Within our (post) modern milieu lurks the problem of self love. Self love is an inescapable problem for ethics, secular, religious, and Christian, because ethics involves claims about human beings, that is, moral anthropologies. Self love is not only a local problem in ethics, it riddles (post) modern culture as a whole. Because ethics arises in response to the demand to orient and guide human life, it must finally be adequate to such a life. Ethics manifests a dialectical relation between human being and thinking about our being in the world and with others. This book explicates and structurally instantiates this dialectic of moral being and moral thinking. It crafts a moral anthropology in response to the practical moral problem of how to love oneself rightly, and argues that right self love designates a particular form of self-relation in which we understand ourselves truly and embody this in our acts and relations.

This project faces several obstacles from the outset. It is increasingly difficult in ethics to offer a normative account of selfhood. In part this is because a going currency, the language of authenticity, has become tired from over-use. Given the surge of self-help programs and products, and the growing tendency to cast religious belief and spirituality strictly in terms of self-fulfillment, the prospect of an adequate theoretical account of the self is undermined by trite exaltations and ideals of self-realization.