Doing Justice in an Unjust World

Consider the following paradox: many of the everyday tools of engaged citizens and progressive activists—especially our various electronic gadgets—contribute directly to the suffering of other unseen human beings in ways that we scarcely realize.

Discarded electronic devices often become hazardous waste exports to developing countries, where they are dismantled by low-wage workers who risk their own health and that of their children to salvage materials for reuse in industrial processes. Likewise, the standard lifestyle of active participants in affluent societies typically involves consumption of energy and fossil fuel resources at a level that is simply unsustainable and will trigger rapid global warming, barring a massive reversal of that course. However, the harshest impacts of climate change will be felt first not by those with the largest carbon footprints but by residents in the developing world living in proximity to oceans and nearer to the equator.

Nonetheless, to be an effective change agent in the United States and other "advanced" nations more or less requires use of these tools and participation in this lifestyle. Yes, individuals can become far more conscientious about their consumption, where their stuff comes from, and how it's made, and they can use their consumer power to promote an alternative, more social economy. Yet, at the end of the day, even the most conscientious of us will still be using far more resources than most others on the planet, in ways that cannot be morally justified.

This is the kind of moral quandary that Cynthia D. Moe-Lobeda's magisterial volume Resisting Structural Evil places before readers. The claim at the heart of Moe-Lobeda's book is that the everyday workings of global capitalism are endangering the survival of the planet and perpetrating structural economic violence on many people in the developing world. This in itself is a challenging claim, but it's only the starting point for an extended ethical reflection that tries to answer honestly this question: how can flawed people like ourselves who are hopelessly entangled in practices and institutions that perpetuate injustice and violence against the earth (and ultimately our own children and grand-children) possibly live an ethically responsible, justice-promoting life?

Acting Morally While Accepting Moral Ambiguity

The title of the book, highlighting resistance, is a bit misleading. For Moe-Lobeda, a religious ethicist operating in the Christian tradition, a moral response to structural evil has three components: "seeing" structural evil (i.e., recognizing the sometimes hidden ways in which institutional systems reinforce deep inequities and cause damage to human lives); resisting such evil; and building alternatives. There are significant obstacles at each stage of this process.

The key point is that it's not enough simply to be aware in some vague sense that the world is riddled with injustice; instead, the morally engaged person and community must take

Climate change poses a serious challenge to Christian theology—how do we make sense of our role in this disaster while continuing to understand ourselves as an "abode of God's active love"?

responsibility for building or creating alternatives to that injustice in whatever ways we can. What we can't do is let ourselves off the hook by telling ourselves that resistance is futile, that this is just the way the world is, and that there are no alternative institutional possibilities.

Yet here things get tricky for most conscientious people. The "Serenity Prayer" attributed to the influential twentieth-century Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr asks for the ability to accept the things that cannot be changed, and the wisdom to know the difference between what can and cannot be changed. For ordinary persons in rich societies, even conscientious ones, global inequality and the domination of the world economy by corporations may easily fall into the category of things that can't be changed (and hence don't need to be engaged). But awareness of alternatives expands the sense of what is possible—and hence what we are responsible for doing (or culpable for not...