The University of Notre Dame has received a $10 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation to examine how the ethics of love can contribute to society.
The amount, the largest Notre Dame has ever received from the Pennsylvania-based philanthropic organization, will fund a project the university is calling Love and Social Transformation: Empowering Scholars and Social Innovators to Develop the Love Ethic.
At its core, the project aims to advance how the ethics of love can factor into decision-making.
“In our fractious, uncertain time, there is an urgent need for serious reflection on an ethic of love,” University President Emeritus Rev. John I. Jenkins said in a Monday news release. “Emerging from the great religious traditions, the call to love has been behind some of the most transformative and enduring advances in human history. I am grateful to the Templeton Foundation for giving Notre Dame this opportunity.”
The project aims to bring scholars, writers, nonprofit leaders and others together in a host of ways:
- Residential fellowships for faculty and graduate students developing the theoretical foundations for the love ethic.
- Fellowships and grants to nonprofit leaders and organizations putting this ethic into practice on social issues.
- Workshops and two global conferences designed to expand the reach of the love ethic.
- A series of public engagement and storytelling programs to inspire the broader public imagination about love and ethics.
Notre Dame will collaborate with up to 10 institutions as research partners, the university said. Project participants will apply the love ethic to a wide range of use cases, including issues of displacement and migration, disability, global philanthropy, political polarization and artificial intelligence.
Love-based ethical insights, the university said, have powered social movements such as Mahatma Gandhi’s Satyagraha nonviolent resistance movement in India and Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights leadership in the United States. But more recently, the university said, the more common approaches to ethical decision-making focus instead on cost-benefit analysis.
“These frameworks neglect the dimensions of life that fit into the rich tradition of virtue ethics — moral touchpoints such as love, dignity and awe,” said Meghan Sullivan, the Wilsey Family College professor of philosophy, director of the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good and the Notre Dame Ethics Initiative, and principal investigator for the grant.
The project will be led by Notre Dame’s Center for Virtue Ethics within the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good.