In his literary masterwork, the Decameron, Boccaccio undertakes a thorough examination of human values along the lines he had drawn in his history of the origins of the gods, the Genealogie deorum gentilium libri, on the assumption that values, in a world emptied of the gods, retain a similarly normative and aggregating function. To Boccaccio both gods and values are transient items in a moral ontology that acknowledges only one set of perennial items: natural impulses and dispositions. Boccaccio adopts a particular stance towards the emergence of values: genealogy is, for him, a distinctive way to examine the processes whereby beliefs, attitudes, and values come about.

Perhaps surprisingly, one of the founders of the modern technological world, Francis Bacon, has a penetrating and sustained lifelong engagement with the phenomenon of love or eros. Bacon's reflections on eros come in two stages. He first examines the human and moral meaning of love. Bacon attends to the exorbitant promises of love—to bring us into a perfect condition, to grant us eternity—and finds them confused or unreasonable. Bacon then moves away from an engagement with the simple experiences of love and their promises. Departing from the human perspective, he proceeds to examine love, from the point of view of natural science or cosmology, as a fundamental property or principle of matter. This departure tends to lead, at least in the case of Bacon's followers, if not in Bacon's own case, to an obliviousness to both his cynical and appreciative insights into love.

The essay examines Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece, which portrays the love of honor animating political life in early Rome. Demonstrating the relation of the soul and the city, the poem depicts the psychology of honor, envy, and shame; the near identity of moral worth and public reputation; the close connection between deeds and truth, action and speech; the insufficiency of moral intention; the city as an association of fathers; the relation between the inner and the outer man, soul and body; manly courage as proof of feminine chastity; the private effects of a fully public life; and, generally, the simultaneously self-denying, self-affirming core of Rome's political life. The essay concludes by considering why Shakespeare, in presenting a historically accurate portrait of early Rome, puts it in the mouth not of a Roman, but of a medieval or Renaissance narrator.

Locke's political philosophy, like any that centers on individual rights such as property rights, raises the question whether human beings have any duty to charity, or economic assistance, to the needy. Locke's works contain some strong statements in favor of such a duty, but in his definitive treatment of property, chapter 5 of the Second Treatise of Government, he is conspicuously silent on charity. Based on a reading of that chapter and other texts, I conclude that the basis of Lockean morality is not individual right per se, but concern for the common good. I compare Locke's theory of property to those of Aquinas, Grotius, and Pufendorf in order to shed light on Locke's view of property and charity. Finally, I argue that Locke has a tiered moral theory that separates justice from charity. His economic and political theories focus on justice, masking Locke's actual devotion to charity.

Constructivist political theory, championed most prominently by John Rawls, builds up a conception of justice from the minimal requirements of political life. It has two powerful attractions. It promises a kind of civic unity in the face of irresolvable differences about the good life. It also offers a foundation for human rights that is secure in the face of those same differences. The very parsimony that is its strength, however, deprives it of the resources to condemn some atrocities. Because it focuses on the political aspect of persons, it has difficulty cognizing violence done to those aspects of the person that are not political, preeminently the body. Constructivism thus can be only a part of an acceptable theory of justice.