- “Jesus and Affluence.” (Unpublished)
Peter Singer famously argued that the moral demands of affluence are high. He claimed furthermore that such is the teaching of many of the world’s great religious traditions, and that Jesus’s teachings on wealth and poverty imply as much. This paper argues in support of the latter claim.
- “Immigration Ethics: Sacred and Secular” (with David J. Clark), Religions 14(1):1 (2023)
The U.S. and other nation-states regularly impose horrific harms on immigrants, would-be immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers: ‘migrants,’ for short. Migrants are regularly separated from their spouses and children, detained for long periods under brutal and dehumanizing conditions, forced to live in squalid camps, threatened with state-sanctioned violence, deported to foreign lands in which they have little social connection or means of support, forcibly prevented from fleeing violence and poverty, and more. The vast majority of migrants subject to such treatment are non-criminal people looking for honest work, hoping to make a better life for themselves and their children. In this paper, we argue that the plausibility of usual justifications for such harms to migrants depends importantly on the metaphysical framework from which one approaches the ethics of immigration. We argue that, from within a secular framework, in which God plays no role in matters moral, there’s at least a surface-level plausibility to some of the standard justifications for harms to migrants in service of border control, but that given a theistic framework of the sort at the heart of Judaism and Christianity, the usual justifications for such harms fall flat: none are even remotely plausible. The upshot of this, we urge, is that denizens of those religious traditions should support a policy of nearly open borders.
- Shalom Ethics: Loving Your Neighbor as Yourself (Fortress Press, 2026)
My long underway book project, entitled Shalom Ethics: Loving Your Neighbor as Yourself, is out with Fortress Press.
The book begins with an exposition of the second love command—“love your neighbor as yourself”—which I take to be the heart of Jesus’s ethical vision. I argue that the command is concerned with shalom—the condition of a community in which the safety, sustenance, freedom, and dignity of all in the community are secure; the command, so I say, is an injunction to seek neighbor inclusion in shalom community, putting pursuit of that on a par with pursuit of one’s own inclusion in shalom community. I then take up the question of what sort of normative ethical theory is suggested by the command, investigation of which yields the book’s focal love ethic.
This in hand, I turn in Chapter 2 to the question of how to think about violence from the standpoint of our ethic. On their face, Jesus’s teachings seem to endorse nonviolence: “You’ve heard it said an eye for eye, but I say don’t violently resist an evildoer.” I argue that things are as they seem here: Jesus’s teachings imply a radical nonviolentism.
In Chapter 3, I consider how practitioners of our love ethic should orient themselves toward the modern state. States are extremely violent institutions, perhaps the most violent institutions on the planet. How should a practitioner of our love ethic posture himself or herself toward these institutions? I’ll argue that love either outright prohibits or enjoins attempts to minimize most types of participation in the state: voting, taxes, jury duty, military service, police service, holding office. I defend a version of “come-outerism,” à la nineteenth-century abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who urged withdrawal from involvement in the state as a means of avoiding complicity in its support of slavery. I then argue for a version of “Christian anarchism” on which there is no such thing as political authority—the power to promulgate laws in such a way as to generate obligations to obey those laws and the right to deploy violence in service of their enforcement. I urge, though, that practitioners of love should seek to cooperate with state authorities in various ways in service of the common good, and that they should aggressively engage the state by traditional methods of nonviolent direct action aimed at encouraging policymakers into more just and loving treatment of the vulnerable.
In Chapter 4, I investigate the bearing of our love ethic on the use of walls by states to keep people out and to keep people in. More exactly, I’m interested here in state practices that keep people locked into prisons and locked out of state borders. Both sorts of practice by states are causes of enormous misery, enormous destruction of shalom for millions of people. Both sorts of practice are taken for granted in the modern world. Both sorts of practice, I claim, are radically at odds with our love ethic: The love command, I’ll argue, requires both prison abolition and open borders. I suggest ways votaries of love—those seeking to order their lives and treatment of neighbor in accordance with the love command—can seek to resist dehumanizing prison and border practices current in most contemporary states.
In Chapter 5, I take up the question of how to think about economic marketplaces from the standpoint of our ethic, arguing that most market activity—buying, selling, et cetera—in developed, capitalist markets like the United States is morally unjustifiable, and that the upshot of all of this is that capitalism is a morally unjustifiable social practice. I consider how votaries of love can position themselves vis-à-vis markets in light of these arguments.
Finally, in Chapter 6, I change gears and take up the question how one might live our focal ethic in real life: What sorts of practices might one undertake to make this ethic practicable? I sketch out what I take to have been the praxis of the early Jesus movement as a model and make some suggestions about what this might look like today.
- “On Gandhian Epistemology,” The Canadian Journal of Philosophy (forthcoming)
I develop in this paper some epistemological themes inspired by the writings of Mohandas K. Gandhi. Gandhi famously thought the method of nonviolence he’d pioneered—satyagraha, as he called it—a powerful means of effecting change in the political domain, but he also thought it a way of life, applicable in the warp and woof of everyday, interpersonal interactions. I’ll investigate here what it might look like to practice the way of Gandhian nonviolence in one’s everyday epistemic interactions. There will be connections between this sort of epistemic practice and some main themes in contemporary work on intellectual humility.
Thomas M. Crisp 