Self Love and Christian Ethics

by Darlene Fozard Weaver

• ISBN13: 9780521520973
• ISBN10: 0521520975
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-11-04
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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 address this problem directly, because it tends to investigate self love within the context of conflicts between the self's interests and those of her neighbors. Self Love and Christian Ethics argues for right self love as the solution of proper self-relation that intersects with love for God and love for neighbor. Darlene Fozard Weaver explains that right self love entails a true self-understanding that is embodied in the person's concrete acts and relations. In making this argument, she calls upon ethicists to revisit ontological accounts of the self and to devote more attention to particular moral acts.

Table of Contents

General editor's preface	ix
Acknowledgments	xi
The contemporary problem of self love	1	(43)
Self love in Christian ethics	44	(37)
A hermeneutical account of self-relation	81	(50)
Right self love	131	(36)
Self love and moral action	167	(41)
Self love, religion, and morality	208	(43)
Bibliography	251	(13)
Index	264