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Loving Kindness and Mercy: their Human and Cosmic Significance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 February 2019

John Cottingham
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Abstract

This paper starts by examining the language used in some well known scriptural passages where the importance of mercy or compassion is stressed. Such passages underline the ethical importance of a direct, physically and emotionally involved response. This leads on to a critique of the shortcomings of approaches to ethics which advocate the impersonal promotion of welfare; our lives as ethical beings depend intimately on the immediate responses arising from our encounters with others in our day-to-day lives. The paper then further explores the special status of loving kindness and mercy in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and argues that secular ethical systems, whether grounded in human nature or in the supposed requirements of rationality, are unlikely to be able to underwrite this kind of status. The final section reflects further on the ‘cosmic’ significance of love in a theistic worldview.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 94 , Issue 1 , January 2019 , pp. 27 - 42
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2019 

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References

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3 misertus, a variant of miseritus, the normal past participle in Classical Latin.

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