You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

by Alan Noble

The important thing is that we establish that someone deserves our compassion. And this is exactly what we witness in our public discourse about justice and equality. We argue over all the ways someone has been disadvantaged in order to decide whether they are worthy of our compassion, to decide whether they are the oppressor or the oppressed. In this debate, disadvantages take on social capital. As Sandel notes, “Liberals who defend the welfare state on the basis of luck egalitarianism are led, almost unavoidably, to a rhetoric of victimhood that views welfare recipients as lacking agency, as incapable of acting responsibly.” Quite rightly, Sandel finds this philosophy to be immoral. It assumes that we are capable of establishing with certainty who “merits” our compassion and who doesn’t. But the real world is more complicated than that. It also leads to a “rhetoric of victimhood” and creates perverse incentives to commodify our disadvantages, to leverage them for social gain. Rather than lead to a more just and compassionate society, we turn suffering into another arena for competition.