The Ethics of Love

The Journal of Ethics -     

Love,Poetry, and the Good Life: Mill's Autobiography and Perfectionist Ethics 1

I argue for a perfectionist reading of Mill's account of the good life, by using the failures of development recorded in his Autobiography as a way to understand his official account of happiness in Utilitarianism. This work offers both a new perspective on Mill's thought, and a distinctive account of the role of aesthetic and emotional capacities in the most choiceworthy human life. I consider the philosophical purposes of autobiography, Mill's disagreements with Bentham, and the nature of competent judges and the pleasure they take in higher culture. I conclude that Millian perfectionism is an attractive and underappreciated option for contemporary value theory.     

Love,Respect, and Individuals: Murdoch as a Guide to Kantian Ethics

I reconsider the relation between love and respect in Kantian ethics, taking as my guide Iris Murdoch's view of love as the fundamental moral attitude and a kind of attention to individuals. It is widely supposed that Kantian ethics disregards individuals, since we don't respect individuals but the universal quality of personhood they instantiate. We need not draw this conclusion if we recognise that Kant and Murdoch share a view about the centrality of love to virtue. We can then see that respect in the virtuous person cannot be blind to the individual, as critics of Kantian ethics contend. My approach contrasts recent efforts (Velleman and Bagnoli) to assimilate Kantian respect to Murdochian love, which overlook Murdoch's distinctive claims about the singularity of moral activity. This idea is not as un‐Kantian as it seems, and it should inform any Kantian ethics that aims to address the charge about individuals.     

Love,Ethics, and Authenticity: Beauvoir's Lesson in What It Means to Read

Beauvoir's distinction between romantic and authentic love offers us an opportunity for thinking through the complex relations among philosophy, reading, and love. If we accept her account of romantic love as a flawed, dependent mode of being, and her suggestion that an authentic love—one that engages maturely with the other—is possible, then we might take the risk of thinking of reading in these terms.     

Ecclesial Ethics and the Gospel sine glossa: Sacramental Politics and the Love of the World

This article examines the charge that the approach D. Stephen Long identifies as “ecclesial ethics” is a world-denying approach. The article examines typologies that pit world-affirmers against world-deniers, showing how “neo-Augustinians” end up on both sides of this divide, depending on who is constructing the typology. The article argues that these typologies are inaccurate, distorting, and often self-contradictory. It offers an alternative etiology, making a case that “ecclesial ethics” can be understood as a development of the progressive wing of Catholic thought that surfaced in Vatican II. The article examines Giuseppe Dossetti’s advocacy of a Gospel sine glossa at Vatican II, and argues that this type of ethics has deep roots in a Catholic sacramental theology. Finally, the article examines Henri de Lubac’s work as exemplary of such a sacramental theology. The article concludes that the basis of “ecclesial ethics” is a deeply sacramental view of creation being transformed by the grace of God through Jesus Christ.     

The Metaphysics of Ethical Love: Comparing Practical Vedanta and Feminist Ethics

In this paper I compare two very different deployments of love in ethics. Swami Vivekananda's concept of ethical love ties into the project of constructing an alternative masculinity for a colonized people; while feminist care ethics uses love to escape the perceived masculinity of traditional ethical theory. Using Kenneth Goodpaster's distinction between ‘framework questions’ and ‘application questions,’ I try to show that love in Practical Vedanta addresses the former while feminist care ethics concerns itself with the latter. Even though this difference, I suggest, could be a function of their varying historical-political contexts, the two issues need to be taken together for a more complete understanding of the ethical subject.     

Punishing War Crimes,Genocide, and Crimes against Humanity: Introduction

The purpose of this paper is to direct attention to a challenge—referred to as the threshold challenge—facing a non-absolutist retributivist view on international criminal justice. It is argued, on the one hand, that this challenge constitutes a practically pertinent problem for the retributivist approach to the punishment of mass crimes and, on the other, that it is very hard to imagine any principled way of meeting this challenge.     

Love from Afar: Distance,Intimacy and the Theology of Love

Proceeding from Jean‐Luc Marion's The Erotic Phenomenon, this article discusses how the Christian concept of love can manifest intimacy. While most theological concepts of love spell out the requirement of distance, they do not pay sufficient attention to the intimate variants of love. The article argues that a full‐fledged theological account should make room for love's different economic and donative variants, as well as for love's advance from ‘distance’ to ‘visibility’ and, finally, ‘intimacy’. Concrete examples of intimate love include mystical union, transforming hospitality, fidelity and love that is as strong as death.     

Optimal Distinctiveness and Identification with the Furry Fandom

We examined perceptions of optimal distinctiveness in the furry fandom and the relationship between this perception and identification with the furry fandom. Self-identified furries (N?=?2998) completed measures of optimal distinctiveness that included felt inclusion/belongingness with the fandom and a measure of perceived group distinctiveness from other groups. Participants also completed a measure of identification with the fandom. Results revealed an interaction between felt belongingness and perceived distinctiveness that predicted fandom identification. Furries who felt both a high degree of belonging/inclusion to the fandom and who perceived the group to be distinct from other fandoms expressed the highest level of identification with the fandom. The results support prior optimal distinctiveness research and demonstrate that furries’ motivation to feel psychologically connected to the furry fandom is driven, in part, by the need for optimal distinctiveness.     

『新时代舟山宗教工作』系列之九:普陀山 爱国爱教 服务社会

普陀山佛教事业近年来取得了可喜的成绩,离不开"信、解、行、证"四个字,即:深入学习贯彻习近平新时代中国特色社会主义思想,党的十九大及十九届二中、三中、四中全会精神,全国宗教工作会议精神与新修订《宗教事务条例》;正信指导正行。     

Christian Ethics,Religious Ethics,and Secular Ethics: A Contemporary Reappraisal

In this essay, I argue that Christian ethicists should not think of themselves as religious ethicists. I defend this claim by arguing that the concept of religious ethics, as it has come to be understood as a discipline that is distinct from secular ethics, is incoherent. In part one, I describe the fraught attempts by theologians in the 20th century to identify the distinctiveness of Christian ethics. In part two, I argue that certain accounts of natural law unwittingly reinforce a problematic conception of secular ethics. Part three examines some trends in religious studies and comparative religious ethics to highlight problematic conceptions of religion. Drawing together these strands of inquiry, I contend that that the secular-religious dichotomy in contemporary ethics should be rejected, but by the same token, I suggest that comparative ethics remains a worthwhile enterprise.     

Development,Ethics, and the Ethics of Development

This article investigates three things: (1) what development might be, (2) how development and ethics might be related, and (3) what an ethics of development might look like. First, I show how if we move away from an essentialist metaphysics of being to a possibilist-functionalist metaphysics of becoming in our understanding of development, we can reconceptualize ethics as self-directed ontogeny. Thus, ethics turns out to be a part of development. Secondly, I sketch out the possibility of an ethics of development, showing how it should be based on three desiderata: (1) sustainability, promoting the long-term existence of the maximum human and non-human biodiversity, (2) democracy, promoting human-human relationships that are bidirectional and, to the extent possible, non-imposing, and (3) non-ethnocentrism, promoting true modernity; a modernity not predicated on a non-existent abstract universality but on concrete syncretism. The ultimate aim of this ethics of development is the optimization of individual and collective subjectivity and agency across time.     

On the Possibility of Universal Love for All Humans: A Comparative Study of Confucian and Christian Ethics

On the one hand, Confucianism and Christianity advocate universal love for all humans on the ultimate basis of particular love for parents or for God respectively. On the other hand, they have to sacrifice the former for the latter in cases of conflict since they give top priority merely to the latter. In order to overcome this paradox in theory and realize the ideal of universal love in practice, they should transform their particularistic frameworks into universalistic ones and assign a supreme position to their ideas of universal love for all humans, which imply in a potential way a modern, humanistic principle ‘respect the deserved rights of every human being’.