Agape-justice conflicts generally require collective action because many of them, especially the more intractable and complicated ones, are at the community level. This is fortuitous because the resulting requisite group action becomes the occasion for growth in collective virtues. Collective virtues are those qualities that people exemplify qua members of the group. These actions and predispositions are central to their collective self-identity, and by extension, to their individual, personal self-understanding. Collective virtues are the building blocks for the common good and are essential for heading off collective-action problems. Agape-justice conflicts paradoxically create opportunities for community building and mutual solicitude.

Agape is just as foundational as justice for the existence, proper functioning, and sustainability of socioeconomic life. In the same way that justice has a crucial function in the marketplace, agape also has its unique and vital role to play. The marketplace requires the tandem of agape and justice working hand in hand if it is to exist at all, much less thrive. We see this in critical areas that shape the character and quality of socioeconomic life: institutional preconditions; value formation and development of customs, law, and usage; triage and pursuit of economic goals; and frictional and transaction costs.

Agape-justice conflicts provide unique opportunities for growth in supernatural excellence. There are “no tidy answers” in sorting through competing duties of justice and agape. However, justice’s obligees who hold strong legal and moral claims can voluntarily and generously choose to forego their claim-rights in favor of those who have none—agape’s beneficiaries. If we can give of ourselves with alacrity, then, even the most intractable agape-justice conflicts can be resolved with the adjudication of last resort—to love as Christ loves. Doing so leads to growth in Christified agape, that is, caritas. Such self-giving dissolves the competing claims of agape and justice.

Social philosophers and theologians prioritize the demands of justice whenever they conflict with agape’s claims. They do so based on the following implicit rules, namely: (1) Perfect duties take precedence over imperfect duties. (2) Subsistence test—whatever is critical for society’s existence has primacy. (3) Legal debt takes priority over moral debt. Both economic history and praxis validate the need to prioritize the claims of justice. After all, it provides critical legal institutional preconditions for the creation and protection of markets. It provides the economic guardrails to prevent anti-social preferences and transactions. It is essential to getting around collective-action problems.

Many agape-justice conflicts reflect the competing demands of universal love (agape) versus kin-particularistic love (justice). It is a clash between impartial and partial love. However, this conflict is not about choosing either agape or justice, but about how much of agape and justice’s claims to mix. The main issue is not one of priorities, but one of superfluity, that is, arriving at what is enough for one’s nearest and dearest. The task is in identifying the threshold that allows one to start satisfying the claims of agape after having fulfilled the claims of justice to one’s own kin.

Agape-justice conflicts are epistemological in nature because they arise from limitations in human knowledge. However, they may in fact be also ontological in nature as occasions to give vent to love’s diffusiveness, to develop the moral faculties of reason and freedom, to acquire personal and collective virtue, and to grow in Christified agape (caritas). Even epistemological limitations may, by divine design, also be meant to serve these purposes. Agape-justice conflicts are instrumental for humans’ eventual union with God, their telos. They are occasions for grace to build on our human frailties and brokenness, grace building on nature.

Agape-justice conflicts can arise from unattended past wrongs and previous disequilibria in socioeconomic homeostasis. We see this both in theory and in practice. This is sometimes called “prior-fault” moral dilemmas. There is an important time- and place-utility to the claims of justice and agape. These dues have multiple dimensions that must be satisfied simultaneously: giving the right claim, the right amount, at the right time, to the right recipient, from the right payer, at the right place, and in the right manner. Deficiencies in any of these contribute to disequilibria in the delicate socioeconomic homeostasis.

Markets do not arise in a vacuum, nor are they self-sustaining. They are undergirded by foundational institutions. They are sustained by formal and informal rules that are enforced through legal means or public moral suasion (forte of justice). There is a requisite minimum level of trust and mutual solicitude among its participants (forte of agape). Agape and justice complement each other—mutually reinforcing, substituting, or making up for each other’s limitations. Akin to “homeostasis” in biology wherein the human body balances various fluids, cells, and organisms to function properly, there is a delicate equilibrium that must be maintained between agape and justice for a functional socioeconomic life.

Perfect duties are deemed to have priority over imperfect duties. We can rank order competing moral duties in a continuum of obligatoriness. Listing them in descending order of obligatoriness and stringency, we have strict legal dues, relational moral obligations, general moral obligations, and supererogation. Most agape-justice conflicts lie along one of three fault lines in this continuum, namely (1) legal debt versus moral debt; (2) particular moral duties versus general moral duties; and (3) legal and moral debt versus supererogatory, self-sacrificial beneficence. Justice requires; it demands. In contrast, agape does not require or demand, but elicits and entices.