Love and human flourishing

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5502/ijw.v15i4.4663

Abstract

We present arguments that the promotion of love within society has tremendous underutilized potential to enhance human flourishing. Some indication that this may be so can be found in sweeping claims sometimes made about love within philosophical, theological, psychological, sociological, and even economic, business and management literatures. We review definitional and theoretical considerations concerning love and flourishing. We summarize various streams of empirical evidence for the role of love in the promotion of human flourishing. We then argue that social policy oriented towards promoting love within families, friendships, schools, workplaces, religious communities, medicine, politics and the media could make substantial contributions to advancing societal flourishing.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biographies

Tyler J. VanderWeele, Harvard University

Tyler J. VanderWeele, Ph.D., is the John L. Loeb and Frances Lehman Loeb Professor of Epidemiology in the Departments of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Director of the Human Flourishing Program and Co-Director of the Initiative on Health, Religion and Spirituality at Harvard University. He holds degrees from the University of Oxford, University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard University in mathematics, philosophy, theology, finance, and biostatistics. His methodological research is focused on theory and methods for distinguishing between association and causation in the biomedical and social sciences and, more recently, on psychosocial measurement theory. His empirical research spans psychiatric and social epidemiology; the science of happiness and flourishing; and the study of religion and health. He is the recipient of the 2017 Presidents’ Award from the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS). He has published over four hundred papers in peer-reviewed journals; is author of the books Explanation in Causal Inference (2015), Modern Epidemiology (2021), and Measuring Well-Being (2021); and he also writes a monthly blog posting on topics related to human flourishing for Psychology Today.

Matthew T. Lee, Baylor University

Matthew T. Lee, Ph.D., is Professor of the Social Sciences and Humanities at the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University. He is also a Research Associate and Director of the Human Flourishing Program’s Flourishing Network at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University.  In addition, he is a member of the Global Study of Human Flourishing research team, a Distinguished Visiting Scholar of Health, Flourishing, and Positive Psychology at Stony Brook University’s Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care, and Bioethics, as well as a Visiting Scholar at the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. In April, 2023, he was designated as an inaugural “Lifetime Community Engaged Scholar” by the EXL Center for Community Engaged Learning at the University of Akron.

Downloads

Published

2025-09-30

Issue

Vol. 15 No. 4 (2025)

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2025 Tyler J. VanderWeele, Matthew T. Lee

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

  1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal. The license prevents others from using the work for profit without the express consent of the author(s). The license also prevents the creation of derivative works without the express consent of the author(s). Note that derivative works are very similar in nature to the original. Merely quoting (and appropriately referencing) a passage of a work is not making a derivative of it.
  2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
  3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).