Abstract

Love is a moral value; it's also a great slogan. The problem, of course, is that like all slogans, it lacks nuance. Selfless love of the stranger is a moral value for sure, but is self-love a moral value? Love of the family, yes, but love of the familiar? How about love of other species, even at the expense of our own? The problem with nuance is that it bores people. The purpose of this symposium is to work against that boredom, so that we and the academic world in the largest sense may begin to renew ourselves as a voice worth listening to. If love is a moral value—and I think it is—then the success of this symposium will be in finding a way for this university to discuss moral values, by transcending the current paradigm of loveless objectivity that has gone so far in making our voices irrelevant to so many people