of

justice that emerges from the implications of his own theological arguments; the

importation of Nussbaum’s secular understanding of capabilities only enhances that

theory. As the coiner of the “anonymous Christian,” he would likely not object to

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receiving a little help from his non-Christian friends in seeking to explain how to build a

world that more closely resembles the Kingdom of God.

As a concluding point, however, I want to emphasize that I do not think that

Nussbaum’s capability theory ought replace or otherwise eclipse Rahner’s conception of

justice. The constructive comparison goes both ways. Nussbaum has something to learn,

and gain, too. As noted above, Nussbaum believes that her moral theory is “universal”;

yet she also believes that she does not need to engage in metaphysics to justify that claim.

At the same time, she does not appear to be rejecting metaphysics on the Kantian grounds

that we cannot know noumena, or things in and of themselves, and so must turn to the

structure of rationality itself in order to derive our moral norms. Indeed, she seems to

believe that we can know something about things in and of themselves, insofar as she

identifies an affinity between capability theory and Aristotelianism in that both, in her

view, see the problem of justice as one of doing and being (and thus not a mere matter of

Kantian duty) and of seeking to realize individuals’ full potential (see, for example,

Nussbaum 2010, 360-362). In this respect, her view of justice is teleological; the

normative human life should be one headed in a particular direction, specifically the

direction of developing enhanced capabilities for all human beings.

And yet, she also affirms that individuals are under no obligation to choose

certain goods with those capabilities; in other words, the good is defined by having,

developing, and exercising capabilities themselves, not on the objects one chooses with

those capabilities. Presumably, as long as one does not use one’s capabilities to limit the

capabilities of others, one’s choice is morally permissible. That, in turns, sounds a lot like

Kantianism, which profoundly disagrees with Aristotelianism on ontological,

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epistemological, and moral grounds. So one potential problem with Nussbaum’s

capability theory is whether it is internally coherent. It is not clear how she can walk the

line between a teleological empiricism (Aristotle), which is based upon the realization of

a particular good in human life (in his view, becoming engaged in the life of the polis and

contemplating the unmoved mover), and a Kantian rejection of any “external” good at all

as the basis of morality. She rejects that society should impose any “comprehensive

doctrine” of the good, calling it “soul rape” (Nussbaum 2010, 36), yet wants to maintain

that “core capabilities” are “universal.”

Nussbaum’s response to the charge of possible inconsistency appears to be an

appeal to what she calls an “overlapping consensus.” She is not seeking to pick a

metaphysical vs. non-metaphysical fight, only seeking to identify practical principles for

helping advance the cause of justice. As she writes in reference to her list of core

capabilities, for example, “The list represents the result of years of cross-cultural

discussion and comparisons…Thus it already represents what it proposes: a type of

overlapping consensus on the part of people with otherwise different views of human

life” (Nussbaum 2000, 76, author’s emphasis). One could certainly ask just how

widespread and overlapping this consensus is in reality. A quick look at any number of

contemporary human conflicts provides depressing counter evidence to the claim that this

list is universal, at least from an empirical perspective (which is precisely what an

overlapping consensus depends upon).

Nussbaum’s theory of justice could, therefore, benefit from engaging a more

Rahnerian analysis of the condition for the possibility of the human good itself, an

analysis that engages all levels of philosophical and theological inquiry (e.g., ontology,

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epistemology, anthropology, etc). This may help Nussbaum find a more solid foundation

for her theory of justice than “consensus.” She may want to reject Rahner’s theology as

an example of a “comprehensive doctrine,” but she is still left with the questions of 1)

why her theory of justice is not “comprehensive” and 2) how any theory of justice can be

universal if it is not “comprehensive” in the sense of appealing to a set of truth claims

that one actually takes to be true.

However, let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that we can, with Nussbaum,

sidestep metaphysical debates with regards to the ground of justice and focus with

coming up with a list that many, if not most people, can agree are important freedoms.

We are still left with the problem of moral motivation, or a response to the question, in

the context of Nussbaum’s argument: why seek to protect and enhance others’ abilities,

especially those of the most vulnerable who likely have nothing to offer in return? The

problem of moral motivation is an old one, going back at least as far as Socrates and

Thrasymachus in The Republic, but it is of central importance here. Nussbaum clearly

argues, as cited above, that protecting and advancing capabilities requires “love” and

“care.” But why love or care for the neighbor at all? Why be moral in the way that she

has defined morality?

It is not clear how Nussbaum does or can answer this question from her secular

standpoint. From an empirical perspective, perhaps she can identify a human capability

for love, but it is not clear why we should exercise it, especially in relation to the

otherwise anonymous people whom we probably do not and cannot love in the sense of

feeling affection for. And, indeed, it is certainly not clear why we should exercise it for

those who actively seek to do us harm—that is, our enemies. In short, Nussbaum’s theory

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leaves a gaping moral lacuna on the question of how we can move from the observation

that people can love and do love to the moral injunction “people ought love”—especially

people far removed from our lives geographically, religiously, culturally, etc. On this

point, too, she ultimately seems to be relying on an “overlapping consensus” not only for

identifying what people should do but also why they should do it, implicitly affirming

that humans, cross culturally, generally agree that we ought to love and care for our

neighbors. Again, such a claim stretches the limits of empirical credulity, especially when

we begin testing who, exactly, defines one’s neighbors for different cultural communities.

For Rahner, on the other hand, the answer to the question of moral motivation is

clear. Recall that to say “yes” to God necessarily includes saying “yes” to the good of the

neighbor in the form of seeking the neighbor’s good. And the “neighbor,” he makes clear,

is every person. As he writes in The Love of Jesus and the Love of Neighbor,

There is no love of God that is not, in itself, already a love neighbor; and love for God only comes to its own identity through its fulfillment in a love for neighbor. Only one who loves his or her neighbor can know who God actually is. And only one who ultimately loves God…can manage unconditionally to abandon himself or herself to another person, and not make that person the means of his or her own self assertion (Rahner 1985, 71).

For Rahner, human freedom is a foundational good, but it is not the foundational

good. God is. Indeed, God is both the ground of freedom’s existence and the normative

goal of its exercise. The culminating object of every act of human freedom, bound into

one final decision of the fundamental option, is to surrender oneself to God as one’s

creator and highest good. And this surrender, he emphasizes in the passage above,

necessarily entails abandoning oneself to the good of the neighbor, not as a means of

“self assertion” (that is, loving the neighbor because one gets something pleasurable or

beneficial from the relationship), but rather for the sake of the neighbor’s good itself. To

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love God, in other words, is to love the neighbor unconditionally. To say “yes” to God is

to say “yes” to the neighbor precisely in recognition of the neighbor’s “otherness.”

This, for Rahner, is why we care about the neighbor’s freedom. This is why we

care about seeking to create the space for that freedom’s normative realization. This is, in

short, why we talk about “justice” at all. To be sure, Nussbaum has much to teach Rahner

about what kind of obstacles can undermine freedom. But Rahner, in the end, has just as

much to teach Nussbaum about why we should worry about those obstacles in the first

place, especially when they are not our own.

Notes

1 I am indebted to the Karl Rahner Society’s 2016 “call to papers” for the Catholic Theological Society of America (CTSA) annual meeting for identifying these specific articles in relation to Rahner’s conception of justice. 2 Two other relatively recent articles also explore Rahner’s conception of justice, though they focus more on explaining how his thought helps address concrete moral problems, rather than seeking to describe his theory of justice itself. They are Nancy Dallavalle’s “Gender Issues in Light of Rahner’s Theological Perspective” (Dallavalle 2014) and Carmichael Peters’s “A Rahnerian Reading of Black Rage” (Peters 2003). 3 Beste recognizes that Rahner understands that the exercise of the one’s freedom to say “yes” to God is vulnerable to interpersonal harm. Drawing on trauma theory, her critique of Rahner is that he does not adequately recognize the depth to which interpersonal harm can undermine individual freedom as it relates to the fundamental option. I do not mean to take a position on Beste’s critique in this paper. I only mean to recognize, as she does, that Rahner sees human freedom as vulnerable, which, I believe, lays the foundation for identifying a theory of justice in his thought. In other words, this article is not seeking to ask and answer the question “Is Rahner’s theory of justice good?” but, rather, “What is Rahner’s theory of justice?” Beste, in contrast, primarily focuses her analysis on the first question. 4 For an interesting treatment on the vulnerability of freedom in relation to the problem of concupiscence in Rahner’s thought, see Dennis Jowers’s article in The Heythrop Journal, “A Conflict Between Freedom and Concupiscence: A Difficulty for the Anthropology of Karl Rahner” (Jowers, 2012). Jowers argues that concupiscence does, indeed, limit human freedom, but that those limitations do not contradict Rahner’s conception of freedom as one in which individuals have the capacity of “self-mastery” in the exercise of the fundamental option. 5 This particular analysis is derived from another essay I wrote on the vulnerability and invulnerability of human freedom as it relates to the fundamental option entitled “The

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Relevance of Karl Rahner’s View of Human Dignity for the Catholic Social Thought Tradition” (see Petrusek 2015).

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