Love
This theme runs through several big questions. Here are the ones where it plays out.
The questions that illuminate it
Is it right to give moral priority to those close to us?
We feel we owe more to our children, our friends, our kin than to strangers; yet morality seems to demand equal regard for all. Favouring our own can slide into injustice; treating everyone alike can become inhuman. To take a position is to say whether loving one's own and being just pull the same way.
What should we do with our desires: affirm them, sort them, or detach from them?
Desire is at once what sets us in motion and what torments us: to extinguish it is to extinguish life, to follow it unchecked is to forfeit peace. To take a position is to say where the drive that makes us live ends and where the servitude that wears us out begins.
What lies at the heart of love: a lack, a gift, or something else?
To love, is it to want to seize what we lack, to give without expecting anything, to be played by forces that surpass us, or to build a chosen bond that is cultivated? Depending on the answer, love may last or die out once fulfilled, and it does not ask the same thing of us. To take a position is to say what we are really seeking when we say we love.