The Most Important Virtue for a Good Life | Meghan Sullivan | TED

So I'm a philosopher at the University of Notre Dame, where I teach a very popular course on the good life. In my career, I have corrupted thousands of youth with philosophy. And tonight, I’m here to try to corrupt you with what I think is one of the most important, but least appreciated ideas in the philosophy of the good life today. Most major philosophers and nearly every major world religion puts the virtue of love at the center of the good life. But what exactly does it mean to practice this virtue? To get my students thinking about this, I give them a thought experiment. Suppose I had a pill, and if you took it, it would cause you to experience love for absolutely anyone you met. Would you take it? I’ve asked this to thousands of students, and the answer I overwhelmingly get from my very earnest, very Catholic freshmen is: no. They wouldn't take the "love everyone" pill. And in hearing their answers, I start to get some insight into how they're thinking about this virtue. One of the most profound answers I ever heard was from a 19-year-old guy I taught a couple of years ago. Let's call him Chris, to protect his identity. When Chris raised his hand to tell me why he wouldn't take the "love everyone" pill, I half expected him to say something like, "Professor, losers don't deserve my love. " But instead, he said something that was actually pretty deep. He said, "Professor, I sleep with my cell phone across my bedroom at night. And sometimes it goes off in the middle of the night. And I wake up and I think, ’Oh my God, something’s happened to my mom. ′ And I feel sick to my stomach until I can get to the phone and answer it and know that she's OK. Feeling that way about everyone, that would be unbearable for me. " Chris has his finger, attention in how we think about love. Love is essential to the good life, but it's also risky, dangerous, it can even be downright unbearable. One thing that's kind of funny is we have all these complex thinkings about the virtue of love, but when it comes to hate and resentment, those are easy. We can absolutely cultivate those. In fact, our current politics, the internet, it has us taking a "hate everyone" pill just about voluntarily every day. There are a lot of philosophers that are trying to figure out a way out of this current chaos. And in my field of ethics, one of the hottest topics right now is the virtue of civility. What we need to teach people is how to turn down their feelings, how to have more sophisticated political conversations, and how to coexist with other people who they disagree with. Now in 2,400 years of philosophy, I can think of no major thinker who thinks civility is a cardinal virtue. Civility, it's a virtue, but like a third tier, division-three virtue at best. (Laughter) Love, on the other hand, love is the deep magic. The philosophers that I study think the virtue of love is crucial for our ethical and social health. The tough thing is figuring out how to get yourself to take that love pill. So to get us on that track, I want to introduce you guys to two of the greatest ancient philosophers of love who don't agree on everything, but have some deep insights that we need to recover to get out of our current mess. The first philosopher is Aristotle of Macedonia. He taught his course on the good life 2,400 years ago, and his big idea was that love is not just a feeling that happens inside of you. When you love another person, you experience them as another self. Love has the power to dissolve the membrane between yourself and another person. When you love someone and they achieve something great or they have extraordinary virtue, Aristotle thinks those achievements and virtues, they come into yourself. When you love someone and they do something shameful or they have vice, that comes into you. Aristotle thought for those reasons you should be super careful who you love. You shouldn't want any potentially bad stuff to come into yourself. About 500 years later, another great philosopher comes on the scene and he innovates this debate. This is Jesus of Nazareth. Now a lot of people don’t think of Jesus as a philosopher, but if you read the Gospels, he is getting into philosophical disputes all the time that rival the ones the ancient Greek philosophers are having. The best one, I think, comes in the Gospel of Luke. Jesus gets a question from a Jewish ethicist.

The core of the good life in Judaism is loving God and loving others as another self. And the ethicist asks Jesus, what does this mean? And Jesus responds with a thought experiment. One day this man is walking down the road from Jerusalem to Jericho when some robbers come upon him, they strip him naked, take all of his stuff and beat him within an inch of his life. They leave him to die by the side of the road. Two men walk by, they notice the man dying by the side of the road, and they're unmoved, they just walk on by. A third man comes around, a Samaritan, and he sees the man, and his guts move inside of him. The Greek word in the Gospel of Luke that we’re given is “splagchnizomai,” his guts churn inside of him. In the ancient world strong emotions like love, they didn't live in your heart. They lived in your intestines. If you wanted to make someone an ancient philosophy-inspired Valentine, you wouldn't cut them out a heart. You would literally coil of intestines and like, a liver and a kidney and give it to them. That's where love lived. The Samaritan loved in his guts. And he stopped and he helped the man, he nursed him back to health all night. Aristotle thought that what connects us with other people, what dissolves that membrane, is expectation of virtue and achievement. But Jesus thought, what dissolves the membrane, what really connects us with other people is vulnerability. And what's interesting about connecting with people on vulnerability is that you can do it with absolutely anyone. We might not all be physically beaten up, laying, dying by the side of the road, but we've all been beaten up by life. We all have some element of that beaten man inside of us, and that is where the love connection can happen. You don't have to take my word for it. I think one of the most interesting studies in social psychology, 30 years ago, Arthur Aron did this amazing experiment where he showed that he could cause strangers to love each other in a lab in under an hour. And here was the experiment. He'd pair people up, and he would have them ask each other questions that required them to be increasingly vulnerable. It would start with simple questions like, who’s someone you’d like to have dinner with? And end with questions like, which member of your family would you be most disturbed to discover had died? People reported, 30 percent of participants in the Aron's study, reported feelings of closeness that rivaled how they felt towards their most intimate partners and towards their best friends. Vulnerability has the ability to cause these connections. I don't know about you guys, but I feel like, especially in the last decade, we have been living through a period of what I would call ethical constipation. (Laughter) We have to get our guts moving again, and we're not going to be able to do that with better political discussions, more abstractions, separating ourselves from each other. We have got to learn to connect, and we've got to learn how to do it through our vulnerability. Guys like Chris that I teach at Notre Dame, they think that their splagchnizomai makes them weak. But I think that this feeling in our guts, this kind of love, this connection, it's the surest sign that we are on the road to the good life. Thank you. (Cheers and applause)