It’s in You: Structural Sin and Personal Responsibility Revisited

Introduction

In 1983, the infamous feminist critic Andrea Dworkin gave a talk about rape to an auditorium full of self-declared feminist men. Characteristically, she refused to allow them any cover. She spoke first about the pervasiveness, the inescapability, of men’s power over women. She reminded them that ‘the power exercised by men day to day in life is power that is institutionalized’—protected by law, by religion, by universities, by the police. ¹ But she refused to let them think that the real problem was confined to those institutions. ‘The problem is that you think it’s out there: and it’s not out there. It’s in you. The pimps and the warmongers speak for you.’ ²

Dworkin spent most of her career making this basic point. The violent power of men over women cannot be localized or contained; it suffuses everything from the abstract structure of our legal system to the secret fantasies that play in our minds. It was a point that made her many enemies wherever she went, in part because it seems so utterly fatalistic: there is no refuge from a problem that runs as deep as this. ³

This is an article about structural sin, not about Andrea Dworkin, but I begin with Dworkin because she gives voice to the moral instinct I want to explore. It is, I think, an essentially Augustinian instinct: ‘The problem is that you think it’s out there: and it’s not out there. It’s in you.’ I want to argue that structural sin ought to be understood as something internal to agents, not just external to them, and that we remain responsible for its distortions nonetheless. I thus hope to join the recent efforts of a number of other theologians—I will give special attention to the work of Julie Hanlon Rubio, Daniel Finn, and Ryan Darr—to give a fresh account of the place of the individual in, and the nature of individual responsibility for, structural sin.

To begin, I will revisit John Paul II’s classic articulation of the problem of responsibility in relation to structural sin. While affirming his basic insistence that structural sin does not undermine our capacity for free human action, I will argue that John Paul—along with some other more recent interpreters—tends wrongly to understand structural sin as something only external to human agents. Calling on various theorists of social structures, but especially Pierre Bourdieu, I will suggest instead that we think about structural sin as inhering not just in policies or institutions or social roles but also in the embodied habits of knowing and willing the good that constitute human agency itself. In the final section, I will propose a different way of understanding personal responsibility, derived from the work of Judith Butler, that explains what it might mean to own up to structural distortions of my agency that I did not consciously choose.

The Problem of Responsibility

Just a few years after Andrea Dworkin gave her speech, Pope John Paul II published Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, the second of his great social encyclicals. Most of the document was devoted to elaborating the meaning of ‘development’—a central concept in Paul VI’s earlier letter, Populorum Progressio—for the latter days of the Cold War. But towards the end of the encyclical, while describing the obstacles that then stood in the way of authentic human development, John Paul invoked an idea with a different provenance: ‘It is important to note therefore that a world which is divided into blocs, sustained by rigid ideology, and in which instead of interdependence and solidarity different forms of imperialism hold sway, can only be a world subject to structures of sin.’ ⁴

The language of ‘structures of sin’ came not from earlier popes or councils but from the Latin American bishops and the controversial writings of Latin American liberation theologians, so John Paul used it gingerly. ⁵ The particular difficulty in the idea had to do with what it meant to call a structure ‘sinful’ in the first place. John Paul had insisted in an earlier letter, called Reconciliatio et Paenitentia, that ‘sin, in its proper sense, is always a personal act, since it is an act of freedom on the part of an individual person and not properly a group or community’. He even went so far as to say that ‘a situation—or likewise an institution, a structure, society itself—is not the subject of moral acts. Hence a situation cannot in itself be good or bad.’ ⁶ People are the subjects of moral acts. People are good or bad. We build structures, and their moral quality depends entirely on what we put into them. He maintains that affirmation in Sollicitudo. It is right to call some structures sinful, he says, only because they are ‘rooted in personal sin’—introduced, consolidated, and maintained by individual human actions. The structure is not sinful in itself. Its sinfulness is derivative.

The danger of the language of structural sin, John Paul thought, was that it could lead people to lose sight of their own responsibility. As he put it in Reconciliatio, the language of social sin can lead ‘more or less unconsciously to the watering down and almost the abolition of personal sin’. He developed his exhortation in one of the most moving paragraphs of the whole letter: every case of social sin, he insisted,

is a case of the very personal sins of those who cause or support evil or who exploit it; of those who are in a position to avoid, eliminate or at least limit certain social evils but who fail to do so out of laziness, fear or the conspiracy of silence, through secret complicity or indifference; of those who take refuge in the supposed impossibility of changing the world and also of those who sidestep the effort and sacrifice required, producing specious reasons of higher order. The real responsibility, then, lies with individuals. ⁷

We need the language of structures of sin to remind us that our sins have effects far beyond our immediate awareness, and to remind us of the magnitude of the moral obstacles we face. But we can never forget that it is we who made these structures, and we who must unmake them.

With these comments, John Paul staked out a clear position on a vexing question: are individuals responsible for structural sin? An emphatic yes is critical, he thinks, for avoiding a slow descent into moral helplessness in the face of the massive, impersonal, seemingly impregnable forces and patterns of social life. I agree entirely, as I think almost all Christian ethicists would. I am reminded of Serene Jones’s emphasis in Feminist Theory and Christian Theology on the rhetorical function of the doctrine of sin: it must be explained in a way that encourages neither despair nor pride. ⁸ The language of structural sin can have the effect of disempowering and exculpating individuals by locating the moral problem at the level of a vague and unaccountable group.

But it is not hard to understand why someone might want to deny the proposition. The sinful structures that shape my life precede me and transcend me. I have laughably little power to change them. If denying individual responsibility for structural sin is a temptation to despair, so is affirming it—because it sets before each person a Sisyphean (not to mention Pelagian) task. And what is more, affirming too quickly that individuals shape the structures they inhabit overlooks the extent to which those structures shape individuals.

It is clear, reading between the lines, that John Paul was aware of such objections. He certainly affirms that structures of sin exercise an ‘influence’ over human action. ⁹ And in fact, his most common examples of structures of sin are examples of shared vices—the desire for profit or power, for example—that might be understood to pre-reflectively shape our view of the world (though John Paul never comes out and says that they do). Yet, even in the midst of defending him on this point, Gregory Baum admits that John Paul’s comments ‘are not as sensitive as the teaching of Medellín to the unconscious, nonvoluntary dimension of social sin’. ¹⁰

The reason for that insensitivity, I think, is because his driving concern was to insist on personal responsibility for structural sin, and for him that meant above all insisting that human beings remain free in the face of the determining power of society. Ultimately, structural sin is imagined as a kind of outside pressure or constraint—he repeatedly calls it an ‘obstacle’ in Sollicitudo—on the individual person. Structural sin is ‘the accumulation and concentration of many personal sins’, ¹¹ something built and maintained by personal sins, but something finally external to and other than the free human person. ¹²

Externalizing Structural Sin

Part of the difficulty with the language of ‘structural sin’ is that it depends on the metaphor of ‘social structure’, and as Daniel Finn has pointed out recently, theologians are rarely clear about what they mean by that metaphor. ¹³ For that matter, neither are social scientists: ‘If social scientists find it impossible to do without the term “structures”’, William Sewell writes, ‘we also find it nearly impossible to define it adequately.’ ¹⁴

It is useful to remember, first of all, that ‘structure’ is in fact a metaphor. It is an image that encourages us to think of society as a kind of physical frame, as a kind of architecture, as something we build and then inhabit. It is meant to call attention to the shared and enduring dimensions of human life and experience. It captures quite well the defining paradox of the modern experience of social life: that societies are made, not fixed or given, but are surprisingly difficult to unmake. They are artificial but sturdy. But the image also tempts us to see the dynamics of social life as something ‘out there’, separate from the human beings who constitute and perform them. Structural sin comes to be understood as sin that somehow attaches to this other, impersonal frame, however defined. But these are implications of the metaphor that we ought to resist. ‘The problem is that you think it’s out there: and it’s not out there. It’s in you.’

John Paul, it seems to me, falls prey to this temptation. Although he never offers his own direct definition of social structures, his clean distinction between personal and structural sin makes it clear that he thinks of structures as by definition ‘impersonal’. Just before the publication of Sollicitudo, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith did offer a direct definition of social structures that I think John Paul would have found amenable: social structures are ‘sets of institutions and practices . . . which orientate or organize economic, social, or political life’. ¹⁵ This sort of identification of structures with institutions and practices, with the impersonal social architecture of our lives, remains the default understanding in moral theology.

For example, two of the most helpful recent proposals for thinking about the relationship between personal and structural sin have come from Julie Hanlon Rubio and Daniel Finn. Both of them improve on John Paul’s account by being more concrete about what a social structure is and how it personally implicates individual agents without compromising their freedom. Yet their accounts too, I want to suggest, reflect the power of the temptation to externalize structural sin.

In two recent essays, Rubio has suggested that theologians develop the old Catholic manualist language of ‘cooperation with evil’ to talk about personal responsibility for structural sin. ¹⁶ The manualists talked about cooperation in mostly individual terms—helping someone else do a bad thing—but Rubio thinks the idea can be pressed into service for social ethics as well. What contemporary social ethics brings to the table is an awareness of the social complexity of human actions. An action is rarely simply ‘mine’. Most actions depend on actions others have already taken and enable others to take further action. Thus the moral meaning of my action can never be a matter solely of what I intend by performing it; it is also a matter of how my action participates in these wider networks of action. ¹⁷ An action that is innocent in itself might be counted as sinful by virtue of other actions in which it cooperates. Buying a new shirt from a particular store or manufacturer, to use Rubio’s main example in her earlier essay, might cooperate in unjust labor practices. Rubio argues that we have duties of both noncooperation with and active resistance against these kinds of structures of sin.

Rubio does not try to theorize social structures in these essays, except to affirm that ‘sinful social structures can be formal (e.g., legal, institutional, political, or economic) or informal (e.g., language, customs, or social roles)’. ¹⁸ But her account of cooperation seems to imply a notion of social structures as consisting crucially, though not exclusively, in these networks of interdependent human action, and more concretely in the practices and institutions that mediate and direct those networks. Structural sin lives in the supply chain, we might say. Participating in the supply chain—as everyone must—implicates us in the actions of others.

This account of cooperation is not meant to stand as a comprehensive account of structural sin, so it is no critique of Rubio to say that it does not say everything that needs to be said. The virtue of Rubio’s proposal is its concreteness. It improves considerably on John Paul’s by helping us see structural sin as the tangible work of a society, of people working in concert, not just the cumulative effect of individual actions. And it makes concretely clear how something I do in my own sphere for my own perfectly innocent purposes might be caught up in a grander evil than I realize. But in focusing on the practical and material networks of human interdependence, real and important as they are, we are still clearly focusing on what is ‘out there’ rather than ‘in you’. Accounting for structural sin in terms of cooperation with evil (language that inevitably treats the evil as external) does not give us many tools for talking about how structural sin influences or even deforms the individual human being from within.

Daniel Finn has recently advocated a different way of accounting for the relationship between individuals and social structures, drawing on the analytical language of the critical realism school of sociology. ¹⁹ Finn actually does set out, unlike Rubio, to offer an explicit theory of social structures, and in particular to explain the causal power that structures have on individual action. As Finn and the critical realists understand them, social structures are emergent realities, dependent on but irreducible to the individual actions that give them rise. Although they are unobservable in themselves, they operate according to their own rules and exert a real power over those who participate in them.

For Finn, following Douglas Porpora, social structures should be understood primarily as ‘systems of human relations among social positions’. ²⁰ He gives the example of the relationship between teacher and student: those roles pre-exist the individuals who occupy them and affect their behavior, such that when I walk into the classroom as a teacher I have strong reasons to act in certain ways rather than others—to stand at the front of the room rather than sitting at the back, to project authority rather than admit ignorance, to have a plan for our meeting rather than asking the students what they want to do. They do not force me to do anything in particular, of course; I am in principle free to disregard them. But those roles confront me with certain ‘restrictions, enablements, and incentives’ ²¹ that will play a critical role in my decision-making.

We can speak of structural sin, then, ‘when the restrictions, enablements, and incentives those persons encounter encourage morally evil actions’. ²² In keeping with John Paul II, social structures are thus called sinful only derivatively—though the path of derivation has been reversed. John Paul said that social structures are sinful because sinful human beings made them; Finn says that social structures are sinful because they incite human beings to sin. But neither believes that social structures are sinful in themselves, since they are not persons and have no immediate causal power. Social structures are still understood as wholly external realities. They influence us in the same way a large rock in our path influences us—a brute fact of our social landscape that we have no choice but to contend with. So even as Finn does provide more language than John Paul does for talking about how structural sin influences us from without, he does not provide language for talking about how structural sin shapes us from within. Structural sin remains ‘out there’.

All three of these authors—John Paul, Rubio, and Finn—are struggling mightily to maintain a clear space of autonomy in the face of structural sin, a point of personal leverage against it. The structures that surround us might be immense, intimidating, intricate; they might mask themselves in the normalcy of things; they might for any number of reasons be very difficult to recognize and resist. But they are nonetheless not me. I remain myself, a free human being, apart from them and against them. That is why it is reasonable to say that I remain responsible for them.

In other words, these accounts of structural sin are emphatically non-deterministic, which of course any Christian account of human life must be. Finn is right to say that theology must not bind itself to any social theory that does not ‘appreciate the radical character of human freedom’. ²³ But too libertarian an account of freedom—one that ignores what Gregory Baum calls the ‘unconscious, nonvoluntary, quasi-automatic dimension of social sin’, ²⁴ or what I would call the dispositional or habitual dimension of structural sin—does justice neither to the actual experience of our sinfulness nor to the subtleties of social theory. ²⁵

Internalizing Structural Sin

Rubio is right to suggest that our embeddedness and participation in unjust structures constitutes a kind of cooperation with evil. And Finn is right to call attention to the way the social positions we inhabit can encourage or constrain moral action. But by conceiving of structural sin entirely in these external ways, they never arrive at a rigorous accounting of its internal dimensions, the way the structures we inhabit reshape us from within. And it is the internal dimensions of structural sin that I find most challenging, particularly when it comes to the question of personal responsibility.

Consider what it is like, for example, to live in a society structured by consumer capitalism. I am undoubtedly implicated in the kinds of injustices Rubio is naming every time I go to the grocery store, and I am incentivized to buy things I do not need in order to meet the demands of my social position as a bourgeois professor, as Finn says I am. But the problem runs much deeper than that. I have been taught not to know or even care to know how that food made it to the grocery store to begin with, and I instinctively desire the trappings of that bourgeois life. I have also been trained subjectively to see value primarily in terms of money; I have been trained to reduce all things to their exchange value. The problem is not just that I live in an objectively capitalist society, but that I am subjectively a capitalist, whether I like it or not (and I do not). That training has been so deep and so thorough that most of us cannot recognize it all. It has utterly transformed my knowledge and desire. Even those of us who do recognize it, and who try to fight it, are constantly discovering new depths of our entanglement.

Or consider the practice of contemporary science. As Paul Scherz has recently argued, the nature of scientific work today is such that it forms those who perform it as a certain kind of moral subject—one he dubs the ‘scientist entrepreneur’. ²⁶ The scientist entrepreneur is competitive, short-sighted, and secretive, as she must be in order to participate in the market-driven economy of scientific knowledge. The ethical problems in contemporary science are not only institutional or legal (though there are plenty of those problems too). The laws could be changed and the problem would remain, because the scientists themselves have come to see themselves and their craft in an entrepreneurial way. They have become a certain kind of person. It is only by means of a Foucauldian or Stoic care of the self, Scherz suggests, a deliberate moral practice of self-making, that the ‘structural’ issues in modern science might be overcome. ²⁷

Or consider the example of racist microaggressions. George Yancy often describes what he calls the ‘elevator effect’: a Black man enters an elevator, a white woman clutches her purse more tightly. ²⁸ The white woman is not implicated here in any complex networks of human action, and she is not responding to incentives inherent in her social position. She is afraid, perhaps even unconsciously afraid, because she has internalized the racist perceptions of her society. It is the same fear that led Darren Wilson to say of Michael Brown, defending his murder, ‘it looks like a demon’. ²⁹ Racism, as structural sin, is not reducible to racist policies or racist distributions of wealth, though it certainly includes those things; the structure of racism is also constituted by this flash of white fear. That is why Chester Pierce, the psychologist who coined the concept of microaggressions, says that ‘it is difficult, if not impossible, for a black to understand how a white, particularly a privileged white, can exhibit offensive micro-aggressions without considering himself a murderer’. ³⁰ It is not that a momentary display of fear is by itself equivalent to murder, but that this fear belongs integrally to the wider system of oppression that routinely destroys Black lives. This fear is structural sin. ³¹

I am not suggesting that recent Christian ethicists are unaware of this internal dimension of structural sin. Far from it. Two especially useful attempts to grapple with the habituating power of structural sin come, unsurprisingly, from thinkers more deeply engaged in the tradition of virtue ethics: Daniel Daly and Katie Grimes. Daly has proposed that we think not simply of structures of sin but of ‘structures of virtue and vice’, that is, structures that train us in habits of acting that promote or discourage the human good. ³² These sorts of habits become, in Aristotelian or Thomist terms, second nature to us. Daly even affirms in a more recent essay that ‘structures influence practices that, when enacted, become the practitioner’ ³³ —the strongest (and to my ears, the most satisfying) affirmation of the subjective side of structural sin to come out of the critical realism school, though he does not develop the claim. ³⁴ Grimes has critiqued ‘white privilege’ discourse for externalizing racism in exactly the way we have done implicitly for structural sin in general. She says that many ethicists ‘situate racial evil as an entity existing outside of the white subject’, whereas ‘in truth, whites do not simply collaborate with and benefit from racial evil; it lives within them, and they enact it directly with their bodies and not just through their interactions with structures’. ³⁵ She argues that we ought to think of what she calls ‘antiblackness supremacy’ as a matter of the habituation of a corporate body. I am deeply sympathetic with both of these projects.

Daly and Grimes have named the internal, subjective dimensions of structural sin more clearly than any other recent ethicists I know of, and I am sure that other thinkers who have not addressed these dimensions in their published writing would still agree wholeheartedly that structural sin has profound and meaningful internal effects. My argument is simply that their accounts of those effects are hampered by an overly ‘objectivist’ account of what social structures, and thus structural sin, are. Grimes makes this plain when, responding to Daly, she explicitly sets the language of structures aside. ‘Calling these phenomena “structures” is rhetorically confusing’, she says: ‘How can a “structure” inhere within the human person?’ ³⁶ But it is only confusing if we have already defined ‘structures’ as something impersonal and extrinsic to human agency, which (as I will explain further in a moment) I think is a mistake. Daly’s turn in his more recent work towards a critical realist account of social structures sits uncomfortably, in my judgment, with his powerful idea of structures as ‘second nature’. ³⁷ Structural virtue or vice as second nature is a much stronger, and I think more accurate, way of describing the causal power of social structures than to say that they offer us ‘restrictions, enablements, and incentives’.

There are two main reasons it is critical to think of structural sin as something internal to the human being, rather than something external that subsequently affects or influences us. First of all, as Daly and Grimes are arguing, it better describes our actual moral experience. I have certainly experienced the sorts of moral incentives or restrictions that the critical realists describe, and I recognize the complex entanglements of action that Rubio brings into focus. But as I have said, what troubles me most is the ways that those structures have made their way into my own subjective patterns of knowing and willing the good. I recognize my own agency as structured, and the language of structural sin ought to account for that. And second, it helps us to notice and account for the homology between the shape of my own moral agency and the shape of the moral communities I am part of. It is on this second point that even Daly and Grimes do not say all that needs to be said. My agency is itself structured, and that structure is of a piece with the ‘objective’ structures of society. To draw a sharp line between the structures ‘out there’ in the world and the habits ‘in you’ is to underestimate the power of the structures themselves and to misunderstand their relationship to our moral lives. ³⁸

I do not think it is necessary or wise for theology to bind itself too tightly to a particular theory of social structures, but it is worth noting that there is ample precedent in the social sciences for ‘internalizing’ social structures in the way I am suggesting we do for structural sin. In The Constitution of Society—one of the most influential attempts to theorize social structures—Anthony Giddens warns, as I have, against social structures ‘naively conceived of in terms of visual imagery, akin to the skeleton or morphology of an organism or to the girders of a building’. Such a view generates a ‘dualism of subject and social object: “structure” here appears as “external” to human action, as a source of constraint on the free initiative of the independently constituted subject’. ³⁹ He advocates instead for what he calls ‘the duality of structure’: the way that structure functions as both product and means of social action, the way that ‘when I go about my daily affairs my activities incorporate and reproduce, say the overall institutions of modern capitalism’. ⁴⁰

At some level, the language of structural sin has always involved this kind of dialectic. In an early essay on personal responsibility for social sin, for example—still one of the best, in my opinion—Kenneth Himes invokes Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s understanding of the dialectical relationship between person and society. ‘Individuals who exist in a society marred by human wickedness will be shaped by that fact; they will come to internalize that evil in their own lives’, he writes. ‘This is the realm of fate or, better, the social conditioning of our consciousness.’ ⁴¹ Yet even Himes prefers to leave structural sin (or social sin, as he more commonly terms it in that essay) external to the individual person, even if it is a very influential externality. ⁴² He conceives the relationship between personal and structural sin as a mutually formative relationship between two essentially separate things. I am suggesting that social structures (and thus structural sin) ought not to be understood as impersonal at all. What is structural is not thereby impersonal, not external to the person. People are an integral part of social structures, and individual people are themselves structured.

The theorist who has done the most to understand the internalization of social structures—or again, perhaps better put, the homology of subjective and objective structures—is probably still Pierre Bourdieu. ‘The mind born of the world of objects does not rise as a subjectivity confronting an objectivity’, Bourdieu writes in Outline of a Theory of Practice. ‘The mind is a metaphor of the world of objects which is itself but an endless circle of mutually reflecting metaphors.’ ⁴³ In other words, it is wrong to treat the social world as something outside of and opposed to the individuals who constitute it by their action, and it is wrong to treat each individual action as, in a Sartrean fashion, a sui generis confrontation with an alien social world. Instead, the inner life of agents is marked by a habitus: ‘systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures.’ ⁴⁴ My habitus is a determinate way of being in the world, a tendency to think or act or position myself this way rather than that. My way of being is a ‘structured structure’, determinate because it has been determined by the social structures I inhabit. My way of being is at the same time, however, a ‘structuring structure’, the power that determines the structures that encompass all of us. For Bourdieu, the language of social structure thus encompasses both self and society, dialectically related to one another. The medium of exchange is practice, which is simultaneously constitutive of both. ⁴⁵

Microaggressions are again a useful example. In her classic book The Politics of Reality, feminist philosopher Marilyn Frye discusses what she calls ‘the male door-opening ritual’. ⁴⁶ All oppression, she says, operates by sorting society into opposing groups and arranging them hierarchically. Sexism in particular sorts us into groups of ‘men’ and ‘women’, and places women in a position of subordination. We mark the distinction between sexes in a dizzying variety of ways, by means of a dizzying variety of practices. We distinguish men from women by the ways they are named or referred to, by the ways they are encouraged to present themselves, by the ways they are greeted and the tone of voice used in greeting them. We mark sex so obsessively, Frye says, that it becomes almost impossible to interact with someone without knowing first whether to treat them as a man or a woman. The consequences of these marking practices are both personal and political: they train us to see the world in certain ways, to relate to people in certain ways, to take up physical space in certain ways, even as they also underwrite wider patterns and norms of social obligation. In Bourdieu’s terms, they structure both our habitus and the fields we occupy. The male door-opening ritual is just one small example of such a practice: something men are supposed to do for women that reinforces a position of beneficence on the part of men and need on the part of women. (Etiquette does not dictate that women open the door for men, note, or men for other men, or women for other women. There is a determinate structure to this ritual.) As Pierce says of racist microaggressions, a man opening the door for a woman is, by itself, entirely benign. But as part of a wider collection of interrelated practices that reinforce a power relation between men and women, it becomes visible as a kind of aggression. Frye makes the same point by means of an analogy with a birdcage: the door-opening ritual is but one wire in the cage that traps women. One wire does not make a cage, but take a step back and its role becomes clear. Bourdieu does not develop his theory to talk about oppression, but his theory of social structures helps to illuminate the homology between personal and social injustices that both Pierce and Frye are pointing out.

What Bourdieu’s theory captures (and the critical realists, in my judgment, do not) is that part of what social structures structure is me, in all my interiority. My body, my perception, my understanding, my desires—my whole self is already structured. It is not nearly enough to say that social structures influence agents only by way of ‘constraints and enablements’ on our action. Nor does it help to appeal to culture as a supplement to these external constraints, which would fail to make the intrinsic unity of these processes of social formation clear. It is not even enough to say that structures, though existing outside us, have a formative influence over us. ‘The problem is that you think it’s out there: and it’s not out there. It’s in you.’ Our habitus is integral to the structure.

Personal and structural sin are most often thought of as differentiated by subject: personal sin inheres in persons, while structural sin inheres in structures, which are something other than persons. But if our background understanding of ‘social structure’ includes, as Bourdieu’s does, ⁴⁷ the determinate formation of human agency, then ‘structural sin’ need not be seen as excluding ‘personal sin’ to begin with. The difference between the concepts is not a matter of subject. Structural sin refers instead to forms of sin that are shared and relatively stable over time within a particular community, rather than forms of sin particular to this or that individual. But structural sin is always already (if never only) personal sin.

The risk of Bourdieu’s account is that it can seem, despite his intentions, rather deterministic. Although Bourdieu says in no uncertain terms that ‘it is necessary to abandon all theories which explicitly or implicitly treat practice as a mechanical reaction’, ⁴⁸ he also says that ‘each agent, wittingly or unwittingly, willy nilly, is a producer and reproducer of objective meaning’ over which she ‘has no conscious mastery’. ⁴⁹ If we are bound to reproduce the structures that precede and shape us ‘willy nilly’, then those structures come to appear (as William Sewell puts it in his own theory of social structures) surprisingly ‘agent-proof’. ⁵⁰ People are so utterly enmeshed in a comprehensive practical schema that it becomes difficult to imagine how anyone could resist or transform it. ⁵¹ And so John Paul II’s worry appears to have been confirmed: personal sin is abolished, because our actions are no longer free in any meaningful sense. Individuals are only ever recreating the schemas they have been trained to enact, in—to use Bourdieu’s own words again—‘an endless circle of mutually reflecting metaphors’. ⁵²

So if it is right, as I am suggesting, to think of structural sin not merely as something outside human agents—in our laws or institutions or networks, or even in our emergent systems of social relations—but also as something within us, the embodied forms of our perception and desire, then we are led back all the more strongly to John Paul II’s initial challenge. If structural sin structures human agency itself, what could it possibly mean to say that we are responsible for structural sin? It is to that question that I turn next.

Taking Responsibility

The strength of the accounts of structural sin offered by John Paul II, Julie Hanlon Rubio, and Daniel Finn is that they are very clear and concrete about the question of taking personal responsibility for it. Like Dworkin, they leave little room to hide. I am responsible for staying silent in the face of oppression, for buying products from an exploitative corporation, for taking advantage of unjust power afforded me by my social position. I am sympathetic to David Cloutier’s recent pleas that social ethicists not lose sight of the importance of offering concrete, practical guidance for actual human agents in the quest to name and evaluate the scope and depth of social structures, ⁵³ and these theologians do a good job of keeping that focus.

By insisting that we think about structural sin as something internal to human agents as well as external to them, I might seem to be undoing their good work. We usually think, after all, that people can only be considered responsible for things they do willingly and intentionally. The implicit accounts of responsibility I have been considering so far leave that understanding intact. If our understanding and will are part of what is structured by structural sin, on the other hand, the meaning of responsibility becomes murkier. What does it mean to say that I am responsible for something I did not mean to do, or did not even know I was doing? What does it mean to say that I am responsible for the structure of my habitus if I never chose to be structured in this way?

Some theologians have simply granted that people are not morally responsible for the structural determination of their knowledge and will. Gregory Baum, for example, accepts that ‘for vast numbers of persons the proper spiritual response to their entrapment in structures of sin is mourning’, not guilt. ‘We are guilty to the extent that we knowingly support and defend the structures of evil, and we are not guilty to the extent that we are blinded by ideology and unaware of what is going on, except possibly for having been unmoved by the misery of others and for not having tried harder to get a better grasp of the situation.’ ⁵⁴ But the idea that the white slaver ought only to mourn his brutal subjection of another human being, not repent of it, not be held accountable for it, is morally preposterous—even if it is true that he had been thoroughly socialized to believe that what he was doing was right and good.

More commonly, theologians have been inclined to elide this pre-reflective dimension of structural sin with original sin. Kenneth Himes appeals to the language of original sin to talk about ‘the universal and involuntary qualities’ of social sin, ⁵⁵ and Daniel Finn spends several pages discussing the overlap between the concepts. ⁵⁶ David Kelsey goes so far as to describe structural sin as ‘the functional equivalent of “original sin” as corruption’ in the context of liberation theology. ⁵⁷ My suggestion that we understand structural sin as something internal to human agents would seem to confirm that connection, given that an important part of the doctrine of original sin is to name the fundamental distortions of human agency that make sin inevitable without God’s saving action. But I think it is important, on the contrary, to think of structural sin as a form of actual sin. To speak concretely about taking responsibility for structural sin, we must think of it that way.

The doctrine of original sin describes a formal condition that affects all human beings equally. ‘There is no distinction’, as Paul says, ‘since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God’ (Rom. 3:22–23). Structural sin, by contrast, names a determinate and differentiated misrelation to God and neighbor. That is to say, structural sin names a particular social structure (which, to repeat, must be understood as encompassing dimensions both external and internal to the human person) that implicates individuals in ways specific to each. Original sin consists in our inability, apart from God, to order our lives towards the good; structural sin consists in a concrete refusal of a specific good. Original sin is a soteriological concept; structural sin is a moral concept. ⁵⁸

The Augustinian notion of original sin does not preclude moral responsibility, of course; it insists on it. But original sin insists on responsibility only in the abstract: we are all sinners, estranged from God and answerable for our estrangement. Associating structural sin too closely with original sin therefore makes it more difficult to talk about what it means for me to take responsibility for this structural sin. ⁵⁹ By thinking of structural sin as kind of actual rather than original sin, the analysis remains rooted in a specific time and place and it becomes possible to articulate specific responsibilities. This is partly why the work that John Paul, Rubio, and Finn have been doing is so important: they are working to explain structural sin in a concrete, localizable way so that we can speak coherently about taking personal responsibility for it. As Rubio put the point in a slightly different context, ‘complicity is endless, but individual responsibilities are particular and limited by location’. ⁶⁰

I think it is a mistake, then, to deny that people are responsible for the structural sins that implicate them without their intending it, and I think it is a mistake to collapse such sins into original sin. The structural sins in which I participate—my racism, my sexism, my reduction of God’s creatures to instruments of exchange—are my actual sins, even if I do not know I am committing them, even if they are embedded in the means by which I interpret and navigate the world. They name concrete misrelations to God and neighbor specific to me.

But this leaves me still with the main problem: what does it mean to be responsible for a habitus I did not choose, for a structured disposition I cannot even fully articulate?

As Ryan Darr argues in a recent essay—the single best essay I have read on responsibility for structural sin—the answer begins with recognizing the social nature of human agency and human action itself. ‘Human action by its very nature participates in a social world and cannot be abstracted from it.’ ⁶¹ My thoughts and desires do not arise in a vacuum; they depend for their particular shape and direction on the kind of body I have, the kind of language I speak, the kind of creatures I interact with, the kind of resources I have available to me, and so on. That fact does not undermine my freedom; it is simply part of what human freedom means.

Responsibility must be understood in light of the social nature of human agency itself, not over against it. On this point, too, Darr is extremely helpful. Our responsibility, he suggests, arises from what he calls (following Stephen Darwall) our ‘intersubjective answerability’, which is to say, from the fact that others can ask me to give an account of my actions. In being so addressed, I may have to give an account of (sinful) features of my situation and formation that go beyond my voluntary control—perhaps even including the rules and patterns of my answerability itself. Moral obligations arise from the demand of another to answer for my actions.

In Giving an Account of Oneself, Judith Butler follows a similar instinct—that responsibility arises at the scene of address, at the moment when another speaks to me and asks, implicitly or explicitly, who are you? ⁶² The work of responsibility is the work of giving an account of an ‘I’ that only fully comes into being in the accounting. Accounting for oneself is not just a matter of recounting my past deeds and intentions; it is not just a matter of laying bare an already-existing agency. My agency only emerges in responding to the one who addresses me.

In his compact history of the concept, Gerald McKenny explains that responsibility is a relatively novel addition to Western ethical vocabulary. ⁶³ In its stronger forms, it appears as a replacement for a diminishing belief in divine providence: if God is not taking care of things, human beings must step into the breach. Butler’s way of thinking about responsibility can at first seem like the apotheosis of this modern expansion of the role of the human subject. For her, the moral life does not mean obeying the divine law or aligning ourselves with the inner logic of the world we inhabit; it does not mean measuring our lives against any reality beyond ourselves. It is a life of sheer self-constitution. We create ourselves in response to the demands of social life. So goes the caricature.

But Butler is far more subtle than that. If the moral life is always characterized by a kind of invention—making myself up as I go along—it is also always characterized by a kind of discovery. I discover something about myself and about the world the moment that another recognizes me, whether as a friend, or an enemy, or something else. I also discover something about myself and the world as soon as I try to answer. In accounting for myself, I have to make use of terms I did not invent, I have to tell stories about others I do not fully understand, I have to subject my narrative to norms of others’ devising. It is a much messier and more difficult process to give an account of ourselves than we might first think. We quickly find that we cannot simply ‘create ourselves’. ‘What is recognized about a self in the course of the exchange’, Butler says, ‘is that the self is the sort of being for whom staying inside itself proves impossible. One is compelled and comported outside oneself.’ ⁶⁴

Responsibility does mean taking a kind of moral ownership of ourselves, both in the past and in the future—the language of responsibility always means at least that. But it also means recognizing we cannot take ownership of ourselves by private fiat. It means being dispossessed of ourselves even as we come into possession of ourselves, learning to recognize that the conditions of my own self-making pre-exist and transcend me. ⁶⁵ Those lie partly in the anonymous dictates of the social world into which I am trying to speak, and they lie partly in the concrete reality of the one I am addressing.

Most importantly for my purposes here, Butler argues that in giving an account of ourselves we quickly find that we do not truly understand ourselves at all. She calls it the ‘primary opacity’ of the self to itself. ⁶⁶ She elaborates that opacity in psychoanalytic terms, but we need not follow her into those waters to understand the point. Our memories are not fully coherent; the formative influences of others are rarely distinct or discernible; we cannot even confidently parse our own desires and intentions. ‘I do not understand my own actions’, as Saint Paul says; ‘For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate’ (Rom. 7:15). Butler is obviously not prepared to attribute that opacity to sin, as Paul goes on to do, but she is describing a similar experience.

It is not hard to see how this is relevant to questions of responsibility for structural sin. We are responsible because we have been addressed. Sometimes that address comes in the form of an accusation: ‘you are killing us’. It might also come as a please (‘please help us’) or a worry (‘we’re scared—where are you?’) or a simple question (‘whose side are you on?’ or ‘what should we do?’). Any of these prompt us to give an account. Our responsibility consists in our responding.

As we begin to give our account, we will find that we are in many ways opaque to ourselves. We will discover things about ourselves and others and the world itself that we did not know. We will realize not only that our actions were caught up in networks of relation we were not aware of, and not only that we were influenced by social expectations more deeply than we knew, but also that our very intentions and desires were structured in ways we did not understand. We will run up against the limits of our own finitude and our own sin, against the language and organization of our communities, against the limits of mutual understanding. For all these reasons, our attempts to account for ourselves will routinely fail. But instead of undermining responsibility, these failures are constitutive of responsibility. These ethical failures—trying to account for ourselves, realizing we cannot, trying again—are the concrete work of responding to the one who addresses us. Irresponsibility is, by contrast, the failure to respond at all, or worse, the response of a self that is so unaware of its primary opacity that it violently imposes a false sense of coherence on itself and others.

Butler’s understanding of responsibility, far from absolutizing the individual subject, thus helps us see how the limits of our subjectivity are integral to the moral life. This is perhaps clearest in the case of blame. It is the common-sense understanding of blame, not Butler’s, that is caught up in a fantasy of a fully actualized agent: I am culpable only for those things I intended to do, for those effects and interpretations I could master, for those desires and habits I consciously willed into existence. When we understand blame instead as arising from the scene of address, we can see more clearly that our culpability is far more often something we discover about ourselves in retrospect than it is something we enter into deliberately. Obviously it does sometimes happen that we knowingly violate some moral obligation—we lie to a spouse, we cheat on a test, we ignore a racist joke. Even in those cases, I would suggest that our actions are less than perfectly clear to us. But that is not the most common kind of blameworthy action we engage in.

For everyone, or nearly everyone, who does blameworthy things does them with the idea that they are doing good. Sometimes that misidentification of the good arises from within an individual herself, but just as often (much more often, I would venture) it is part of a systematic misidentification on the part of a whole community. The father who beats his son to toughen him up, the white politician who excoriates ‘welfare queens’, the Christian who lovingly encourages her gay friend to try conversion therapy—all these people are operating from a habitus that is already structured in a way that alienates them from God and neighbor. They are committing structural sin. ⁶⁷

To speak of sin for John Paul is to speak paradigmatically of an act of deliberate disobedience or harm, an act of conscious refusal of God. But that is not how most sins come to be, and it is not sin in its most troubling form. An act of deliberate disobedience at least recognizes and acknowledges the moral norm that is being violated. As José Ignacio González Faus argues, the paradigm of sin (the ‘first analogy’, Faus calls it) is not the conscious transgression of the law, but ‘identification with the sin by the one who commits it’. ⁶⁸ The paradigm of the sinner is the one who sins without knowing he is sinning, who earnestly believes that his greatest sin is the greatest good.

To put all of this in more formal terms, what I am proposing we adopt from Butler is a twofold paradigm shift in our usual understanding of personal moral responsibility. First, we are responsible not only for those things we consciously intend, but for the full operation of our agency in the world—even though our agency is structured beyond our intention or understanding. ⁶⁹ Although I think it is a mistake to identify structural sin with original sin, the doctrine of original sin does give Christian ethicists good reason to make this shift: it insists that human agency develops within an inescapably distorted matrix of relationships, and that the inescapability of those distortions do not undermine either freedom or accountability. Second, responsibility should be understood not just as, say, imputed blameworthiness—not just as an objective condition—but as an ongoing moral practice all its own. In other words, to be responsible is to take responsibility, to do the self-critical work of answering those who address me, to give an account of who I am in full recognition of the distorted matrix I inhabit and even, in part, constitute. ⁷⁰ Since she is so deeply attuned to the limits of moral subjectivity and the concrete practices of its development, Butler is an especially useful guide through both of these shifts.

The Butlerian understanding of responsibility I am sketching and defending here—a practice of honest accounting for ourselves in response to another, for a self that always evades our understanding, for a self that is partially constituted in the accounting—helps to dissipate the tensions we often feel between structural sin and individual responsibility. It means accounting for the structure of my own agency as well as for my position in the structure of social roles and institutions. I can fully affirm John Paul’s initial concern that we not lose sight of the fact that structures of sin are human creations. We are always creating and reinforcing those structures in ways we understand and in ways we do not—cooperating with evil, as Rubio puts it, both consciously and unconsciously. But I can also give a better account of how those structures shape us, both at the external level (standing as obstacles or incentives) and the internal level (shaping our understanding and desire), than John Paul does. Responsibility is not undercut by the fact that we do not fully control or even understand our own actions; on the contrary, responsibility is the work of facing up to that lack of control.

Conclusion

I have been trying to make two basic points in this article. First: structural sin should be understood as something subjective as well as objective, something internal as well as external to human agents. Structural sin names one way that, by virtue of their participation and place in particular social structures, individuals alienate themselves from others and from God. It has been tempting for many theologians to externalize structural sin as a way of protecting human freedom, but to echo Andrea Dworkin once more, ‘it’s not out there, it’s in you’. Second: recognizing that the basic conditions of human agency—our embodied habits of knowing and willing the good—are always already structured does not undermine our moral responsibility for those structures. Responsibility should not be understood merely in terms of being culpable for bad things I did deliberately. Instead, responsibility should be understood as a practice of giving an account of myself as a socially-constituted agent. It means owning up, as I respond to others who address me, to the ways that my agency has been organized and directed in ways that exceed my awareness or control.

Taking responsibility for my own habitus, my own structured way of being in the world, is of course no replacement for taking responsibility at the level of institutions or policies. The acts of non-participation or direct resistance that Rubio recommends are absolutely crucial, and in fact they may contribute to the restructuring of my own agency even as they interrupt the wider networks of human action that perpetuate injustice. But to understand not just the breadth but the depth of structural sin, we need to bring its internal dimensions into much clearer focus. ⁷¹