Self-Love and Its Forms

Sarah Buss argues that if we are to rise to the challenge of standing up to justice when doing so is costly, we will have to internalise a sense of our own unimportance. That is, we will have to cultivate an attitude that is ‘the opposite of self-love’. I try to show that what we need is not to eliminate our love of self but to give it a proper and discerning shape, so that it conduces to our goodness rather than to our self-interest narrowly construed.