Loving Strangers: A Philosophical Guide

We are living in an era defined by loneliness, resentment, and moral exhaustion. The former Surgeon General has warned that social disconnection poses as grave a public health risk as smoking. Meanwhile, social media platforms have found ways to monetize ridicule and outrage, and our political discourse feeds on grievance. Against this backdrop, the love ethic seeks to recover an alternative moral framework rooted in a straightforward but demanding vision: love is a virtue we are wired to develop, mere human dignity is the only rational basis for love, and our flourishing depends upon expanding this skill even to strangers and adversaries. These Wilde Lectures are based on a book I am completing – Loving Strangers – which lays out a philosophical (rather than theological) defense of the love ethic, while exposing readers to the rich historical sources and contemporary applications for this approach.

The ethical theory will be developed through a close reading of the Parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10, treating it as a philosophical thought experiment with significant implications for major debates in contemporary moral theory. I’ll defend a methodology for reading the parables as philosophical texts. The substance of the lectures will focus on four interconnected themes. First, I’ll consider the connection between our moral lives and our capacity for various forms of attention. I’ll revisit the famous Darley and Batson “good Samaritan" study in social psychology and develop a theory of the various forms of attention which are crucial to the love ethic, engaging with Weil, Levinas, and Murdoch along the way. Second, I’ll offer a philosophical account of what characterizes Samaritan love, comparing and contrasting it with the more common Aristotelian love ethic. We’ll consider how that parable fits in the broader tradition of virtue ethics. Third, I’ll consider one of the most significant objections to the Samaritan love ethic, namely that it will inevitably lead to moral burnout on the part of its adherents. We’ll consider the theoretical and practical problems that accompany demandiness and consider the extent to which moral theory must provide a “way of life” for adherents. I’ll argue that we have misunderstood the concept of supererogation which the parable introduced to ethical theory. Finally, we’ll consider how the love ethic compares to rationalist approaches to philanthropy. I’ll offer a defense of the love ethic against pressing recent criticisms from the Effective Altruism movement.

The opening lecture will introduce the Loving Strangers project and develop a methodology for reading biblical parables as philosophical thought experiments. We will then begin to practice this method with the Parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10.

We’ll start by practicing what St. Ignatius of Loyola describes as “composition of place” looking at the road from Jerusalem to Jericho and the situation travelers would have found themselves in. We’ll consider the situationist challenge to developing a love ethic, revisiting the landmark Darley and Batson “Good Samaritan" study at Princeton. We’ll consider whether it is coherent to blame someone for a failure of Samaritanism.

This lecture will argue that common failures of Samaritanism are not necessarily due to heartlessness but to a failure of perception; the state of being hurried or "task-oriented" effectively closes the moral aperture, rendering the stranger invisible. Drawing on the insights of Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch and Emmanuel Levinas, we’ll consider the two forms of attention that are most salient to the love ethic. One form of attention requires being interruptible, prioritizing attention to a person over attention to a task. The other requires looking again, challenging the impersonal stereotypes that harden our perception of others. The love ethic demands a shift from seeing others as "non-playable characters" to recognizing them as particular, dignified selves.

The second lecture will take up the figure of the Samaritan. We will closely examine his intentions and behavior in the parable, raising questions about how the Samaritan is meant to fulfill the love commandment given in Leviticus 19:18. We will focus on a detail about what moved the Samaritan to act once he noticed the stranger – he experienced splanchgnizomai or “a movement of his guts”. This detail illustrates that the Samaritan love ethic is based in a certain type of emotional vulnerability. How does this situate the Samaritan love ethic in modern virtue ethics?

We will compare the key features of the Samaritan's love ethic with the features of the more commonly studied Aristotelian love ethic. Aristotle’s love ethic treats love as one among many important virtues for eudaimonia. Love is only possible among those who are of similar virtue and able to reciprocate emotional connection. Love tends toward contemplation and shared activity. The lover experiences their beloved as a “second self”  Love of strangers is incoherent on the Aristotelian approach to virtue ethics.

The Samaritan love ethic agrees with the Aristotelian approach in that love is an experience of a second self. But vulnerability, not virtue, is the basis of the connection with the other person. Love is characterized by attention and tending, which may never be reciprocated. We will conclude this lecture by revisiting the methodological questions from Lecture One. Can we distill a complete moral theory from the details in this parable? What gaps remain?

The Parable of the Good Samaritan is the historic basis for the concept of supererogation in ethics. A supererogatory act is one which goes beyond what moral duty requires of us. In the Vulgate Latin translation of Luke 10, when the Samaritan promises the innkeeper he will “pay anything over and above” what is needed to sustain the injured man, it is translated as quodcumque supererogaveris. This one detail has prompted centuries of debate, especially in duty-based ethical traditions, about how to understand the moral significance of acts which seem to exceed what morality requires.

In this lecture, we will approach these debates about supererogation from a somewhat unconventional angle. We will meditate on the figure of the priest, one of the two characters in the parable who attended to the injured man but was not moved to stop. We’ll consider the phenomenon of moral burnout, which occurs when a moral theory asks something of an agent which they find themselves unable to satisfy. We’ll consider whether those who fail to stop are guilty of suberogation or whether rather the problem lies with the excessive demandiness of the Samaritan love ethic.

We will survey three arguments against the Samaritan love ethic arising from three different threats of moral burnout: emotional exhaustion, loss of integrity, and ineptitude. Each type of moral burnout is driven by a distinctive feature of the Samaritan love ethic as we developed it in Lecture Two. I’ll defend the love ethic against these objections, in the process refining our understanding of the types of emotional vulnerability, attention and beneficence that this ethical framework requires. At the conclusion of the lecture, we’ll consider whether contemporary debates about supererogation in moral theory are poorly framed.

The fourth lecture will consider another significant objection to the love ethic, namely that in its focus on attention and emotional vulnerability, it causes agents to abnegate responsibility for the consequences of their decisions. The love ethic requires us to be “interruptible” in our tasks and to pay attention to the needs of others in noncompetitive ways. There is a significant worry that such an approach to ethics renders us wasteful and inefficient. The two denarii that the Samaritan spent on the night at the inn represented roughly a week’s worth of wages for a middle class person in that period. For that amount, the Samaritan could have funded projects to make the road safer for many other travelers.

We’ll develop the objections to the love ethic from rationalism, using the character of the Levite as a stand-in for one who approaches the ethics of philanthropy from this rationalist framework. I’ll argue that the Samaritan love ethic challenges the assumptions about control and attention that are central to rationalist arguments. And I’ll defend the role of vulnerability and proximity in philanthropy while rejecting defenses of partiality that are common in modern virtue ethics. I’ll develop an alternative to Effective Altruism, inspired by the Samaritan love ethic, which I call Affective Altruism.