What are the roles of beauty and love in the good life?

Love can be merited, and it is merited by a person's intrinsically valuable qualities. What matters is not that such qualities can be ranked against one another, but that they are gradable: to merit love is to meet a threshold of value. Discerning where those thresholds lie, and who meets them, takes practical wisdom. Since our capacity to love is finite, such judgments belong at the center of philosophizing about love rather than at its margins.

Respect is ambiguous between a constraint on practical reason and a person-directed pro-attitude, as Darwall has argued. That ambiguity creates trouble for self-respect: in the pro-attitude sense, it lacks warrant. I turn to Nietzsche's notion of self-reverence, which can serve as a replacement for Kantian self-respect in that second sense.

On Nietzsche's view, shame plays a fundamental role in regulating social relations, though it also carries serious costs for the person who feels it.

Two questions about disgust in Nietzsche: how moral disgust harms, and when it is nonetheless a fitting response. Self-disgust is dangerous because it is characteristic of ascetic morality — but disgust is conditionally fitting insofar as it provokes an immediate adverse reaction to ascetic moral systems, which I call disgusting moralities. I compare Nietzsche's analysis with the Terror Management and Animal-Nature Reminder theories, and argue that his view is compatible with the Entanglement and Co-Opt theses.