Brief musings on the idea of love and ethics

A year ago I randomly came across a document on the net called "A Christian Response" to "A Common Word Between Us and You." The idea behind the document is that we - Christian and non-Christian alike - are called to "love our neighbors as ourselves." As I read this document, I could not help but think how far we often stray from the spirit of this noble ideal. It is because "perfect love" is so elusive that ethics is needed. While we may be unable to love everyone equally in every instance, ethics allows us to treat others justly or with compassion, as if we loved them. Hatred, selfishness, fear are the ultimate foils to ethical behavior, however. In a book I read several years ago, called Humanity, Jonathan Glover argued that cruelty toward others is borne out of objectifying them, regarding them from a "distance," seeing them as some ignominious "other." We can fall into this trap even if we do not intend to, or consider ourselves to be good people, by merely being complacent about or momentarily indifferent to the suffering of those who are not part of our immediate circle of close friends and loved ones, choosing only to care about others in the most disastrous of situations, as Rebecca Solnit points out in her interestingly titled new book, A Paradise Built in Hell. This is why empathy, being able to put one’s self in another person’s shoes, is so important. In the future I will try to provide my thoughts on books and, to a lesser extent, current event stories dealing with questions about ethics.