The Judgment of the Nations: Structural Sin, Social Ontology, and Social Eschatology

Abstract

Can social groups, as social groups, sin? Can they be judged? There is an ambivalence in late 20th-century Catholicism in this regard, between a form of personalism on the one hand, in which only individuals are persons and hence moral subjects, and traditional Thomists along with revisionary liberation theologians on the other. This paper argues that we can accommodate the worries of the first group with the more robust social ontology implied by the second. This social ontology can be found both in the work of contemporary analytic philosophers and, inchoately at least, in traditional Aristotelianism, and it allows us to give a more precise account of the metaphysics of structural sin than the alternatives. The paper concludes by suggesting that there is a way in which social groups, as social groups, might face judgment and then persist eschatologically.