Self Love and Christian Ethics

Self love is an inescapable problem for ethics, yet much of contemporary ethics is reluctant to offer any normative moral anthropologies. Instead, secular ethics and contemporary culture promote a norm of self-realization which is subjective and uncritical. Christian ethics also fails to provide easy or direct resources to address this problem, because it tends to investigate self love with respect to conflicts between the self’s interests and those of her neighbors. Self Love and Christian Ethics explicates and defends right self love by casting it as a problem of proper self-relation that intersects with love for God and love for neighbor. This book argues that right self love entails a true self-understanding that is embodied in the person’s concrete acts and relations. In making this argument, it calls ethics to revisit ontological accounts of the self and to devote more attention to particular moral acts.