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Woman with shoulder-length brown hair wearing glasses, gold hoop earrings, a beige blazer, and a white blouse against a plain white background.
Meghan Sullivan
Meghan Sullivan is the Wilsey Family College Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, where she leads the Ethics Initiative and founded the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good.
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Thupten Jinpa
Thupten Jinpa Langri has been a principal English translator to the Dalai Lama since 1985. He has translated and edited more than ten books by the Dalai Lama including The World of Tibetan Buddhism (Wisdom Publications,[…]
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Sharon Salzberg
Sharon Salzberg is a meditation pioneer and industry leader, a world-renowned teacher, and a New York Times bestselling author. As one of the first to bring meditation and mindfulness into[…]
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Want to know if someone is compassionate? It’s identifiable in more ways than one. 

Philosopher Meghan Sullivan, PhD, Buddhist scholar and former monk Thupten Jinpa, PhD, and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg explore love through neuroscience, philosophy, and lived practice. They discuss society’s flaw in mistaking kindness for weakness, how neuroscience has proven to identify compassion in brain scans, and how expanding Aristotle’s Love Ethic can change our society for the better.

We created this video for Brain Briefs, a Big Think interview series created in partnership with Unlikely Collaborators. As a creative non-profit organization, they’re on a mission to help people challenge their perceptions and expand their thinking. Often, that growth can start with just a single unlikely question that makes you rethink your convictions and adjust your vantage point. Visit Perception Box to see more in this series.

MEGHAN SULLIVAN: We think about love as primarily a psychological phenomenon, something that we don't have a great deal of control over. Aristotle famously said, when you really love a friend, you experience that person as a second self. And the Love Ethic says those same feelings should be extended to strangers. How do we navigate our lives in an era where our politics, our economics, our technology is causing us to become far more isolated and divided?

THUPTEN JINPA: I would define compassion in a nutshell as a natural sense of concern that arises in us in the face of someone who is in need and wanted to do something about it. And much of the current scientific studies that overlaps the science of compassion is the study of empathy. Empathy is the ability to vicariously experience someone else's pain. 

And that's what allows us to connect with the other person. There are some interesting studies coming from meditators who meditate many hours on compassion. And then looking at their brain, you can actually see the brain's expression in action. The whole mapping of the brain regions that are involved in an experience, something like compassion is beginning to be done. What is really natural to our human being is the ability to connect with someone, and the ability to relate to that person at a deeper level, and have a much more open hearted interaction.

SHARON SALZBERG: The common perception tends to be that a quality like love and kindness is a sort of weakness, that it makes you sort of silly or very complacent. Being a doormat, letting someone walk over you. Why do we have such a sense of love and kindness that it's degraded into this foolish reaction, compared to the force that it genuinely is? We can have a genuine compassion for someone and also protect ourselves and have a strong boundary.

If you can't be brilliant, and you can't be courageous and you can't be wonderful, be kind. It actually is great to really feel into the pain of someone and to wish them well.

MEGHAN SULLIVAN: A Love Ethic, or a love-based approach to ethics says to love your neighbor with the same intensity with which you love yourself. The Love Ethic is asking us to feel something about the people who are in need, who are around us to open ourselves up, to have that kind of emotional reaction again, and also giving us a glimmer of hope that maybe our emotions, especially one particular emotion, might be the path forward for us learning how to build a better society where people are genuinely cared for.

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