Ethics

Research question 6. Ethics of Love

(a) Christianity. How have the key texts of the Synpotic Gospels and the Johannine literature about love of God and love of neighbour shaped Christian ethical thinking? (Mark 12:28-31 = Matthew 22: 37-40 = Luke 10:27-28; John 13:34-36, John 14:23-24; 1 John 3:11-17, 4:7-12).
What different forms has the tension between self-love and neighbour-love taken in the late-modern age?
What perspective on the nature of reality is given by a a ‘virtue ethics’ driven by love?

(b) Islam. How much has ‘ethics of character’ in contemporary Islamic thinking been shaped by considerations of love?
Is Muslim thinking about peace, conflict and reconciliation shaped by a discourse of love?
Has the emphasis of the open letter A Common Word (2007) on the double love command (love of God and neighbour) had any emphasis on current thinking in Islamic communities? Does it have the potential to do so?

(c) Judaism. How can stress on love as command and as an eternal, disinterested law be related to the self’s autonomous, finite and mutable preferential desires?
How has the Toranic command to love one’s neighbour been interpreted in different cultural contexts through Jewish history?
What varying stress has been placed on universality and particularity of the neighbour?
How is the command to love understood in a post-Holocaust world?