We should live Love. All our dealings, large and small, impact others and we should act so that they will be moved to live a life of unconditional love. We don't have to look at saving a life in a grandiose way.
To practice unconditional Love, you need to be wholly interested and devote a great deal of effort to discovering their deepest hopes and do what is best for the beloved with no though or expectation of personal reward.
We need to dispense with all pejorative labels and see ourselves as flawed and foible and never put ourselves above anyone.
Not only must we love those that we are ordinarily not predisposed to love, we should also allow ourselves to love by those who don't love us. Or else we will be keeping ourselves only in situations when we have control over the "loving situation".
Bertrand Russell expounds the Socratic and Buddhist ideal over the example found in the New Testament because in unconditional Love, no one really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment. Socrates, upon his death, never exhorted his followers to exact revenge on his persecutors. Instead, he told them to reach out to others in love, more than ever. (Positive Revenge!) Russell finds this more worthy than what is advanced in the New Testament where anyone who does not believe in Jesus will not be able to escape the damnation of Hell and shall not be forgiven.
The Old Testament also speaks of Unconditional Love of Man for God. Job is in anguish because he has apparently been forsaken by one he himself would never forsake. Indeed, his very actions and persistence to stick to the course of Love in a Loveless world is a form of positive revenge and encourages all who strive.
To give birth to Unconditional Love, empathy must be gained. Can you "teach" empathy? Do you have to first suffer cruelty and harshness yourself to identify with others who have suffered? Nussbaum asserts that all intelligence has its emotional component. Once emotions are suffused with intelligence and discernment, an awareness of value or importance is achieved and this cannot easily be sidelined in accounts of ethical judgment.
Positive Revenge brigs about a heroism and intensity of thought, feeling and acts of love which continue ad infinitum, irregardless of the mortal lifespan of their agents.
As my mum has contended, would not people who make positive revenge a way of life be "fools"? The moral-realist's position is that if you believe the worst in people, they will be all too happy to comply and show you their worst. But if you believe the best in them, they may be inspired to bring out the goodness within and act accordingly. And since our end goal is love, we must believe and act in the course of love so as to give it room to grow.
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