Sullivan Wins $10 Million Grant for “Love Ethic” Project at Notre Dame
Meghan Sullivan, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, has won a $10 million grant for the project, “Love and Social Transformation: Empowering Scholars and Social Innovators to Develop the Love Ethic.”
(Photo by Barbara Johnston/University of Notre Dame)
According to a press release from Notre Dame:
The Love and Social Transformation project will bring scholars, writers, nonprofit leaders and others together to advance a framework that captures the power, richness and applicability of the love ethic—a core component of many faith traditions throughout the world.
Love-based ethical insights have powered some of the most important social movements of the past century, such as Mahatma Gandhi’s Satyagraha movement in India and Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights leadership in the United States. But in the 21st century, the more common approaches to ethical decision-making — especially in policy realms — focus instead on cost-benefit analysis.
“These frameworks neglect the dimensions of life that fit into the rich tradition of virtue ethics — moral touchpoints such as love, dignity and awe,” said Meghan Sullivan, the Wilsey Family College Professor of Philosophy, director of the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good and the Notre Dame Ethics Initiative, and principal investigator for the grant.
“In contrast, the love ethic has three components: It holds that a widespread, non-merit-based trait like dignity is what grounds moral significance for each one of us; it is built around principles that situate interpersonal love at the foundations of our ethical reasoning; and it suggests love-oriented policies on diverse social issues as well as a love-oriented way of life.”
The grant is from the John Templeton Foundation.
Notre Dame will collaborate with up to 10 other institutions as research partners on this work, and researchers “will apply the love ethic to a wide range of use cases, including issues of displacement and migration, disability, global philanthropy, political polarization and artificial intelligence.”
The funding will support residential fellowships for faculty and graduate students developing the theoretical foundations for the love ethic, fellowships and grants to nonprofit leaders and organizations putting this ethic into practice on pressing social issues, intensive workshops and two global conferences designed to expand the reach of the love ethic, an integrated series of public engagement and storytelling programs that will inspire the broader public imagination about love and ethics, among other things.
You can learn more about it here.
Wow—congrats, Meghan, and good luck with the project!
Two mildly cranky observations:
(1) It might have come as a surprise to Gandhi and King that the “love-based ethical insights” pertinent to their philosophies were in any tension with “cost-benefit analysis,” given that both were leading risky social movements that (a) required them to strategically leverage very limited resources with (b) very little room for error that (c) predictably imposed profound costs on their participants.
(2) I suspect that the twentieth-century philosophers who immediately come to mind as having done the most provocative and influential work in this area—Beauvoir, Weil, and Murdoch—would all have found the prospect of writing and thinking about love under the auspices of big Templeton grants and vaguely corporate university “centers” distasteful. I also suspect that this isn’t an accident.
Cool! This reminds me of Thomas Jay Oord’s work. I hope there will be a side to this project which focuses on promoting a dialectic between the loving agent and the beloved for the purposes of arriving at a shared conception of what counts as love.