Self-Love and Neighbor-Love in Kierkegaard’s Ethics

Ethics of Love? Morality and the Meaning of Divine Love

While there is wide agreement on the importance of love to Christian ethics, just what an ethics of love includes and entails differs depending upon how Christian love is understood. Toward clarifying the relationship between love and Christian ethics, this essay briefly engages the highly influential agapist conception of love and questions its sufficiency as the basis of Christian ethics. Con...

Theocentric Love Ethics

Joseph Selling proposes a contemporary revision of natural law ethics, making it more person-centered. Earlier James Gustafson insisted that natural law ethics was too egoist or anthropocentric, so his work proposed theocentrism as a corrective. Richard Gula in turn proposed an ethics that centers on imitating God’s relationships. This essay combines the merits of all three with the author’s ow...

Don't love thy nearest neighbor

Self - Knowledge and Self - Love

In this paper I argue for the claim that self-love is a precondition for self-knowledge. This claim is relevant to the contemporary philosophical debate on self-knowledge, but mainly because it draws attention to the role of claims of self-knowledge in the larger context of our ordinary practice of rationalizing and appropriating our actions. In this practice it is crucial for persons to open-m...

Selfishness and Self-love

First published in: Psychiatry. Journal for the Study of Interpersonal Process, Washington (The William Alanson Psychiatric Foundation), Vol. 2 (1939), pp. 507-523. Reprint in the Yearbook of the International Erich Fromm Society, Vol. 5 (1994): Dealing with the Alien, Münster: LIT-Verlag, 1995, pp. 173-197. Copyright © 1994 and 2001 by The Literary Estate of Erich Fromm, c/o Dr. Rainer Funk, U...