Debt and the Moral Case Against Third-Party Collectors

By Mark Griswold | FāVS News Columnist

St. Augustine once defined peace as “the tranquility of order.” That’s a fine definition: compact, moral and meaningful. But if you’ve ever had the pleasure of being hounded by a debt collector over a billing error, you know that modern finance rarely traffics in either peace or order. It is chaos disguised as professionalism, and nowhere is this more evident than in the morally murky world of third-party debt collection.

I recently got a call from AmeriCollect, a collection agency whose tagline according to its website is “Ridiculously Nice.” It claims to collect debts with compassion and understanding. (Insert ironic laughter here.)

According to them, I owed $190. According to me — and, more importantly, the medical office that hired them — I didn’t. The office had sent the bill to the wrong address, never followed up, and only realized the error a year later — after sending it off to collections.

The medical office apologized and said they’d fix it, but apparently forgot to tell the collectors. (And, apparently, it takes 30 business days to recall a debt from AmeriCollect. Seems convenient.)

So, the calls kept coming. “They’re just doing their job,” they claimed. Yes, and so was War Relocation Authority when they rounded up tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans and threw them into concentration camps in 1942.

Hyperbole? Maybe. But there’s a real moral question here: Should debt collectors even exist?

Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that people ought to pay their debts. That’s basic justice, and we find it in Scripture: “Give to everyone what you owe them: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor.” (Romans 13:7)

Likewise, St. Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa Theologica (II-II, Q. 61), affirms that justice includes the restitution of debts. But Aquinas does not leave the matter there. He warns against harshness and scandal in the exercise of justice, noting: “A man is not bound to give alms out of what he owes another, except in a case of extreme necessity.” (ST II-II, Q.32, A.5)

When paying an unjust debt is the more Christian choice

In other words, justice must be tempered by charity. To pursue a debt legally owed in a way that harms the debtor — especially the poor or innocent — is itself unjust.

This brings us to the peculiar invention of the modern debt collection agency. These agencies purchase or are contracted to pursue debts on behalf of creditors, often for pennies on the dollar. Their incentive is not to resolve disputes justly but to extract payment by whatever legal means will yield results — phone harassment, credit threats, intimidation. They’re the bounty hunters of capitalism.

The question must be asked: If justice exists, why do we need mercenaries to enforce it?

Would Aquinas recognize these agencies as just? Doubtful. He affirms in De Regno that: “The aim of all just government is the peace and common good of its people.”

If an industry thrives on disorder, confusion and the exploitation of communication gaps — say, between a medical office’s billing department and a confused patient — it is not upholding justice. It’s profiting from its absence.

Aquinas was also clear on delegation. Justice can be administered by a legitimate authority (like a judge), or in some cases by agents (like a steward), but always under the direction of right reason. A third-party collection agency has no such legitimacy. It’s not an officer of the court, nor the creditor’s true proxy. It’s a for-profit middleman with one job: squeeze.

Now, someone might argue that collections exist because civil courts are too slow or expensive. But this only strengthens the critique. If civil justice is so inaccessible that we must outsource it to market-driven enforcers, then the problem lies in our legal system — not in the moral legitimacy of bounty collectors.

In a just society, if someone is owed money and believes they have exhausted reasonable efforts to resolve it, they should bring the matter to court. Let a judge — who is bound by rules of evidence, process and discretion — decide what’s fair.

As Thomas More warned in “A Man for All Seasons,” by Robert Bolt, “The law is not a light for you or any man to see by; the law is not an instrument of any kind… it is a causeway upon which, so long as he keeps to it, a citizen may walk safely.”

By contrast, modern collection agencies often abandon that causeway entirely, choosing instead back alleys and pressure tactics.

I’ve even paid debts I didn’t technically owe — not out of guilt, but because peace was more valuable than being right. Sometimes it’s simpler, more humane and frankly more Christian to absorb the cost of someone else’s mistake than to fight over what’s “owed.”

That’s not sainthood; it’s just good business with a long view. After all, the heart of Christianity is someone paying a debt on behalf of others. If I can echo even a faint shadow of that in everyday life, why not?

Augustine, Aquinas and the call for justice with mercy

What about Augustine? As a bishop, he was no stranger to disputes between creditors and debtors. But in his Letter 153, he pleads with a creditor to show mercy to a man who could not pay: “Do not suffer the debtor to perish for a temporal debt; help him rather that he may be saved for eternity.”

Augustine reminds us that every financial encounter is also a moral one. The soul of the debtor matters more than the sum of the debt.

To be clear: I’m not arguing that all debts should be forgiven automatically. That would be unjust to those who render services or goods in good faith. Nor am I suggesting that deadbeats should be canonized. But in many cases, including my own, the problem wasn’t refusal to pay — it was a mistake. A clerical error. And yet, the punishment didn’t fall on the institution that made the mistake. It fell on the recipient of their incompetence.

Which brings us full circle. Even if we assume that third-party debt collectors could operate ethically, the better question is: Why should they exist at all?

If you’re owed a debt, pursue it yourself. If the person you’re dealing with refuses to pay, file a claim. If it’s not worth pursuing in court, maybe it’s not worth pursuing at all. That’s not weakness — that’s prudence. That’s peace.

To quote a line G.K. Chesterton might have written, if he were around to get robocalls about “urgent debt resolution”: “A society is judged not by how it honors its contracts, but by how it forgives its clerical errors.”

In other words: justice, yes. But without mercy, it’s not justice. It’s just noise.

The views expressed in this opinion column are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the views of FāVS News. FāVS News values diverse perspectives and thoughtful analysis on matters of faith and spirituality.

****

Some of this commentary’s creation was assisted with AI. Author and staff still carefully edited material for content quality and publication standards.