The Moral Status of Self-Love in Early Reformed Ethics

Abstract

Abstract Reformed moral philosophers in the period of early orthodoxy (ca. 1550–ca. 1650) continue a medieval tradition of engaging moral questions in conversation with Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and they often address the moral status of self-love in connection with the virtue of friendship. There is broad agreement among these authors that self-love is not only not necessarily sinful, but that some kinds of self-love are morally good and that self-love is the source and rule for love of one’s neighbor. Lambert Daneau’s Ethices Christianae, however, stands in a more complex relationship to this consensus.