Matthew Moore: What does it mean to love your neighbor, a stranger, an enemy even? Tomorrow evening, the University of Arkansas’ philosophy department will be tackling that idea with a guest lecturer. Meghan Sullivan is the director of the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good at the University of Notre Dame. She’ll be speaking as part of the Kraemer Lecture Series tomorrow night from 7 to 9 on the campus of the University of Arkansas.
We spoke over the phone earlier this week. She says studying the idea of good came to her in her first semester of college, when she took a course called “The Issues of Life and Death”.
Meghan Sullivan: It was an applied ethics course where our professor would get up every week and give us a question. It was basically, ‘Is this good? Is this a good life?’ So I remember the one week we debated whether or not it would ever be morally acceptable to kill yourself. Another week, ‘Is it morally acceptable to eat meat?’ And that course and that professor was the first time I realized that you can really spend your life trying to get to the bottom of what’s good, of pursuing what’s good. And that this is something that philosophy and theology and our education can help us do. So that kind of really formed me very deeply my first semester of college and is what I’ve devoted my career to.
Moore: You know, there’s this idea of understanding the concept of good. Is there a place of study where you study the concept of bad?
Sullivan: That’s interesting. The newspapers right now, I don’t know. I think we study both of these subjects in colleges or when you read novels or you watch television shows. How many of us like to watch TV shows where the main character always makes the right decision and ends up on top as a result? No way. Those kinds of stories do not inherently interest the human mind. The stories that we love are TV shows like “Breaking Bad”, TV shows where people realize that they find themselves in situations where they have no clue what to do, or they find themselves in situations where they made a terrible mistake and now they’ve got to figure out if they’re going to come clean or get out of it.
So I actually think a lot of our mental lives are spent wrestling with things that we realize are bad and trying to figure out how we would respond if we were in those circumstances, or why exactly are they bad and how bad are they. So I think we study that subject just as much as we study what’s good, probably even more so. That takes up a lot more of our time. I’ve spent a whole lot more time thinking about why my friends have made immoral or bad decisions than I do thinking about all the good things they’ve done.
Moore: What do you think people misunderstand about the idea of the common good?
Sullivan: Interesting. I think a lot of folks mistake it for the lowest common denominator. The minimum amount of what people would think is good. So they really focus on the common part of it. You might think in our very divided communities right now, we might disagree about everything under the sun, but the common good is like we all agree that we want the snowplows to come through and clear our streets. So the common good is some kind of what we settle on, the basic minimum.
And that’s not what we mean when we talk about the common good. The common good is nothing more, nothing less than our lives together, the social lives that we create together. And sometimes caring about the common good really pushes us to try harder and to dream bigger than what we might have imagined.
Maybe an example of this is to think about the common good in a family. A family that has a really deep sense of its identity as a family will have members who are willing to make a whole lot of sacrifices for their family members. A family that cares a lot about the common good will have everybody drop everything to go to little Johnny’s baseball tournament because the common good today involves helping this little kid feel the glory of his sports achievements. Or the common good for a family might mean folks banding together when a relative is sick and really making sacrifices, putting in money and time to help this person recover. In this case, the common good is demanding a whole lot of us.
When we talk about the common good in our institute, thinking about it on a broader societal level, we’re not just talking about the bare minimum we could all agree on, but instead thinking about if we’d built a beautiful society and community together, what would we all be contributing to that effort. So it’s meant to be motivating, a positive ideal vision that we’re moving toward.
Moore: When you talk about common good just now, you're describing it kind of within a family dynamic. You'll be on the University of Arkansas campus Thursday evening as part of the Department of Philosophy's Kraemer Lecture Series, with a talk entitled “Loving Strangers”. How does your perception of common good change in a dynamic between family and familiar connections, as opposed to strangers?
Sullivan: Oh, it’s a great question. You’ve got to come to the talk to get all the answers here. But first, I’d say I’m so excited to come out to the University of Arkansas. They have such a fantastic community of students and faculty out there. I’m going to get the 49th state off my list of states that I’ve visited and spent the night in, so I’m very, very excited about that.
And I’ll tell you what. Every time I give a public lecture like this and I look out in this lecture hall and you’ve got all of these students and community members and professors who show up to talk about a philosophical topic, that’s how I experience the common good. People could be anywhere. You could be watching Netflix. You could be rewatching the Super Bowl halftime show. And instead you choose to be part of a live lecture and you want to do a little bit of philosophy and debate these big ideas. I think that shows that we all want something more out of our lives together in our evenings. I’m always just so, so excited when people come out for these events.
The theme of the talk, Aristotle and Jesus. Two absolutely world-class philosophers who have a whole lot to say about our ability to love strangers. Aristotle, my ancient Greek guy famously thinks it’s impossible. Aristotle thinks that there’s absolutely no way you can love a complete stranger. You can wish strangers well. You can have goodwill toward strangers. But the concept of loving a complete stranger, that is just impossible. And even if you could do it, you shouldn’t do it. It’d be way too risky.
Jesus, on the other hand, thinks not only is it possible for you to love complete strangers, to love even your enemies, but you should do it. To live a good life, you’ve got to figure out a way to do it. So the lecture is going to get into a little bit about these two great philosophers of love and where they agree and where they disagree about the role that love plays in our life.
And then I'm going to come down and try to offer a philosophical defense of Jesus’ teaching. We’re going to take a really close look at the parable of the Good Samaritan from the Gospel of Luke, and I’m going to teach everybody in the audience how to read that parable like a philosopher would read it. Try to ask interesting questions about what love means in our lives and how far we’re able to extend our ability to love if we’re being thoughtful about it.
Moore: How does a philosophical examination of that scripture look different from an exegetical perspective of that scripture?
Sullivan: It's another thing I'm hoping to show the audience at the talk. To do philosophy well, you’ve got to know a little bit of the context. To think about the philosophical significance of the parable of the Good Samaritan, you’ve got to know something about Jericho and something about Jerusalem and something about who the Samaritans were in relationship to the Jewish people. You’ve got to do a little bit of exegesis.
But whereas a theologian might read that parable and really focus on the fact that God commands love for us or God himself is love, a philosopher is going to read it and think a little bit more about what kinds of questions this parable raises for people, regardless of where they are in their theological or religious journey. How would we teach this parable as being, uh, the story that's in conversation with Socrates and Aristotle about the vision of what it is to have love in your life?
Philosophers aren’t going to assume already that you completely understand God’s will or that you understand the relevant theology. They’re not even going to assume that you’ve read the rest of the Christian Bible. But instead, they’re going to look in a detailed way at the different claims that that story is making and then try to draw some general suggestions for how we should live our lives as a result of it. So philosophers are not atheological, but philosophers are looking at a different set of questions than maybe theologians might look at when they read the parable. And I think they’re complementary. I say this as a person of faith who also loves philosophy. Is it a parable like this has so many different dimensions to it, so many different interesting and provocative ideas that are contained within it, that you kind of need all of the different disciplines to really grasp how important it is.
Moore: Right, you're not looking at it from a monotheistic lens. The biblical scripture that comes to mind when I think about loving strangers is the greatest commandment, Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. And the second is to love your neighbor as yourself. But Christians aren't the only people who have a corner on the idea of loving strangers.
Sullivan: No. Well, it's fascinating because if you look at the parable of the Good Samaritan, it starts off as a philosophical debate. So this scholar of Jewish ethics approaches Jesus, and he basically asks him to comment on Leviticus 19, love your neighbor as you love yourself. And he asked Jesus, what's the path to eternal life? Jesus reminds him that the greatest commandment, the commandments from Deuteronomy and Leviticus, that love is the kind of secret to eternal life in the Jewish tradition. And the man says, oh, I've got a follow up question, though, the love your neighbor passage. Who exactly is my neighbor? Like, who do I have to love in order to fulfill this commandment?
And then you're off to the races with the parable and the philosophical discussion. So I think you're totally right. In the first instance, the way you read the parable of the Good Samaritan is these two guys are having a philosophical debate about Jewish ethics, and in particular, what's held up to be one of the kind of organizing ideas in the rest of Jewish ethics, which is that all of the ethical law comes down to how you love God and to how you love others.
Moore: Do you think about, whether it’s accidental or otherwise, the timeliness of a sort of conversation like this is we're we're kind of in a place politically where we seem to be so divided on everything, and everyone feels like an us versus them scenario. Do you think about the timeliness element of a perennially important conversation, loving strangers every day?
Sullivan: Absolutely. I started working on this project about the parable of the Good Samaritan seven years ago. So I didn’t necessarily predict where we were going to be in 2026, I think I hoped I'd finish it faster than I have. But I think in our current circumstances, if you’re the kind of person that’s reading the news every day and just thinking, ‘What is happening? I don’t recognize myself. I don’t recognize my community anymore. 2000 years ago I think a lot of Jews and Romans felt the same way about their own particular circumstance. There’s something incredibly powerful about taking a step back and going to these beautiful texts and these beautiful ideas that have guided people for thousands of years and saying, ‘Alright, let me really understand what I’m about and what my identity is in this debate.’
So I think it's helpful to have these kinds of conversations right now, and I think it's more important than ever that we be willing to take a beat and really think about our capacity for love and how we can extend it.
Moore: Meghan Sullivan is a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and the director of the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good. She’ll be on the University of Arkansas campus tomorrow evening, Feb. 12 beginning at 7 p.m. in Room 0132 in the Chemistry Building.
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