Virtue, Sin, and Law

I've given Mark's critique of law and economics only a quick read, and even on detailed reading I doubt I'd have anything particularly insightful to say.  However, I was thinking about Steve's argument that (in Mark's words) "law and economics . . . provides appropriate rules for a fallen world" and Mark's response that this conflicts "with the Aristotelian and Aquinean concept of virtue and the conception of civic happiness articulated by . . . Catholic economists."

The virtue-based emphasis of Catholic social thought was also the subject of a talk here at St. Thomas this week by Mark Massa, who teaches theology at Fordham.  (You can listen to the talk here with Real Player; click on the April 15 "Midday" show, and he's the first half.)  Professor Massa argues (as he does in this book as well) that anti-Catholicism in America stems from a fundamental difference between the typically Catholic and typically American (and Protestant) ways of looking at the world.  Borrowing from U. Chicago theologian David Tracy, Professor Massa argues that Catholic thought takes an "analogical" approach to theology, seeing truths about God embodied in things in this world, including the Church.  By contrast, the Protestant groups that set the main course of American thought have taken a "dialectical" approach to theology, emphasizing the distance and divergence between God and the world and the dangers of idolatry that lurk in making analogies between the two.  This attitude tends to bring all institutions, including the Christian Church, under critique, primarily by the individual conscience.  But more to the point here is that the analogical approach tends to emphasize the pursuit of virtue in formulating laws, while the dialectical approach tends to emphasize the pervasiveness of sin and the limited function of law in maintaining a basic social order.  (This should be familiar to those who have studied the social ethics of, say, Aquinas versus Luther (and I'd add Augustine).)

As one who believes in the centrality of "original sin" as a Christian concept, but also is greatly attracted to Catholic social thought (CST), I think and hope that CST -- and indeed any good Christian social ethic -- can give proper weight to both sin and virtue.  That is, development and articulation of legal norms should take into account both the importance of embodying and encouraging virtue and community through law, and the need to adjust law to the pervasive reality of human limitations such as self-interest, lack of knowledge, and so forth.  The most convincing Christian arguments combine the two.  I think, for example, of Reinhold Niebuhr's defense of democracy from Christian premises:  "humans' capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but humans' capacity for injustice makes democracy necessary."  That's just an aphorism -- summarizing the argument Niebuhr made in full in The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (1944) -- but it exemplifies the kind of double-barreled argument I mean.

I guess that, as a total layman on law and economics, I'd ask how Mark's "virtue" approach makes appropriate room for original sin, and how Steve's "fallen man equals economic man" approach makes appropriate room for "original virtue."  (I can think of answers on both scores, but posing the questions might help frame a discussion.)

Tom