If you followed the firestorm on twitter that sprang up after Jesse Myerson published this Rolling Stone piece last weekend, you likely heard a number of responses from the opposing side claiming more or less the following: give it up, nobody owes you anything. (There was also quite a lot of inside-joke hashtagging with #fullcommunism, which was probably as responsible for the froth as the suggested reforms themselves!)

That maxim, that nobody owes anyone anything, is actually advanced as one of the precepts evincing the moral superiority of free-market capitalism. Here’s Ben Shapiro, explaining that view:

So what is the moral case for capitalism? It lies in recognition that socialism isn’t a great idea gone wrong — it’s an evil philosophy in action. It isn’t driven by altruism; it’s driven by greed and jealousy. Socialism states that you owe me something simply because I exist. Capitalism, by contrast, results in a sort of reality-forced altruism: I may not want to help you, I may dislike you, but if I don’t give you a product or service you want, I will starve. Voluntary exchange is more moral than forced redistribution.

Let’s break this down in a Christian ethical framework, in order to answer the question: do I owe you anything?

In Shapiro’s framework, two scenarios are posed in contrast. There is socialism, which states that people are owed things by virtue of being people. Then there is capitalism, which states that people do not owe one another anything, though their wills may interact in such a way that all may benefit. According to Shapiro, this latter scenario is preferable to the former because it is totally voluntary, that is, it maximizes freedom.

In this case, freedom is the telos. By telos, I mean goal or end. Freedom, in Shapiro’s frame, is an end or goal in and of itself, and that is why maximizing it creates the greatest good. So in order to maximize freedom, we need to dissolve claims on one another, since those claims either demand or limit action. This is why Shapiro does not believe people owe one another anything: in his world, those claims reduce freedom and thus decrease goodness.

But is it the case in Christianity that the good is accomplished when the human will is allowed maximal operation, unencumbered by anything outside itself? No. I’ll turn now to German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who I choose because he wrote a great deal about freedom, and had a very developed sense of its place in Christian life. This is the way Bonhoeffer describes the use and meaning of freedom within the Christian context in his Ethics:

“The commandment of God is permission. It differs from all human laws in that it commands freedom. It is by overcoming this contradiction that it shows itself to be God’s commandment; the impossible becomes possible, and that which lies beyond the range of what can be commanded, liberty, is the true object of its commandment. That is the high price of God’s commandment; it is no cheaper than that. Permission and liberty do not mean God now after all allows man a domain in which he can act according to his own choice, free from the commandment of God, but this permission and liberty arise solely from the commandment of God itself. They are possible only through and in the commandment of God; they are never detached from God; it is still always God’s permission, and it is only as such that it gives freedom from the torment of anxiety in the face of each particular decision and deed; it is only as such that it gives the certainty of personal accomplishment and of guidance by the divine command.”

Now we see that the definition of freedom that belongs to Shapiro and the definition of real freedom expressed in Christianity differ widely. Freedom in the Christian sense is a freedom from those things which encumber us: sin, anxiety, helplessness, death. It frees us precisely in that it sets us up to fulfill our true purpose as intended by God, and our purpose is not to arbitrarily express our human wills. Instead our purpose is to express God’s will. Any other freedom is a false one, a pale imitator. (This is not to say that human creativity and activity have no place in the Christian matrix of morality, but that maximizing the expression of purely human will for its own sake is not the final evaluation.)

So then, is it a part of God’s will for us that we owe one another things merely by nature of being fellow humans? Bonhoeffer goes on:

“The fact that responsibility is fundamentally a matter of deputyship is demonstrated most clearly in those circumstances in which a man is directly obliged to act in the place of other men, for example as a father, as a statesman or as a teacher…He is not an isolated individual, but he combines in himself the selves of a number of human beings. Any attempt to live as if he were alone is a denial of the actual fact of his responsibility… Jesus was not the individual, desiring to achieve a perfection of his own, but He lived only as the one who has taken up into Himself and who bears within Himself the selves of all men. All His living, His action and His dying was deputyship. In Him there is fulfilled what the living, the action and the suffering of men ought to be. In this real deputyship which constitutes His human existence He is the responsible person par excellence.”

Jesus, as an exemplar of humanity, lived totally within his responsibility to humankind, and that responsibility is inherent in God’s will. You can’t escape it: to be human is to inherit this responsibility, and if you don’t meet it, it doesn’t mean that it does not exist. It can therefore really be said in the Christian sense that no human person is an island, isolated from claims on and claims placed by others. To be in this together is written into our very being.

Now, we can argue about what our responsibility to one another entails, but it’s not hard to look again to the example of Jesus and see the right direction. (Bonhoeffer has a somewhat unfinished — or at least regrettably unfulfilled — theory of rights along these lines, which he views as being entwined with and predicating responsibilities.) Did Jesus require a good or service from anyone to prevent them from starving? He didn’t. Did he request payment for his miracles? Never. He never told us not to expect to be paid for work, and of course we should be: but we should also recognize that work itself, that the economy and the state themselves, are to be placed in service of the responsibility we have to one another. If we can use any of those things, therefore, to meet our responsibilities, then we should do so.

There are, of course, completely reasonable situations that exist between free-market capitalist situations like the kind Shapiro imagines and ‘full communism.’ We’re free to be creative here, and to use our intelligence and creativity to come up with practices that serve our responsibilities. But our intention itself — that is, the expression of human will, unencumbered by any outside reality — is not the purpose of humankind, and to try to create a pale and vitiated ‘freedom’ by dissolving our responsibilities to one another is to turn totally away from God.

Thanks for reading. You can keep up with me on twitter!