This chapter finds that Augustine thought of self-love and neighbour-love as both eros and philia and that he found that vicious people were able to love other people unselfishly, even though their love for others would always be sinful as the love for something temporal. This chapter establishes that eros for our neighbours was not a self-centred love – it did not instrumentalise others by making them the ‘means’ to our happiness; rather, for Augustine, eros for the neighbour, whether this love was sinful or virtuous, was a form of benevolence.

As discussed throughout the book, Black women experience racial trauma and discrimination and may internalize these messages and become highly self-critical. These experiences can lead to feelings of low self-worth, anxiety, and depression. In this chapter, we share the strategies of self-compassion, self-forgiveness, and self-love and acceptance to support Black women in emotional healing. We also discuss the use of the arts and religion and spirituality as resources for Black women’s healing and thriving.

Hutcheson and Butler were contemporaries whose best-known works appeared within a year of one another. Although they had similar intellectual temperaments and styles, their philosophical approaches differed in important ways that reverberated through thinkers that followed. Both were sharply analytical, and both shared a keen insight into moral psychology. Moreover, both laid great stress on the psychology of moral judgment. Hutcheson called this, following Shaftesbury, “moral sense,” and Butler referred to it alternately as the “principle of reflection” or “conscience.” For both, moral judgment involves the human capacity to (more or less successfully) reflect upon and respond affectively to motives, characters, and actions in dispassionate impartial way. However, the role of moral reflection for these two philosophers is profoundly different. For Hutcheson, it is an observer’s moral sense that enables a person to make moral evaluations of motivation and actions, but these evaluations are not self-reflexive – the agent is not evaluating their own, or even others’, moral sense. For Butler, on the other hand, conscience is a moral faculty by which agents crucially make judgments of themselves, judgments they employ to shape their own actions. Conscience is action-guiding for Butler in a way that moral sense is not for Hutcheson.

Scott Jenkins concentrates on the specific passion of self-contempt that plays such a large role in the Prologue of Nietzsche’s book where the Übermensch is introduced. This evaluative emotional state sounds unpleasant and unhealthy, but Scott shows why Nietzsche recommends it as a distinctive self-critical stance that is actually grounded in true self-love. We must be careful, Scott says, not to confuse it with the two familiar varieties of contempt discussed by Nietzsche, noble indifference and moral vengefulness. Instead, we should regard it as Nietzsche’s secular transposition of religious-ascetic contempt. Here we take a critical attitude toward our present state as falling short of a superior future ideal that lies within us which we love and yearn to realize. This is why Zarathustra says, paradoxically, that he loves humans and wants them to perish for the sake of a superior Übermensch species.

Grotius’s theory of property was meant to yield practical results. The principle of the freedom of the seas, for instance, was based on the idea of seizure as a constituent element of property and exclusivity. This focus on practical results enables a secularized reading of his theory of property. However, some essential aspects of his property theory are not entirely comprehensible without taking into account Grotius’s wider theological framework. Therefore, in this article I will focus on Grotius’s idea of consent to the principle of first occupation as the foundation of his property theory, and link it with his theologically loaded conceptions of man’s freedom and equality, or the universal fellowship of humankind.

This chapter evaluates Hume’s positive account of benevolence in Section 2 and his critique of the selfish theories in Appendix 2 of the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. The chapter’s first part elucidates Hume’s definition of the concepts of benevolence and self-love and explains the difference between the sentiments of benevolence and humanity. In Hume’s view, this first part further highlights, the virtue of benevolence belongs to a class of social virtues distinct from justice. A second part focuses on the example of Pericles on his deathbed in Section 2 to illustrate Hume’s positive account of benevolence as well as the reductionist and skeptical suspicion of the selfish theories concerning benevolence and the social virtues. A third part offers a critical examination of Hume’s critique of the selfish theories and shows how Appendix 2 gives further evidence in favor of Hume’s nonreductionist account of benevolence and the social virtues. In the last part, focusing on the intriguing Section 9, some concluding reflections are offered on Hume’s avowal of the unorthodox character of his own benevolence-based moral theory and his appraisal of a modified self-love as constitutive of the flourishing of the sentiment of humanity.

Kant’s thesis that there is in human nature an innate, universal, inextirpable, and radical propensity to evil belongs to his attempt to choose fragments of (Christian) revelation and see if they cannot be seen to lead back to the religion of pure reason. Though Kant regards this thesis as unproven, he offers it as an interpretation of the Christian doctrine of original sin that can be used in moral discipline, though not in moral dogmatics. To understand Kant’s concept of evil, we must understand his concept of freedom and disentangle it from incomprehensible metaphysical speculations with which it has often been associated in the literature. Kant’s concept of moral evil is extremely abstract, consisting in the choice of some nonmoral incentive over the moral incentive. Evil can never be made entirely intelligible because evil is action, hence done for reasons, but there can never be a sufficient or decisive reason for doing it because the moral incentive is rationally prior to all nonmoral incentives. But Kant thinks evil can be made intelligible to an extent by seeing it as part of nature’s purposiveness in developing human species predispositions in the social condition.