Synopsis
Love as Service argues that public service is best understood as the pursuit of public welfare through love in action. That definition is intentionally wider than charity or kindness. Love can look like feeding and clothing people, administering government well, accompanying someone through a frightening process, negotiating common ground, breaking secrecy when whistleblowing is required, naming suffering in public, or resisting systems that produce harm. The paper compares how justice ethics, care ethics, and differing moral foundations change what people recognize as loving public action.
The problem it responds to
Public service is often reduced either to benevolent helping or to the formal machinery of government. Both definitions miss the ethical question underneath the work: what kind of obligation moves a person to act for public welfare, especially when service requires conflict, sacrifice, criticism of institutions, or solidarity with people whose values differ from one’s own?
What the work contributes
- Defines public service broadly enough to include direct aid, administration, advocacy, whistleblowing, protest, negotiation, and institutional reform.
- Treats joy as one manifestation of love rather than the boundary of it, leaving room for anger, courage, grief, patience, and defiance as service responses.
- Compares justice-based and care-based ethical foundations to show why people can pursue public welfare through different moral vocabularies.
- Connects an ethical definition of service to the practical work of building institutions, policies, and systems capable of caring well.
What counts as love here
- Material care: feeding, clothing, sheltering, supporting, and accompanying people through vulnerable moments.
- Institutional care: making government, nonprofits, and public systems function in ways that protect dignity and public welfare.
- Confrontational care: whistleblowing, protest, revolution, public criticism, or other acts that oppose harmful systems rather than soothing them.
- Relational care: negotiating common ground, remaining present in ambiguity, and recognizing that different moral foundations produce different understandings of fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority, and harm.
Development
- Written through graduate study in Foundations of Public Service.
- Provides the clearest statement of the public-service philosophy that connects the site’s relational-ethics work to its applied systems and civic work.
Keywords