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Aaron Stalnaker

Aaron Stalnaker portrait
  • Indiana University-Bloomington
  • Faculty Fellow (2026-2027)
  • "Love’s Illusions: Zhuangzi and Augustine on the Dangers of Misguided Love"

Aaron Stalnaker is a professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University, with courtesy appointments in Philosophy and East Asian Languages and Cultures. His research interests span ethics, political theory, and philosophy of religion, with serious attention to both Chinese and Western theories and practices, from ancient to contemporary periods.

At Notre Dame he will be working on the shadow side of love ethics: those wrongly ordered or misguided forms of love that overshoot the target of right action, thought, and feeling. To this end, his research puts the early Christian Augustine’s influential moral theology of love in conversation with the early Daoist thinker Zhuangzi. Some aspects of Zhuangzi’s thought hold real promise for extending and refining key Augustinian themes through a constructive imagined dialogue about (1) the perils of rigid, self-centered consciousness and the forms of disordered passion this generates; (2) the all-too-human misconstrual of self-interest as general interest or “the common good;” (3) the way these psychological dynamics can lead well-meaning people to excessive and misguided moral judgment of others, sometimes including unwarranted and destructive moralistic punishment; and (4) the resulting value of skeptical self-interrogation when pursuing justice or reform. One key focus of the project is an understudied issue in social ethics: the potential dangers of moral commitment when expressed through “moral overreach,” that is, morally motivated punishment, which can easily go too far.

In past work, Stalnaker has written two book-length studies in comparative religious ethics, both extensively engaging early Chinese sources: Mastery, Dependence, and the Ethics of Authority (Oxford, 2020) and Overcoming Our Evil: Human Nature and Spiritual Exercises in Xunzi and Augustine (Georgetown, 2006). He has also published articles in venues such as the Journal of Religious Ethics, Soundings, Philosophy East and West, Dao, and International Philosophical Quarterly. He founded the Comparative Religious Ethics group within the American Academy of Religion, and is currently a trustee of the Journal of Religious Ethics.